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

by Frank, Thomas

  “The collapse and end of the New Deal is one of the most frequently announced events in American media,” wrote a political scientist in 1985. It was announced so often and so predictably in those days that cataloguing it became an academic exercise in itself. The historian William Leuchtenburg filled several chapters of his 1989 book, In the Shadow of FDR, with New Deal death notices of this kind. For example, after Carter’s electoral disaster in 1980, Senator Paul Tsongas said, “Basically, the New Deal died yesterday.” After the electoral disaster of 1984, syndicated columnist Joseph Kraft announced that “the repudiation of Mondale was a repudiation of the Democratic Party that had emerged from the old Roosevelt coalition.” After the electoral disaster of 1988, it was the same, even though candidate Michael Dukakis had worked hard to distance himself from the New Deal and even from the word “liberal.” On the eternal return of the death-of-the-New-Deal, Leuchtenburg himself wondered, “It was far from clear why if, as Gary Hart claimed, the New Deal was dead in 1974, it was necessary for him to kill it off in 1980 and again in 1984.”12

  Can we really blame the media for telling the story this way, time after time? All the bright young Democrats with the post-partisan ideas were saying the same thing. All through the Seventies and Eighties, in fact, new waves of liberal thinkers kept washing up, divining from the political stars the same ideas: that labor unions were an economic drag and/or dying fast; that industrial society itself had gone into eclipse; and that the future belonged to people like them, meaning—always—affluent professionals or some other highly educated and market-savvy cohort.

  The most exciting of these bright young thinkers were the tech-minded Washingtonians who called themselves the “Neo-Liberals”; in the early 1980s their bold thinkings were the subject of a manifesto, an anthology, a collective biography, and countless news stories. To the reader of today, however, what stands out in their work is the distaste they expressed for organized labor and their enthusiasm for high-tech enterprises. The 1983 Neo-Liberal manifesto, for example, blamed unions for the country’s industrial problems, mourned all the waste involved in the Social Security program, and called for a war on public school teachers so that we might get a better education system and thereby “more Route 128s and Silicon Valleys.” It was all so modern, so very up-to-date. “The solutions of the thirties will not solve the problems of the eighties,” proclaimed a book-length account of this band of cutting-edge thinkers. “Our hero,” announced one of the leaders of the bunch, “is the risk-taking entrepreneur who creates new jobs and better products.”13

  THE COMING OF THE NEW DEMOCRATS

  Success came eventually to these different Democratic prophets of postindustrialism, but it was brought, ironically, by a group that initially distanced itself from the McGovern turn. I refer to the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), established by a group of white Southern politicians in 1985 and supposedly committed to the working-class voters the Democratic Party had left behind. As the DLC saw it, whenever Democrats lost an election, it was because their leaders were too weak on crime, too soft on communism, and too sympathetic to minorities.

  The DLC had a single-factor theory of politics: that voters had grown disgusted with the cultural liberalism of the post-McGovern era. Why did Carter lose in 1980? Too damn liberal. Why did Mondale lose in 1984? Still too liberal. Why did Dukakis lose in 1988? Liberal again. The DLC also had but a single prescription for this malady: the Democratic Party could only win if it moved to “the center,” severing ties with its constituent groups and embracing certain free-market policies of the right. The essential flaw in this neat little syllogism flashed on and off like a neon sign—that all three of the Democratic candidates in the 1980s had followed this exact strategy of shifting rightward and had lost anyway.

  What made the DLC succeed where others had failed were the contradictions it managed to juggle. It was a bluntly pro-business force—friendly with lobbyists and funded by corporate backers—that nevertheless proclaimed itself as a warrior for the working class. It was a strictly inside-the-Beltway operation that presented itself as the champion of “forgotten Democrats.” One of its early manifestos, for example, berated “higher socioeconomic status Democrats” for antagonizing working-class voters both culturally and economically, by embracing (among other things) “no-growth policies in the mid-seventies just as the economy was beginning to grind to a halt.”14

  Why working-class voters were supposed to pine for balanced budgets, free-trade treaties, and the rest of the items on the DLC wish-list was a mystery. The answer, it would soon become clear, was that the DLC didn’t really care all that much about working people in the first place. The aim of the group was to capture the Democratic Party for its lobbyist supporters by whatever means were at hand, and in the 1980s, claiming to represent the overlooked middle American probably seemed like a good gambit.

