Thomas Frank has long been an insightful commentator on
political matters. His latest effort
takes to task Democratic leadership for directing the Party away from what
Frank believes is its true mission: serving the needs of the middle and working
classes. He presents his case in Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
In his introduction he details the growth in inequality
in recent decades and points out that whether Republicans or Democrats were in
charge mattered not as the health of the middle class declined. He then states his intention to prove the
following statements about the Democratic Party.
“This is not because they are
incompetent or because sinister Republicans keep thwarting the righteous
liberal will. It is Democratic failure,
straight up and nothing else. The agent
of change isn’t interested in the job at hand.
Inequality just doesn’t spark their imagination. It is the point at which their famous
compassion peters out.”
“What I am suggesting is that
their inability to address the social question is not accidental. The current leaders of the Democratic Party
know their form of liberalism is somehow related to the good fortune of the top
10 percent. Inequality, in other words,
is a reflection of who they are. It goes
to the heart of their self-understanding.”
Those are rather serious charges for a liberal to hurl at
the liberal political party. Let us
proceed with his arguments before deciding if Frank might be correct.
Frank describes Democrats as “the party that was once
such a militant defender of workers and the middle class.” The “once” referred to was the good old days
of Roosevelt as contrasted with the bad new days of Clinton (Bill) and Obama.
After the Roosevelt and Truman years and the prosperity that
followed, the Democrats might have declared victory and rested on their laurels,
but they knew that the world and the people in it were changing and they would
have to change with them. As the
Democrats deliberated over the years, they incorporated a premise that Frank
found unjustified and inconsistent with their principles.
“What remained constant
throughout these decades of wandering was a certain knowledge of what Democrats
were not. On this, everyone agreed: Democrats could no
longer be the party of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, with its heavy reliance
upon organized labor and its tendency to see issues through the lens of social
class. Through the Seventies, the
Eighties, the Nineties, and into the Aughts, as different Democratic reform
movement came and went, this was the universal thesis: The New Deal coalition
was done for.”
By the 1970s it was clear that the Labor Movement was not
going to produce an organized worker class.
And if there was such a thing as a worker class it was divided among
itself as the southern laborers refused to unionize and insisted on reelecting
anti-union legislators. If the South was
not on board then the northern unions were always at threat of having work
moved south. In addition, the working
class seemed ominously attracted to the 1968 campaign of George Wallace.
“Democratic leaders decided to
reorient the party after 1968 not because this was necessary for survival but
because they distrusted their main constituency and had started to lust after a
new and more sophisticated one.”
While the nation never quite generated a “worker class,”
Frank believes it did create a “professional class,” based on “merit, learning,
and status.”
“….we must understand that there
are different hierarchies of power in America, and while oligarchy theory
exposes one of them—the hierarchy of money—many of the Democrats’ failings
arise from another hierarchy: one of merit, learning, and status.”
“ We lampoon the Republican
hierarchy of money with the phrase ‘the one percent’; if we want to recognize
what has wrecked the Democratic Party as a populist alternative, however, what
we need to scrutinize is more like the Ten Percent, the people at the apex of
the country’s hierarchy of professional status.”
Frank seems to use the term “professional” to refer to
those who are highly educated or highly trained in a particular field and have
attained recognition as being expert in that area. One might think that it would be a good thing
for politicians to surround themselves with such people in order to obtain
expert advice in formulating policies.
Frank disagrees.
Recognized professionals are assumed to have advanced to their
high status because they earned it and thus are worthy of their place. Unfortunately, it is easy to turn this around
and imply that those who have not achieved the status of “professional” are in
some way unworthy. Since the path to
professionalism is via education, then one can conclude that the answer to
inequality is to provide poor people better education.
“The professional class is
defined by its educational attainment, and every time they tell the country
that what it needs is more schooling, they are saying: Inequality is not a
failure of the system; it is a failure of you.”
The concept of merit by which the highly educated justify
their lofty positions puts them at odds with what Frank views as the Democrats
traditional constituency.
“….professionals do not hold
that other Democratic constituency, organized labor, in particularly high
regard. This attitude is documented in
study after study of professional-class life.
One reason for this is because unions signify lowliness, not
status. But another is because solidarity,
the core value of unions, stands in stark contradiction to the doctrine of
individual excellence that every profession embodies. The idea that someone should command good pay
for doing a job that doesn’t require specialized training seems to
professionals to be an obvious fallacy.”
While one might assume that surrounding oneself with “the
best and the brightest” is a great strategy, Frank warns that professionalism
carries with it the burden of conformity and a certain deficit of imagination.
