Barney Frank might not draw a connection between his coming out as gay nearly four decades ago and his coming out against left-wing dogmatism in the Democratic Party today. But the parallel is unmistakable: The 86-year-old former Democratic congressman from Massachusetts is shining a light on a sensitive subject that many people wish he would keep quiet about.
In his forthcoming book, The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy, Frank contends that left-wingers have saddled his party with a “vote-repelling platform” of open borders, defunded police departments, and “the rule of the pronoun police.” By voicing his criticism of these stances, Frank hopes to give cover to fellow liberals who share his political concerns, if not his courage. “I know most Democrats agree with me,” Frank told me via Zoom from his home in Ogunquit, Maine, where he recently began hospice care. “But they’ve been intimidated out of saying so.” Frank’s physical infirmity had no apparent effect on his mental acuity and, if anything, made his message more urgent. By refusing to repudiate far-left ideas, he said, Democrats “allowed the impression that we agree with them.”
With its allusions to personal integrity, the importance of setting an example, and the ignominy of silence, Frank’s explanation for speaking up now echoes his comments in 1987 when, in an interview with The Boston Globe, he became the first elected federal officeholder to voluntarily disclose he was gay. Now, as then, his candor has prompted a certain amount of discomfort and even hostility.
On CNN earlier this month, the host, Jake Tapper, asked a frail and visibly gaunt Frank why he believes his own side needs fixing. “As we succeeded in bringing the mainstream of the left into a concern with inequality,” he told Tapper, “we also enabled people who wanted to use that as a platform for a wide range of social and cultural changes, some of which the public isn’t ready for.” Frank lamented that by subjecting Democrats to litmus tests on highly controversial issues—such as “male-to-female transsexuals playing sports designated for women,” as he put it—progressives set their causes up for defeat.
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The left’s new moralism will backfire]
The response on the left proved Frank’s point. An X post that commented “Barney Frank literally dying on CNN while denouncing trans kids in sports is all time peak for the Dem brand” earned 41,000 likes. “Having the argument be made by someone clearly in the last months of his life does not do much to counteract the impression that the left wing of the party represents its future,” Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs gloated.
During his 32-year congressional career that ended in 2013, Frank developed a reputation as one of the House’s most prominent progressives. In addition to helping lead the movement for gay and lesbian equality, he was a crucial defender of President Bill Clinton during his impeachment, and Frank’s name graces a major piece of progressive banking legislation. Frank has more than earned the credibility to criticize his own side for its failings. Indeed, the fact that a figure with such sterling progressive bona fides is so concerned about those failings that he wrote an entire book about them indicates how serious the problem has become. His political valedictory deserves a fair hearing, not catty rejoinders.
The growing popularity of economic populism on both sides of the ideological divide, Frank argues, has vindicated the left’s economic program. But just when the “mainstream left” had the opportunity to capitalize on the public’s embrace of economic populism, the cultural left sabotaged the opportunity by forcing a suite of far-out ideas into public discussion. “Instead of accepting victory” for having convinced Americans of their economic views, Frank told me, the left “took it as a sign that they were right about a broader range of things.”
Frank’s last name captures his personality. Friends and foes alike frequently describe his temperament as “brusque.” Speaking his mind is a trait Frank developed early in his career, when he showed the sort of moxie necessary for a Harvard-educated Jewish New Jerseyan to gain prominence in Boston, a city whose politics were long dominated by ward-heeling Irish Catholics.
Frank came of age politically between the end of World War II and the Vietnam War, when liberalism was the country’s reigning creed. The opening pages of Smahtguy, a cartoon biography by Frank’s former staffer Eric Orner, describe how Frank’s parents revered Franklin D. Roosevelt, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. One panel depicts the Franks reading an installment of Eleanor Roosevelt’s daily syndicated column, “My Day,” in which the former first lady lambastes the British authorities for refusing Jewish refugee boats to dock in Palestine. In his early 20s, Frank unknowingly participated in a CIA-funded trip to a youth festival in Helsinki with Gloria Steinem (a program aimed at buttressing the non-Communist left, which, along with funding a smattering of highbrow anti-Communist literary magazines, counts among the greatest things the agency ever did).
Although liberal interest groups gave him consistently high scores throughout his career, Frank has long had an independent streak. In 1978, as a Democratic member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Frank crossed party lines to endorse Republican Senator Edward Brooke, the first Black candidate to win a Senate seat by popular vote. Brooke, the only Black senator to serve from 1881 to 1993, was a prominent member of what is now an extinct species: the liberal Republican. Frank, who served as a co-chair of Democrats for Brooke, thought Brooke’s reelection was crucial not only for racial representation, but also for political moderation. “Brooke’s loss in 1978 was a prime example of the negative impact of people with strong ideological passions demanding rhetorical militancy from their candidates,” Frank wrote in a 2015 appreciation.
In Congress, Frank supported higher taxes on the rich and opposed Bill Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement and welfare-reform package. His support for economic populism has not waned. Well-intentioned mistakes made by liberals, he writes in The Hard Road to Unity, “are largely responsible for the political strength that xenophobic populism has come to enjoy in the developed world.” He attacks, at length, the neoliberal policies pursued by Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and other followers of the post–Cold War, center-left “third way” philosophy that sought a path between social democracy and the free-market orthodoxy of President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. These leaders were so single-mindedly devoted to economic growth, Frank argues, that they ignored the massive gulf emerging between the super wealthy and everyone else. A process of what he calls “globalization without amelioration,” that is, the passing of international free-trade agreements without measures to address the economic displacement they would cause the working class, “reinforced the identification of liberal governance with economic hardship.”
