23 March 2016
Listen Liberal — the book all good Democrats should read by Easter
My introduction to the Democratic Party occurred in the mid-sixties, at a Democratic Farmer Labor bean feed in northern Minnesota. My fellow college students and I were substantially outnumbered by the union men and women who were the party’s stalwarts.
Today, those of us with college degrees often outnumber less well educated Democrats at party functions. Indeed, with only a B.A. degree and some graduate level credits, I’m often one of the least well educated Democrats present when the party meets.
It’s no longer Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal working class coalition. Working class whites — those with less than a college education and who work for wages — sometimes are no more welcome than a battalion of Archie Bunker clones whistling Dixie, chewing snoose, and waving the Confederate flag.
As Thomas Frank observes with his usual trenchant clarity in his new book, Listen Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?, today's Democrats are the party of technocrats and professionals.
It’s a book that’s meant to get you steamed — and if you’re a Democrat with any New Deal blood left in your veins, it will. Here are a few excerpts:
The problem with such broad-brush generalizations about any social stratum, of course, is that there are lots of exceptions, and a group of educated and often sophisticated individuals naturally contains lots of honorable folks who care sincerely about society’s well-being. Many of them understand the madness of a deregulated market system as it spins out of control. But in a sweeping sociological sense, professionals as a class do not get it. This is because inequality does not contradict, defy, or even inconvenience the logic of professionalism. On the contrary, inequality is essential to it.
Professionals, after all, are life’s officer corps. They give the orders; they write the prescriptions. Status is essential to professionalism; according to sociologist Larson, achieving a more exalted level in life’s hierarchy is “the most central dimension of the professionalization project.” What she means is that inequality is what it’s all about. Sometimes the privileges accorded to the professions are enshrined in law — not just anyone is allowed to step into a courtroom and start pleading before a judge, for example — and even when they aren’t, they are maintained by artificial scarcity, by what Larson called, in her classic 1977 book on the subject, a “monopoly of expertise.”
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Meritocracy is what makes these ideas fit together; it is “the official professional credo,” according to one group of sociologists— the conviction that the successful deserve their rewards, that the people on top are there because they are the best. This is the First Commandment of the professional-managerial class.
These days meritocracy has come to seem so reasonable that many of us take it for granted as the true and correct measure of human value. Do well in school, and you earn your credential. Earn your credential, and you are admitted into the ranks of the professions. Become a professional, and you receive the respect of the public plus the nice house in the suburbs and the fancy car and all the rest. Meritocracy makes so much sense to us that barely anyone thinks of challenging it, except on its own terms.
For President Barack Obama, for example, belief in meritocracy is a conviction of the most basic sort. “Obama’s faith lay in cream rising to the top,” writes Jonathan Alter in his account of the early days of the Obama presidency. The president believed this, Alter continues, for the most personal of reasons: because this was the system that had propelled him to the top. “Because he himself was a product of the great American postwar meritocracy,” Alter continues, “he could never fully escape seeing the world from the status ladder he had ascended.”
Obama proceeded to fill his administration with the graduates of the most prestigious universities and professional schools, in turn causing David Brooks to feel such optimism for the country. “At some level,” Alter writes, “Obama bought into the idea that top-drawer professionals had gone through a fair sorting process, the same process that had propelled him and Michelle to the Ivy League, and were therefore in some way deserving of their elevated status.”
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One final consequence of the ideology of professionalism is the liberal class’s obsessive pining for consensus. I have already mentioned President Obama’s remarkable zeal for bipartisan agreement; as we shall see, this is not his passion alone. Most of the Democratic leadership has shared these views for decades; for them, a great coming-together of the nation’s educated is the obvious objective of political work.
This obsession, so peculiar and yet so typical of our times, arises from professionals’ well-known disgust with partisanship and their faith in what they take to be apolitical solutions. If only they could bring Washington’s best people together, they believe, they could enact their common-knowledge program. That the Obama administration chose to fritter away months and even years pursuing this fantasy — with its health care proposal, with its deficit-reduction commission — could probably have been predicted based strictly on the educational pedigree of the president’s cabinet choices. Not to be too reductionist here, but it was all a class performance. It was the essence of professionalism.