Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

by Thomas Frank

As everyone would soon learn with the help of a National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden, to understand the Internet in terms of this set-piece battle of free speech versus censorship was to miss the point entirely. There’s something else the Internet makes it easy for governments to do—something called “mass surveillance,” and, we later learned, the very government Hillary Clinton served was the one doing it. Not some despot in Damascus. Not some terrorist in Tripoli. Her government. Her government didn’t care what you posted in the chat room or whether you talked on your phone all day long—they just wanted to watch and listen as you did. They recorded people’s calls. They read people’s email. They spied on the president of Mexico. They spied on French business leaders. They listened to the phone calls of some thirty-five world leaders. They hacked the cellphones of entire nations. They spied on low-level foreign diplomats in order to swindle them at the bargaining table.

That access to the Internet was not all one needed to bring a country from a backwater to American-style prosperity.

And then: Libya sank into civil war, with armed factions, outrageous brutality, and fleeing refugees. Making a stand for Internet Freedom sounded like a noble goal back in 2011—a cheap way to solve Libya’s problems, too—but in retrospect it was hardly sufficient to quell the more earthly forces that roiled that unhappy land.

What was most attractive about microlending was what it was not, what it made unnecessary: any sort of collective action by poor people, coming together in governments or unions.

Instead, we were to understand poverty in the familiar terms of entrepreneurship and individual merit, as though the hard work of millions of single, unconnected people, plus cellphones, bank accounts, and a little capital, were what was required to remedy the third world’s vast problems.

it was extending Western banking methods to encompass every last individual on earth.25

Everyone in this room is a banker, because everyone here is banking on self-employment to help alleviate poverty around the world.

In the decade that followed, the theology of microlending developed a number of doctrinal refinements: the idea that women were better borrowers and better entrepreneurs than men; the belief that poor people needed mentorship and “financial inclusion” in addition to loans; the suggestion that they had to be hooked up to a bank via the Internet; the discovery that it was morally OK to run microlending banks as private, profit-making enterprises—many of the arguments that I had heard at the No Ceilings conference, expressed in the unforgettable tones of international female solidarity.

These are fine, sterling sentiments, but they suffer from one big problem: microlending doesn’t work. As strategies for ending poverty go, microlending appears to be among the worst that has ever been tried, just one step up from doing nothing to help the poor at all. In a carefully researched 2010 book called Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work?, the development consultant Milford Bateman debunks virtually every aspect of the microlending gospel. It doesn’t empower women, Bateman writes; it makes them into debtors. It encourages people to take up small, futile enterprises that have no chance of growing or employing others. Sometimes microborrowers don’t even start businesses at all; they just spend the loan on whatever. Even worse: the expert studies that originally sparked the microlending boom turn out, upon reexamination, to have been badly flawed.

the increasing dominance of the microfinance model in developing countries is causally associated with their progressive deindustrialization and infantilization

There’s a second reason the liberal class loves microfinance, and it’s extremely simple: microlending is profitable. Lending to the poor, as every subprime mortgage originator knows, can be a lucrative business. Mixed with international feminist self-righteousness, it is also a bulletproof business, immune to criticism. The million-dollar paydays it has brought certain microlenders are the wages of virtue. This combination is the real reason the international goodness community believes that empowering poor women by lending to them at usurious interest rates is a fine thing all around.29

What I concluded from observing all this is that there is a global commerce in compassion, an international virtue-circuit featuring people of unquestionable moral achievement, like Bono, Malala, Sting, Yunus, Angelina Jolie, and Bishop Tutu; figures who travel the world, collecting and radiating goodness. They come into contact with the other participants in this market: the politicians and billionaires and bankers who warm themselves at the incandescent virtue of the world-traveling moral superstars.32

What drives this market are the buyers. Like Wal-Mart partnering with the State Department, or Goldman Sachs paying two hundred grand for a single speech, what these virtue-consumers are doing is purchasing liberalism offsets, an ideological version of the carbon offsets that are sometimes bought by polluters in order to compensate for the smog they churn out. At the apex of all this idealism stands the Clinton Foundation, a veritable market-maker in the world’s vast, swirling virtue-trade. The former president who stands at its head is “the world’s leading philanthropic dealmaker,” according to a book on the subject.33 Under his watchful eye all the concerned parties are brought together: the moral superstars, the billionaires, and of course the professionals, who organize, intone, and advise. Virtue changes hands. Good causes are funded. Compassion is radiated and absorbed.

