Review of “Listen Liberal” by Thomas Frank (ISBN 9781925228885)
This book explains when the Democratic Party decided to abandon organized labor, befriend Wall Street, and embrace the 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. It explains how and why all of Obama’s “best and brightest” simply ended up doing what the Republicans had done before them. It explains why — even in Bright Blue states like Rhode Island and Massachusetts — economic inequality has not been addressed or repaired by Democrats. It takes us from Boston to Fall River, one of the poorest cities just a short ride away. It looks at the record of Duval Patrick, once an “Obama Lite” governor, one who started his professional career at Ameriquest and ended up at Bain Capital.
But Democrats can’t help it. This is who they are. Clinton the First, Clinton the Second, Obama, and many other “meritocracy” Democrats draw Frank’s scrutiny. Their friends, the Eric Schmidts, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerbergs, are their idols. Their shared values are with pharmaceutical magnates 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 the teachers. Half the time Democrats at war with Labor (think Rahm Emanuel’s and Arne Duncan’s attacks on teachers). The New Democrats are nothing like FDR’s allies 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 the Democrats of their fathers’ generation — all while betraying them.
They are a separate economic class — themselves neither fish nor fowl, workers nor oligarchs. They have no idea where their allegiances lie. They think they’re voting for the common man but they live, dress, and eat better — and then they wonder why their noble gestures aren’t appreciated.
Frank concludes his book with this:
“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.”
I would also add — don’t automatically give your vote to a party that hasn’t earned it.
Comments are closed.