Barney Frank, long known as America’s crankiest liberal, is actually not feeling too bad. Frank retired from Congress in 2012, after three decades of representing Massachusetts’s Fourth District, then wrote a memoir, became a director of the Signature Bank, and took his curmudgeon act on the road as a lecturer. But the election of Donald Trump has not shattered his confidence about the nation’s political future. “This was not a wipeout. People will tend to overinterpret it. Remember, we got more votes than they did,” he said, in an interview this week. “And there is one silver lining for us. They have succeeded in blaming us for everything that goes wrong in the world. From now on, anything bad that happens is on them. They control the whole government—White House, Senate, House, Supreme Court. Some people think that maybe Trump can somehow evade that responsibility, but I think it will be hard to blame it on some Mexicans when something goes wrong.”

Still, Frank believes that politics did change in some fundamental ways with Trump’s victory. “Two major rules of American politics disappeared this year,” he said. “The first was that you had to argue that America has to be strong and assertive worldwide. Trump won while rejecting that view. And the second change was that you should only talk about growth for everyone and avoid talk of class warfare. The fundamental reason that Trump won is the anger in America and other developed countries at the unfairness of the distribution of wealth. It’s been building and building, and all of a sudden it broke through.”

In particular, Frank believes that Bernie Sanders’s primary campaign helped Trump’s portrayal of himself as a populist succeed in the fall. “Sanders wounded her badly,” Frank said, referring to Hillary Clinton. “His differing with her on the issues was entirely reasonable, but he’s the one who sold the argument that she was corrupt and bought by Wall Street. He had one ad which I called McCarthyite—where he essentially said Goldman Sachs got off so easy because they paid Clinton for speeches. Sanders helped Trump become the guy who says we are tired of rich guys getting away with everything. Sanders helped persuade people that she is on the wrong side of that issue.” Then, too, of course, there were the e-mails and the last-minute intervention of James Comey, the F.B.I. director. “If she hadn’t been using that e-mail system, she would have won, and Comey exacerbated the problem,” Frank said.

Frank is fond of the adage, attributed to Harold Macmillan, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, that the future of politics is determined by “events, my dear boy, events.” The success or failure of Trump’s Presidency will be the critical factor in the future of the Democratic Party. “If he delivers somehow and increases employment among the white working class, and increases prosperity, then we”—the Party, that is—“have a political problem,” Frank said. But since Frank believes that Trump’s program will not yield these kinds of successes, he feels that Democrats will have room to criticize and propose alternatives.

In some respects, Frank believes that the Trump campaign may help the Democrats produce an updated and more appealing message. “Obama began to walk away from the idea that we have to be the leader of the free world,” Frank said. “Now it’s clear that we don’t have to be the leader of the free world and we don’t have to pay to be the leader of the free world.” That will open the door, Frank believes, to substantial reductions in military spending—on the order of a hundred and fifty to two hundred billion a year. “We could then use that money to offset some of the inequality in the economy. Reduce the age of access to Medicare to fifty-five. Raise the minimum wage. Put a lot of people to work on infrastructure.”

His second idea for Democrats may be more controversial within the Party. “We need to be less absolutist on environmental issues, especially wetlands and endangered species,” he said. “We currently treat those issues as absolute bars to development, and they should not be absolute. They should be balances. I saw in my district how much anger these issues generate. Our current position is bad politics and bad public policy.” Frank does not believe, however, that Democrats should retreat on climate change. “Too much at stake on climate change to give way there,” he said.

One part of Trump’s ascendancy reflects the great political success of Frank’s life. During Trump’s campaign, and in a recent interview on “60 Minutes,” the President-elect said that he regarded same-sex marriage as a settled issue, which he would not seek to overturn. As a longtime leader in the gay-rights movement, and the husband of Jim Ready since 2012, Frank, who is now seventy-six, watched the cause of same-sex marriage move from the fringe to the realm of conventional wisdom. Indeed, the subject turns this often cantankerous man downright cheerful. “Sixty years ago, people didn’t talk about being gay,” Frank said. “But now that so many people are out, straight people know they have gay relatives, gay co-workers. Being gay is kind of positive. It’s kind of fun.”