This is modern liberalism in action: an unregulated virtue-exchange in which representatives of one class of humanity ritually forgive the sins of another class, all of it convened and facilitated by a vast army of well-graduated American professionals, their reassuring expertise propped up by bogus social science, while the unfortunat...

Day on which you were supposed to commemorate the efforts of female workers and the sacrifices of female strikers. It is a vestige of an old form of feminism that didn’t especially focus on the problems experienced by women trying to be corporate officers or the views of some mega-billionaire’s wife. However, one of the things we were there in New York to consider was how unjust it was that women were underrepresented in the C-suites of the Fortune 500—and, by implication, how lamentable it was that the United States had not yet elected a woman president.

There was no consideration—I mean, zero—of the situation of women who work on the shop floors of the Fortune 500—for Wal-Mart or Amazon or any of the countless low-wage employers who make that list sparkle. Working-class American women were simply … not there. In this festival of inclusiveness and sweet affirmation, their problems were not considered, their voices were not heard.

The result, Edelman maintains, has been exactly what you’d expect: extreme poverty has increased dramatically in this country since Bill Clinton signed welfare reform in 1996. For poor and working-class American women, the floor was pulled up and hauled off to the landfill some twenty years ago. There is no State Department somewhere to pay for their cellphones or pick up their daycare expenses. And one of the people who helped to work this deed was the very woman I watched present herself as the champion of the world’s downtrodden femininity. Sitting there in gilded Manhattan, I thought of all the abandoned factories and postindustrial desolation that surround this city, and I mused on how, in such places, the old Democratic Party was receding into terminal insignificance. It had virtually nothing to say to the people who inhabit that land of waste and futility.

They knew which things were necessary to make up a liberal movement, and all of the ingredients were present: well-meaning billionaires; grant makers and grant recipients; Hollywood stars who talked about social media; female entrepreneurs from the third world; and, of course, a trucked-in audience of hundreds who clapped and cheered enthusiastically every time one of their well-graduated leaders wandered across the screen of the Jumbotron. The performance of liberalism was so realistic one could almost believe it lived.

Barack Obama, the next Democrat to occupy the White House, mimicked Clinton in policy decisions and personnel choices, and so it made sense to do exactly as his predecessor had done in vacation destinations. Obama, too, spent all his presidential holidays on Martha’s Vineyard with one exception—the year he ran for reelection and needed to burnish his populist image. When you research the place, you keep bumping into cozy details like the following: the Martha’s Vineyard estate where Obama stayed in the summer of 2013 belonged to one David Schulte, a corporate investment adviser and Clinton intimate who met Bill at Oxford and Hillary at Yale, where Schulte was editor of the Yale Law Journal.3

It’s a nice thought, but I suspect the real reasons Democratic politicians like to come here are even simpler. First of all, there’s security. Martha’s Vineyard is an island; it is remote by definition and difficult to travel to. People in many parts of the country have never even heard of it.

Then there’s the money. What has sanctified the name of Martha’s Vineyard among Democratic politicians are the countless deeds of fund-raising heroism that have graced the island’s manicured golf courses, its quaint hotels, and its architecturally celebrated interiors. During the summer season, when the island’s billionaires have returned like swallows to the fabulous secluded coastal estates they own, there are fundraisers every night of the week. Often these are thrown for the benefit of worthy charitable causes, not politicians, but of course it is the political fundraisers that make the headlines.

On Martha’s Vineyard, declared the New York Times, the presidential race “is dividing old loyalties, testing longtime friendships and causing a few awkward moments at the island’s many dinner parties.” The struggle between the two Democrats made situations fraught at resort communities across the country, the paper allowed. “But perhaps nowhere is the intensity as great as on the Vineyard because of its history, the pedigree of its residents and those residents’ proximity to power.”4

On the outside wall of the shop hung a poem by Charles Bukowski, because of course nothing goes better with tasteful clothing than transgressive poetry. It’s about the horror of blue-collar life, about how dehumanizing it is to do the kind of work that no one who passes by here ever does anymore: I think of the men I’ve known in factories with no way to get out— choking while living choking while laughing When I think of the men I’ve known in factories, I think of those locked-out workers I met in Decatur, Illinois, in the early days of the Clinton administration.

