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

by Frank, Thomas

  If you think this is about bowing down before the One Percent, you’ve got Markell all wrong. Writing for the Atlantic magazine a few months after his Stanford speech, he called on Americans to recognize “the synergy, rather than the contradiction, between economic growth and economic justice.” What he means is that economic justice only comes about through economic growth, and therefore the primary duty of anyone who wants to tackle inequality is “to create a nurturing environment where business leaders and entrepreneurs want to locate and expand.”6

  SHINING CITY ON A HILL

  The real spiritual homeland of the liberal class is Boston, Massachusetts. As the seat of American higher learning, it seems unsurprising that it should anchor one of the most Democratic of states, a place where elected Republicans are highly unusual. When other cities and states, made desperate by the advance of deindustrialization, set up fake bohemias and implore their universities to generate profitable ideas, Boston is the place they are trying to emulate, the city where it all works, smoothly and successfully. This is the city that virtually invented the blue-state economic model, in which prosperity arises from higher education and the knowledge-based industries that surround it.

  As of 2010, some 152,000 students lived in the city of Boston, making up 16.5 percent of the total population. Boston’s metro area encompasses eighty-five private colleges and universities, the greatest concentration of higher-ed institutions in the country—probably in the world. The Boston area has all the ancillary advantages to show for it: a highly educated population, an unusually large number of patents, and more Nobel laureates than any other city in the country.7 Harvard University, the country’s oldest institution of higher learning, is actually mentioned in Massachusetts’s 1780 constitution, a document which quaintly declares the commonwealth’s interest in promoting “the republic of Letters.”

  These days, all Americans are interested in higher ed, but not because we want better poets and theologians. We love our universities because we believe they carry a straight-up payoff in dollars. Here, too, Massachusetts is the model. The Boston area has prospered fabulously as knowledge workers have become the country’s dominant cohort. In every sort of lab-coat and starched-shirt pursuit the city is well-represented: it has R&D; it has law firms; it has investment banks; it has management consulting; it has a remarkable concentration of life-science businesses.

  The coming of post-industrial society* has treated this most ancient of American cities extremely well. Massachusetts routinely occupies the number one spot on the previously mentioned State New Economy Index, a measure of how “knowledge-based, globalized, entrepreneurial, IT-driven and innovation-based” a place happens to be. Massachusetts also ranks high on most of Richard Florida’s statistical indices of approbation—in 2003, it was number one on the “creative class index,” number three in innovation and in high tech8—and his many books marvel at the city’s concentration of venture capital, its allure to young people, or the time it enticed some firm away from some unenlightened locale in the hinterlands.

  Boston’s knowledge economy is the best, and it is the oldest. The city’s Route 128 corridor was the original model for a suburban tech district, lined ever since it was built with defense contractors and computer manufacturers. The suburbs situated along this golden thoroughfare are among the wealthiest municipalities in the nation, populated by engineers and lawyers and aerospace workers. Their public schools are excellent, their downtowns are cute, and their socially enlightened residents were the prototype for the figure of the “suburban liberal”—the kind of people who voted enthusiastically for McGovern in 1972.9

  Another prototype: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, situated in Cambridge, is where began our modern conception of the university as an incubator for business enterprises. According to a report on MIT’s achievements in this category, the school’s alumni have started nearly 26,000 companies over the years, including Intel, Hewlett Packard, and Qualcomm; if you were to take those 26,000 companies as a separate nation, the report tells us, its economy would be one of the most productive in the world.10

  Then there are Boston’s many biotech and pharmaceutical concerns, grouped together in what is known as the “life sciences super cluster,” which, properly understood, is part of an “ecosystem” in which PhDs can “partner” with VCs and in which big pharmaceutical firms can acquire small ones. While other industries shrivel, the Boston super cluster grows, with the life-sciences professionals of the world lighting out for the Athens of America and the massive new “innovation centers” shoehorning themselves one after the other into the crowded academic suburb of Cambridge.11

  To think about it slightly more critically, Boston is the headquarters for two industries that are steadily bankrupting middle America: big learning and big medicine, both of them imposing costs that everyone else is basically required to pay and yet which increase at a pace far more rapid than wages or inflation. A thousand dollars a pill, thirty grand a semester: the debts that are gradually choking the life out of people where you live are what has made this city so very rich.

  Perhaps it makes sense, then, that another category in which Massachusetts leads the nation is inequality. Once the visitor leaves the brainy bustle of Boston, he discovers that this state is filled with wreckage—with former manufacturing towns, with workers watching their way of life drain away, with cities that are little more than warehouses for people on Medicare.12 According to one survey, Massachusetts has the eighth-worst rate of income inequality among the states; by another metric it ranks fourth. However you choose to measure the diverging fortunes of the Ten Percent and the rest, Massachusetts always seems to finish among the nation’s most unequal places.13

  SEETHING CITY ON A CLIFF

  You can see what I mean when you visit Fall River, an old mill town fifty miles south of Boston. Median household income in that city is $33,000, among the lowest in the state; unemployment is among the highest, 15 percent in March 2014, nearly five years after the recession ended. Twenty-three percent of Fall River’s inhabitants live in poverty. The city lost its many fabric-making concerns years ago and with them it lost its reason for being. People have been deserting the place for decades.14

  Many of the empty factories in which their ancestors worked are still standing, however. Solid nineteenth-century structures of granite or brick, these huge boxes dominate the city visually—there always seems to be one or two of them in the vista, contrasting painfully with whatever colorful plastic fast-food joint has been slapped up next door.

