Barney Frank, the former Massachusetts congressman who helped write the Dodd-Frank Act, is in hospice care at his home in Ogunquit, Maine, and says he still believes Democrats can beat President Donald Trump’s brand of right-wing populism.
Speaking to WBUR’s senior political reporter Anthony Brooks, Frank said the hardest part of that fight is not Republicans but what he sees as the left wing’s insistence on pushing voters toward positions many Americans reject. He cited open borders, defunding the police, political correctness, transgender participation in girls’ sports and the Green New Deal as examples of ideas that have gone too far.
Frank, who represented Massachusetts’ 4th Congressional District for more than 30 years, said the conversation with Brooks was shaped by his health as much as by politics. He lives in Ogunquit with his husband, Jim Ready, and said, “Better than I expected to. You have just seen one of the reasons with Jim lifting me out of the chair. He's been just terrific. I'm usually not in pain. My father died in 1960 at the age of 53 from heart disease; I had my first heart attack in 1990, and frankly, I didn't think I'd get this far. My heart is just wearing out, but I'm generally comfortable.”
The interview comes as Frank has been speaking to multiple journalists, including from and Politico, while also promoting a forthcoming book, The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy, due in September. The book and the interview together show an effort to turn a late-career health update into a final political argument: that Democrats can still win national power, but only if they stop making ideological purity a test of membership.
That warning was blunt. Frank said, “That it is essential for the values that have driven me into politics to defeat right-wing populism, and that the major obstacle to doing that is the insistence by part of the left wing of pushing everybody to adopt politically unacceptable views.” He added, “Open borders is one. Defunding the police would be another, along with insistence on political correctness and transgender participation in girls' sports. And environmental issues like the Green New Deal — they just go too far.”
Frank has spent much of his political life on the left side of the Democratic Party and still argues that core liberal goals can win if they are framed in a way more voters can accept. He said he filed a bill to legalize marijuana in 1972 and has long viewed politics through the lens of economic and social change, saying there was a sharp divergence in the 1980s between economic growth and how widely it was shared.
Even in hospice care, Frank is offering a familiar kind of Democratic admonition, but this time with the urgency of a man who says his heart is wearing out. His closing point was not about messaging alone. It was about whether the party can persuade skeptical voters that it has room for both principle and pragmatism. “OK, now we're all for fighting inequality and we'll diminish the anger,” he said, making clear the debate he wants left behind is one he still believes Democrats can win.
