Listen, Liberal: or, what ever happened to the party of the people?

by Thomas Frank

According to official measurements, the last few years have been a time of brisk prosperity, with unemployment down and the stock market up. Productivity advances all the time. For those who work for a living, however, nothing seems to improve. Wages do not grow. Median income is still well below where it was in 2007. Workers’ share of the gross national product (as opposed to the share taken by investors) hit a record low in 2011—and then it stayed there right through the recovery. It is there to this day; economists now regard its collapse as a quasi-permanent development.

Look at the same numbers beginning in 1997—from the beginning of the New Economy boom to the present—and you find that this same group, the American people, pocketed none of America’s income growth at all.

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.

The first adjustment they made, he recalled, was when women entered the workforce. Families “added that income, you got to keep your boat, or your second car, or your vacation, and everything was OK.” Next, people ran up debt on their credit cards. Then, in the last decade, people began “pulling home equity out,” borrowing against their houses. “All three of those things have kept the middle class from having to sink down into abject poverty,” he said.

Another would be to say he saved a bankrupt system that by all rights should have met its end. America came through an economic debacle, an earthquake that shook people’s faith to the ground. Yet out of it, the system emerged largely unchanged.

Trying to pinpoint where and when the hope drained out of the Obama movement is something of a parlor game for my disgruntled friends. Some say they lost their faith in Obama even before he took office, when he named the bailout architect Tim Geithner as his choice for Treasury secretary and the deregulation architect Larry Summers as his main economic adviser.

March 27, 2009.

What was shocking about all this was to realize that Obama believed these clichés. Consensus, bipartisanship, the “center”: those were the things this admirable and intelligent man was serious about—the kind of stale, empty verbiage favored by Beltway charlatans on the Sunday talk shows.

Today, the House of Representatives is dedicated obsessively to the concerns of the rich—to cutting their taxes, to chastising their foes, to holding the tissue box as they cry about the mean names people call them.

Brooks did not point out that choosing so many people from the same class background—every single one of them, as he said, was a professional—might by itself guarantee closed minds and ideological uniformity.

Today we live in a world of predatory bankers, predatory educators, even predatory health care providers, all of them out for themselves.

Put it a different way: what does it mean when the dominant constituency of the left party in a two-party system is a high-status group rather than the traditional working class?

Chris Hayes, “—gay rights, inclusion of women in higher education, the end of de jure racial discrimination—are the battles it has fought or is fighting in favor of making the meritocracy more meritocratic. The areas in which it has suffered its worst defeats—collective action to provide universal public goods, mitigating rising income inequality—are those that fall outside the meritocracy’s purview.”

On anything having to do with organized labor, as we shall see, they are downright conservative.

This is because inequality does not contradict, defy, or even inconvenience the logic of professionalism. On the contrary, inequality is essential to it.

This has all sorts of important consequences for liberalism, but let us here take note of just one before proceeding: professionals do not hold that other Democratic constituency, organized labor, in particularly high regard.

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. Nor is it surprising that both of them eventually signed on to a social theory in which higher education is the route to individual success and to national salvation as well.

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.

But what are we to make of our modern-day technocracy, a meritocracy of failure in which ineffectual people rise to the top and entire professions (accountants, real-estate appraisers, etc.) are roiled by corruption scandals?

Despite the favorite Sixties slogan, professionals do not question authority; their job is to apply it. This is the very nature of their work and the object of their training, according to Schmidt; by his definition, professionals are “obedient thinkers” who “implement their employers’ attitudes” and carefully internalize the reigning doctrine of their discipline,

Exhibit A of these interlocking pathologies is economics, a discipline that often acts like an ideological cartel set up to silence the heterodox.

I have already mentioned President Obama’s remarkable zeal for bipartisan agreement; as we shall see, this is not his passion alone. Most of the Democratic leadership has shared these views for decades; for them, a great coming-together of the nation’s educated is the obvious objective of political work.

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.

But neither is it a demographic with any particular concern for the fate of working people.

Labor’s reward was as follows: by the time of the 1972 presidential contest, the Democratic Party had effectively kicked the unions out of their organization. Democratic candidates still wanted the votes of working people, of course, as well as their donations and their get-out-the-vote efforts. But between ’68 and ’72, unions lost their position as the premier interest group in the Democratic coalition.

Neglecting workers was the opening that allowed Republicans to reach out to blue-collar voters with their arsenal of culture-war fantasies.