“….professional ideology brings
with it certain predictable, recurring weaknesses. The first of these pitfalls of
professionalism is that people with the highest status aren’t necessarily
creative or original thinkers….professionals do not question authority; their
job is to apply it. This is the very nature
of their work and the object of their training….professionals are ‘obedient
thinkers’ who ‘implement their employers’ attitudes’ and carefully internalize
the reigning doctrine of their discipline, whatever it happens to be.”
“In addition, the professions
are structured to shield insiders from accountability. This is what defines the category:
professionals do not have to listen.
They are the only occupational group, as the sociologist Eliot Freidson
put it many years ago, with ‘the recognized right to declare…”outside”
evaluation illegitimate and intolerable’.”
“Every academic discipline with
which I have some experience is similar: international relations, political
science, cultural studies, even American history. None of them are as outrageous as economics,
it is true, but each of them is dominated by some convention or ideology. Those who succeed in a professional
discipline are those who best absorb and apply its master narrative.”
It gets even worse.
Frank ascribes to professionalism the cause of the worst crimes
Democratic leaders have committed over the years: the quest for bipartisan
solutions.
“One final consequence of the
ideology of professionalism is the liberal class’s obsessive pining for
consensus.”
“This obsession, so peculiar and
yet so typical of our times, arises from professionals’ well-known disgust for
partisanship and their faith in what they take to be apolitical solutions.”
Much of Frank’s book is devoted to how this embrace of
the professional class and its faults by Democratic leadership rendered the Clinton
and Obama presidencies ineffective, if not actively harmful. Clinton was surrounded by the conventional wisdom
of his entourage telling him he had to move to the center and become less
liberal, thus fostering harmful legislation.
Obama wasted much of his presidency trying to negotiate bipartisan
deals. He should have broken up the
banks and jailed all the financial criminals.
And so on.
Finally Frank arrives at this conclusion.
“The Democrats posture as the ‘party
of the people’ even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving
and glorifying the professional class.
Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that
Americans find stomach-turning. And
every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to
rally voters of the nation to their standard.
This cannot go on.”
“The course of the party and the
course of the nation can both be changed, but only after we understand that the
problem is us.”
Frank often conflates the terms “worker class” and “middle
class.” If one walked the streets in the
US asking people if they belonged to the worker class it is likely that very
few would apply that label to themselves.
If one asked the same people if they belonged to the middle class almost
all are likely to claim membership. A bit more precision is called for if the
present, past, and future of the Democratic Party are to be evaluated.
Steve Fraser provides a comprehensive history of what
passed as a worker class in the US and how it evolved in The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. If there ever was a worker class in this
nation it would be associated with the unionization battles of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. If one
needed to conjure up a worker class at the moment it might be appropriate to associate
that label with the collection of unionized workers of the current era.
Frank brings up the fact that there are European
countries where union membership is national in scope, and where unions and
management have settled into stable and well-defined roles. The system works. He seems to assume that if it can work in
Germany it can work in the US.
Fraser’s narrative produces a much more complex situation
in our country than in European nations.
The goal of worker unity here always seemed to be threatened by the
demon pair of immigration and race. Consider
his description of the workers striking against United States Steel early in
the twentieth century.
“Tragically, the labor question
merged directly into the country’s racial dilemma. The steel strike failed to humanize the
industry in part because these impoverished and degraded workers didn’t
constitute a united proletarian army after all, the fears of their foes
notwithstanding. They were instead ‘micks,’
‘guineas,’ ‘Hunkies,’ ‘Polacks,’ and ‘niggers,’ whose mutual distrust and even
hatred corroded their solidarity. The
once despised Irish, now lodged at the top of the workplace hierarchy, thought
of themselves as ‘white’; the Slavs and the Italians couldn’t be sure just what
they were as they faced the contempt of their Irish foremen and gang
leaders. But at least they knew they
weren’t ‘darkies.’ Even while the
strikers were displaying extraordinary courage in facing off against United
States Steel and the vast infrastructure of power it could bring to its
defense, the strike became a theater of primordial tribalism, proving how
impossible it was to separate the labor question from the race question. And African Americans could have no doubt
they were the mudsills of the steelworker community, only allowed in at all to
subvert the organizing efforts of their fellow workers as spies, as scabs, as
people so intimidated and desperate they could be cynically manipulated.”
This “theater of primordial tribalism” managed to hold
itself together for a few decades and the legality of unionization was
established. But this “worker class”
continued to be unstable and racial strife coupled with Cold War ideology soon
led to its inevitable decline.
The corporate world was always searching for
opportunities to attack the New Deal and anyone promoting “foreign” ideas. The apparent success of the Russian
Revolution and the power of the Soviet Union spread fear throughout the nation
that could be put to use.
