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

by Frank, Thomas

  This has all sorts of important consequences for liberalism, but let us here take note of just one before proceeding: 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.22 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.

  THE PANACEA OF EDUCATION

  It is not a coincidence that the two most successful Democratic leaders of recent years—Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—were both plucked from obscurity by prestigious universities. Nor is it surprising that both of them eventually signed on to a social theory in which higher education is the route to individual success and to national salvation as well.

  Educational achievement is, after all, the foundation of the professions’ claim to higher status. It should not surprise us that the liberal class regards the university as the greatest and most necessary social institution of all, or that members of this cohort reflexively propose more education as the answer to just about anything you care to bring up. College can conquer unemployment as well as racism, they say; urban decay as well as inequality. Education will make us more tolerant, it will dissolve our doubts about globalization and climate change, it will give us the STEM skills we need as a society to compete. The liberal class knows, as a matter of deepest conviction, that there is no social or political problem that cannot be solved with more education and job training. Indeed, the only critique they will acknowledge of this beloved institution is that it, too, is not meritocratic enough. If we just launch more charter schools, give everyone a fair shot at the SAT, and crank out the student loans, then we will have done all it is humanly possible to do.

  To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you’ll need in the society of the future. Take inequality. The real problem, many liberals believe, is that not enough poor people get a chance to go to college and join the professional-managerial elite. Driving this point home is the object of report after report from the Hamilton Project, a Democratic think tank that is named, tellingly, for the original advocate of an American ruling elite.23 Other leading members of the liberal class have flogged the point relentlessly over the years. A sampling:

  • “If there is an income divide in America it is over education,” wrote Democratic media strategist Bill Knapp in the Washington Post in 2012, “and this makes sense: People who are better educated should make more money.”24

  • “What I fundamentally believe—and what the president believes,” Arne Duncan, Obama’s secretary of education, told a reporter in 2012, “is that the only way to end poverty is through education.”25

  • “The best way by far to improve economic opportunity and to reduce inequality is to increase the educational attainment and skills of American workers,” declared Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to the graduating class at Harvard in 2008, a group much perturbed by inequality.26

  • Thomas Friedman, Obama’s other favorite newspaper columnist, comes back to the subject again and again. “The biggest issue in the world today is growth, and, in this information age, improving educational outcomes for more young people is now the most important lever for increasing economic growth and narrowing income inequality,” he wrote in 2012. “In other words, education is now the key to sustainable power.”27

  To the liberal class this is a fixed idea, as open to evidence-based refutation as creationism is to fundamentalists: if poor people want to stop being poor, poor people must go to college.

  But of course this isn’t really an answer at all; it’s a moral judgment, handed down by the successful from the vantage of their own success. 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.

  This way of thinking about inequality offers little to the many millions of Americans—the majority of Americans, in fact—who did not or will not graduate from college. It dismisses as though a moral impossibility the well-known fact that there have been and are places in the modern world where people with high school diplomas can earn a good living—like, say, the northern states of the USA between 1945 and 1980 or the Germany of today.

  Then there are disturbing reports like the recent study showing that, in terms of wealth, black and Hispanic college graduates actually “fared significantly worse” in the late recession than did members of those groups who hadn’t gone to college. The people in question were the ones who did everything right, who went through life the way our society instructs us to, and they were punished for it.28

  And that’s only the beginning of the problems. Who is to say that a college degree by itself is the silver bullet? In the arms race of merit, perhaps it’s getting straight As that makes you worthy, or going to a “good school,” or studying the STEM subjects, or not wasting time on the STEM subjects. Even then, the education panacea offers nothing to the ones who check every box and who still find, after they graduate, that there are simply no jobs out there, or that the jobs that exist pay poorly.

  But nothing can dissuade the leaders of the liberal class from this faith—not the many scandals reverberating through the universities, not the much-discussed misery that has engulfed high-achieving humanities PhDs, not the crushing weight of the student loans, not the perverse fact that the quality of American higher ed has declined while its price tag has grown so massively.

  Nor can the leaders of the professional class see the absurdity of urging everyone else to do exactly as they themselves did to make their way to the top. It is as if some oil baron were to proclaim that the unemployed could solve their problems if they just found good places to drill for oil. Or if some mutual-fund manager were to suggest that the solution to inequality was for everyone to put their savings in the stock market.

