Listen, Liberal Quotes

“Regardless of who leads it, the professional-class liberalism I have been describing in these pages seems to be forever traveling on a quest for some place of greater righteousness. It is always engaged in a search for some subject of overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness with which it can identify itself and under whose umbrella of virtue it can put across its self-interested class program.

There have been many other virtue-objects over the years: people and ideas whose surplus goodness could be extracted for deployment elsewhere. The great virtue-rush of the 1990s, for example, was focused on children, then thought to be the last word in overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness. Who could be against kids? No one, of course, and so the race was on to justify whatever your program happened to be in their name. In the course of Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book, It Takes a Village, the favorite rationale of the day—think of the children!—was deployed to explain her husband’s crime bill as well as more directly child-related causes like charter schools.

You can find dozens of examples of this kind of liberal-class virtue-quest if you try, but instead of listing them, let me go straight to the point: This is not politics. It’s an imitation of politics. It feels political, yes: it’s highly moralistic, it sets up an easy melodrama of good versus bad, it allows you to make all kinds of judgments about people you disagree with, but ultimately it’s a diversion, a way of putting across a policy program while avoiding any sincere discussion of the policies in question. The virtue-quest is an exciting moral crusade that seems to be extremely important but at the conclusion of which you discover you’ve got little to show for it besides NAFTA, bank deregulation, and a prison spree.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People

“To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you’ll need in the society of the future.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People

“When the left party in a system severs its bonds to working people—when it dedicates itself to the concerns of a particular slice of high-achieving affluent people—issues of work and income inequality will inevitably fade from its list of concerns.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

“This is modern liberalism in action: an unregulated virtue-exchange in which representatives of one class of humanity ritually forgive the sins of another class, all of it convened and facilitated by a vast army of well-graduated American professionals, their reassuring expertise propped up by bogus social science, while the unfortunate objects of their high and noble compassion sink slowly back into a preindustrial state.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People

“In its quest for prosperity, the Party of the People declared itself wholeheartedly in favor of a social theory that forthrightly exalted the rich—the all-powerful creative class. For many cities and states, this was the economic strategy; this was what our leaders came up with to revive the urban wastelands and restore the de-industrialized zones. The Democratic idea was no longer to confront privilege but to flatter privilege, to sing the praises of our tasteful new master class. True, this was all done with an eye toward rebuilding the crumbling cities where the rest of us lived and worked, but the consequences of all this “creative class” bootlicking will take a long time to wear off.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People

“Innovation liberalism is "a liberalism of the rich," to use the straightforward phrase of local labor leader Harris Gruman. This doctrine has no patience with the idea that everyone should share in society's wealth. What Massachusetts liberals pine for, by and large, is a more perfect meritocracy--a system where everyone gets an equal chance and the truly talented get to rise. Once that requirement is satisfied--once diversity has been achieved and the brilliant people of all races and genders have been identified and credentialed--this species of liberal can't really conceive of any further grievance against the system. The demands of ordinary working-class people, Gruman says, are unpersuasive to them: "Janitors, fast-food servers home care or child care providers--most of whom are women and people of color--they don't have college degrees."

And if you don't have a college degree in Boston--brother, you've got no one to blame but yourself.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People

“Professional-class liberals aren't really alarmed by oversized rewards for society's winners; on the contrary, this seems natural to them -- because they are society's winners. The liberalism of professionals just does not extend to matters of inequality; this is the area where soft hearts abruptly turn hard.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People

“...[I]t doesn't take an advanced degree to figure out that this education talk is less a strategy for mitigating inequality than it is a way of rationalizing it. 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. From this perspective, wages aren't what they are because one party (management) has a certain amount of power over the other (workers); wages are like that because the god of the market, being surpassingly fair, rewards those who show talent and gumption. Good people are those who get a gold star from their teacher in elementary school, a fat acceptance letter from a good college, and a good life when they graduate. All because they are the best. Those who don't pay attention in high school get to spend their days picking up discarded cans by the side of the road. Both outcomes are our own doing.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People

