Too busy attending TED talks
I’m reading Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal. The Times ran a review in April 2016, while liberals were cheerfully watching the Republicans destroy themselves…
At the same time, many liberals have expressed a grim satisfaction in watching the Republican Party tear itself apart. Whatever terrible fate might soon befall the nation, the thinking goes, it’s their fault, not ours. They are the ones stirring up the base prejudices and epic resentments of America’s disaffected white working class, and they must now reap the whirlwind.
In his new book, the social critic Thomas Frank poses another possibility: that liberals in general — and the Democratic Party in particular — should look inward to understand the sorry state of American politics. Too busy attending TED talks and vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard, Frank argues, the Democratic elite has abandoned the party’s traditional commitments to the working class.
He’s not wrong about that.
Frank’s most famous book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” (2004), argued that Republicans had duped the white working class by pounding the table on social issues while delivering tax cuts for the rich. He focused on Kansas as the reddest of red states (and, not incidentally, the place of his birth). This time Frank is coming for the Ivy League blue-state liberals, that “tight little network of enlightened strivers” who have allegedly been running the country into the ground. Think of it as “What’s the Matter With Massachusetts?”
Frank’s book is an unabashed polemic, not a studious examination of policy or polling trends. In Frank’s view, liberal policy wonks are part of the problem, members of a well-educated elite that massages its own technocratic vanities while utterly missing the big question of the day. To Frank, that question hasn’t changed much over the last few centuries. “It is the eternal conflict of management and labor, owner and worker, rich and poor — only with one side pinned to the ground and the other leisurely pounding away at its adversary’s face,” he writes.
The book is an unabashed polemic but it is one with citations. He doesn’t just spin his “view” out of nothing; he makes an argument and he cites sources.
And he’s not wrong. There’s a very interesting (and persuasive) chapter about professionals as the new ruling class, and meritocracy as the unquestioned ideology of that class, and both political parties, and basically everyone except…of course…the working class.
Frank argues that the Democratic Party — once “the Party of the People” — now caters to the interests of a “professional-managerial class” consisting of lawyers, doctors, professors, scientists, programmers, even investment bankers. These affluent city dwellers and suburbanites believe firmly in meritocracy and individual opportunity, but shun the kind of social policies that once gave a real leg up to the working class. In the book, Frank points to the Democrats’ neglect of organized labor and support for Nafta as examples of this sensibility, in which “you get what you deserve, and what you deserve is defined by how you did in school.”
Which wouldn’t be so terrible, maybe, if it went along with strong support for unions, a national health service, health and safety regulations, good public schools…you know, all that. But it doesn’t.
The problem, in Frank’s view, is not simply that mainstream Democrats have failed to address growing inequality. Instead, he suggests something more sinister: Today’s leading Democrats actually don’t want to reduce inequality because they believe that inequality is the normal and righteous order of things.
I don’t know if I think it’s that or if it’s that they think touching inequality will electrocute them.
Frank’s book ends on a pessimistic note. After two decades of pleading with liberals to think seriously about inequality, to honor what was best about the New Deal, Frank has concluded that things will probably continue to get worse. “The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way,” he writes. “There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor.”
But this conclusion, too, may rest on a faulty analogy with the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt did not suddenly decide on his own to enact Social Security or grant union rights. Those ideas came up from below, through decades of frustration and struggle and conflict. If Americans want something different from their politicians, there is no alternative to this kind of exhausting and uncertain hard work. In the end, it is the only way that liberals — or conservatives — will listen.
Right now they seem to be too busy cheering on white supremacists.
I suspect this is it. The liberals I know do care deeply about inequality, but feel that it is impossible to achieve in the political climate of the country. They think electing Democrats is the first step (and it is), but they don’t recognize the problem. If the Democrats get into office they will not enact these things for fear of being voted out again, and then it will be back to the nasty Republicans. So the Democrats slide rightward in the interest of staying relevant, and in the process, the people who used to rely on them get hurt.
