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by
Thomas Frank
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April 29, 2019 - May 20, 2020
In the summer of 2014, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average hitting all-time highs, a poll showed that nearly three-quarters of the American public thought the economy was still in recession—because for them, it was.
they know that no amount of labor will ever catapult them into the ranks of the winners.
And that’s where we are, eight years post-hope. Growth that doesn’t grow; prosperity that doesn’t prosper. The country, we now understand, is simply no longer arranged in such a way as to make its citizens economically secure.
“Inequality” is not even the right word for the situation, really, since it implies a technical problem we can solve with a twist of the knobs back in D.C. The nineteenth century understood it better: they called it “the social question,” and for once their polite Victorian euphemism beats ours. This is nothing less than the whole vast mystery of how we are going to live together.
As a political ideology, professionalism carries enormous potential for mischief. For starters, it is obviously and inherently undemocratic, prioritizing the views of experts over those of the public.
Today we live in a world of predatory bankers, predatory educators, even predatory health care providers, all of them out for themselves.
Professionals dominate liberalism and the Democratic Party in the same way that Ivy Leaguers dominate the Obama cabinet. In fact, it is not going too far to say that the views of the modern-day Democratic Party reflect, in virtually every detail, the ideological idiosyncrasies of the professional-managerial class.
professionals do not hold that other Democratic constituency, organized labor, in particularly high regard.
To the liberal class this is a fixed idea, as open to evidence-based refutation as creationism is to fundamentalists: if poor people want to stop being poor, poor people must go to college.
The professional class is defined by its educational attainment, and every time they tell the country that what it needs is more schooling, they are saying: Inequality is not a failure of the system; it is a failure of you.
Even then, the education panacea offers nothing to the ones who check every box and who still find, after they graduate, that there are simply
no jobs out there, or that the jobs that exist pay poorly.
Alfred Kahn, an economist, had this to say about the fights over deregulation and inflation: I’d love the Teamsters to be worse off. I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off. You may say that’s inhumane; I’m putting it rather baldly but I want to eliminate a situation in which certain protected workers in industries insulated from competition can increase their wages much more rapidly than the average without regard to their merit or to what a free market would do, and in so doing exploit other workers.10 This is a Democrat, remember, and what he was objecting to was the way unions
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that labor unions were an economic drag and/or dying fast; that industrial society itself had gone into eclipse; and that the future belonged to people like them, meaning—always—affluent professionals or some other highly educated and market-savvy cohort.
Why working-class voters were supposed to pine for balanced budgets, free-trade treaties, and the rest of the items on the DLC wish-list was a mystery. The answer, it would soon become clear, was that the DLC didn’t really care all that much about working people in the first place. The aim of the group was to capture the Democratic Party for its lobbyist supporters by whatever means were at hand, and in the 1980s, claiming to represent the overlooked middle American probably seemed like a good gambit.
These factions appeared to be opponents, and yet there was a persistent habit of thought that united them: regardless of what it was they were demanding, they all agreed that what stood in their way was the legacy of the New Deal—the Democratic Party’s commitment to equality for working people. That was what had to end.
Here is where our story takes its remarkable turn: slowly but relentlessly, these different loser reform traditions came together, and as they did, the Democratic Party became a success. Bad ideas plus bad ideas turned out, in this case, to yield electoral victory. The exact point where these trajectories intersected was occupied by one Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas, a Rhodes Scholar and a McGovern campaign worker who had grown up to become the chairman of the DLC. He led the idealistic Sixties generation and he warred with the teachers’ union; he smoked dope and he never got high; he
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Twelve years later, Miller would appear at the Republican convention, endorsing George W. Bush and winning renown as one of the greatest turncoats in Democratic Party history,
Let us recall that Bill Clinton came to national prominence as the leader of the Democratic Leadership Council, whose object was to shift the party to the right using whatever ideological tools were at hand. It is ironic, given the damage they proceeded to do to working-class people, that the New Democrats finally got their chance to move into the executive branch as the result of a distinctly populist campaign pounding away at the oldest of left-wing themes.
novel. It raises the basic question of what to do about inequality—collective action or individual effort—raises it and then dismisses it with a glib call to go out and get some “skills.” It is the glibness of that dismissal, the professional-class certainty that has been repeated in a thousand presidential statements and Senate hearings and casual conversations on the Acela train, that explains the Democratic Party’s flat inability to rise to the challenge of plutocracy.
I put Clinton’s line about “what you earn” in italics because it may well be the most important passage of them all for understanding how his party—how our entire system—has failed so utterly to confront income inequality.
You get what you deserve, and what you deserve is defined by how you did in school.
But it doesn’t take an advanced degree to figure out that this education talk is less a strategy for mitigating inequality than it is a way of rationalizing it.
