Over the weekend, I read Thomas Frank's
Listen, Liberal or, what ever happened to the party of the people?, based on a kind of "indirect recommendation" by jcb, partly to understand jcb's thoughts better.
I don't agree with everything Frank writes, but he makes some very good points. Basically, he's saying that there are a lot of bad, self-centered attitudes among what he calls the "professional class", and that that's bad because the "professional class" has been basically running the Democratic Party in the USA since the 1970s.
The simplified version of this that jcb seems to believe in is that the Democrats betrayed the working class during the Clinton years, and as a result, the working class turned against the Democrats. Now,
that simplified version is easy to refute, by simply writing something like
1968 Large parts of the working class turn against the Democrats. The Republican nominee wins.
1972 Large parts of the working class turn against the Democrats. The Republican nominee wins in a landslide.
1980 Large parts of the working class turn against the Democrats. The Republican nominee wins in a landslide.
1984 Large parts of the working class turn against the Democrats. The Republican nominee wins in a landslide.
1988 Large parts of the working class turn against the Democrats. The Republican nominee wins in a landslide.
1992 The Democrats nominate Bill Clinton for President.
The 2020s ZBB member jcb posts a lot about how the working class turned against the Democrats because of what Bill Clinton did as President.
But Thomas Frank gets around that objection by arguing that the Democrats already turned against organized labor in the 1970s, specifically, during the work of the McGovern Commission to reform the nominating- and convention process. What Frank doesn’t like about that commission’s work is that they tried to ensure fair representation for all kinds of different demographic groups, but not for blue collar workers.
So according to Frank, most of the internal fighting among Democrats in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s was just between different wings of the “professional class”, who had their differences but were united in their common rejection of old-school union activism and New-Deal-ism.
Frank traces this back to one of the people who worked on the McGovern Commission, a certain Frederick Dutton, who wrote a book called
Changing Sources of Power, which Frank calls “The Powell Memo of the Democrats”. To quote Frank:
Dutton’s argument was simple: America having become a land of universal and soaring affluence, all that traditional Democratic stuff about forgotten men and workers’ rights was now as relevant as a stack of Victrola discs. And young people, meaning white, upper-middle-class college kids—oh, these young people were so wise and so virtuous and even so holy that when contemplating them Dutton could scarcely restrain himself. They were “aristocrats—en masse,” the Democratic grandee wrote (quoting Paul Goodman); they meant to “rescue the individual from a mass society,” to “recover the human condition from technological domination,” to “refurbish and reinvigorate individuality.” Better: the young were so noble and so enlightened that they had basically transcended the realm of the physical. “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.”
Yes, the young were beyond the reach of economics, and seen from the vantage point of 1971, the Great Depression—the period that formed the identity of the Democratic Party—was a far-off country suffering from incomprehensible troubles.
And, according to Frank, ever since, the Democrats cared more about the people Dutton praised, or at least older versions of the people Dutton praised, than about the actually disadvantaged people they
should have cared about.
But what, exactly, is Frank’s problem with the “professional class”?
Basically, that they don’t really care that much, or are even really aware of, people outside their own class. If they’re, by their own standards, well-meaning, they really want to help non-members of their class to become members of their class, but they don’t care about people who don’t eventually end up in their class.
They can be very left-wing in the sense that they want to do a lot to give every child a fair chance to grow up to be a member of their class – that’s where their pro-education and anti-discrimination stances come from – but they don’t care much about the well-being of those who
don’t eventually join their class.
Frank traces this tendency through Bill Clinton, Obama, and Hillary Clinton (the book was published before Biden). For me personally, the sections on Obama were a kind of weird experience – I’ve spend so much time hearing from people who thought Obama was either great or good, or that he was a socialist Kenyan-born Muslim mole on a mission to turn the USA into an Islamostalinist dystopia, that reading a carefully researched, reasonable, fact-based, but still hard-hitting criticism of him feels kind of odd.
Some quotes from the book:
Dodd-Frank goes about reforming the banks by outlawing many of the specific practices that were implicated in the housing bubble and the financial crisis, thus generating the tens of thousands of pages of rules and exceptions that are the law’s most remarkable feature. At the same time, however, Dodd-Frank leaves the banks themselves standing, and it does little to alter the more fundamental conventions of modern banking—like ballooning compensation—that gave rise to the madness in the first place. As the regulatory expert Bill Black says, it is like trying to achieve gun safety by banning the specific caliber of ammunition that was used in the latest massacre. It won’t be difficult for the villains to find a different way to get what they want.
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.”
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.
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.
The CEO of a crowdworking company called CrowdFlower explains how the magic is done:
Before the Internet, it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for ten minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those ten minutes. But with technology, you can actually find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when you don’t need them anymore.
By the way, the CEO who reportedly spoke those lines—a young gentleman named Lukas Biewald—is an Obama donor who, according to a post on the CrowdFlower blog, was asked in 2012 to help out with the Big Data part of the president’s reelection campaign.
One criticism I have of Frank’s book is that he’s way too dismissive of not directly economic issues. He seems to see them mostly as distractions. For instance, he almost only mentions race issues when they give him an opportunity to attack the Clintons from the Left. That ignores all those people on the receiving end of various forms of (systemic and personal) bigotry.
That said, on the whole, the book is great. If you’re seriously interested in grappling with jcb’s views, no matter whether you agree with those views or not, you should read this book, if you practically can.