The problem is, the media and the pundits are all so busy telling the Dems to do that. Practically everything I read (except here, of course) is telling the Dems to quit playing “identity politics”, and listen to “fly over country”, which of course means kick the poor, the women, the LGBTQ, the people of color, the labor unions, and everyone else that is not white, male, and middle class under the bus, then drive the bus over them for good measure. After that, people MIGHT let them govern for a term of two, but they won’t get to do anything the true ruling class doesn’t like.
The funny thing is, whenever I listen to the pundits, the one thing I routinely hear is that the Dems are too liberal for society, and that they are ruining the country by their radical left wing politics. There are voices on the left who correct this (like Jim Hightower, Rachel Maddow, etc), but they are lost in the constant shouting and finger pointing.
So in an effort to make themselves relevant, the Democrats make themselves….Republicans, of the Eisenhower sort of Republican.
I have a couple of points of disagreement with Frank’s analysis. Firstly, a great deal of those “lawyers, doctors, professors, scientists, programmers, even investment bankers” were not born in the cities, or to the class, in which they ply their trades; not a majority, perhaps, but at least a significant plurality. And, in any case, the vast majority of these kinds of professionals are hardly better-off than the vaunted ‘middle class’ to which every politician everywhere panders and to which every working-class person is supposed to aspire. And, more and more, they’re loaded with student loan burdens which they’ll have to pay back over decades, and which take a significant chunk of their not-exactly-stellar salaries. Couple that with the sky-high rents for subpar living accommodations, health insurance costs (at least in the US), and the lack of any real labour protections for their professions, and it’s hard to argue that most of them any kind of elite (unless by ‘elite’, you mean ‘can pronounce five-syllable words without stumbling’, which also describes a great deal of working-class people).
The second point on which I disagree strongly with Frank is that, if the Democratic Party is not as good for working people as it used to be, why does it logically follow that working-class (white) people have flocked to the Republican Party? It’s a bit like James Damore’s latest blurt, wherein he insists that if we can’t acknowledge anything good about the KKK, we’ll just drive people to join the KKK; it betrays a hidden assumption about how horrible the average person is, that if their interests aren’t actively stoked and their prejudices catered to, they’ll default to choosing the worst possible option, for themselves and everyone else.
Thus trying to explain away the white working class’s disdain for Democrats and affinity for Republicans actually hinges on an implicit assumption that their motivations aren’t dominated by their labour concerns. After all, it’s been Democrats proposing every policy Ophelia posits as good, and Republicans refusing to entertain them unless they’re watered down beyond all effectiveness; it’s Democrats who always have to compromise, to seek common ground, and to clean up after Republicans burn everything down; it’s Democrats who can only win by tacking to the ‘centre’. If the white working class had really been animated by labour concerns, they wouldn’t have abandoned the Democratic Party as soon as it passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, which did not by themselves supplant the Great Society policies which were themselves an extension of the New Deal policies which essentially built the modern American working class out of the starving farmers and sclerotic factory workers of the Great Depression.
We can’t escape racism, including the racism of white people being worried about having to compete with non-white people, as an explanatory factor for the white working class’s abandonment of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party’s compromise on traditional labour issues came after this abandonment, not before, because those traditional labour issues plus racial integration and equality were no longer enough to attract white working people.
In the book, the elite he means is the one that went to the hot-shot Ivy League universities, including (perhaps especially) the ones who got there from non-elite backgrounds like Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton as well as Barack O and Hillary C (who were a little more middle-class but not a lot).
And yes, I think I agree with your disagreements about the rest. At the same time I agree with much of what he says. It’s interesting to wrestle with.
“I don’t know if I think it’s that or if it’s that they think touching inequality will electrocute them.”
I’m guessing (hoping?) this is closer to the truth. Having to solve the problem of inequality is something they don’t want to have to do since this would leave them open to being cudgeled with accusations of “socialism.” Hell, they couldn’t even avoid the accusation when installing those weak-tea health care measures which the Republicans are so determined to eradicate.
