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

by Thomas Frank

People who are twenty-five today are doing worse than people of that age ten years ago, and much worse than people who were twenty-five back in 1996.4 The same is true, incidentally, of people who are thirty-five, forty-five, and probably fifty-five, but for the young this reversal of the traditional American trajectory is acutely painful: they know that no amount of labor will ever catapult them into the ranks of the winners.

Yup.

These days meritocracy has come to seem so reasonable that many of us take it for granted as the true and correct measure of human value. Do well in school, and you earn your credential. Earn your credential, and you are admitted into the ranks of the professions. Become a professional, and you receive the respect of the public plus the nice house in the suburbs and the fancy car and all the rest. Meritocracy makes so much sense to us that barely anyone thinks of challenging it, except on its own terms.

There is no solidarity in a meritocracy. The very idea contradicts the ideology of the well-graduated technocrats who rule us.

To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you’ll need in the society of the future. Take inequality. The real problem, many liberals believe, is that not enough poor people get a chance to go to college and join the professional-managerial elite.

“In other words, education is now the key to sustainable power.”27 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. But of course this isn’t really an answer at all; it’s a moral judgment, handed down by the successful from the vantage of their own success. 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.

Can't disagree.

Democratic leaders decided to reorient the party after 1968 not because this was necessary for survival but because they distrusted their main constituency and had started to lust after a new and more sophisticated one.

In a 1981 interview looking back at the administration’s deeds, Carter adviser 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,

According to company management, the real problem was that employees were in denial; the union “still thinks it is 1950,” declared the CEO of Caterpillar.9 Those aggrieved Midwesterners simply hadn’t understood how the world had changed, how savage the competitive environment had become—and how ridiculous it was now for working-class people to expect to live middle-class lives. (It’s something CEOs still say, incidentally, about anyone who expects to be paid decently.)