Both wings of the left, Frank believes, are to blame for its sorry predicament: The moderate left’s “complacent confidence in the calming effect of a steadily rising GDP” has alienated working-class voters while the progressive left’s immoderation on social issues keeps them away.
Especially divisive, Frank believes, is immigration, which he described to me as “one of the exacerbating factors but not one of the original causes” of America’s current populist moment. The mainstream right, which once welcomed more immigrants, has entirely shifted its stance. “My barometer is weasel-in-chief Lindsey Graham,” Frank said. The South Carolina Republican senator co-sponsored a comprehensive immigration-reform package two decades ago only to turn toward restrictionism once Donald Trump made immigration the centerpiece of the GOP’s agenda. But Frank also faults his own party for its refusal to adapt to growing misgivings about immigration within the electorate. Instead, Democrats lurched in the opposite direction. Frank recalls a debate in which nearly all of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates raised their hand in agreement with a statement that border crossings should be decriminalized. That image, Frank writes, “should have been captioned ‘We who are about to die politically salute you.’”.
On transgender issues, Frank has personal experience with how the left defeats itself. In 2007, he introduced the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that would have banned employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Frank was excoriated by left-wing activists for not including gender identity as a protected category. Doing so would have made the measure impossible to pass; even Frank’s more narrowly scoped bill drew a veto threat before being defeated in the Senate. Every subsequent effort to pass federal anti-discrimination legislation that included a gender-identity provision failed. (The need for such legislation was largely obviated by a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects individuals from discrimination on the basis of both characteristics.)
Today’s LGBTQ activists, he says, could learn something from their predecessors, who would not have forced elected officials to face a litmus test on whether transgender women should be allowed to participate in women’s sports. He points to Barack Obama, who was widely viewed as an ally of the gay community in 2008 despite opposing its signature issue at the time, marriage equality. Contrast that politically savvy and ultimately successful approach with the left’s treatment of Democratic Representative Seth Moulton, who was widely denounced after the 2024 election for expressing discomfort at the idea of his daughters “getting run over” by biological males on a playing field.
To Frank, the greatest internal difficulty that people on the left face is an unwillingness to recognize that they live in a moderate country. A liberal incrementalist, he all but accuses his intra-party opponents of delusion. After Republican Barry Goldwater and Democrat George McGovern suffered landslide defeats in their campaigns for the presidency in 1964 and 1972, respectively, some supporters of each nominee, Frank told me, had the same reaction: The candidate “didn’t do enough to bring out the true believers.” The real problem, Frank contended, was the opposite: an abundance of partisans who scared away moderates. Making matters worse, the left truly believes that its radical views are embraced by the public. They’re “not advocating that we take consciously unpopular stands,” Frank says. “They think they’re popular. They’ve convinced themselves of that.”
Such righteousness exacerbates the intra-left squabbling over the Democratic Party’s future. Many progressives believe their own hearts to be pure but cannot conceive that anyone to their right might have sincere reasons for opposing them on borders, crime, foreign policy, or any other issue. “Many of these zealots,” Frank writes, “are convinced that the source of their abandonment is some form of corruption.” One can see this motivated reasoning in the current attempts to blame Kamala Harris’s election loss on her not taking a stronger position against Israel during the war in Gaza. Of those who refused to vote for Harris on such grounds, Frank is unsparing. “If there were to be a competition for the dumbest, most counterproductive voting behavior in American history since secession,” he writes, “this would be in the running.”
[Read: The left’s self-defeating Israel obsession]
The title of Frank’s book calls for party unity. He gives the impression that his definition of the term is broad, and it essentially means: whatever it takes for Democrats to win elections. Strangely, he has little to say about the issue that, more than any other, is making that unity so elusive: Israel-Palestine. When I asked Frank what he makes of the rampant anti-Semitism on the activist left, he responded by blaming not its purveyors but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who “wins the prize for achieving the biggest political movement I can think of, which is moving Israel from being an untouchable, third-rail issue in America to making it so unpopular.” He cited the disproportionate representation of Jews in Congress as evidence that anti-Semitism is “not a broad political issue” but “a problem at the individual level, a personal-safety issue.” Frank seems oblivious to the ways in which the progressive ideologues he correctly faults for repelling voters are, by and large, the same people pushing the party in an extreme anti-Israel direction. They will not be satiated by a change in the ideological composition of the Israeli government.
In contemplating how the American left should advance its goals, Frank distinguishes between “swords,” which he describes as interventionist policies “into the behavioral patterns of others” favored by progressives, and “shields,” or protective measures “less likely to provoke a backlash.” The 1968 Fair Housing Act, which prohibited discrimination in the sale, renting, or financing of housing, was a shield. Busing children as a means of desegregating schools was a deeply unpopular sword. Frank says that the gay-rights movement wisely chose to advance the shield of local antidiscrimination measures long before pushing for marriage equality—a lesson, he believes, that the transgender movement should follow.
Striking the right balance on these divisive issues will not be easy. On affirmative action, climate change, immigration, and other matters, a significant distance separates progressive activists and the white working class whom the Democratic Party needs to attract. When I asked Frank whom he likes as a 2028 presidential nominee, the only name he mentioned was Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. “My fear is not that we will nominate someone from the far left but that whoever is nominated will be tempted to move too far in that direction to win,” he said.
It took nerve for Barney Frank to come out as gay four decades ago, at a time when homosexuality was still grounds for denyingsomeone a security clearance. And it takes nerve to stand up to a bullying, intolerant left today. As he nears the end of his life, Frank is offering his fellow Democrats a message they would be wise to heed. The future of the country may very well depend on their ability to listen.
The post Barney Frank’s Second Coming Out appeared first on The Atlantic.
