Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

by Frank, Thomas

  Teachers know what we must learn; architects know what our buildings must look like; economists know what the Federal Reserve’s discount rate should be; art critics know what is in good taste and what is in bad. Although we are the subjects of all these diagnoses and prescriptions, the group to which professionals ultimately answer is not the public but their peers (and, of course, their clients). They listen mainly to one another. The professions are autonomous; they are not required to heed voices from below their circle of expertise.

  In this way the professions build and maintain monopolies over their designated fields. Now, “monopoly” is admittedly a tough word, but it is not really a controversial one among sociologists who write about the professions. “Monopolizing knowledge,” according to one group of sociologists, is a baseline description of what professions do; this is why they restrict entry to their fields.6 Professions certify the expertise of insiders while negating and dismissing the knowledge-claims of outsiders.

  Specialized knowledge is, of course, a necessity in this complicated world of ours. From ship captains to neurosurgeons, modern society depends heavily on people with technical expertise. And so nations grant professionals their elevated status, the sociological theory continues, in exchange for a promise of public service. The professions are supposed to be disinterested occupations or even “social trustees”; unlike other elements of society, they are not supposed to be motivated by profit or greed. This is why we still find advertising by lawyers and doctors somewhat off-putting, and why Americans were once shocked to learn that radio personalities took money to play records they didn’t genuinely like: because professionals are supposed to answer to a spirit more noble than personal gain.7

  With the rise of the postindustrial economy in the last few decades, the range of professionals has exploded. To use the voguish term, these are “knowledge workers,” and many of them don’t fit easily into the old framework. They are often employees rather than independent practitioners, taking orders from some corporate manager instead of spending their lives in private practice. These modern professionals aren’t workers per se, and they aren’t capitalists either, strictly speaking. Some professions share certain features with these other groups, however. The accountants at your neighborhood tax preparation chain, for example, are sometimes just scraping by. And teachers are often union members, just like blue-collar workers. At the other end of the scale, certain lucky professionals in Silicon Valley happen to be our leading capitalists. And the gulf between professional hedge fund managers and the rich folks whose money they invest is small indeed.

  As these last two examples suggest, the top ranks of the professions are made up of highly affluent people. They are not the billionaire Wal-Mart clan, but they have a claim to leadership nevertheless. These two power structures, one of ownership and the other of knowledge, live side by side, sometimes in conflict with one another but usually in comity.

  The concern of this book is not investigating the particular expertise of any given profession, but rather the politics of professionalism in a larger sense. As the political scientist Frank Fischer writes in Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise, professionalism is more than an occupational category; it is “a postindustrial ideology.”8 For many, it provides an entire framework for understanding our modern world.

  As a political ideology, professionalism carries enormous potential for mischief. For starters, it is obviously and inherently undemocratic, prioritizing the views of experts over those of the public.9 That is tolerable to a certain degree—no one really objects to rules mandating that only trained pilots fly jetliners, for example. But what happens when an entire category of experts stops thinking of itself as “social trustees”? What happens when they abuse their monopoly power? What happens when they start looking mainly after their own interests, which is to say, start acting as a class?

  “RULING IN THE NAME OF KNOWLEDGE”10

  Americans have pondered these questions before. The professions’ claims of superior authority and of a monopoly on the power to prescribe rubbed early Americans the wrong way, and in the first decades of the Republic the country reacted harshly against them. In the Jacksonian period, a time of profound anti-aristocratic feeling, “the ideology of merit clashed in America with the ideological egalitarianism of the political system,” as the sociologist Magali Larson writes. It was impossible to reconcile equality, Americans believed, with the professional ideal of a legally sanctioned clique of experts. Cartels and monopolies were in bad odor back then, and the public rebelled against the professions as attempts to maintain aristocratic entitlement through “mystification and concealment,” as an 1835 newspaper put it. Many states in those days took the revolt against professionalism so far as to repeal medical licensing requirements.11

  The anti-professional spirit persisted for decades. The Farmers’ Alliance and the Knights of Labor, two nineteenth-century workers’ organizations, specifically excluded lawyers from membership. I myself have seen a Populist-inspired sculpture garden in western Kansas in which a figure labeled “Labor” is crucified by statues representing the professions: “Doctor,” “Preacher,” “Lawyer,” “Banker.”12

