Meredith’s Reviews > Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People > Status Update

Frank: Hilary Clinton tends to navigate to a version of feminism that is a straight synonym of “meritocracy,” that is concerned almost exclusively with the struggle of professional women to rise as high as their talents will take them. No ceilings!

Frank: Many of our most vaunted innovations are simply methods—electronic or otherwise—of pulling off some age-old profit-maximizing maneuver by new and unregulated means. Sometimes they are designed to accomplish things that would be regulated or illegal under other circumstances ...

Frank: If our goal is to rescue the reputation of a hero who turned out to have feet, this is surely the way to go. Ocean liners are hard to turn. Presidents don’t have a lot of power. Republicans are in league with the devil. If what we are concerned with is inequality, however, it would behoove us to admit the obvious forthrightly: Obama could have done many things differently ...

Frank: It is painful to recall how earnestly those [union members] believed in democracy, how deeply they seemed to feel that if average Americans could just get together and talk it over and settle on a plan, why, they could take on multinational corporations. Solidarity would prevail over everything. It was like something out of Lincoln’s time. Or Roosevelt’s, anyway.

Frank: That was the essential New Democrat idea: The world has 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.

Frank: Professionalism is “postindustrial ideology,” and today the Democrats are the party of the professional class.

Frank: We can now pinpoint the exact moment when the Obama administration formally renounced any intention of making the big historical turn it had been elected to make: it was the meeting between the new president and a roomful of Wall Street CEOs on March 27, 2009 ... [Obama reassures them] that he had no intention of restructuring their industry or changing the economic direction of the nation.

Frank: “Inequality” is shorthand for all the things that have gone to make the lives of the rich so measurably more delicious, year on year for three decades — and also for the things that have made the lives of working people so wretched and so precarious.