I am referring to a book called Changing Sources of Power, a 1971 manifesto by lobbyist and Democratic strategist Frederick Dutton, who was one of the guiding forces on the McGovern Commission. Taken along with the Republican Powell Memo, it gives us the plans of the two big party organizations as the country entered upon the disastrous period that would give us Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Gingrich, and the rest.

With the help of a Democratic Congress, he enacted the first of the era’s really big tax cuts for the rich and also the first of the really big deregulations.

Alfred Kahn,

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.

As the Nineties began, public fury over inequality was beginning one of its great cyclical eruptions.

The former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips kicked things off with his best-selling 1990 book, The Politics of Rich and Poor, asserting that upper-bracket excess could only go so far before it triggered a populist backlash—and that America had reached that point.

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.

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.

The world we face today is the world where what you earn depends on what you can learn.

The workers turned out to be right about the war zone. Before long the local police escalated the conflict with a spectacular bit of violence, using pepper spray on a crowd of peaceful protesters at the Tate & Lyle factory gate. I lived in Chicago at the time and I remember being shocked by the pictures of that incident, in particular by a poignant one of a middle-aged protester holding an American flag as the pepper spray hit his face.

“The Clinton Administration was to fulfill Cecil Rhodes’s dream,” wrote the British journalist Walker. “Seldom has any foreign country been run so completely by such a narrowly defined elite.”12

cozy relationships between press, law, academia and government”

Now we remember that it was Bill Clinton’s administration that deregulated derivatives, deregulated telecom, and put our country’s only strong banking laws in the grave.

He’s the one who rammed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through Congress and who taught the world that the way you respond to a recession is by paying off the federal deficit. Mass incarceration and the repeal of welfare, two of Clinton’s other major achievements, are the pillars of the disciplinary state that has made life so miserable for Americans in the lower reaches of society. He would have put a huge dent in Social Security, too, had the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal not stopped him. If we take inequality as our measure, the Clinton administration looks not heroic but odious.

Globalization was irresistible, the argument went, and free trade was always and in all situations a good thing. So good, it didn’t even really need to be explained. Everyone knew this. Everyone agreed.

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. And, as feared, the agreement gave one class in America enormous leverage over the other: employers now routinely threaten to move their operations to Mexico if their workers organize. A surprisingly large number of them—far more than in the pre-NAFTA days—have actually made good on the threat.

In an ugly coda that was delayed by about a year, the ’94 law also required President Clinton personally to sign off on the infamous 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. The former drug was thought to be the scourge of the planet—and 88 percent of the people arrested for it were black—while the latter, even though it was essentially the same thing, was regarded as just another harmless yuppie crime. Handing down prison sentences of many decades for one drug but not the other was both racist and insanely cruel. But Clinton went out of his way to ensure that this practice continued.

Realizing the predicament he was in is what set off Clinton’s famous explosion in the Oval Office one day in early 1993, which we also know about from Woodward: “I hope you’re all aware we’re all Eisenhower Republicans,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “We’re Eisenhower Republicans here, and we are fighting the Reagan Republicans. We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn’t that great?”27 Here we get a rare glimpse of the Bill Clinton that might have been. But the president was a quick study.

As with NAFTA, every expert who mattered was on the same page. A retrospective on the banking law published by the Minneapolis Fed in 2000 casually referred to it as “the now infamous Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.” “Almost everybody agreed that Glass-Steagall was an anachronism in a global economy,” proclaimed a 1995 New York Times news story on the effort to repeal the law. “Enacted in 1933 to prevent a recurrence of financial skulduggery that many believed touched off the Great Depression, the act is widely viewed today as a drag on the economy.”35

Here’s why the D.C. pundits came to love Bill Clinton: He almost did it. He almost achieved that great coalescence of the professional and business classes.

A few years ago, I read an article claiming that the United States is the first society ever to record more rapes of men than of women, a distinction attributable to the vast numbers of men we have seen fit to imprison.

Another disturbing fact: According to the legal scholar Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, there are now more black adults in some kind of “correctional control”—meaning under the restraint of some arm of the criminal justice system—than there were slaves in 1850.

But I doubt it. Someday we will understand that the punitive hysteria of the mid-1990s was not an accident; it was essential to Clintonism, as essential as his vaunted repeal of the welfare system. Clinton treated different groups of Americans in radically different ways—crushing some in the iron fist of the state just as others were getting bailouts, deregulation, and a frolicking celebration of Think Different business innovation.

What the poor get is discipline; what the professionals get is endless indulgence.