Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
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The progressives had a point. Many of the industrial world’s problems were—and are—highly technical ones that require the attention of well-trained experts. Markets could obviously not be counted on to bring about democratic solutions to the scourge of exploitation, layoffs, and workplace injuries. There were no easy, Jeffersonian ways around these problems.
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Let me confess here a nostalgia for the managerial professionalism that I have just described. It was, after all, the system that administered the country’s great corporations, its news media, its regulatory agencies, and its welfare state in the more benevolent years of the American Century. Here and there, in certain corners of our national life, this older organizational form still survives, keeping our passenger jets from exploding and our highway bridges from collapsing. But generally speaking, that system of professionalism was long ago subverted and transformed into something different ...more
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The problems of technocracy were never solved. Instead technocracy became a way of life, with its own mass constituency. Today, as we are so often reminded, we live in a “postindustrial” age, and in this advanced state of civilization, the demand for expertise has become enormous. Knowledge industries such as software, finance, communication, surveillance, and military contracting are the vital economic sectors of our time, and the corporate world has proceeded to bulk up with armies of middle managers, efficiency experts, laboratory scientists, and public-relations specialists.
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As we shall see, leading members of the professional class show enormous respect for one another—what I will call “professional courtesy”—but they feel precious little sympathy for the less fortunate members of their own cohort—for the adjuncts frozen out of the academic market for tenure, for colleagues who get fired, or even for the kids who don’t get into “good” colleges.
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That was the essential New Democrat idea: The world had changed, but certain Democratic voters expected their politicians to help them cling to a status that globalization had long since revoked. However, a true statesman—a real New Democrat—would challenge them to open their eyes.
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That’s the magic moment that turns the fictional presidential race around: when the Clinton character speaks truth to weakness. In Klein’s cosmogony, this is something noble, something honest, something Democrats must do in order to win. Although this particular story was made up, as a description of a certain Democratic outlook it was exactly right. What workers need, this passage tells us, is to be informed that, in the face of global markets, there’s nothing anyone can do to protect them. That resistance is futile. That only individual self-improvement is capable of lifting you up—not ...more
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Klein was right to make this scene the fulcrum of his 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.
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the most important passage of them all for understanding how his party—how our entire system—has failed so utterly to confront income inequality. It’s a line Clinton repeated a number of times in the course of his years in government,* and here, in a single sentence, is the distilled essence of the theory that has governed the politics of work and compensation from that day to this: You get what you deserve, and what you deserve is defined by how you did in school. Furthermore, this is supposedly true both for individuals and for the nation. Everyone says this. Barack Obama says it, David ...more
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A more serious objection is that Reich’s plan to put people on the path to symbolic analysis simply missed the point. The problem of inequality was more fundamental than upgrading the jobs people did. During the ’92 campaign, one of Clinton’s best lines had been that Americans were “working harder for less”; what he was acknowledging when he said this was one of the basic facts of the decades-long inequality debate: that worker productivity was going up but wages were not.
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To the mass of the professional-managerial class, people who weren’t directly threatened by the treaty, holding an opinion on NAFTA was a matter of deferring to the correct experts—economists in this case, 283 of whom had signed a statement declaring the treaty “will be a net positive for the United States, both in terms of employment creation and overall economic growth.”
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The predictions of people who opposed the agreement turned out to be far closer to what eventually came to pass than did the rosy scenarios of those 283 economists and the victorious President Clinton. NAFTA was supposed to encourage U.S. exports to Mexico; the opposite is what happened, and in a huge way. NAFTA was supposed to increase employment in the U.S.; a study from 2010 counts almost 700,000 jobs lost in America thanks to the treaty.
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The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who is fond of the phrase, has gone so far as to claim that free-trade treaties are so good that supporting them doesn’t require knowledge of their actual contents. “I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade Initiative,” he told Tim Russert in 2006. “I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.”
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Clinton’s wandering political identity fascinated both his admirers and biographers, many of whom chose to explain it as a quest: Bill Clinton had to prove, to himself and the nation, that he was a genuine New Democrat. He had to grow into presidential maturity. And the way he had to do it was by somehow damaging or insulting traditional Democratic groups that represented the party’s tradition of egalitarianism. Then we would know that the New Deal was truly dead. Then we could be sure.
