Barney Frank, the liberal icon and gay-rights trailblazer who represented Massachusetts’ 4th congressional district for more than three decades, is currently in hospice care in Ogonguit, Maine, where he lives with his husband Jim Ready.
Frank is also awaiting the publication of his new book by Yale University Press, titled “The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy.” The book is scheduled to come out in mid-September, but Frank is already engaged on a publicity tour of sorts, describing the book’s central arguments to an array of media outlets in recent days.
In a conversation with GBH News, Frank emphasized that he believes big political change is indeed attainable — but only after sustained, incremental advocacy has primed the general public to embrace it.
The book starts, Frank said, with a simple proposition: Too many mainstream liberals dropped the ball, to disastrous effect, on the problem of economic inequality. They ignored it even as they exacerbated it, by supporting policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization.
According to Frank, this approach ultimately yielded popular rage and the presidency of Donald Trump — as well as a conviction, on the part of the Democratic Party’s left flank, that they know better than their compatriots and that their agenda should be embraced in full.
“We finally, a bunch of us, got the Democratic Party off of that [economic] agenda,” Frank said. “So what happened then, unfortunately, was instead of our more militant Left joining and getting the most out of the anti-inequality fight, they said, ‘Hey, we were right about equality. We’re right about all these other issues.’ So they then attached themselves to an agenda with a degree of social and cultural change that goes beyond what’s currently acceptable politically.”
Frank, who was the first member of Congress to voluntarily come out, and also the first to marry a same-sex partner, cites the fight for gay rights as Exhibit A of how advocates on the left should proceed.
“In the gay rights effort, we took the most controversial aspects of the agenda and put them last: marriage,” Frank said. “We did discrimination in employment, gays in the military, a number of other things came before marriage.”
“Back as late as 2004, you could be against same-sex marriage, as [President Barack] Obama was, and still be widely supported by the gay community,” Frank said. “Because people understood, if you’ve got somebody supporting most of your agenda, don’t drive them away with an unpalatable litmus test.”
So where, according to Frank, is the Democratic left moving too quickly now? He cites several examples, including the Green New Deal, which he describes as “much too intrusive” and inordinately focused on individual mandates.
Frank also points to trans rights. The participation of trans women in women’s sports is, he contends, analogous to marriage in the gay rights movement, and should have been delayed as a goal until people had become acclimated to other more palatable steps toward trans equality.
“Most of the transgender agenda is very supported and easily defensible, but there is still a lot of resistance to female trans playing sports,” Frank said. “Just as we [in the gay rights movement] deferred marriage, didn’t make marriage part of the litmus test, we should be doing the same with participation in sports.
“When you defer the most controversial things, after a while they become less controversial because the object of the discrimination, it becomes less alien to people.”
There are some areas, though, in which Frank believes what he calls the prevailing orthodoxy on the left will never be palatable to most Americans. He puts a particular attitude toward immigration in this category.
“Clearly, it’s not popular to kick out people who’ve been here and are well-behaved,” Frank said. “But shutting down asylum, shutting down new entries has some muscle to it.
“Basically, the immigration policy of many of my friends on the left was, ‘If you can physically reach America, you can stay there forever.’ And that was unsustainable.”
There’s an important caveat here. As Frank explains it, he has no problem with some advocates taking stances the electorate as a whole isn’t yet ready to embrace. What he rejects is those same advocates insisting that everyone else embrace their positions in the present moment, regardless of public palatability.
“I don’t mind people advocating advanced positions,” Frank said. “I filed a bill to legalize marijuana in 1972. What I object to is when this ideologically committed group takes the things that they are most committed to, that are the most controversial, and make[s] them litmus tests and then cause problems for everybody else.”
For example, Frank contends that the catchphrase “Defund the police” created a damaging perception that too many Democrats failed to rebut.
“A lot of my mainstream friends say, ‘Well we don’t advocate defunding the police, we don’t advocate this and that,’” Frank said. “My answer: That’s not good enough. You have to separate yourself from them , because the perception right now is that the Democratic Party as a whole is committed to a number of things that only a small minority supports.”
Frank believes his advice is especially urgent in the midst of a second Trump presidency. While he says he’s optimistic about the fate of liberal democracy in the United States, particularly given Trump’s “implosion” and the defeat of illiberal darling Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Frank adds that nothing is assured, and that Democratic strategic acumen is essential in the months and years to come.
“I obviously wish I wasn’t dying,” Frank said. “On the other hand, I am very happy to have the opportunity to make this point, because I think we’re at a cusp.”
“I am optimistic …. about liberal democracy beating reactionary populism, but I’m not convinced,” he added. “I’ve gotten a great opportunity to frankly put my money where my mouth is on that issue.”