The real problem was one of inadequate worker power, not inadequate worker smarts.* The people who produced were losing their ability to demand a share in what they made. The people who owned were taking more and more.
In the Clinton view, which would become the standard Democratic view, the only ones who had to change their ways were the victims themselves.
One point where Clinton’s obliviousness to the situation of ordinary people became conspicuous was in the brief tussle over his first choice for attorney general: one Zoë Baird, a typically well-connected corporate lawyer who was married to a famous law professor at Yale. Between the two of them, Baird and her husband made more than six hundred and fifty grand per year, but still they saw fit to pay their two undocumented domestic servants a little more than $250 per week, without having initially made the required Social Security payments. Had Baird been a Bush appointee, this would no doubt
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looking over the rosters of Clinton appointees, their spouses, and their interlocking circles of friends, Jacob Weisberg of the New Republic fretted about the “increasingly cozy relationships between press, law, academia and government” that he saw there. “There’s rarely been a time,” he concluded, “when the governing elites in so many fields were made up of such a tight, hermetic and incestuous clique.”14 There was something else Weisberg understood in those early days of the administration. “The Clinton circle has a pronounced class consciousness that tells them they’re not just lucky to be
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What the poor get is discipline; what the professionals get is endless indulgence.
the administration supported charter schools and standardized tests; they gave big grants to Teach for America. In Jonathan Alter’s description of how the administration decided to take on the matter, it is clear that professionalism provided the framework for their thinking. Teachers’ credentials are described as somewhat bogus; they “often bore no relationship to [teachers’] skills in the classroom.”
As it happens, the vast majority of Americans are unprofessional: they are the managed, not the managers. But people whose faith lies in “cream rising to the top” (to repeat Alter’s take on Obama’s credo) tend to disdain those at the bottom. Those who succeed, the doctrine of merit holds, are those who deserve to—who race to the top, who get accepted to “good” colleges and get graduate degrees in the right subjects. Those who don’t sort of deserve their fates.
Remember, as you let that last sentence slide slowly down your throat, that this was a Democrat saying this—a prominent Democrat, a high-ranking cabinet official in the Clinton years and the man standing at the right hand of power in the first Obama administration.*
The President, who was so impressed with his classmates’ intelligence at Harvard and Columbia, gave them the real reins of power, and they used those reins to strangle him and his ambition of being a transformative President. The overwhelming aroma of privilege started at the top and at the beginning.… It reached down deep into the operational levels of government, to the lowest-level political appointees. Our members watched this process unfold in 2009 and 2010, and when it came time to defend the Obama Administration at the polls in 2010, no one showed up.
It didn’t have to be this way. In fact, none of the lamentable episodes I have described in these chapters—not even the technocratic longing for consensus—are built-in defects of expertise-in-government. Nations have found ways to have genius and daring at the same time; indeed, before the “ocean liner” experience of the Obama years taught me otherwise, I used to believe that these qualities went hand-in-hand. For example, the original New Deal, which set the standard for an administration of intellectuals, was creative and experimental above all else. Programs would be conjured out of nothing
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They had successfully internalized mainstream thinking in their respective disciplines, maybe, but that was not enough for the challenges of the moment. Reform often comes from the margins of American life, but marginal is not a term anyone would use to describe the satisfied, conventionally minded people of the Obama administration. This team was limited by its excellence, restrained by its orthodoxy.
Professional correctness also fetched the Obama administration a beating in the arena of partisan combat. In their guileless search for Grand Bargains and bipartisan comity, it seems never to have dawned on Team D that their Republican opponents might do exactly what Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay taught them to do in the 1990s: dedicate themselves completely to obstruction, drag the conversation always to the right, and refuse to confer even the slightest bit of legitimacy on the Democratic administration. Failing to guess that this extremely likely eventuality might come to pass cost our pack
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Those upset because Team Obama didn’t get tough with Wall Street would have nowhere else to go, they thought. It was science, political science: move to the center, and you can take such people’s votes for granted. That the liberals’ failures might expose them to deadly flanking fire from the right is something the administration appears not to have seen coming; for all their subtle learning, many members of the liberal class still don’t believe it really happened—what did them in, they think, was just the recrudescence of some boorish reflex in the minds of an unenlightened public. And this
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Not this time. When the Justice Department learned about the conspiracy to suppress tech workers’ wages in 2010, it did just about the same thing it had done with the “Too Big to Jail” banks: it filed a civil suit and boldly extracted from the tech companies in question … a promise not to do it again, for five years. (The affected tech workers had more success on their own, filing a class-action lawsuit against four of the big Silicon Valley companies; it was settled for $415 million in 2015.)24
In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio chose to side with taxi drivers, calling for a cap on the number of Uber drivers allowed in the city. But Governor Andrew Cuomo got the last word, forcing de Blasio to back down and saluting Uber as “one of these great inventions, startups, of this new economy … it’s offering a great service for people, and it’s giving people jobs.”25
I doubt it. That Google hired several of President Obama’s former advisers probably had something to do with it. But a more basic reason is that many of our leading Democrats know you don’t treat blue-state innovators in this way. They lead clean industries, virtuous industries—knowledge industries. They represent the learning class, the creative class. They are the future, and what you do with the future is you win it.
