Seymour Hersh's good Substack, with Thomas Frank

And it's one of the few that's not paywalled.

Sy interviews "Listen, Liberal" author Thomas Frank. Unfortunately, the national Democrats won't listen, and the national GOP, because Trump stole enough from the New Deal on worker-related stuff (or pretended to; Trump has never really cared about employees) it thinks it doesn't have to.

Some of its takeaways?

• Crying wolf on Russiagate by Dems is part of why more people who aren't total BlueAnon don't accept the reality of Jan. 6
• The national Democrat-mainstream media alliance is semi-incestuous
• Neither duopoly party really wants to change right now
  
• We need viable third parties, but in the wake of the Populists of the 1880s-90s, the duopoly continues to raise walls higher.

To summarize where we're at, off one Tweet?

Catturd is indeed a top non-generally famous Trumpian social media influencer on Twitter. (And, in another tweet, despite having a blue check, presumably gratis from Musk, claims Musk gave him no money for Twitter ads etc. last month. Probably got $8 and change and Musk deducted it.) 

A heartfelt message, and for the best that he didn’t go with the first title “Catturd is 54 and Unemployed.” pic.twitter.com/IcIdODC5SP

— Gary Peterson 🇺🇸 (@GaryPetersonUSA) July 19, 2023

The "deal" on how he reinforces Frank is that, this is the type of people that Trump listens to (and probably DeSantis and some others). Note also the junior-league messianic overtones, tying right in with #MAGAts proclaiming Trump the new Father Moon of Reunification Church Christology.

And, at the same time, even a triply-saner version of a "Catturd" is the type of people that Bill Clinton on have ignored. (This sets aside Catturd's slipstreaming on the late Actual Flatticus, who indeed passed away 5-plus years ago.)

The piece isn't perfect, I'll state.

FDR wasn't quite as radical as Frank paints. National Dems first shot themselves in the foot over Vietnam. (If civil rights handed the South to the Republicans and for more than a generation, LBJ expanding the war footing as much as he did made the Northeast and Great Lakes less Democratic-fertile.)

And, on working class America, as America turns more nonwhite, Frank doesn't wrestle with the issue of how well a class-based (but also focused on racism etc.) Democratic Party could retain working-class whites. It would do better than it's doing now, but ... how much better? I mean, this goes back to St. Ronald of Reagan's dogwhistle at the Neosheba County Fair. 

There's also a demographic issue. We've added 100 million people since that 1980 dogwhistling time. I think more and more of Merikkka feels an anomie of isolation and diminished focus.

It's still worth a read, for how the current status of the duopoly is ties to the walls against third parties.