  By the early 1990s, however, the DLC’s proletarian period was over. Instead, the group used different rhetoric to persuade Democrats to let them drive. Now its leaders talked about getting “beyond left and right,” about occupying the “vital center,” about themselves as visionary “New Democrats,” empty phrases that nevertheless carried—that carry still—a kind of hypnotic power over the technocratic Washington mind. Before long, the DLC had discovered the great Cause on whose behalf it would henceforth make its demands: not the forgotten worker but the future—the “postindustrial, global economy.” It was in order to “do business” in this new realm, the group’s many manifestoes declared, that we needed to reform “entitlements” (i.e., Social Security), privatize government operations, open charter schools, get tough on crime, and all the rest of it.15

  This was the DLC’s “futurist” period, with everything exactly the same as in its earlier phase except that the New Economy had taken the place of the “forgotten Democrat” as the factor everyone needed to consider. Indeed, the group now seemed to revel in the imminent downfall of the working class. A remarkable artifact of this period was a 1995 cover story in the DLC magazine entitled “Beyond Repair: The Politics of the Machine Age Are Hopelessly Obsolete,” in which the reader learns that, “Thanks to the near-miraculous capabilities of microelectronics, we are vanquishing scarcity.” The reign of plenty that was to come meant that “the venerable politics of class warfare … is dying,” but also that lots of people in society’s lower ranks were going to get nowhere in the future. The insufficiently educated, it was said, would eat the dust “like illiterate peasants in the Age of Steam.”16

  By then, one of the DLC’s leaders had seated himself in the Oval Office, a story I will tell in the next three chapters. But allow me to step away from that chronological sequence for a moment to relate how the saga of the DLC ended. At first, remember, the group was critical of “higher socioeconomic status Democrats” for being too liberal; by 1998, however, they had completely reversed themselves. In that year, the Democratic Leadership Council published a manifesto announcing who history’s lucky winners were going to be—and it was the same group of people the DLC had once reviled for dragging the Democrats to the left. To find this out, readers had to make their way through a preface declaring yet again that “the New Deal era has ended,” but then political scientists William Galston and Elaine Kamarck were ready to divulge their finding: “The New Economy Favors a Rising Learning Class Over a Declining Working Class.”

  Yes, a “learning class.” This cohort, which the authors also called “Wired Workers,” was made up of individuals who were “better educated, more affluent, more mobile, and more self-reliant” than others. These fine people were scheduled to “dominate at least the first half of the 21st century,” and both of the country’s political parties would be required—on pain of utter destruction—to compete single-mindedly for their votes. Amazingly, the things that Wired Workers wanted were exactly the things that the Democratic Leadership Council had been pushing since its inception—entitlement reform, free markets, charter schools, and the rest of i
t.17

  ENTER THE BUBBA

  The different schools of Democratic Party reform that I have briefly described here are usually regarded as separate if not mutually despising tendencies. Frederick Dutton and his fellow worshippers at the shrine of enlightened youth were part of what is called the “New Politics” persuasion; among other things, they were open to cultural radicalism and strongly opposed the Vietnam War. The Democratic Leadership Council, on the other hand, were a faction of hippie-punching white Southerners who loved free markets and who ultimately discredited themselves many years later by whooping it up for the Iraq War.18

  These factions appeared to be opponents, and yet there was a persistent habit of thought that united them: regardless of what it was they were demanding, they all agreed that what stood in their way was the legacy of the New Deal—the Democratic Party’s commitment to equality for working people. That was what had to end.

  Here is where our story takes its remarkable turn: slowly but relentlessly, these different loser reform traditions came together, and as they did, the Democratic Party became a success. Bad ideas plus bad ideas turned out, in this case, to yield electoral victory.

  The exact point where these trajectories intersected was occupied by one Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas, a Rhodes Scholar and a McGovern campaign worker who had grown up to become the chairman of the DLC. He led the idealistic Sixties generation and he warred with the teachers’ union; he smoked dope and he never got high; he savored Fleetwood Mac and he got tough with welfare mothers. Here was the one-man synthesis of the grubby dialectic I have been describing, and he arrived in Washington to fulfill the sordid destiny of his class like Lenin arriving at the Finland Station.

  3

  The Economy, Stupid

  As the Nineties began, public fury over inequality was beginning one of its great cyclical eruptions. For the twenty preceding years, pundits and politicians had hoped, predicted, and declared that the egalitarian impulses of the Depression years had been cured; instead, the economic effects of Reaganism made their revival inevitable. The rich were richer than at any time since World War II, while small farmers and manufacturing workers were seeing their livelihoods destroyed. The cult of the entrepreneur had produced a group of buyout artists and savings and loan owners who were little better than criminals. The stock market had been galloping along at a tremendous pace—until the crash of 1987 suggested the whole thing was built on sand.

  The former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips kicked things off with his best-selling 1990 book, The Politics of Rich and Poor, asserting that upper-bracket excess could only go so far before it triggered a populist backlash—and that America had reached that point. The book was filled with the now-familiar sorts of charts showing how income inequality had accelerated over the years and how the top percentages were pulling away from everyone else. “Only for so long,” Phillips wrote, “will strung-out $35,000-a-year families enjoy magazine articles about the hundred most successful businessmen in Dallas or television programs about the life-styles of the rich and famous.”1

  The following year, two reporters for the Philadelphia Inquirer published an even more bitter account of how the wealthy had plundered the country’s productive enterprises during the 1980s, “pushing the nation toward a two-class society.” In 1992, the series appeared in book form under the title America: What Went Wrong?, with a then-shocking inverted flag on the cover; it, too, spent many weeks on the best-seller lists. A typical passage fumed that in 1989

  the top 4 percent of all wage earners in the country collected as much in wages and salaries as the bottom 51 percent of the population. Mull over the numbers carefully: The top 4 percent of America’s work force earned as much as the bottom 51 percent. That is in wages and salaries alone.2

  Class outrage was in the air. The Eighties boom had soured into a sharp recession in 1990, but the president at the time, the patrician George H. W. Bush, seemed less than concerned. In December 1991, General Motors announced plans to close 21 plants and lay off an astonishing 70,000 workers. The month after that, TV news footage showed almost 10,000 people lined up in the bitter Chicago cold for 1,000 job openings at a new hotel.

