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A look back The NationCoverage of Frank’s long and storied political career suggests that the late congressman was always a man of multitudes.
Former Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank gestures during a news conference at the Capitol in Washington on January 13, 2010.
(Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo) Former Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank died this month at the age of 86. Most obituaries have emphasized first Frank’s pioneering role as an openly gay politician, and second his legislative accomplishments, among them the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform package, a valiant if imperfect effort to root out the abuses that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Even from his hospice bed, Frank continued to distribute advice to the Democrats. Mystified as to why his own favored Maine Senate candidate, Gov. Janet Mills, lost to outsider insurgent Graham Platner, Frank criticized the progressive left for combining a critique of economic inequality with an impolitic insistence on “racial and cultural things.” A look back The NationThe coverage of Frank’s long and storied political career – admiring, sometimes sympathetic, but far from uncritical – suggests that the late congressman was always a man of multitudes; a brilliant and brash politician whose famous wit could speak to both the left and the right.
In 1987, Frank called a reporter from The Boston Globe and asked him to come to his office without any stated purpose. During the interview, Frank did something that was still unthinkable at the time: he told the reporter that he was gay. (Cartoonist Eric Orner depicted the scene in his 2022 graphic biography of Frank, Smahtguy, extract In The Nation.)
“To everyone who has been on Capitol Hill for more than a month,” wrote the late journalist Nicholas von Hoffman in The Nation at the time, “the news was one of the biggest surprises of the year.”
Frank, von Hoffman observed, was “one of the most intelligent men in national politics.” He had seen how reports of an extramarital affair doomed Democratic Sen. Gary Hart’s bid for the party’s presidential nomination in 1988. Frank wanted to prevent something similar from happening to him, so he took action before one of those news outlets that von Hoffman called “gonad-seeking practitioners of sex journalism” exposed him. The rules had changed: the private sex lives of politicians were now fair game. Frank wanted to control the narrative.
As Frank’s career continued, he became an occasional contributor to The Nationbeginning with a letter to the editor in August 2000. The progressive left at the time was torn between supporters of Ralph Nader’s Green Party bid for president and nose-to-nose Al Gore voters. A supporter of Gore, Frank challenged a Nation article that quotes Nader dismissing the serious consequences a George W. Bush presidency would have on social issues. Frank wrote that Nader had “never, during his career, paid attention to issues of abortion or gay rights.”
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Frank was early to spot some of the major contradictions and hypocrisies in American life that have come to structure the very reality we live in, and he was one of the few sitting legislators unafraid to name them. In 2006, he wrote In The Nation that he was skeptical of Democrats who wanted to shift their party’s focus on Bush from specific areas of policy disagreement, such as the destructive and illegal war in Iraq and worsening economic inequality, to more abstract accusations that the administration harbored secret plans to subvert democracy in America. Words like “authoritarianism” should not be “thrown around” or “used lightly,” Frank argued, apparently anticipating the debate over fascism that has divided the left in the Trump era.
Yet Frank argued that while the United States under Bush remained a democracy, it was clearly undergoing a significant transition process. Some of the fundamental pillars of the constitutional order were being eroded by the aggressive excesses of the executive branch. Frank argued that the country was transforming into what scholars call a “plebiscitary democracy,” in which “a leader is elected but, once elected, holds almost all the power.” Congressional Republicans seemed remarkably willing to give up their own powers in deference to a president actually claiming unlimited authority to do whatever he wanted. “Never in American history has Congress been so willing to renounce its constitutional function,” Frank wrote.
I am not accusing authoritarianism. It’s still a free country, and I encourage people to use that freedom, to be critical and to organize. But we are still talking about a very, very different mode of governance, the mode of governance in which, instead of checks and balances, collaboration and input from large numbers of people, one man makes the decisions…. We have an administration that is radically trying to change the nature of our democracy.
In March 2009, at the dawn of the Obama presidency, as Republicans hypocritically began calling for budget cuts after giving Bush blank checks for years to wage wars against abstract nouns, Frank sarcastically propose that anyone calling for budgetary restrictions should also mention uncontrolled military spending. Even liberal and progressive institutions have sometimes called for reining in social spending like Medicare and Social Security, while refusing, Frank noted, to “talk about an area in which substantial budget cuts would have the doubly beneficial effect of reducing the deficit and cutting spending that often does more harm than good.” In his Nation In his op-ed, Frank condemned what he called a “militarized Keynesianism whereby military spending is important because it creates jobs and stimulates the economy.”
There was always money available for a new war, Frank observed, but never for new programs guaranteeing health care for all: “If we do not reduce the military budget, we will either become accustomed to endless and growing budget deficits or we will seriously undermine our ability to improve the quality of our lives through sensible public policies.” » Somehow, in their infinite wisdom, American policymakers chose, in the years that followed, to do both.
Shortly after authoring and passing the Dodd-Frank financial reform package in 2010, Frank decided not to seek re-election to Congress in 2012. At the time, The Nationby John Nichols called Frank “is not a perfect progressive on all issues, but a consistent liberal.” He noted that the bill signed by Frank “dealt blows that should have been aimed at big banks and Wall Street speculators.”
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Long lasting Nation contributor Jon Wiener underlines the point in 2015, taking Frank to task for an episode that the retired congressman described in his memoir as the “stupidest” decision he ever made. The year was 1966. Frank was a student leader at Harvard’s Kennedy School when he invited Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to speak on campus. At the time, Wiener was a member of the Harvard chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, which protested McNamara’s appearance. Wiener wrote that Frank’s account of the episode left much out, such as that the student protesters wanted McNamara to publicly debate an anti-war activist rather than speaking only to a select group of students in private.
Frank wrote admiringly in his memoir of McNamara’s composure when surrounded by student protesters. He even praised the students who started a petition to apologize to McNamara for his treatment on campus, rather than the students who protested McNamara’s senseless and destructive war. Concluding that rowdy student protesters had damaged the Democratic Party in the 1966 midterm elections and thus “opened the door for Nixon,” Frank drew exactly the wrong lesson from the incident, Wiener argued: “Barney Frank is wrong about the ‘stupidest’ thing he did.” It was not about getting McNamara to Harvard, but about his failure to join the movement calling for an end to the Vietnam War.
Frank’s journey, then, is that of a man who clearly understood power: how it worked, who had it, who lied about it. But Frank was sometimes less reliable when it came to solidarity with people trying to challenge those in power. He saw the abuses of the Bush years with unflinching clarity, named the pathologies and depredations of Wall Street with rare acuity, and came out as gay at a time when it required real courage. But when protesters surrounded McNamara’s car, Frank wanted them to apologize. This instinct to protect established institutions, even as he criticized them, shines through his career and still defines the Democratic Party he proudly served for decades.
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