Barney Frank’s dying warning should worry conservatives

Barney Frank spent his final months warning Democrats that the left had become a danger to itself.

Frank, the 16-term congressman from Massachusetts who died May 19 at 86, had been promoting a book scheduled for September publication: “The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy.”

The most effective revolutionaries do not always sound revolutionary. Sometimes they sound like men telling the revolutionaries to shut up, count the votes, and wait their turn.

That title says a great deal. Frank warned his fellow Democrats that they’re losing the electorate. But he was no mushy moderate. He was solidly a man of the left who understood that his party had developed habits that could cost it power — and, in his view, endanger