That was the essential New Democrat idea: The world had changed, but certain Democratic voters expected their politicians to help them cling to a status that globalization had long since revoked. However, a true statesman—a real New Democrat—would challenge them to open their eyes. The climactic point in Primary Colors comes when the Clinton-figure visits a union hall in New Hampshire—“an obscure local of a dying craft … a fraternal organization for people left behind.” To these working-class losers, the candidate decides to tell the hard, unpleasant truth:
“So let me tell you this: No politician can bring these shipyard jobs back. Or make your union strong again. No politician can make it be the way it used to be. Because we’re living in a new world now, a world without borders—economically, that is. Guy can push a button in New York and move a billion dollars to Tokyo before you blink an eye. We’ve got a world market now. That’s good for some.… But muscle jobs are gonna go where muscle labor is cheap—and that’s not here. So if you all want to compete and do better, you’re gonna have to exercise a different set of muscles, the ones between your ears.”
“Uh-oh,” said the woman.
And Stanton [read: Clinton] did something really dangerous then: he didn’t indulge her humor. “Uh-oh is right,” he said. “And anyone who gets up here and says he can do it for you isn’t leveling with you. So I’m not gonna insult you by doing that. I’m going to tell you this: This whole country is gonna have to go back to school. We’re gonna have to get smarter, learn new skills. And I will work overtime figuring out ways to help you get the skills you need.”
That’s the magic moment that turns the fictional presidential race around: when the Clinton character speaks truth to weakness. In Klein’s cosmogony, this is something noble, something honest, something Democrats must do in order to win. Although this particular story was made up, as a description of a certain Democratic outlook it was exactly right. What workers need, this passage tells us, is to be informed that, in the face of global markets, there’s nothing anyone can do to protect them. That resistance is futile. That only individual self-improvement is capable of lifting you up—not collective action, not politics, not changing how the economy is structured. Americans can only succeed by winning the market’s favor, and we can only do that by proving ourselves worthy in school.
Klein was right to make this scene the fulcrum of his novel. It raises the basic question of what to do about inequality—collective action or individual effort—raises it and then dismisses it with a glib call to go out and get some “skills.” It is the glibness of that dismissal, the professional-class certainty that has been repeated in a thousand presidential statements and Senate hearings and casual conversations on the Acela train, that explains the Democratic Party’s flat inability to rise to the challenge of plutocracy.
EVERY MAN A YUPPIE
In reality, remember, Bill Clinton owed his election to hard times and his remarkable ability to make people think he cared about their suffering. With an assist from the plain-speaking billionaire Ross Perot, Clinton succeeded in winning back many of the working-class voters his centrist, technocratic predecessors had lost to the Republicans.
Once elected, Clinton expressed his thoughts in a December 1992 speech to his “economic summit.” Here is how he proposed to deal with the various economic problems he had identified on the campaign trail:
Our new direction must rest on an understanding of the new realities of global competition. The world we face today is the world where what you earn depends on what you can learn. There’s a direct relationship between high skills and high wages, and therefore we have to educate our people better to compete. We will be as rich and strong and rife with opportunity as we are skilled and talented and trained.
I put Clinton’s line about “what you earn” in italics because it may well be the most important passage of them all for understanding how his party—how our entire system—has failed so utterly to confront income inequality. It’s a line Clinton repeated a number of times in the course of his years in government,* and here, in a single sentence, is the distilled essence of the theory that has governed the politics of work and compensation from that day to this: You get what you deserve, and what you deserve is defined by how you did in school. Furthermore, this is supposedly true both for individuals and for the nation. Everyone says this. Barack Obama says it, David Brooks says it, George W. Bush says it, even Wisconsin governor Scott Walker says it, by implication, when he demands that the mission of the University of Wisconsin be changed from the “search for truth” to making people employable.
There is a sense in which this is obviously true; a platitude, even: None of us would get very far if we didn’t know how to read or to do math. Research and development is indeed important. People have to have the right skills before they can run the big machinery.
But it doesn’t take an advanced degree to figure out that this education talk is less a strategy for mitigating inequality than it is a way of rationalizing it. To attribute economic results to school years finished and SAT scores achieved is to remove matters from the realm of, well, economics and to relocate them to the provinces of personal striving and individual intelligence. From this perspective, wages aren’t what they are because one party (management) has a certain amount of power over the other (workers); wages are like that because the god of the market, being surpassingly fair, rewards those who show talent and gumption. Good people are those who get a gold star from their teacher in elementary school, a fat acceptance letter from a good college, and a good life when they graduate. All because they are the best. Those who don’t pay attention in high school get to spend their days picking up discarded cans by the side of the road. Both outcomes are our own doing.