“To put it bluntly, it is not clear that cheering for innovation in the bombastic way we see in the blue states actually improves the economic well-being of average citizens. For example, the last fifteen years have been a golden age of financial and software innovation, but they have been feeble in terms of GDP growth. In ideological terms, however, innovation definitely works: as a way of excusing soaring inequality and explaining the exalted status of the rich, it's the best we've got.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People

“my purpose here is to scrutinize the tacit Democratic boast about always being better than those crazy Republicans. In truth, what Bill Clinton accomplished were things that no Republican could have done. Thanks to our two-party system, Democratic politicians carry a brand identity that inhibits them in some ways but allows them remarkable latitude in others. They are forever seen as weaklings in the face of the country’s enemies, for example; but on basic economic questions they are trusted to do the right thing for average people. 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. “It’s kind of the Nixon-goes-to-China theory,” the conservative Democrat Charles Stenholm told the historian Steven Gillon on this last subject. “It takes a Democrat to do some of the hard choices in social programs.”19”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

“It’s striking that so many of the great economic initiatives of the Clinton presidency led eventually to catastrophe. But what really makes this story poisonous is that liberals by and large convinced themselves for many years that nothing had gone wrong at all. Everything Clinton’s team had done was an act of professional-class consensus. Because most of the fuses lit by Clinton and Co. didn’t actually detonate until after he had left office—and by then some science-denying Republican was in the Oval Office—they found it easy to absolve the Democrat from blame.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People

“Technological innovation is not what is hammering down working peoples’ share of what the country earns; technological innovation is the excuse for this development. Inno is a fable that persuades us to accept economic arrangements we would otherwise regard as unpleasant or intolerable—that convinces us that the very particular configuration of economic power we inhabit is in fact a neutral matter of science, of nature, of the way God wants things to be. Every time we describe the economy as an “ecosystem” we accept this point of view. Every time we write off the situation of workers as a matter of unalterable “reality” we resign ourselves to it.

In truth, we have been hearing some version of all this inno-talk since the 1970s—a snarling Republican iteration, which demands our submission before the almighty entrepreneur; and a friendly and caring Democratic one, which promises to patch us up with job training and student loans. What each version brushes under the rug is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Economies aren’t ecosystems. They aren’t naturally occurring phenomena to which we must learn to acclimate. Their rules are made by humans. They are, in a word, political. In a democracy we can set the economic table however we choose.

“Amazon is not happening to bookselling,” Jeff Bezos of Amazon likes to say. “The future is happening to bookselling.” And what the future wants just happens to be exactly what Amazon wants. What an amazing coincidence.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People

“Professionalism is “postindustrial ideology,” and today the Democrats are the party of the professional class. The party has other constituencies, to be sure—minorities, women, and the young, for example, the other pieces of the “coalition of the ascendant”—but professionals are the ones whose technocratic outlook tends to prevail. It is their tastes that are celebrated by liberal newspapers and it is their particular way of regarding the world that is taken for granted by liberals as being objectively true. 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.
Liberalism itself has changed to accommodate its new constituents’ technocratic views. Today, liberalism is the philosophy not of the sons of toil but of the “knowledge economy” and, specifically, of the knowledge economy’s winners”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People

“Deleting welfare didn't eliminate poverty itself. We might as well have expected to conquer aging by overturning Social Security.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People

“Then there are disturbing reports like the recent study showing that, in terms of wealth, black and Hispanic college graduates actually “fared significantly worse” in the late recession than did members of those groups who hadn’t gone to college. The people in question were the ones who did everything right, who went through life the way our society instructs us to, and they were punished for it.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People

“The reasoning that led Clinton to turn the Rector execution into a ritual appeasement of the electoral gods brought him, in 1994, to call for and then sign his name to the most sweeping police-state bill that modern-day America has seen. Among other things, the measure provided for the construction of countless new prisons, it established over a hundred new mandatory minimum sentences, it allowed prosecutors to charge thirteen-year-olds as adults in some cases, and it coerced the states into minimizing parole. It also increased the number of federal death penalties from three to sixty,”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

“You can find dozens of examples of this kind of liberal-class virtue-quest if you try, but instead of listing them, let me go straight to the point: This is not politics. It’s an imitation of politics. It feels political, yes: it’s highly moralistic, it sets up an easy melodrama of good versus bad, it allows you to make all kinds of judgments about people you disagree with, but ultimately it’s a diversion, a way of putting across a policy program while avoiding any sincere discussion of the policies in question. The virtue-quest is an exciting moral crusade that seems to be extremely important but at the conclusion of which you discover you’ve got little to show for it besides NAFTA, bank deregulation, and a prison spree.

