What's Thomas Frank Been Up to Lately?

Since 2000 Thomas Frank has had a major book out every presidential election year--One Market Under God (his study of '90s-era market populism), What's the Matter With Kansas? (probably still his most famous work, about the use of the culture wars to sell an elite economic agenda), The Wrecking Crew (a study of "government by people who hate government" from the Reagan era forward), Pity the Billionaire (about how, even though the 2007 financial crisis and Great Recession looked like the end of the line for the neoliberals, they rallied to triumph yet again), Listen, Liberal (which had for its subject how American "liberalism" and the Democratic Party supposed to be its standard-bearers went astray), and finally The People, No (a history of "anti-populism" in America).

It being 2024 one would have expected to see his latest months ago--and perhaps done so the more eagerly in as his last (The People, No) was more a work of fairly distant history than contemporary affairs, more background to analyzing the present than analysis of the present than his other works, and in that, at least in his interview with Seymour Hersh, he did indicate that he was working on a new book. Alas, he has had nothing out so far as I can tell, any details on when or even if something will be out are elusive--and, once again, Frank's general media profile is a lot lower than it used to be, all of which seems to me to bear out the impression that the scope the mainstream is willing to afford his analyses has only gone on shrinking through this century.