Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank has a lot to say to Massachusetts Democrats specifically. We — and I now reveal myself to be a #DemEnter Democrat — often regard ourselves as the most liberal of the liberal, the most progressive Democrats of all Democrats. An elite, if you will. This was certainly the self-congratulatory message we all heard last Saturday at the Massachusetts Democratic Party platform convention. Yet that’s not quite the reality, is it? In a post to follow I will write about the convention itself. But Frank’s book puts on paper many of the criticisms that progressives of every stripe — Greens, PDA, DSA, Working Families, Progressive Massachusetts, Our Revolution — have with the party. Some of us are now trying a little experiment — seeing for ourselves how far we can at least move it back to a democratic (small “d”) party of the people. But, like pharmaceutical research, these clinical trials may take some time.
Frank marks the moment that the Democratic Party decided to abandon organized labor, befriend Wall Street, and embrace a professional, instead of the working, class. It explains how Bill Clinton put a bullet in the head of an already-injured New Deal, ushered in a new era of “meritocracy” and its close friend, social and economic inequality. Frank explains how and why all of Obama’s “best and brightest” simply ended up doing what the Republicans had done before them. He explains why — even in bright Blue states like Rhode Island and Massachusetts — economic inequality has not been addressed or repaired by Democrats. Frank takes us from Boston to Fall River, one of the poorest cities just a short ride away. He looks at the record of Deval Patrick, once an “Obama Lite” governor, one who started his professional career at Ameriquest and ended up at Bain Capital. With Mitt Romney.
But Democrats just can’t help it. This is who they — we — are now. Clinton the First, Clinton the Second, Obama, and many other “meritocracy” Democrats deserve Frank’s tough love. Their friends — the Eric Schmidts, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerbergs — are their idols and rock stars. Their “shared values” are with pharmaceutical and software developers, hedge fund managers, and dot.com billionaires. Long gone are Democratic friendships with captains of organized labor such as the teamsters or teachers. Half the time Democrats are at war with Labor — think Rahm Emanuel’s and Arne Duncan’s attacks on teachers. These new Democrats are nothing like FDR’s friends of the common man. Instead, they are smug, well-fed, well-educated functionaries — “gatekeepers” who serve the ruling class yet still like to think of themselves as Democrats of their fathers’ generation, all while betraying their professed constituency.
Frank’s conclusions speak for themselves:
“It is time to face the obvious: that the direction the Democrats have chosen to follow for the last few decades has been a failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health.”Failure” is admittedly a harsh word, but what else are we to call it when the left party in a system chooses to confront an epic economic breakdown by talking hopefully about entrepreneurship and innovation? When the party of professionals repeatedly falls for bad, self-serving ideas like bank deregulation, the “creative class,” and empowerment through bank loans? When the party of the common man basically allows aristocracy to return?
Now, all political parties are alliances of groups with disparate interests, but the contradictions in the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. 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-Republicans is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on.
Yet it will go on, because the most direct solutions to the problem are off the table for the moment. The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way. 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, the one social movement that is committed by its nature to pushing back against the inequality trend.
What we can do is strip away the Democrats’ precious sense of their own moral probity — to make liberals live without the comforting knowledge that righteousness is always on their side. It is that sensibility, after all, that prevents so many good-hearted rank-and-file Democrats from understanding how starkly and how deliberately their political leaders contradict their values. Once that contradiction has been made manifest — once that smooth, seamless sense of liberal virtue has been cracked, anything becomes possible. The course of the party and the course of the country can both be changed, but only after we understand that the problem is us.”
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