This book is about Democrats, but of course Republicans do it too. The culture wars unfold in precisely the same way as the liberal virtue-quest: they are an exciting ersatz politics that seem to be really important but at the conclusion of which voters discover they've got little to show for it all besides more free-trade agreements, more bank deregulation, and a different prison spree.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People

“In truth, however, nothing is inevitable and very little is new. And tech is no more the root of the problem than are trade or globalization. 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.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People

“The truth of the New Democrats’ purpose was presented by the journalist Joe Klein in his famous 1996 roman à clef about Clinton’s run for the presidency, Primary Colors. Although the novel contains more than a nod to Clinton’s extramarital affairs, Klein seems broadly sympathetic to the man from Arkansas as well as to the DLC project more generally. Toward the equality-oriented politics of the Democratic past he is forthrightly contemptuous. Old people who recall fondly the battles of the Thirties, for example, are objects of a form of ridicule that Klein thinks he doesn’t even need to explain; it is self-evident that people who care about workers are fools. And when an old-school “prairie populist” challenges the Clinton character for the nomination, Klein describes him as possessing “a voice made for crystal radio sets” and “offering Franklin Roosevelt’s jobs program (forestry, road-building) to out-of-work computer jockeys.” Get it? His views are obsolete! “It was like running against a museum.” 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,”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

“attempts to maintain aristocratic entitlement through “mystification and concealment,” as an 1835 newspaper put it.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

“Team Obama joined the fight against teachers unions from day one: the administration supported charter schools and standardized tests; they gave big grants to Teach for America. In Jonathan Alter’s description of how the administration decided to take on the matter, it is clear that professionalism provided the framework for their thinking. Teachers’ credentials are described as somewhat bogus; they “often bore no relationship to [teachers’] skills in the classroom.” What teachers needed was a more empirical form of certification: they had to be tested and then tested again. Even more offensive to the administration was the way teachers’ unions had resisted certain accountability measures over the years, resulting in a situation “almost unimaginable to professionals in any other part of the economy,” as Alter puts it.15 As it happens, the vast majority of Americans are unprofessional: they are the managed, not the managers. But people whose faith lies in “cream rising to the top” (to repeat Alter’s take on Obama’s credo) tend to disdain those at the bottom. Those who succeed, the doctrine of merit holds, are those who deserve to—who race to the top, who get accepted to “good” colleges and get graduate degrees in the right subjects. Those who don’t sort of deserve their fates. “One of the challenges in our society is that the truth is kind of a disequalizer,” Larry Summers told journalist Ron Suskind during the early days of the Obama administration. “One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be treated.”16 Remember, as you let that last sentence slide slowly down your throat, that this was a Democrat saying this—a prominent Democrat, a high-ranking cabinet official in the Clinton years and the man standing at the right hand of power in the first Obama administration.* The merit mind-set destroyed not only the possibility of real action against inequality; in some ways it killed off the hopes of the Obama presidency altogether. “From the days of the 2008 Obama transition team offices, it was clear that the Administration was going to be populated with Ivy Leaguers who had cut their teeth, and filled their bank accounts, at McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup,” a labor movement official writes me. The President, who was so impressed with his classmates’ intelligence at Harvard and Columbia, gave them the real reins of power, and they used those reins to strangle him and his ambition of being a transformative President. The overwhelming aroma of privilege started at the top and at the beginning.… It reached down deep into the operational levels of government, to the lowest-level political appointees. Our members watched this process unfold in 2009 and 2010, and when it came time to defend the Obama Administration at the polls in 2010, no one showed up. THE”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