The two-class system that those men-in-factories spoke of during the strikes has pretty much come to pass. I mean this not only in the sense that Wall Street traders are very rich, but in the highly specific way that the two-tiered system the Caterpillar workers were protesting has been installed in workplaces across the country; as a result, younger workers will never catch up to the pay earned by their seniors no matter how many years they log on the job. In 2015 I went back to Decatur to catch up with veterans of the war zone like Larry Solomon, who had been the leader of the local United Auto Workers union at the Caterpillar plant. He went back in after the strike ended but retired in 1998. When I met Solomon in his tidy suburban home, he talked in detail about the many times he got crossways with management in days long past; about all the grievances he filed for his coworkers over the years and all the puffed-up company officials he recalls facing down.

Today, that old social contract is gone—or, at least, the part of it that ensured health care and retirement for blue-collar workers. Now, as Solomon sees it, companies can say, “We want your life, and when your work life is over, then good-bye. We thank you for your life, but we’re not responsible for you after we turn you out.”

And they understand that they’re working two and three jobs just to get by, and a lot of them can’t own anything, and they understand seeing mom and dad forced into retirement or forced out of their job, now they’re working at Hardee’s or McDonald’s to make ends meet so they can retire in poverty. People understand that. They see that.

Let me acknowledge that I sometimes feel this way, too. I think it is a terrible thing when Republicans periodically capture the nation’s commanding heights. But even when it comes to containing the Republicans—the area where the Democratic Party’s mission is so clear and straightforward—it has not been a great success. Despite their highly convincing righteousness, despite their oft-touted demographic edge, and even despite a historic breakdown of the GOP’s free-market ideology, the Democrats have been unable to suppress the Republican challenge. The radicalized Republican Party seems to be conquering the nation, one state legislature at a time. What I saw in Kansas eleven years ago is now everywhere.

It is time to face the obvious: that the direction the Democrats have chosen to follow for the last few decades has been a failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health. “Failure” is admittedly a harsh word, but what else are we to call it when the left party in a system chooses to confront an epic economic breakdown by talking hopefully about entrepreneurship and innovation? When the party of professionals repeatedly falls for bad, self-serving ideas like bank deregulation, the “creative class,” and empowerment through bank loans? When the party of the common man basically allows aristocracy to return?

Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on.

Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way. There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor, the one social movement that is committed by its nature to pushing back against the inequality trend.

The Washington political world anticipated another boring presidential battle fought out along the same lines as always: A nicely polished candidate would be chosen by the Republican Party’s billionaire donors, and he would advance with trumpets blaring over the extremely familiar terrain of the culture wars. As the Democrats prepared to meet the anticipated Republican foe, they felt that they, too, could do what they always do: offer bromides on the economy and encouraging words to the various groups that made up their coalition. They would talk about innovation and education; they would demonstrate how responsible they were to the swing voters who inhabited the political “center,” and ultimately demographics would deliver the victory. The coalition of the ascendant would ascend a little more.

Like the “prairie populist” who challenged the Bill Clinton character in Primary Colors (see Chapter Three), Sanders was a living symbol of what the Democrats used to stand for, and party leaders didn’t seem to appreciate being reminded of how far they had strayed. Elected Democratic officials lined up almost unanimously against Sanders. The President made it clear he stood with Clinton. Even the Democratic National Committee, supposedly a neutral party during the primaries, was later discovered to have consistently taken the side of the Clinton campaign.

But intolerance was only part of the story. If you listened to Trump’s speeches, you noticed a peculiar thing. In addition to his insults and his boasting, he also spoke about an entirely legitimate issue. Donald Trump was a bigot, yes, and this was inexcusable, but he also talked about trade: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he would make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the

Besides, as many pointed out during the campaign, he was a hypocrite on the trade issue as well as so many other things, having his name-brand shirts and ties made overseas. But what mattered in 2016 was that Trump was giving voice to people’s economic frustration.

An indelible image from 2016: an amateur video going around on the Internet that showed a room full of workers at a Carrier air conditioning plant in Indiana being told by an officer of the company that the factory is being moved to Monterrey, Mexico, and that they’re all going to lose their jobs.

The company received bailout money promise the workers again that they wouldn't leave and then close the plant anyways

As I watched the famous footage, I thought of all the arguments over trade that we’ve had in this country since the Bill Clinton days, all the sweet words from our economists about the scientifically proven benevolence of free trade, all the ways in which our newspapers mock people who say that treaties like NAFTA allow companies to move jobs to Mexico. Well, here is a video of a company moving its jobs to Mexico, courtesy of NAFTA. This is what it looks like. The Carrier executive talks in that familiar and highly professional HR language about the need to “stay competitive” and “the extremely price-sensitive marketplace.” A worker shouts, “Fuck you!” at the executive. The executive asks people to please be quiet so he can “share” his “information.” His information about all of them losing their jobs.