Amazon updates the practices of Wal-Mart, for example, while Google has dusted off corporate behavior from the days of the Robber Barons. What Uber does has been compared to the every-man-for-himself hiring procedures of the pre-union shipping docks, while TaskRabbit is just a modern and even more flexible version of the old familiar temp agency I worked for back in the 1980s. Together, as Robert Reich has written, all these developments are “the logical culmination of a process that began thirty years ago when corporations began turning over full-time jobs to temporary workers, independent
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Technological innovation is not what is hammering down working peoples’ share of what the country earns; technological innovation is the excuse for this development.
In truth, we have been hearing some version of all this inno-talk since the 1970s—a snarling Republican iteration, which demands our submission before the almighty entrepreneur; and a friendly and caring Democratic one, which promises to patch us up with job training and student loans. What each version brushes under the rug is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Economies aren’t ecosystems. They aren’t naturally occurring phenomena to which we must learn to acclimate. Their rules are made by humans. They are, in a word, political. In a democracy we can set the economic table however we
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That those financiers and hedge fund managers do not actually find Hillary’s populism menacing is a well-established fact. Barack Obama’s mild rebukes caused Wall Street to explode in fury and self-pity back in 2009 and 2010; the financiers pouted and cried and picked up their campaign donations and went home. But Hillary’s comments provoke no such reaction. Only a few days before she launched her campaign, for example, John Mack, the former CEO of Morgan Stanley, was asked by a host on the Fox Business channel whether her populist talk was causing him to reconsider his support for her. On the
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One of the themes in this book is Rubin’s constant war with the populists in the Party and in the Clinton administration—a struggle in which Hillary was an important ally. Rubin tells how Hillary once helped him to get what he calls “class-laden language” deleted from a presidential speech and also how she helped prevent the Democrats from appealing to “class conflict” in a general election—on the grounds that it “is not an effective approach” to the “swing voters in the middle of the electorate.”3
Trying to figure out exactly where Hillary Clinton actually stands on political issues can be crazy-making. As a presidential candidate, for example, she says she deplores the revolving door between government and Wall Street because it destroys our “trust in government”—a noble sentiment. When she ran the State Department, however, that door spun on a well-lubricated axis. As a presidential candidate, she opposes Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, as do I; as secretary of state, however, she helped negotiate it. As a presidential candidate in 2008, she claimed to oppose NAFTA, the
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If you’re like me, all this talk of rock-solid principles makes you immediately wonder what those principles are. Young Hillary was “known” for them; she had no intention of ever conceding them; she takes second place to nobody in honoring them; but what they actually were is always left unspoken. The “politics of meaning,” yes, we remember hearing that phrase, but meaning what? What did it all mean?
“Techno-ecstatic” was the term I used to describe rhetoric like this during the 1990s, and now, two crashes and countless tech scandals later, here it was, its claims of freedom-through-smartphones undimmed and unmodified. This form of idealism had survived everything: mass surveillance, inequality, the gig economy. Nothing could dent it. Roughly speaking, there were two groups present at this distinctly first-world gathering: hard-working women of color and authoritative women of whiteness. Many of the people making presentations came from third-world countries—a midwife from Haiti, a student
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but ultimately it’s a diversion, a way of putting across a policy program while avoiding any sincere discussion of the policies in question. The virtue-quest is an exciting moral crusade that seems to be extremely important but at the conclusion of which you discover you’ve got little to show for it besides NAFTA, bank deregulation, and a prison spree. This book is about Democrats, but of course Republicans do it too. Over the years, the culture wars unfolded in precisely the same way as the liberal virtue-quest: as an exciting ersatz politics that seemed to be really important but at the
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I guess she hadn’t heard about what was happening to journalists or musicians or taxi drivers in her own country, but I quibble; as long as this technology was free, anyone could see that it pushed in one direction only, and that was up.
to sympathize with business leaders facing tough questions like “Is there something you can do to prevent governments from using your products to spy on their own citizens?” She was introduced on that occasion by Google’s Eric Schmidt, who praised her as “the most significant secretary of state since Dean Acheson”; Hillary reciprocated by calling Schmidt a “co-conspirator” and welcomed the participation of his company, which she said was “co-hosting” the freedom-ringing proceedings.18