  Most of these old factories are boarded up, unmistakable emblems of hopelessness right up to the roof. But the ones that have been successfully repurposed are in some ways even worse, filled as they often are with enterprises offering cheap suits or help with drug addiction. A clinic in the hulk of one abandoned mill has a sign on the window reading, simply, “Cancer & Blood.”

  The effect of all this is to remind you with every prospect that this is a place and a way of life from which the politicians have withdrawn their blessing. Like so many other American scenes, this one is the product of decades of deindustrialization, engineered by Republicans and rationalized by Democrats. Fifty miles away, Boston is a roaring success, but the doctrine of prosperity that you see on every corner in Boston also serves to explain away the failure you see on every corner in Fall River. This is a place where affluence never returns—not because affluence for Fall River is impossible or unimaginable, but because our country’s leaders have blandly accepted a social order that constantly bids down the wages of people like these while bidding up the rewards for innovators, creatives, and professionals.

  Even the city’s one real hope for new employment opportunities—an Amazon warehouse that is in the planning stages—will serve to lock in this relationship. If all goes according to plan, and if Amazon sticks to the practices it has pioneered elsewhere, people from Fall River will one day get to do exhausting work with few benefits while being electro
nically monitored for efficiency, in order to save the affluent customers of nearby Boston a few pennies when they buy books or electronics.15

  But that is all in the future. These days, the local newspaper publishes an endless stream of stories about drug arrests, shootings, drunk-driving crashes, the stupidity of local politicians, and the lamentable surplus of “affordable housing.” Like similar places, the town is up to its eyeballs in wrathful bitterness against public workers. As in, Why do they deserve a decent life when the rest of us have no chance at all? It’s every man for himself here in a “competition for crumbs,” as a Fall River friend puts it.

  For all that, it is an exemplary place in one respect: as a vantage point from which to contemplate the diminishing opportunities of modern American life. This is the project of Fall River Herald News columnist Marc Munroe Dion, one of the last remaining practitioners of the working-class style that used to be such a staple of journalism in this country. Here in Fall River, the sarcastic, hard-boiled sensibility makes a last stand against the indifference of the affluent world.

  Dion pours his acid derision on the bike paths that Fall River has (of course) built for the yet-to-arrive creative class. He cheers for the bravery of Wal-Mart workers who, it appears, are finally starting to stand up to their bosses. He watches a 2012 Obama-Romney debate and thinks of all the people he knows who would be considered part of Romney’s lazy 47 percent—including his own mother, a factory worker during World War II who was now “draining our country dry through the twin Ponzi schemes of Social Security and Medicare.”16

  “To us, it looks as though the city is dissolving,” Dion wrote in late 2015. As the working-class apocalypse takes hold, he invites readers to remember exactly what it was they once liked about their town. “Fall River used to be a good place to be poor,” he concludes. “You didn’t need much education to work, you didn’t need much money to live and you knew everybody.” As that life has disappeared, so have the politics that actually made some kind of sense; they were an early casualty of what has happened here. Those who still care about the war of Rs and Ds, Dion writes, are practicing “political rituals that haven’t made sense since the 1980s, feathered tribesmen dancing around a god carved out of a tree trunk.”17

  THE GREAT ENTREPRENEURIAL AWAKENING

  Back in Boston, meanwhile, there is meaning and exciting purpose wherever you look. When I visited, in the spring of 2015, I found a city in the grip of a collective mania, an enthusiasm for innovation that I can only compare to a religious revival, to the kind of crowd-passion that would periodically sweep through New England back in the days when the purpose of Harvard was to produce clergymen, not startups.

  The frenzy manifests itself in countless ways. The last mayor of Boston was mourned on his passing as a man who “believed in innovation”; who “brought innovation to Boston.” The state’s Innovation Institute issues annual reports on the “Massachusetts Innovation Economy”; as innovation economies go, they brag, this one is “the largest in the U.S. when measured as a percent of employment.” And of course there are publications that cover this thrumming beehive of novelty: “BostInno,” a startup website dedicated to boosting startups, and “Beta Boston,” which is a project of the more established but still super-enthusiastic Boston Globe.18

  Fall River is pocked with empty mills, but the streets of Boston are dotted with facilities intended to make entrepreneurship easy and convenient. In my brief time there, I toured innovation center after innovation center, each one featuring brightly colored furniture, open workspaces, inspiring quotations about inventiveness, ping-pong tables and Guitar Hero sets and other instruments of break-time levity (not one of which I ever saw actually being used), and walls that were covered with high-gloss paint meant to be written upon with dry-erase markers.