The Clinton name was associated permanently with that betrayal, and Hillary herself was implicated personally as well, thanks to her service in the free-trade Obama administration. Centrism of the Clinton variety worked when Republicans were reliably to the right of the Democrats on trade matters, but change that essential element of the political framework and the whole structure would start to shake.

“These people aren’t racist, not any more than anybody else is,” he told me when I asked him about working-class Trump supporters in March 2016. “When Trump talks about trade, we think about the Clinton administration, first with NAFTA and then with PNTR China, and here in Northeast Indiana, we hemorrhaged jobs.”

… And here’s Trump talking about trade, in a ham-handed way, but at least he’s representing emotionally. We’ve had all the political establishment standing behind every trade deal, and we endorsed some of these people, and then we’ve had to fight them to get them to represent us.

What our consensus politics have done to working people is obvious to anyone outside the prosperous enclaves on the two coasts. Ill-considered trade deals and generous bank bailouts and guaranteed profits for insurance companies but no recovery for average people, ever—these things have taken their toll.

The least inspiring presidential candidate in many years, Hillary Clinton was famous for her intimate friendship with Wall Street bankers. At one point she actually scolded Bernie Sanders for wanting to get tough with the financial industry because such a policy, by itself, would not also end racism and sexism—a new low in self-serving sophistry. The Democrats’ unofficial slogan, “America is already great,” sounded like the kind of thing you’d see inscribed in a country club logo somewhere.

Venture capital! The man Americans elected in 2008 to get tough with high finance and stop the revolving door was now, in 2016, considering taking his own walk through that revolving door and getting a job in high finance.

Today Cleveland is less than half the size it was in the Fifties. One of the country’s five largest cities in 1920, it now ranks forty-eighth. The only fields in which Cleveland serves today as a leader, as an urban exemplar, are foreclosure and empty housing.

There was a necessary and healthful aspect to all this. Trump richly deserved to be called out for his bigotry and sexism. Many voters would eventually back Hillary purely to show their disgust with Republican racism. But it is not easy to turn a political convention into a Sunday school. And what I saw in Philadelphia was a hollow performance. The virtue quest kept being defeated by the ugly facts on the ground. The lavish investment-bank parties about which attendees kept hearing, for example. Or the special deal that the party of organized labor struck with Uber to ferry delegates back and forth from the convention center.

It’s hard for a group to make a stand against the powerful when the powerful are celebrated members of that very group. Countless delegates at the convention, for example, could be seen waving signs opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and chanting “No TPP!” On day three of the convention, however, many of these same delegates cheered lustily for Barack Obama, who was working hard to make the TPP the final great achievement of his administration.

Anyone here? These things were taking place under the Democratic administration of Barack Obama. The failure of the wealth to trickle down was directly attributable to policy choices made by Obama and his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, both of whom would be apotheosized in the days that followed. In short, Democratic aspirants would have trouble enunciating an attractive economic message in 2016 because it was immediately contradicted by the deeds or failures of an actual existing Democratic administration. That left them to try to make the sale to voters on righteousness alone.

The blunders and scandals with which the campaign ended are worth remembering, of course: Hillary’s complete failure to visit the formerly liberal state of Wisconsin, which she proceeded to lose; the hacking of various Democratic officials’ email accounts; the FBI’s apparent revival of its investigation of her shortly before election day; and the big increases in Obamacare premiums, which came (as if sent by Trump himself) just before the contest came to an end.

This was a catastrophic failure for the professional-class ideology.

Trade was the spot where the smart young liberals who knew how to run an economy first stuck the knife into organized labor. Over the years, trade became the space where liberal columnists and prize-winning economists would get together to celebrate the way their enlightened worldview coincided with their amazing prosperity. And now trade has become the junkyard where it all came apart, where blue-collar America finally got even with the Clinton dynasty.

But even after the debacle of 2016, liberals show little taste for the self-examination that is required of them. On the contrary: They have just run a campaign that embodied everything objectionable about the professional-class outlook, and in the aftermath of its failure, they have insisted on blaming everyone but themselves. As I write this, Democratic insiders can be heard blaming Bernie Sanders for Hillary Clinton’s loss. Or blaming the sexism of the public. Or blaming “fake news.” Or blaming real news. Or blaming Russia. Or blaming the FBI. I have even heard some declare that any effort to win over working-class voters is a tacit capitulation to racism. Better to lose future elections than to compete for the votes of those who spurned their beloved Hillary.