Frank grew up around people who worked. Not people who managed work or facilitated work or created synergies around work. People who actually did things with their hands and their backs and came home tired in a specific way that only people who have actually done something understand.
His father worked. His uncles worked. The men in his neighborhood worked. They fixed things and built things and maintained things and when something broke they figured out how to fix it because nobody was going to come fix it for them and they could not afford to pay someone else to do it.
Frank learned to work before he learned to drive. This was not presented to him as optional.
He has been thinking about this lately because he has been watching the people who make decisions about working Americans and he has been trying to identify which ones have actually worked and the list is shorter than it should be.
What Frank means by worked.
Frank is going to be specific because words mean things and this word has been stretched past its useful meaning by people who want credit for things that do not deserve it.
Frank does not mean interned at a law firm. Frank does not mean worked on a campaign. Frank does not mean consulted, advised, lobbied, or served in an appointed position. Frank does not mean summer jobs that were arranged by family connections and appear on a resume as formative experiences in public service.
Frank means woke up before the sun, did something physically or mentally demanding for eight to twelve hours, came home with less left than you started with, and repeated it the next day because that is what the mortgage required.
Frank means understood at a cellular level that if you did not show up the money did not come and if the money did not come the lights went off.
That understanding, Frank has found, changes how you think about policy. It changes how you think about regulations that cost businesses money. It changes how you think about taxes and inflation and gas prices and the forty seven steps required to get a permit to build a deck on your own property.
People who have never experienced the direct consequence of a bad decision tend to make more bad decisions. Frank has observed this at the local level, the state level, and the federal level with remarkable consistency.
The working class and the party that claims to represent it.
Frank is not going to tell you which party to vote for. Frank is going to point out something that he finds interesting and let you draw your own conclusions because Frank respects your intelligence even when Washington does not.
The party that has historically claimed to represent working Americans has, over the past several decades, become increasingly led by people with advanced degrees from elite universities who have spent their careers in academia, law, nonprofit administration, and politics. The platform has evolved to prioritize issues that poll well in faculty lounges and foundation boardrooms. The working class voters who built that coalition have noticed. The exit polling data is clear about this. Frank is not saying anything the data does not already show.
The other party claims to champion the working class while primarily legislating in the interest of corporate entities and wealthy donors. Frank has read the tax bills. Frank has read the regulatory rollbacks. Frank has read the trade agreements. The working class appears in the speeches. In the legislation it is harder to find.
Both parties talk about working Americans the way people talk about a relative they never visit. Warmly, frequently, and from a considerable distance.
What Frank thinks actually needs to happen.
Frank is not a policy wonk. Frank does not have a fourteen point plan with appendices. Frank has something he thinks is more valuable which is a clear understanding of what the problem actually is.
The problem is representation. The people making decisions about working Americans are not working Americans and have not been for a long time. They do not understand the specific weight of a decision made at a kitchen table at eleven o'clock at night about which bill gets paid this month. They do not understand what it costs in dignity to need help and what it costs in time and energy to navigate the systems theoretically designed to provide it.
Frank is not saying working class people are smarter than anyone else. Frank is saying they have information that is directly relevant to governing a country where most people work for a living, and that information is not currently well represented in the rooms where decisions get made.
Frank would like that to change. Frank is not holding his breath. But Frank is saying something about it, which is more than most people are doing.
— Frank