One source of this idea, obviously, was the country’s traditional Protestant work ethic. There was also an important contemporary source. A few pages ago, I described a handful of popular authors who wrote on inequality in the early Nineties, but I left out the one whose views turned out to be most consequential of them all: Harvard professor Robert Reich, a close Clinton friend who became secretary of labor in 1993. On the campaign trail, Clinton had carried with him an oft-consulted copy of Reich’s 1991 magnum opus, The Work of Nations, and the plan for job training and infrastructure spending that Clinton announced as a candidate followed the strategy Reich outlined.4 Like the other books I mentioned, The Work of Nations acknowledged that most of us were sinking while others were enjoying fabulous success. In his gently ironic style, Reich told the story of how the well-to-do—the “fortunate fifth,” he called them—were engaged in a kind of “secession” from the larger American community, withdrawing into exclusive suburbs and private schools. Here they were “able to shop, work, and attend the theater without risking direct contact with the outside world.”
Today Robert Reich is something of a populist prophet and a fighter for economic justice, but in those days he was a very different sort of thinker. Inverted-flag distress signals were not for him. Despite his acknowledgement of rising inequality, he seemed rather satisfied with the way things were unfolding. The Work of Nations appeared to be a critique, but it was in fact a long valentine to society’s winners—the “symbolic analysts,” as Reich famously dubbed them, the professionals and consultants whose work was creative and pleasant and intellectual and who rode effortlessly on the waves of the international market, electronically connected at all times even as they jetted around the world. While manufacturing workers drifted hopelessly toward history’s dustbin, the symbolic analysts were the coming class, the only people who really mattered: “Never before in history,” Reich wrote, “has opulence on such a scale been gained by people who have earned it, and done so legally.”
That bit about the winners having “earned” their wealth is a critical moral point. For some, the social crevasse that began to open in the Eighties was an outrage; for Reich, the success of the symbolic analysts was entirely legitimate. These were creative p
eople who were “adding substantial value.” They were highly educated. Their innovations were in worldwide demand. They had merit.
In Reich’s understanding of the world circa 1991, not a whole lot could be done for that part of the population who worked in traditional blue-collar jobs. In the future, people would either have to become servants of the symbolic analysts or become symbolic analysts themselves. Reich assured us that the latter was possible, if we dedicated ourselves to spending more on education, infrastructure, and job training. Unlike other dominant classes in history, there was technically no limit on the number of people who could join this favored cohort, who could grow up and “sell symbolic-analytic services worldwide.” In theory, everyone could become a yuppie.
A more serious objection is that Reich’s plan to put people on the path to symbolic analysis simply missed the point. The problem of inequality was more fundamental than upgrading the jobs people did. During the ’92 campaign, one of Clinton’s best lines had been that Americans were “working harder for less”; what he was acknowledging when he said this was one of the basic facts of the decades-long inequality debate: that worker productivity was going up but wages were not.
This was—and remains—essential to the inequality problem. Before the late 1970s, productivity and wage growth had always increased in unison—as workers made more stuff, they earned more money. But by the early 1990s, the two had clearly separated. Workers made more stuff than ever before, but they no longer prospered from what they made.5 Put differently: Workers were working as hard and as well as ever; they simply weren’t reaping the profits from it. Wall Street was. This was a massive and fundamental disorder, but one thing it was not was a failure of education. Had the problem been one of inadequate worker skills, productivity would not have been increasing so fast.
The real problem was one of inadequate worker power, not inadequate worker smarts.* The people who produced were losing their ability to demand a share in what they made. The people who owned were taking more and more.
Today the separation of productivity from reward is a feature of nearly every sort of work—white-collar, blue-collar; symbolic, literal; physical, mental; analytic, representational; all of us going nowhere while owners ascend the stratosphere. But because it happened to production workers first, it was possible for Democrats like Reich and Clinton to look at the situation and conclude that the real problem was those workers’ lousy educations.
It was a costly mistake. While this interpretation might have made a kind of narcissistic sense to the well-graduated, it allowed Democrats to ignore what was happening in the real economy—from monopoly power to financialization to labor-management relations—in favor of a moral fantasy that required them to confront no one. In the Clinton view, which would become the standard Democratic view, the only ones who had to change their ways were the victims themselves.