“Even during World War II, but
with immeasurably greater force right afterward, every element of the
labor-liberal outlook—from racial equality to universal health insurance, from
union power to public housing, from government regulation to economic planning,
from welfare to women’s rights, from academic freedom to free expression in the
arts—was subjected to a withering assault.
They were stigmatized as disguised forms of communism, indubitably ‘Un-American’.”
Labor leaders knew that their hard-fought gains would be
at risk unless they managed to unionize the South. If they failed, the South would become a
haven for companies trying to escape the wage demands of unions.
“Its achievements in unionizing
millions were historic. But to continue
them was vital: either grow or lose ground.
Cracking the ‘solid South,’ infamous for hostility to unions, and home
(as the whole Sun Belt would eventually become) to firms running away from the
threat of unionized labor, was strategically critical. The labor movement tried. But the attempt was doomed. The region’s racial divisions were difficult
enough to surmount. A one-party
political system run by landlords, the labor lords of the textile industry, the
mercantile elite, and captive Protestant churches also stood in the way. The anti-Communist persuasion that conflated
unionizing with communism stopped the CIO’s Operation Dixie in its tracks.”
Succumbing to the pressures of the time along with its
own internal weaknesses, the labor movement retreated to a mode in which
protecting existing gains became the focus rather than extending their goals to
a universal “working class.”
“Labor no longer appeared on the
stage of public life battling for universal welfare, championing the cause of
all working people; it seemed increasingly concerned with its conspicuously
better-off membership, which was also conspicuously white and male. The roots of today’s scapegoating of unions
by business, policy makers, and even ordinary but less protected working people
go back to that.”
In the era about which Frank writes, the union/worker
class was sufficiently diminished, and even unpopular enough, that its support
could not form the philosophical basis for a healthy Democratic Party. The Democrats were correct in treating unions
as a component of a broader constituency.
Frank likes to compare the expediency of the
Clinton/Obama years with the “purity” of Roosevelt and the New Deal era. However, it should be recalled that in order
to pass New Deal legislation, Roosevelt acquiesced to the demands of his
southern Democrats and effectively allowed all African Americans to be excluded
from the benefits of social security legislation. That was a political accommodation that was,
in retrospect, as odious as any actions taken by Clinton and Obama that, in
retrospect, have infuriated Frank.
Frank’s construction of a professional class and his
description of its shortcomings are quite startling. He seems to equate professionalism with the
academic elite, find shortcomings in our university departments, then apply
those faults to everyone. Clearly, a
professional class would also have to include legions of lawyers, physicians,
business executives, financial managers, and educators—a diverse bunch indeed.
University elites would then constitute a small sliver of
this class, but likely the most influential in government circles. Are his criticisms of academic leaders valid?
Perhaps his most relevant criticism is that
academic departments breed conformity of beliefs. His best example arises in the field of
economics where a given school might foster a particular ideology and only
allow in faculty members whose beliefs conform to that ideology. That is not the same thing as saying that
candidates will change their belief system in order to conform and thus perhaps
be hired. There are other universities
where different schools of thought dominate and departments look for a
different class of candidate. Competition
is maintained within the discipline of economics even if individual departments
might not encourage it internally. This
type of effect is common in many fields of study. The really good schools will generally not
allow themselves to fall into this conformity trap.
Frank suggests that university elites are somehow trained
be obedient to their masters, the government leaders who hire them for their
expertise. To repeat Frank:
“….professional ideology brings
with it certain predictable, recurring weaknesses. The first of these pitfalls of
professionalism is that people with the highest status aren’t necessarily
creative or original thinkers….professionals do not question authority; their
job is to apply it. This is the very nature
of their work and the object of their training….professionals are ‘obedient
thinkers’ who ‘implement their employers’ attitudes’ and carefully internalize
the reigning doctrine of their discipline, whatever it happens to be.”
It is not clear what Frank’s experience is in dealing
with academic superstars, but most people would probably use adjectives like “arrogant,”
“pompous,” “stubborn,” ‘intolerable,” rather than “obedient thinker” in
describing them. The idea that our
universities turn out intellectual wimps is so foreign to experience that Frank
risks invalidating everything he claims by promoting such ideas.
Where does the Democratic Party find itself today? It has a coalition that includes African Americans,
Latinos, and Asian Americans. It is the
party of choice for young people, the college educated, union members, and many
classifications of women. They have
dealt themselves a strong hand. Who are
the Democrats contending against? Their
opponents are mostly poorly-educated whites stoked by racial resentments—a form
of white nationalism. Many of the Republican
voters are exactly the people who Frank claims the Democrats betrayed: members
of his working/middle class.
You can’t help people who refuse to be helped.
The interested reader might find the following articles
informative:
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