I don’t buy this completely. It’s not simple inequality we’re looking at now, it’s gross concentration of wealth, like what they had in France before the Revolution, but with somewhat better labor laws.
I don’t think even the East Coast Ivy League elite think that’s either normal or righteous. I suspect though that they’ve watched white working class Republicans cling to God, guns, and the GOP while Republicans in power fought tooth and nail against every attempt at rebuilding the social safety net (or reining in the plutocrats) for so long, they’ve come to see THAT as normal.
I see this as part of the problem with his analysis. One of my experiences as someone who came out of poverty into a rather precarious middle class is that while you are poor, the liberals love you and the conservatives hate you. The liberals want to help you, or at least seem like they’re helping you. The conservatives want to make sure no one helps you.
If you happen to move out of that situation into an educated professional class, everyone hates you. The liberals no longer like you because you are automatically among the privileged few who were fed everything as you grew up (because you no longer LOOK like you were once poor). The conservatives still hate you because, well, they hate everyone.
This might impact the way that Dems like the Clintons and Obamas interact. They are walking a tightrope between people who scorn them as privileged because the moved out of the working class, and people who scorn them as inferior because they were once working class.
I don’t know what the answer is. I think there are too many people who are trying to find an answer. I think there is no answer. I think there are about 70 gazillion answers all looped together in a massive web that cannot be untangled.
And this is the elephant that no one wants to notice. To notice the racism is to suggest that the white working class might be part of the problem. That thread ran through this entire election. You can’t say nasty things about these people, they are the salt of the earth. Hillary got dissed roundly (and still gets thumped constantly) for her “basket of deplorables” comment, while the Trump campaign called liberals and moderates (and a substantial portion of the right) much worse things, threatened them with violence, suggested locking up whole swaths of people, and just in general threw feces everywhere. Hillary was vilified for one extremely accurate comment summing up only a small part of the electorate; Trump rode high on the nastiness he perpetrated against most of the citizens (and non-citizen residents) of this country who work just as hard, pay their taxes, and contribute as much to the country as the “basket of deplorables” (maybe they contribute more).
The reality is, you can say any nasty thing you want against women, people of color, LGBTQ, immigrants, and other “identity” politics, and get away with it. You cannot say a single true statement against a small minority of nasty white people without getting every conservative, liberal, and moderate pundit piling on and screaming about your awfulness.
That could have a lot to do with the failure of the Democrats to make progressive politics happen. Too many liberal thinkers pick up the refrain and pile on about how awful such things are, we are hurting flyover country, we are dismissing a whole group of people (yes, I heard the same thing from some about the whole Neo-Nazi thing – let’s not be mean to the poor Neo-Nazis who only want to remind blacks to stay in their place by erecting in-your-face Confederate statuary. They’re really just economically disadvantaged). The liberal pundits will also criticize the Donald Trumps of the world, but unfortunately, the false equivalence hurts the female Democrat more, and causes the Democrat (female or not) to retreat into their carapace and play it “safe”.
I don’t think the marchers in white polo shirts, who were able to get from across the country to a political shindig, can claim to be economically disadvantaged, and it’s shameful of any pundit to suggest it.
But for kittens’ sake – a political party can walk and chew gum at the same time. It can stand for social justice (“identity politics”, but, you know, for people who NEED IT) and economic justice at the same time. It’s hard for me to believe that the pundits genuinely think that’s impossible. Or even difficult. It’s easy to believe that they figure that the Democrats cannot talk seriously about economic justice without (1) the socialism smears (because the U.S. political “center”, rhetorically at least, is waaaay over in right field), but worse (2) losing too much support among the donor class, without which they will never be heard on television. But saying that openly is problematic, and we get the usual pressure for the Dems to be just barely to the right of wherever the Republicans are this year, and hope enough people who are allowed to vote care enough about that tiny difference to bother to do so. It worked for (Bill) Clinton and Obama. Not quite so well for America, when we’ve got, effectively, high speed Republican devastation with Republican administrations and slow, easy speed Republican devastation with the Democratic ones.