  THE PATHOLOGIES OF PROFESSIONALISM

  Having people of talent run the vast federal apparatus is clearly a desirable thing. The EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ought to be under the direction of people who know what they’re doing, as surely as qualified engineers should design our bridges and historians should be the ones who teach history.

  But what are we to make of our modern-day technocracy, a meritocracy of failure in which ineffectual people rise to the top and entire professions (accountants, real-estate appraisers, etc.) are roiled by corruption scandals?

  The answer is that the professional ideology brings with it certain predictable, recurring weaknesses. The first of these pitfalls of professionalism is that the people with the highest status aren’t necessarily creative or original thinkers. Although the professions are thought to represent the pinnacle of human brilliance, what they are actually brilliant at is defending and applying a given philosophy. In Disciplined Minds, an important description of the work-life of professionals, the physicist Jeff Schmidt tells us that “ideological discipline is the master key to the professions.” Despite the favorite Sixties slogan, 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, according to Schmidt; by his definition, professionals are “obedient thinkers” who “implement their employers’ attitudes” and carefully internalize the reigning doctrine of their discipline, whatever it happens to be.29

  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 recogni
zed right to declare … ‘outside’ evaluation illegitimate and intolerable.”30

  Exhibit A of these interlocking pathologies is economics, a discipline that often acts like an ideological cartel set up to silence the heterodox. James K. Galbraith has written a classic description of how it works:

  Leading active members of today’s economics profession … have joined together into a kind of politburo for correct economic thinking. As a general rule—as one might expect from a gentleman’s club—this has placed them on the wrong side of every important policy issue, and not just recently but for decades. They predict disaster where none occurs. They deny the possibility of events that then happen.… No one loses face, in this club, for having been wrong. No one is disinvited from presenting papers at later annual meetings. And still less is anyone from the outside invited in.31

  Professional economists screw up again and again, and no one cares. The only real accountability they face is from their endlessly forgiving peers in economics departments across the country. Granted, economics is an extreme case, but its thoroughgoing application of the right to disregard criticism has made it a kind of fascinating anti-profession, a brotherhood of folly rather than of expertise.

  The peril of orthodoxy is the second great pitfall of professionalism, and it’s not limited to economics. 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.32

  Our modern technocracy can never see the glaring flaw in such a system. For them, merit is always synonymous with orthodoxy: the best and the brightest are, in their minds, always those who went to Harvard, who got the big foundation grant, whose books are featured on NPR. When the merit-minded President Obama wanted economic expertise, to choose one sad example, he sought out the best the economics discipline had to offer: former treasury secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers, a man who had screwed up time and again yet was shielded from the consequences by his stature within the economics profession.

  Look back to the days when government-by-expert actually worked and you will notice an astonishing thing. Unlike the Obama administration’s roster of well-graduated mugwumps, the talented people surrounding Franklin Roosevelt stood very definitely outside the era’s main academic currents. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closest confidant, was a social worker from Iowa. Robert Jackson, the U.S. Attorney General whom Roosevelt appointed to the Supreme Court, was a lawyer who had no law degree. Jesse Jones, who ran Roosevelt’s bailout program, was a businessman from Texas with no qualms about putting the nation’s most prominent financial institutions into receivership. Marriner Eccles, the visionary whom Roosevelt appointed to run the Federal Reserve, was a small-town banker from Utah with no advanced degrees. Henry Wallace, who was probably the nation’s greatest agriculture secretary, studied at Iowa State and came to government after running a magazine for farmers. Harry Truman, FDR’s last vice president, had been a successful U.S. senator but had no college degree at all.

  Even Roosevelt’s Ivy Leaguers were often dissenters from professional convention. John Kenneth Galbraith, who helped to run the Office of Price Administration during World War II, spent his entire career calling classical economics into question. Thurman Arnold, the Wyoming-born leader of FDR’s Antitrust Division, wrote a scoffing and derisive book called The Folklore of Capitalism. Just try getting a job in Washington after pulling something like that today.