  Amid the enormous strikes and the sudden, catastrophic recessions of the Gilded Age, however, a group of reformers who came to be known as “progressives” came to see professionalization as a positive thing—indeed, as the only hope for a society being torn apart in the war between capital and labor. Professionals, recast now as an enlightened managerial class, were supposed to bring about an industrial peace that would be impossible under the profit motive alone. The progressives of this period could be frankly and openly elitist on the subject: Herbert Croly, the author of the seminal work The Promise of American Life and later a founder of the New Republic, openly advocated for a sort of neo-aristocratic order led by “exceptional” citizens, and left-wing critics ranging from Thorstein Veblen to R. H. Tawney imagined capitalism tamed by professional expertise.

  The progressives had a point. Many of the industrial world’s problems were—and are—highly technical ones that require the attention of well-trained experts. Markets could obviously not be counted on to bring about democratic solutions to the scourge of exploitation, layoffs, and workplace injuries. There were no easy, Jeffersonian ways around these problems.

  For many years the progressive ideal seemed like a brilliant success. Franklin Roosevelt’s “brain trust,” for example, still stands today as a symbol of the liberal possibilities of professionalism, as do the New Deal’s many interventions in the workings of the market. Economies could be managed, at least in part; world wars could be planned and won; an assortment of consumer goods could be essentially guaranteed to each and every member of the broad middle class. The administration of FDR was something of a golden age for government-by-professionals, although (as we shall see) one that was different in important ways from our current regime of rule-by-expert.

  Let me confess here a nostalgia for the managerial professionalism that I have just described. It was, after all, the system that administered the country’s great corporations, its news media, its regulatory agencies, and its welfare state in the more benevolent years of the American Century. Here and there, in certain corners of our national life, this older organizational form still survives, keeping our passenger jets from exploding and our highway bridges from collapsing.

  But generally speaking, that system of professionalism was long ago subverted and transformed into something different and more rapacious. Today we live in a world of predatory bankers, predatory educators, even predatory health care providers, all of them out for themselves. The corruption of the professions is a grand story in its own right, and one that parallels the story told in this book: it starts at roughly the same time, it features a number of the same characters, and so on. With a few exceptions, however, it is not my subject here.

  What concerns us instead are popular attitudes toward the professions, and by the 1970s they
were definitely starting to sour. “Technocracy” was the new term for describing the reign of professionalism, and its connotations were almost entirely negative. Rule-by-expert, it began to seem, excluded rule-by-the-people. It was dehumanizing and mechanical. In a technocracy, the important policy decisions were made in faraway offices that were insulated from the larger whirl of society. The people making the decisions identified far more with society’s rulers than they did with the ruled, and their decisions often completely ignored public concerns. Busing was one of the era’s classic examples of failed technocratic overreach; another was the Vietnam War, a catastrophic intervention in which tens of thousands of working-class Americans were sent to their deaths—not to mention the vast death toll among the Vietnamese themselves—largely because foreign-policy professionals in Washington were unwilling to listen to voices from outside their discipline, bearing uncomfortable news.13

  The problems of technocracy were never solved. Instead technocracy became a way of life, with its own mass constituency. Today, as we are so often reminded, we live in a “postindustrial” age, and in this advanced state of civilization, the demand for expertise has become enormous. Knowledge industries such as software, finance, communication, surveillance, and military contracting are the vital economic sectors of our time, and the corporate world has proceeded to bulk up with armies of middle managers, efficiency experts, laboratory scientists, and public-relations specialists.

  As the professional-managerial class grew, its political alignment also changed. Between the Eisenhower era and today, professionals undertook a mass migration from the Republican to the Democratic Party, for reasons that will become apparent as we proceed. In fact, according to the sociologists Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks, professionals went from being the most Republican social formation in the country in the 1950s to being the most Democratic by the mid-Nineties.14

  Professionalism is “postindustrial ideology,” and today the Democrats are the party of the professional class. The party has other constituencies, to be sure—minorities, women, and the young, for example, the other pieces of the “coalition of the ascendant”—but professionals are the ones whose technocratic outlook tends to prevail. It is their tastes that are celebrated by liberal newspapers and it is their particular way of regarding the world that is taken for granted by liberals as being objectively true. Professionals dominate liberalism and the Democratic Party in the same way that Ivy Leaguers dominate the Obama cabinet. In fact, it is not going too far to say that the views of the modern-day Democratic Party reflect, in virtually every detail, the ideological idiosyncrasies of the professional-managerial class.