I have a sort of half idea going through my head on the whole why the working class turned to Trump.
https://ak1.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/3772061/thumb/1.jpg
That is a pretty normal stock photo for corporate culture right? You know they make a big deal about being inclusive and all of that. We all know that behind the scenes there’s sexism, racism, and quite a lot of homophobia, but the public corporate face is all about showing off how diverse the team is.
https://cdn.unicornbooty.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/16135839/superman-fights-white-supremacists-987.jpg
That is how we portray racists – as that guy getting punched by Superman. He’s heavily coded working class.
Now the people in the first picture – they’re largely fucking over the working class. They’re the people who haven’t given the working class a pay rise since the 1970s. They’re the people who buy patents for cheap drugs and turn them into expensive ones, who have offshored working class jobs and then hired the people who lost their jobs at wages well below what it would cost to rent a single bedroom apartment.
And when you get right down to it, they’re also the ones most responsible for racism, sexism and the rest of it.
Okay, not the stock models of course, but the idea they’re representing.
Think about the various wage gaps, the ultimate indicators of racism, who is it that decides that? Is it the guy with the US flag bandana, or the people in suits? And in a capitalist society it all comes down to what you earn, paying someone less for their gender or race really is saying that they are lesser for their gender or race.
It is a bit like how you get these super-polite religious types who will never tell someone to go fuck themselves, but will heartily condemn their neighbours to hell every Sunday.
But still Superman is fighting white supremacy – by punching a guy who looks, well, not exactly like he’s reigning supreme now does he?
Now to me what it looks a lot like is a rebellion against the former picture – that sort of phony facade type social justice that’s great for a letterhead but not exactly showing up on the payroll, and a resentment over being painted as the guy in the second picture because they can’t afford the facade themselves.
Of course, as usual, I might just be being a bit crazy. I don’t know, its just something that has been bothering me.
The white working class *is* the problem. I’ve worked with them, by and large they’re trash. They can get a job done but listening to them open their mouths is chilling and/or infuriating.
And @Seth #2
“it betrays a hidden assumption about how horrible the average person is, that if their interests aren’t actively stoked and their prejudices catered to, they’ll default to choosing the worst possible option, for themselves and everyone else.”
It’s an accurate assumption confirmed by anecdata.
Ugh – let’s not call people trash, ok? I’ve seen enough of that lately to last 10 lifetimes.
Sorry, force of habit.
That and I found out a few days ago that my seat mate (one of these people) stabbed a cat to death with a knife.
All of this talk about supporting the working class misses the point that the poor mostly do not vote. Both the Democrats and the Republicans cling to the myth that there is a large groundswell of the working poor for the Democrats to tap, with the Republicans issuing scare adds about how poor black folks are stealing the elections, and Democrats wondering why poor folks aren’t stealing the elections. But the Republicans have been doing voter suppression for some time, and it has been remarkably effective, especially when paired with plain apathy on the part of the poor of all colors.
The medium income of Trump supporters is $80,000. They are not some mythical abandoned working class. They are what used to be called the petit bourgeoisie, and their reappearance in the 21st century is the achievement of a deliberate campaign to create the “precariat”; a lower and middle class too frightened to organize or complain. We have resurrected a class that we have not experienced before in our lifetime but who were common in the 19th and early 20th century, and who were widely despised for their eagerness to throw others into the gutter to save themselves, because before the appearance of social safety nets, the fall down the class ladder often ended in death, and this terrified them.
They have unleashed the meritocracy, and discovered that it does not favour them. Corporations do not support diversity because they are havens of political correctness, but because they will take talent wherever they can find it, and it turns out that intelligence and talent are not limited to white christian men. The tendentious ravings of Charles Murray aside, it seems that white men have encountered the bell curve, and they are often not at an advantage.
Rather than support a bloviating mediocrity who despises ‘losers’ (i.e. his base), they might be better served to support the cause of mercy. They may soon find that they need it.