  In the presidential campaign then unfolding, economic populism was the flavor of the moment, the clear way to voice the spirit of the times and to challenge the uncaring, high-born incumbent. Four different candidates in 1992 struggled to make themselves the favorite of the discontented voter; the one who pulled it off most convincingly was the young governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, who preached the old-time religion with everything he had. Not only did Clinton wave a copy of America: What Went Wrong? during his speeches, but he talked like its authors, too. Middle-class Americans now “worked harder for less,” he would say. “One percent of America’s people at the top of the totem pole now have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent,” he liked to add, calling it “the biggest imbalance in wealth in America since the 1920’s right before the Great Depression.” Indeed, Clinton said, we were now facing the danger of raising “the first generation of Americans to do worse than their parents.”3

  When he was finally offered the nomination of the Democratic Party, he accepted it “in the name of the hardworking Americans who make up our forgotten middle class.” Then he added this: “When I am president, you will be forgotten no more.”

  It was the kind of campaign that old-style Democrats loved to run, a hard-times set piece in which a clever commoner squares off against a bored grandee who yawns at the suffering all around him—a man who actually checks his watch when asked a question about the woes of the “common people.” It was the election of 1932 all over again, with Bush standing in for the hated Herbert Hoover. The fieriest rhetoric of all came from one of Clinton’s chief surrogates, Democratic Georgia governor Zell Miller. Twelve years later, Miller would appear at the Republican convention, endorsing George W. Bush and winning renown as one of the greatest turncoats in Democratic Party history, but in 1992 he was still a flamboyant Southern populist, a purveyor of proletarian bombast so purple he actually began his keynote speech by boasting about the authenticity of his accent and the hardness of his upbringing. He laced into “aristocrats,” “the rich,” and the “billionaire” third-party candidate, Ross Perot. He recalled the days of Franklin Roosevelt. He blasted Republicans in classic style. “I know what Dan Quayle means when he says it’s best for children to have two parents,” Miller thundered at one point. “You bet it is! And it would good if they all had trust funds, too!” He continued:

  I’m for Bill Clinton because he is a Democrat who does not have to read a book or be briefed about the struggles of single-parent families, or what it means to work hard for everything he’s ever received in life. There was no silver spoon in sight when he was born, three months after his father died. No one ever gave Bill Clinton a free ride as he worked his way through college and law school.

  SPEAKING TRUTH TO WEAKNESS

  Zell Miller’s later career as a double-crosser gives some hint of how phony it all was. The Democratic rhetoric of 1992 may have made you feel like the heroes of the Thirties were still with us, standing ready to take up the old fight against arrogant wealth—in fact, their campaign talk was patently designed to create exactly that impression. In truth, however, erasing the memories and the accomplishments of Depression-era Democrats was what Bill Clinton and his clique of liberals were put on earth to achieve.

  That is not the conclusion of some sour and cynical Clinton hater, of which there were once so many; that is the sober and considered judgment of a responsible journalist, Martin Walker of the British Guardian newspaper and author of the 1996 book, The President We Deserve. Walker was clearly an admirer of the forty-second president, and after acknowledging Clinton’s failings, he urged his readers to think bigger: the president’s shortcomings were “in the end balanced and even outweighed by his part in finally sinking the untenable old consensus of the New Deal, and the crafting of a new one.” Only a Democ
rat was capable of such a deed, and Clinton did it. That was his great and undeniable achievement: He put the Thirties sensibility down so forcefully it would never again be revived.

  Let us recall that Bill Clinton came to national prominence as the leader of the Democratic Leadership Council, whose object was to shift the party to the right using whatever ideological tools were at hand. It is ironic, given the damage they proceeded to do to working-class people, that the New Democrats finally got their chance to move into the executive branch as the result of a distinctly populist campaign pounding away at the oldest of left-wing themes.

  The truth of the New Democrats’ purpose was presented by the journalist Joe Klein in his famous 1996 roman à clef about Clinton’s run for the presidency, Primary Colors. Although the novel contains more than a nod to Clinton’s extramarital affairs, Klein seems broadly sympathetic to the man from Arkansas as well as to the DLC project more generally. Toward the equality-oriented politics of the Democratic past he is forthrightly contemptuous. Old people who recall fondly the battles of the Thirties, for example, are objects of a form of ridicule that Klein thinks he doesn’t even need to explain; it is self-evident that people who care about workers are fools. And when an old-school “prairie populist” challenges the Clinton character for the nomination, Klein describes him as possessing “a voice made for crystal radio sets” and “offering Franklin Roosevelt’s jobs program (forestry, road-building) to out-of-work computer jockeys.” Get it? His views are obsolete! “It was like running against a museum.”