Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative
By Evan Barker
Threshold, 288 pages, $29
In the summer of 2004, as the Democratic Party hurtled toward its second defeat at the hands of George W. Bush, the Kansas City-born historian and writer Thomas Frank published What’s the Matter With Kansas? Frank’s basic thesis—that Republicans had used culture-war wedge issues to get working-class voters to back an economic agenda unfavorable to their interests—seemed to be vindicated by Bush’s victory. It was widely reported, after all, that Karl Rove’s strategy of using state-level referenda on gay marriage to drive turnout for Bush had been a decisive factor in the outcome. Frank’s book became a sensation, and spent months on the Times bestseller list.
“Frank’s real target was the Democratic Party.”
Today, What’s the Matter With Kansas? often seems to be misremembered as a coastal liberal lament about the benighted heartland. But Frank’s real target was the Democratic Party, which he argued had sold out its one-time base in favor of the donor class and ceased to even try to channel the concerns of average voters across much of the country. As Frank summarized his position in a 2006 column: “Democratic leaders must learn to talk about class issues again.”
Frank’s follow-up book, Listen, Liberal, put this critique of the Democrats front and center, contending that the party had become “the party of the professional class,” to its detriment. One reviewer proposed its title should have been “What’s the Matter With Massachusetts?” Listen, Liberal was released in the spring of another election year that would prove disastrous for Democrats: 2016. In the intervening years, Barack Obama’s two commanding victories might have seemed to invalidate Frank’s gloomy earlier prognosis that the party would see its “relevance slowly ebbing.” But he argued that Obama had squandered the populist moment that followed the 2008 crash, and that Democrats would pay the price. During that election cycle, Frank backed Bernie Sanders, and was among the few left-of-center pundits who didn’t doubt Trump could actually win.
Ten years after Listen, Liberal, another native of the Kansas City area has published a similarly themed indictment of the Democratic Party. The author of this new cri de coeur, the former Democratic fundraiser and operative Evan Barker, tells us she became disillusioned with the party upon realizing that “the Democrats were now run by people who had zero cultural connection to the people the party had long represented.” Although she had inklings of this for years while ensconced inside the party’s machinery, the scales finally fell from her eyes during Kamala Harris’s coronation at the party’s 2024 National Convention.
Eight years prior to that, Frank had denounced the Democrats for having severed their “bonds to working people,” and decried a party that “dedicates itself to the concerns of a particular slice of high-achieving affluent people.” But it was around this time that the now disillusioned Barker was first immersing herself in campaign work. She was driven, as she tells it, by gratitude that Obamacare had given her access to healthcare despite a severe chronic illness, and by a desire to fight for the interests of her working-class family in Kansas and Missouri.
Although she launched her career as part of the Clinton campaign, Barker soon became a dogged opponent of the centrist establishment, employed in the network of insurgent electoral projects that grew out of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 challenge to Clinton. After a brief and ill-fated stint working for a suburban Clintonite girlboss running for Congress in New Jersey, she moved on to the campaign of Brent Welder, a Sanders-aligned progressive upstart in her native Kansas who later lost the primary to the establishment-backed Sharice Davids. In this race, the establishment strategically deployed Davids’s identity as a Native American lesbian as a cudgel against the white male Welder—and succeeded. (Clinton ran a similar playbook against Sanders.) In Barker’s telling, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had just won her primary upset against Joe Crowley, hesitated to endorse Welder, saying she didn’t “want to be seen as someone who isn’t supporting another woman of color.” But in the end, “AOC put the Bernie Bros first.”
That might have seemed encouraging, but shouldn’t have been. Not only did Welder lose, the progressive wing of the Democrats proved just as fixated on identity as the establishment. Moreover, Barker argues, “both wings captured each other’s worst impulses”: The party’s left flank leaned into ever more radical rhetoric on race and gender, and got the party’s mainstream to go along with it while downplaying policies like Medicare for All. The “merger” of insurgents and insiders symbolized by the 2019 Rolling Stone cover featuring AOC and Nancy Pelosi, according to Barker, “came at the expense of the populist vision expressed in Bernie’s 2016 campaign.” The terms of the pact dictated that “the party would only focus on the culture war.”
Here one might notice an echo of Frank’s thesis in What’s the Matter With Kansas?—but now it is the Democrats who are using “culture war” as a diversion from material politics. Cultural conditions had changed considerably in the meantime, though. In the 2000s, Frank had evidently assumed that abortion and gay marriage were and would remain losing issues for Democrats to foreground. But especially after Obergefell seemed to portend the inexorable advance of cultural progressivism, it became possible to imagine the opposite was true. Leaning left on the culture war could therefore become the main thing uniting progressive and centrist Democrats.
Nearly a decade on, the political valence of culture war issues seems in flux again, even as what exactly those issues are has also shifted. Barker concludes her book, in part, by calling for “moderation” on this front from both parties, but what that means can be difficult to parse. After facilitating the apparent pro-life triumph of the Dobbs decision, Donald Trump has often been concerned to present himself as a moderate on abortion, but he has no such compunctions when it comes to transgender issues. Moderation in 2026 means something different than it did in 2016 in part because the cultural ground has shifted, as it will continue to do. The problem with the “moderate” position is that it is often little more than a lagging indicator of such changes.
What is most valuable about Nothing Left is that Barker was on the inside of the effort to push the Democrats in a left-populist direction, roughly along the lines Frank argued for. She rubbed shoulders with Sanders as well as AOC, compared notes with the founders of Justice Democrats, and was employed by the fundraising outfit Left Rising, which assisted the rise of figures like Summer Lee and Cori Bush. By her account, this tendency only succeeded by betraying its original impetus. Its efforts, Barker concludes, only deepened the party’s disconnect with working-class voters.
“This tendency only succeeded by betraying its original impetus.”
Barker traded in her career as a behind-the-scenes operative for that of a public-facing pundit with a viral TikTok video posted after the Harris coronation, in which she denounced the party’s disastrous trajectory. Later that year, as she recounted in an essay for The Free Press, she voted for Donald Trump, an act she presented there and continues to present in the book as more of a protest vote than a full-bore endorsement of the MAGA project. “My vote for Trump,” she writes in Nothing Left, “made me a conscientious objector in the wars of our politics.”
Even if she voted for Trump in uncompetitive California, it seems questionable to present a vote for one candidate as equivalent to the rejection of both. Elsewhere, Barker says that at the time of Trump’s 2024 victory she had “hoped for a true realignment” by which the GOP would “become the true party of the working class.” She expresses disappointment that Trump has instead “cut social safety net programs, defunded healthcare, and started new wars.”
Nonetheless, these actions seem to be less viscerally objectionable to Barker than the cultural ambience she was exposed to in Democratic circles. What evidently soured her on her former party was its insiders’ repugnant cocktail of viciousness, cynicism, and identitarian self-righteousness. The reaction is entirely understandable, but it also ratifies an insight Barker would like, in theory, to reject: that the animal spirits of culture war enjoy more potency than alternative sources of political identity and commitment.
Barker’s own recent career path offers further proof of this unpleasant truth. Although she underlines her continued independence from the Republican Party, she is now de facto ensconced in the conservative media ecosystem. Nothing Left is published by an imprint whose other authors include Glenn Beck, Greg Abbott, Pete Hegseth, and Donald Trump himself. Far be it from me—a non-right-wing author with plenty of bylines in right-wing outlets—to fault Barker for any of that. But her apparent value in this context tells us that the Republican coalition remains adept at playing on (often enough reasonable) cultural antipathies to compensate for the dismal reality of its material project. As Frank put it in What’s the Matter With Kansas?: “The trick never ages: ... Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.”