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Historians of the Clinton presidency generally skip over the imprisonment craze into which he led the country in the mid-Nineties. It is hard to account for if the framework you’re applying to those years is one in which Clinton was the victim of right-wing persecution. Those who do acknowledge Clinton’s part in the Big Clampdown either depict it as a great success in the fight against crime—which it was not*—or else describe it in superficial Washington terms: He got a great big law passed through Congress, thus proving that he could be an effective bipartisan leader.
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There is really no contradiction between these. Lenience and forgiveness and joyous creativity for one group while the other gets a biblical-style beatdown—these things actually fit together quite nicely. Indeed, the ascendance of the first group requires that the second be lowered gradually into hell. When you take Clintonism all together, it makes sense, and the sense it makes has to do with social class. Think of it as a slight variation on Stiglitz’s observation about the superiority of speculation to all other occupations: What the poor get is discipline; what the professionals get is ...more
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Welfare reform is almost always spoken of these days as a policy triumph, usually because of the single data point that there are fewer people now who collect welfare than there were before the law went into effect.
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Even the political aspect of welfare reform has proven illusory. Repealing AFDC was supposed to inoculate Democrats against predictable right-wing attacks on the party of moochers; this is what made it the crowning glory of Clintonism, the change that had to come before the New Dems could get started on “transforming politics.” But today it’s as though nothing changed at all. Conservatives still routinely blast the clueless generosity of the welfare state, which supposedly coddles the 47 percent and rocks the lazy to sleep in a comfy government-issue hammock.
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But what I want to focus on here are the economic effects of welfare reform. Plunging our society’s weakest and most vulnerable into economic desperation triggered a domino effect of misery right down the line, with the slightly better-off now feeling the competition of the utterly hopeless. The effect was to make all of us a little more precarious. On its own, welfare reform was a meanspirited thing to do—“one of the most regressive social programs promulgated by a democratic government in the twentieth century,” in the words of the sociologist Loïc Wacquant, who has studied the subject in ...more
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Considered as part of a grander economic architecture, however, it makes an awful kind of sense. As Wacquant continues, welfare reform “confirmed and accelerated the gradual replacement of a protective (semi) welfare state by a disciplinary state mating the stinging goad of workfare with the dull hammer of prisonfare, for which the close monitoring and the punitive containment of derelict categories stand in for social policy ...
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That a Democrat might be the one to pick apart the safety net is a violation of this basic brand identity, but by the very structure of the system it is extremely difficult to hold the party accountable for such a deed. This, in turn, is why only a Democrat was able to do that job and get away with it. Only a Democrat was capable of getting bank deregulation passed; only a Democrat could have rammed NAFTA through Congress; and only a Democrat would be capable of privatizing Social Security, as George W. Bush found out in 2005.
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President Clinton himself hosted a White House Conference on the New Economy in April of 2000, claiming the marvelous new era to be the product of a balanced federal budget and the deregulatory program he had enacted during his time in office.2 The protagonists of this economic story were our familiar friends: the “learning class,” the “wired workers,” the “symbolic analysts.” Innovation was the driving force behind this new era, sometimes personified by Wall Street, on other occasions by Silicon Valley. The place where the magic happened was “the ideopolis”: the postindustrial city, where ...more
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Look more closely at these prosperous ideopolises and the picture becomes even more familiar. The symbolic embodiment of all this innovative postindustrial economic activity was none other than Frederick Dutton’s countercultural hero, hymned now as the very embodiment of the New Economy. Youth radicalism became the language in which the winners assured us that they cared about our individuality and that all their fine new digital products were designed strictly to liberate the world. Remember? “Burn down business-as-usual,” screamed a typical management text of the year 2000 called The ...more
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The connection between counterculture and corporate power was a typical assertion of the New Economy era, and what it implied was that rebellion was not about overturning elites, it was about encouraging business enterprise. I myself mocked this idea in voluminous detail at the time. But it did not wane with the dot-com crash; indeed, it has never retreated at all. From Burning Man to Apple’s TV commercials, it is all over the place today. Think of the rock stars who showed up for Facebook billionaire Sean Parker’s wedding in Big Sur, or the rock ’n’ roll museum founded by Microsoft ...more
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It is, in a way, the telos of everything I have been describing so far. It is as though the enlightened youth of the Sixties had stepped straight from battling the pig in Chicago ’68 to a panel discussion on crowdfunding at this year’s South by Southwest, the annual festival in Austin, Texas, that has mutated from an indie-rock get-together into a tech-entrepreneur’s convention; a place where the hip share the streets with venture capitalists on the prowl. This combination might sound strange to you, but for a certain breed of Democratic politician it has become a natural habitat. At SXSW ...more