  Liberalism itself has changed to accommodate its new constituents’ technocratic views. Today, liberalism is the philosophy not of the sons of toil but of the “knowledge economy” and, specifically, of the knowledge economy’s winners: the Silicon Valley chieftains, the big university systems, and the Wall Street titans who gave so much to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. Liberal thinkers dutifully return the love, fussing over their affluent, highly educated sweethearts with all manner of flattering phrases: these high-achieving professionals are said to be the “wired workers” who will inherit the future, for example. They are a “learning class” that truly gets the power of education. They are a “creative class” that naturally rebels against fakeness and conformity. They are an “innovation class” that just can’t stop coming up with awesome new stuff.

  The phrase I will apply to them in the pages that follow is the “liberal class,” a designation I borrow from the radical writer Chris Hedges, although with a pretty big caveat.15 The premise of Hedges’ book on the subject, Death of the Liberal Class, is that the cohort behind liberal politics is disappearing or has lost its nerve. He writes to mourn their passing; I write to protest their triumph.

  POP TECHNOCRACY

  To protest their triumph? Why would a person of vivid pink sentiments like me object to the ascendancy of any liberal group? What difference does it make if the driving force behind Democratic victory comes from below or from on high?

  Put it a different way: what does it mean when the dominant constituency of the left party in a two-party system is a high-status group rather than the traditional working class?

  One thing we know for sure that it means is soaring inequality. When the left party in a system severs its bonds to working people—when it dedicates itself to the concerns of a particular slice of high-achieving affluent people—issues of work and income inequality will inevitably fade from its list of concerns.

  We know this, for starters, because this is exactly what has happened. Issues of income inequality have been recontextualized so thoroughly in our time that certain Democrats even have trouble understanding what their forebears of the 1930s and ’40s meant when they talked about the subject. For our modern liberals, it is obvious that careers should be open to talent and it is an outrage when barriers of any kind prevent the able from rising to the top.

  Another term for this understanding of equality is meritocracy, which is one of the great, defining faiths of the professional class. Meritocracy is about winners, and ensuring that everyone has a chance to become one. “The areas in which the left has made the most significant progress,” writes the journalist Chris Hayes, “—gay rights, inclusion of women in higher education, the end of de jure racial discrimination—are the battles it has fought or is fighting in favor of making the meritocracy more meritocratic. The areas in which it has suffered its worst defeats—collective action to provide universal public goods, mitigating rising income inequality—are those that fall outside the meritocracy’s purview.”16

  Another reason we know that a party of professionals will care little about inequality is because professionals themselves care little about it. While this segment of the population tends to be very liberal on questions of civil liberties and sexual mores, the sociologist Steven Brint tells us that professionals are “not at all liberal on economic and equality-related issues.” On anything having to do with organized labor, as we shall see, they are downright conservative.17

  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.”18

  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.19 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 mu
ch 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.”20

  What this doctrine means for the politics of income inequality should be clear: a profound complacency. For successful professionals, meritocracy is a beautifully self-serving doctrine, entitling them to all manner of rewards and status, because they are smarter than other people. For people on the receiving end of inequality—for those who have just lost their home, for example, or who are having trouble surviving on the minimum wage, the implications of meritocracy are equally unambiguous. To them this ideology says: forget it. You have no one to blame for your problems but yourself.

  There is no solidarity in a meritocracy. The very idea contradicts the ideology of the well-graduated technocrats who rule us. As we shall see, leading members of the professional class show enormous respect for one another—what I will call “professional courtesy”—but they feel precious little sympathy for the less fortunate members of their own cohort—for the adjuncts frozen out of the academic market for tenure, for colleagues who get fired, or even for the kids who don’t get into “good” colleges. That life doesn’t shower its blessings on people who can’t make the grade isn’t a shock or an injustice; it’s the way things ought to be.21