  A third consequence of modern-day liberals’ unquestioning, reflexive respect for expertise is their blindness to predatory behavior if it comes cloaked in the signifiers of professionalism. Take the sort of complexity we saw in the financial instruments that drove the last financial crisis. For old-school regulators, I am told, undue financial complexity was an indicator of likely fraud. But for the liberal class, it is the opposite: an indicator of sophistication. Complexity is admirable in its own right. The difference in interpretation carries enormous consequences: Did Wall Street commit epic fraud, or are they highly advanced professionals who fell victim to epic misfortune? As we shall see again and again, modern-day liberals pretty much insist on the latter view, treating Wall Street with extraordinary deference despite all that went on during the last decade. This is no doubt due, in part, to Wall Street’s enormous political contributions. But anyone seeking to understand this baffling story must also take note of the widely shared view among Democrats that Wall Street is a place of enormous meritocratic prestige, on a level equivalent to a high-end graduate school. Wall Street’s veneer of professionalism is further buttressed by its complicated technical jargon, which (like other disciplines) the financial industry uses to protect itself from the scrutiny of the public.33

  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.34 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.

  ON THE LIBERALISM OF THE RICH

  I am pressing on a sensitive point here. Democrats cherish their identification as the Party of the People, and they find it unpleasant to be reminded that affluent professionals are today among their most dedicated supporters. Democrats’ close relationship with the successful is not something they advertise or even discuss openly.

  Exceptions to this rule are rare. One of the few works I know of that seems to approve, albeit with reservations, of liberalism’s alliance with a segment of the upper crust is the 2010 book Fortunes of Change, written by the philanthropy journalist David Callahan.35 The premise of his argument is that our new, liberal plutocracy is different from plutocracies of the past because rich people today are sometimes very capable. “Those who get rich in a knowledge economy,” the journalist tells us, are well-schooled; they often come from the ranks of “highly educated professionals” and consequently they support Democrats, the party that cares about schools, science, the environment, and federal spending for research. It is not a coincidence, Callahan continues, that “some of the biggest zones of wealth creation are near major universities.” The smart get richer and the dumb get … Republicans, I guess.

  If we accept this equation between wealth and educational accomplishment, it begins to seem unremarkable that, in 2008, hedge funds and investment banks made Barack Obama the first Democrat to outraise his Republican opponent on Wall Street.36 There’s a simple reason that financial firms rallied to the Democrat on that occasion, Callahan suggests: because people on Wall Street, being very smart and very well-educated, are natural liberals. As the journalist reminds us, financial companies these days are populated not by “jocks” but by “quants,” by people who are familiar with “new financial products for managing risk or structuring debt, such as derivatives.”

  As an example, Callahan points us to the D. E. Shaw Group hedge fund, which was founded by a man with a PhD from Stanford who gives enormous sums to Democratic candidates and who also employed former Treasury Secretary Larry
Summers for a few years between Summers’s gig as president of Harvard and his next gig running President Obama’s National Economic Council. Callahan quotes at length from D. E. Shaw’s recruiting materials:

  Our staff includes a number of Rhodes, Fulbright, and Marshall Scholars, Putnam Fellows, and the winners of more than 20 medals in the International Math Olympiad. Current employees include the 2003 U.S. Women’s Chess Champion, a Life Master bridge player, and a Jeopardy winner, along with a number of writers, athletes, musicians, and former professors. Over 100 of our employees hold PhDs, almost 40 are entrepreneurs who previously founded their own companies, and approximately 20 percent are published authors whose work ranges from highly technical papers in specialized academic journals to award-winning mystery novels.

  To this honor roll of intellectual and financial achievement, Callahan appends the following observation: “This is definitely not the Sarah Palin demographic.”37

  No. But neither is it a demographic with any particular concern for the fate of working people.

  2

  How Capitalism Got Its Groove Back

  Democrats have been wondering who they are and squabbling over what they believe for virtually my entire life. It has taken them years to get to wherever it is they are today; years filled with quarrels and vituperation and occasional bouts of manic self-love. It has required long periods of slow evolution, usually in the wrong direction; runs of rapid but lousy choices; epochs of soft-headed enthusiasm for fad ideas, each of which was then followed by a savage Thermidor in which hard-headed party toughguys promoted different fad ideas that turned out to be even worse.