“THE HORROR OF THE UNPROFESSIONAL I was surprised to learn that when Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter wanted to scold Russia for its campaign of airstrikes in Syria in the fall of 2015, the word he chose to apply was “unprofessional.” Given the magnitude of the provocation, it seemed a little strange—as though he thought there were an International Association of Smartbomb Deployment Executives that might, once alerted by American officials, hold an inquiry into Russia’s behavior and hand down a stern reprimand. On reflection, slighting foes for their lack of professionalism was something of a theme of the Obama years. An Iowa Democrat became notorious in 2014, for example, when he tried to insult an Iowa Republican by calling him “a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.” Similarly, it was “unprofessionalism” (in the description of Thomas Friedman) that embarrassed the insubordinate Afghan-war General Stanley McChrystal, who made ill-considered remarks about the president to Rolling Stone magazine. And in the summer of 2013, when National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden exposed his employer’s mass surveillance of email and phone calls, the aspect of his past that his detractors chose to emphasize was … his failure to graduate from high school.14 How could such a no-account person challenge this intensely social-science-oriented administration? But it was public school teachers who made the most obvious target for professional reprimand by the administration. They are, after all, pointedly different from other highly educated professions: Teachers are represented by trade unions, not proper professional associations, and their values of seniority and solidarity conflict with the cult of merit embraced by other professions. For years, the school reform movement has worked to replace or weaken teachers’ unions with remedies like standardized testing, charter schools, and tactical deployment of the cadres of Teach for America, a corps of enthusiastic graduates from highly ranked colleges who take on teaching duties in classrooms across the country after only minimal training.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

“Fall River, an old mill town fifty miles south of Boston. Median household income in that city is $33,000, among the lowest in the state; unemployment is among the highest, 15 percent in March 2014, nearly five years after the recession ended. Twenty-three percent of Fall River’s inhabitants live in poverty. The city lost its many fabric-making concerns years ago and with them it lost its reason for being. People have been deserting the place for decades.14 Many of the empty factories in which their ancestors worked are still standing, however. Solid nineteenth-century structures of granite or brick, these huge boxes dominate the city visually—there always seems to be one or two of them in the vista, contrasting painfully with whatever colorful plastic fast-food joint has been slapped up next door. Most of these old factories are boarded up, unmistakable emblems of hopelessness right up to the roof. But the ones that have been successfully repurposed are in some ways even worse, filled as they often are with enterprises offering cheap suits or help with drug addiction. A clinic in the hulk of one abandoned mill has a sign on the window reading, simply, “Cancer & Blood.” The effect of all this is to remind you with every prospect that this is a place and a way of life from which the politicians have withdrawn their blessing. Like so many other American scenes, this one is the product of decades of deindustrialization, engineered by Republicans and rationalized by Democrats. Fifty miles away, Boston is a roaring success, but the doctrine of prosperity that you see on every corner in Boston also serves to explain away the failure you see on every corner in Fall River. This is a place where affluence never returns—not because affluence for Fall River is impossible or unimaginable, but because our country’s leaders have blandly accepted a social order that constantly bids down the wages of people like these while bidding up the rewards for innovators, creatives, and professionals. Even the city’s one real hope for new employment opportunities—an Amazon warehouse that is in the planning stages—will serve to lock in this relationship. If all goes according to plan, and if Amazon sticks to the practices it has pioneered elsewhere, people from Fall River will one day get to do exhausting work with few benefits while being electronically monitored for efficiency, in order to save the affluent customers of nearby Boston a few pennies when they buy books or electronics.15”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