INEQUALITY COMES TO TYPICALTOWN, USA
Clinton and company would have done well to pay attention to what was going on in Decatur, Illinois, a prairie town of homegrown hamburger stands, WPA murals, and numerous statues of Abraham Lincoln, a local boy who made good. During World War II, Decatur was so exactly the quintessence of who-we-are that it scored 99 out of 100 on an East Coast professor’s “most typical” scale; that professor proceeded to send the then-unknown sociologist C. Wright Mills to Decatur to study its completely average population. What Mills found in Decatur later became the nucleus of White Collar, his famous study of the middle-class mind.6
Mills should have stuck around a little longer. Shortly after the Clinton administration took office, this most average of American cities descended into class war, with industrial actions at three different local factories. It all started in 1993 when the managers of a Decatur corn-processing plant, owned by the Tate & Lyle multinational sweetener concern, locked out their unionized employees. Contract negotiations had been going nowhere. The union was upset about what they saw as unsafe working conditions in the plant, and management was demanding concessions that were so extreme—for example, they wanted to put the workers on twelve-hour rotating shifts in place of the conventional eight-hour day—they seemed designed to provoke a strike. Instead, the union members had launched a campaign in which they worked exactly as they were instructed to work by managers and operating manuals; no more, no less. Production declined. Management responded by bringing in replacement workers to do their jobs.7
Shortly after the lockout began, the unions representing workers at Decatur’s Firestone tire plant and its Caterpillar earth-mover factory also went on strike. Here, too, the twelve-hour shift was an issue, in addition to two-tier pay scales in which new employees would never be able to earn as much as those who had hired in previously. These were no ordinary concessions. As I learned when I went to Decatur in 1994, a worker’s internal clock never adjusts to a rotational system, in which one’s shift moves all the time. More ominously, the twelve-hour rotating shift system would make it impossible for workers to participate in the life of their family or town: no more league sports or church choirs for them.8
The three union locals in Decatur quickly made common cause with one another, and before long a big part of the working population in that most typical American town were out protesting. With billboards, placards, newsletters, and the other publicity tools of that pre-Internet era, these aggrieved Midwesterners reached out across the country to tell the story of how their town had become a “war zone,” by which they meant to suggest that working-class Americans were in the crosshairs of a merciless new economic order.
The workers turned out to be right about the war zone. Before long the local police escalated the conflict with a spectacular bit of violence, using pepper spray on a crowd of peaceful protesters at the Tate & Lyle factory gate. I lived in Chicago at the time and I remember being shocked by the pictures of that incident, in particular by a poignant one of a middle-aged protester holding an American flag as the pepper spray hit his face.
That detail was fairly typical. The union members in Decatur grew increasingly radical as time went on, but they always took care to start their meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance. And those meetings themselves—it is painful to recall how earnestly those people believed in democracy, how deeply they seemed to feel that if average Americans could just get together and talk it over and settle on a plan, why, they could take on multinational corporations. Solidarity would prevail over everything. It was like something out of Lincoln’s time. Or Roosevelt’s, anyway.
What I remember above all—what I will never forget—is a march I observed in October 1994 that passed by Decatur’s three affected factories. Seven thousand people from all over the region had come to the war zone to participate, and I climbed up onto an overpass at one point to look back at the parade. The street was filled from side to side and as far as the eye could see with an advancing multitude of workers and average citizens—even the police had given up trying to exert control by this point—and as I beheld all this I experienced a spontaneous apprehension of what liberalism was all about, of what it stood for and of where its power came from—or, rather, where its power used to come from.
According to company management, the real problem was that employees were in denial; the union “still thinks it is 1950,” declared the CEO of Caterpillar.9 Those aggrieved Midwesterners simply hadn’t understood how the world had changed, how savage the competitive environment had become—and how ridiculous it was now for working-class people to expect to live middle-class lives. (It’s something CEOs still say, incidentally, about anyone who expects to be paid decently.)
The Democratic administration in Washington, meanwhile, did virtually nothing to remedy the situation in the Midwestern war zone; Robert Reich had actually wondered in a 1993 interview with the New York Times “whether the traditional union is necessary for the new workplace.”10
The union workers themselves had a grittier—and, as it turned out, far more accurate—impression of where events wer
e taking us. At a contentious union meeting in 1994, I was talking with a bunch of people about the labor struggles of times past, and a locked-out worker at Tate & Lyle named Royal Plankenhorn told me this: “Now it’s our turn. And if we don’t do it, then the middle class as we know it in this country will die. There will be two classes, and it will be the very very poor and the very very rich.”11
YUPPIE CRIMES
But Decatur was far away from Washington, and its problems made no impression that I could detect on Bill Clinton’s wise brain trust. The New Economy was dawning, creativity was triumphing, old industry was evaporating, and those fortunate enough to be among the ascendant were absolutely certain about the direction history was taking.
How could they be so certain? How did the liberal class know so confidently that education and training were the solution for inequality as well as the explanations for individual and national success?
Their certainty came, for one thing, from the fact that just about everyone was repeating the same platitudes. Postindustrialism! Globalization! The information superhighway! These were gods before whom everyone bowed back then, deities who made their will known to the country’s opinion columnists and management theorists.
Another reason so many were convinced so completely that education determined everything from personal prosperity to national competitiveness was, again, that it was true for them personally. Going to fancy colleges is what had allowed them to succeed, what had defined them as a generation, what had kept them out of trouble in Vietnam; it was natural for them to think that it could do the same for all people at all times in all situations.
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? Page 7
