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by
Thomas Frank
Started reading
November 9, 2016
Ordinary citizens are beyond disillusioned, though.
In 2014, according to a much-discussed think tank report, the total of all the bonuses handed out on Wall Street was more than twice as much as the total earned by every person in the country who worked full-time for the minimum wage.
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.
This is a book about the failure of the Democratic Party—about how they failed when the conditions for success were perfect.
“Inequality” is a euphemism for the Appalachification of our world.
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.
The agent of change isn’t interested in the job at hand. Inequality just doesn’t spark their imagination. It is the point at which their famous compassion peters out.
Yes, they might lose a Congressional election here and there, but they are the natural majority party now, they think; when they encounter an obstacle, all they have to do is stand by and let the natural process of demographic “ascendancy” work.
Democrats no longer need to plead, explain, or persuade; henceforth they need merely to wait.
Which brings us face-to-face with our mystery: how is it that, in our moment of utmost need, a fake crisis like the problem of “extreme partisanship” was able to trump the real deal? These are not Obama’s shortcomings alone. They are failings of the party he leads. They are, in a word, ours. It’s time to own up.
We lampoon the Republican hierarchy of money with the phrase “the One Percent”; if we want to understand what has wrecked the Democratic Party as a populist alternative, however, what we need to scrutinize is more like the Ten Percent, the people at the apex of the country’s hierarchy of professional status.
There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.
Our economy has been reliving the 1930s; why hasn’t our politics?
A good sociological definition of professionalism is “a second hierarchy”—second to the main hierarchy of money, that is—“based on credentialed expertise.”
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.
the Vietnam War, a catastrophic intervention in which tens of thousands of working-class Americans were sent to their deaths—not to mention the vast death toll among the Vietnamese themselves—largely because foreign-policy professionals in Washington were unwilling to listen to voices from outside their discipline, bearing uncomfortable news.13
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.
Meritocracy is about winners, and ensuring that everyone has a chance to become one.
Meritocracy makes so much sense to us that barely anyone thinks of challenging it, except on its own terms.
For successful professionals, meritocracy is a beautifully self-serving doctrine, entitling them to all manner of rewards and status, because they are smarter than other people.
There is no solidarity in a meritocracy.
It is not a coincidence that the two most successful Democratic leaders of recent years—Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—were both plucked from obscurity by prestigious universities.
The liberal class knows, as a matter of deepest conviction, that there is no social or political problem that cannot be solved with more education and job training. Indeed, the only critique they will acknowledge of this beloved institution is that it, too, is not meritocratic enough. If we just launch more charter schools, give everyone a fair shot at the SAT, and crank out the student loans, then we will have done all it is humanly possible to do.
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.
Nor can the leaders of the professional class see the absurdity of urging everyone else to do exactly as they themselves did to make their way to the top. It is as if some oil baron were to proclaim that the unemployed could solve their problems if they just found good places to drill for oil. Or if some mutual-fund manager were to suggest that the solution to inequality was for everyone to put their savings in the stock market.
This is what defines the category: professionals do not have to listen. They are the only occupational group, as the sociologist Eliot Freidson put it many years ago, with “the recognized right to declare … ‘outside’ evaluation illegitimate and intolerable.”
Professional economists screw up again and again, and no one cares. The only real accountability they face is from their endlessly forgiving peers in economics departments across the country.
The Folklore of Capitalism.
For old-school regulators, I am told, undue financial complexity was an indicator of likely fraud. But for the liberal class, it is the opposite: an indicator of sophistication. Complexity is admirable in its own right.
The premise of his argument is that our new, liberal plutocracy is different from plutocracies of the past because rich people today are sometimes very capable. “Those who get rich in a knowledge economy,” the journalist tells us, are well-schooled; they often come from the ranks of “highly educated professionals” and consequently they support Democrats, the party that cares about schools, science, the environment, and federal spending for research. It is not a coincidence, Callahan continues, that “some of the biggest zones of wealth creation are near major universities.” The smart get richer
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they all pointed toward the same North Star, toward the same constantly growing awareness of what Democrats had to become in the future: the party of well-educated professionals.
After decades of toil on behalf of liberalism, “they were being taken for granted,” is how the journalist Theodore White summarized their attitude. “Said Al Barkan, director of the AFL/CIO’s political arm, COPE, early in 1972 as he examined the scenario about to unfold: ‘We aren’t going to let these Harvard-Berkeley Camelots take over our party.’”3
Neglecting workers was the opening that allowed Republicans to reach out to blue-collar voters with their arsenal of culture-war fantasies.
“They define the good life not in terms of material thresholds or ‘index economics,’ as the New Deal, Great Society, and most economic conservatives have done,” Dutton marveled, “but as ‘the fulfilled life’ in a more intangible and personal sense.”
The main thrust of Changing Sources of Power was that Democrats needed to reach out to the young, educated professionals-to-be because they were better, more liberal people; but Dutton also suggested from time to time that Democrats needed to do this because that was the direction the world was going.
Enlightened people didn’t really care anymore about the minimum wage or workers’ rights. But the stuff about authenticity and personal fulfillment—the stuff that appealed to “the young existentialists”—that stuff would win elections.
Then Frederick Dutton, Democratic Party power broker, went farther: he identified workers, the core of the New Deal coalition, as “the principal group arrayed against the forces of change.” They were actually, to a certain degree, the enemy.
Besides, what kind of Democrat gives up on basic economic issues in order to focus on matters of “the psyche” and “the soul”? This was not politics; it was psychotherapy. Worse: it was aristocratic hauteur disguised as enlightenment.
“The new Democrats came out of the anti-war protests and the McGovern campaign, the Peace Corps and the women’s movement, the professions and the suburbs,” writes historian Jefferson Cowie, “but not the union halls and the wards.”
Americans can only succeed by winning the market’s favor, and we can only do that by proving ourselves worthy in school.
To attribute economic results to school years finished and SAT scores achieved is to remove matters from the realm of, well, economics and to relocate them to the provinces of personal striving and individual intelligence.
Unlike other dominant classes in history, there was technically no limit on the number of people who could join this favored cohort, who could grow up and “sell symbolic-analytic services worldwide.” In theory, everyone could become a yuppie.
But when Clinton said in a speech about free trade in 1993 that Change is upon us. We can do nothing about that, he was enshrining the opposite idea as the progressive creed.
Change was an external force we could neither escape nor control; it was a reality that limited what we could do politically and that had in fact made most of our political choices for us already.
When a Rhodes scholar was the one deregulating and cutting taxes, why, those were good times; when some idiot from Texas tried his hand at it, the world crashed and burned. Just another demonstration of the importance of a good education, I guess.
many Democratic leaders regard such voters as people who have nowhere else to go. Regardless of how poorly Democrats perform on inequality matters, they will never be as awful as those crazy Republicans.