“But that is all in the future. These days, the local newspaper publishes an endless stream of stories about drug arrests, shootings, drunk-driving crashes, the stupidity of local politicians, and the lamentable surplus of “affordable housing.” Like similar places, the town is up to its eyeballs in wrathful bitterness against public workers. As in, Why do they deserve a decent life when the rest of us have no chance at all? It’s every man for himself here in a “competition for crumbs,” as a Fall River friend puts it. For all that, it is an exemplary place in one respect: as a vantage point from which to contemplate the diminishing opportunities of modern American life. This is the project of Fall River Herald News columnist Marc Munroe Dion, one of the last remaining practitioners of the working-class style that used to be such a staple of journalism in this country. Here in Fall River, the sarcastic, hard-boiled sensibility makes a last stand against the indifference of the affluent world. Dion pours his acid derision on the bike paths that Fall River has (of course) built for the yet-to-arrive creative class. He cheers for the bravery of Wal-Mart workers who, it appears, are finally starting to stand up to their bosses. He watches a 2012 Obama-Romney debate and thinks of all the people he knows who would be considered part of Romney’s lazy 47 percent—including his own mother, a factory worker during World War II who was now “draining our country dry through the twin Ponzi schemes of Social Security and Medicare.”16 “To us, it looks as though the city is dissolving,” Dion wrote in late 2015. As the working-class apocalypse takes hold, he invites readers to remember exactly what it was they once liked about their town. “Fall River used to be a good place to be poor,” he concludes. “You didn’t need much education to work, you didn’t need much money to live and you knew everybody.” As that life has disappeared, so have the politics that actually made some kind of sense; they were an early casualty of what has happened here. Those who still care about the war of Rs and Ds, Dion writes, are practicing “political rituals that haven’t made sense since the 1980s, feathered tribesmen dancing around a god carved out of a tree trunk.”17”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

“Dion, “A Sicker Fall River Eases Its Pain By Getting High,” Fall River Herald-News, October 4, 2015.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

“Hillary Clinton was famous for her intimate friendship with Wall Street bankers. At one point she actually scolded Bernie Sanders for wanting to get tough with the financial industry because such a policy, by itself, would not also end racism and sexism—a new low in self-serving sophistry.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

“her one overarching cause during the campaign was opposing discrimination, the unfair “barriers” that kept the talented from rising.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

“There’s a second reason the liberal class loves microfinance, and it’s extremely simple: microlending is profitable. Lending to the poor, as every subprime mortgage originator knows, can be a lucrative business. Mixed with international feminist self-righteousness, it is also a bulletproof business, immune to criticism. The million-dollar paydays it has brought certain microlenders are the wages of virtue. This combination is the real reason the international goodness community believes that empowering poor women by lending to them at usurious interest rates is a fine thing all around.29”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

“Somehow that stuff never comes up, however. We know what innovation is about, and it’s righteousness and triumph. Success is all you’ll find when you riffle through the inno-thoughts produced by the various foundations, institutes, websites, mentors, accelerators, incubators, and entrepreneurship competitions. You hear about startups that just raised $3.1 million in venture capital; startups that are partnering with some more established operation from California; startups that have made their starter-uppers into billionaires.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

“This struck me as a pretty basic misunderstanding of the way capitalism works—as does, in fact, the whole notion of a nurturing “ecosystem” dedicated to “mentoring” and “incubating” other people’s precious startups. (It’s a basic misunderstanding of ecology, too, but we will let that pass.) Other than the chance to make some money, why would a capitalist participate in such a thing? If startups really were to encourage other startups, they would be contributing pretty directly to their own competition—and robust competition is precisely what today’s thinking business person wants to avoid. The winning quality today is monopoly, not competition. But this is not a literature given to subtlety or introspection. As the tech writer Evgeny Morozov points out in To Save Everything, Click Here, the cult of innovation holds every info-age novelty to be “inherently good in itself, regardless of its social or political consequences.” Sure enough, as far as I have been able to determine, few of the people who write or talk about innovation even acknowledge the possibility that innovations might be harmful instead of noble and productive. And yet recent history is littered with exactly such stuff: Innovations that allow companies to spy on us. Innovations that allow terrorist groups to recruit online. Innovations that allowed Enron to do all the fine things it used to do. Come to think of it, the whole economic debacle of the last ten years owes its existence to the financial innovations of the Nineties and the Aughts—the credit default swaps, or the algorithms companies used to hand out mortgage loans—innovations that were celebrated in their day in the same mindlessly positive way we celebrate tech today.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?