American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears

by Farah Stockman

instead of grappling with the vast inequalities created by globalization, the United States’ leaders focused on expanding access to a college education. That created a class of credentialed professionals who feel entitled to rule even as they are increasingly divorced from the economic realities of ordinary people. Thomas Frank made a similar argument in his book Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, which described how the Democratic Party had deliberately chosen to switch allegiances from labor unions to the professional class in the 1970s. “The first commandment of the professional class is the idea of meritocracy, which allows people to think that those on top are there because they deserve to be,” Frank told In These Times in 2016 after his book came out. “With the professional class, it’s always associated with education. They deserve to be there because they worked really hard and went to a good college and to a good graduate school. They’re high achievers. Democrats are really given to credentialism in a way that Republicans aren’t.” In an interview with me, he said, “It’s incredibly satisfying to be part of this elite. Not only are you economically elite, the crème of the American meritocracy, but you are morally elite. The elites in the nineteenth century had a moral cloud hanging over them. Today’s elite doesn’t feel that way.”