  In addition to these many designated centers of business creativity, I discovered that Boston boasts a full-blown Innovation District, a disused industrial neighborhood that has actually been zoned creative—a projection of the post-industrial blue-state ideal onto the urban grid itself. The heart of the neighborhood is a building called “District Hall”—“Boston’s New Home for Innovation”—which appeared to me to be a glorified multipurpose room, enclosed in a sharply angular façade, and sharing a roof with a restaurant that offers “inventive cuisine for innovative people.” The wi-fi was free; the screens hung here and there displayed still more famous quotations about inventiveness; and of course the walls were writable; but otherwise it was not much different from an ordinary public library. Aside from not having anything to read, that is.

  This was my introduction to the innovation infrastructure of the city, much of it built up by entrepreneurs shrewdly angling to grab a piece of the entrepreneur craze. There are “co-working” spaces like “Workbar” and “WeWork,” shared offices for startups that can’t afford the real thing. There are startup “incubators” and startup “accelerators,” which aim to ease the innovator’s eternal struggle with an uncaring public: the Startup Institute, for example, and the famous MassChallenge, the “World’s Largest Startup Accelerator,” which runs an annual competition for new companies and hands out prizes at the end.

  The keystone of the inno-structure is the university; indeed, some people in this city of universities have come to believe that the starting-up of companies and the launching of professional careers is the very purpose of higher education. The one equals the other. It is the reason MIT has two associate deans for innovation rather than just one and that its president writes op-eds instructing the nation about the right way “to deliver innovation.” It is the reason Northeastern University has a “venture accelerator” it calls IDEA; that Harvard has the famous Innovation Center; that Boston University’s business school has a Department of Strategy and Innovation; that its College of Engineering has a Product Innovation Center; and that one of its colleges offers a certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

  At Harvard, where I met innovation guru Clayton Christensen ambling across a parking lot, the dream of being the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates is almost palpable. As well as the usual incubators and accelerators, the school boasts a $100 million venture capital fund that is focused on commercializing the ideas of former students.19 One of this fund’s press releases quotes a Harvard professor on how this heap of money advances the school’s “mission,” which today (apparently) includes “marshaling significant resources to help create thrilling companies.” The fund holds campus events too, and at the one I attended, at a Harvard dormitory called Eliot House, an audience of undergraduates listened as a professor from a nearby university talked about his many patents in the medical and pharmaceutical fields.

  Sometimes the theology of the innovation cult is stated plainly: We know what makes an economy work, and it is university-driven innovation. The state’s own Department of Housing and Economic Development says it flatly on its website: “The foundation of the Massachusetts economy is the innovative and entrepreneurial capability of its residents to transform existing technologies and industries and create new ones.” This is the state government speaking, remember. It continues:

  The pillars of this innovation economy are the state’s universities and research institutions, the rich cluster of innovation-based companies, and the sophisticated angel, venture capital and financial services communities that help fund and mentor the pipeline of entrepreneurs. At the heart are the skilled and creative people who choose to make Massachusetts their home.

  More typical, however, are tail-chasing proclamations like this one, which can be found on the website of the MIT Innovation Initiative: “The MIT Innovation Initiative is an Institute-wide, multi-year agenda to transform the Institute’s innovation ecosystem—internally, around the globe and with its partners—for accelerated impact well into the 21st century.”20

  This sounds distinctly like bullshit, but if MIT wants to think of itself in such a way, that’s their business. The problem arises when we enshrine i
nnovation as a public philosophy—when we look to it as the solution to our economic ills and understand it as the guide for how economies ought to parcel out rewards. To put it bluntly, it is not clear that cheering for innovation in the bombastic way we see in the blue states actually improves the economic well-being of average citizens. For example, the last fifteen years have been a golden age of financial and software innovation, but they have been feeble in terms of GDP growth. In ideological terms, however, innovation definitely works: as a way of excusing soaring inequality and explaining the exalted status of the rich, it is the best we’ve got.

  TRIUMPH OF THE INNO-CRATS

  Massachusetts’s identification with the Democratic Party is profound and well-known. The home state of the Kennedy family, it has produced two other Democratic presidential nominees in recent decades—Governor Michael Dukakis and Senator John Kerry—and was, as we know, the only state won by George McGovern in 1972. Mitt Romney, the Republican leader in 2012, also hailed from the Bay State, but Massachusetts was none too enthusiastic about his candidacy. When that year’s results were in, Romney didn’t carry a single county of the state he had once served as governor.

  Even when Massachusetts has had Republican governors, it hasn’t really mattered. Not only do these lonesome GOPers tend to be just as dedicated as their rivals to the blue-state model, but the Mass legislature remains lopsidedly Democratic no matter what, capable of passing whatever it chooses over the governor’s veto. In the time I was writing this book, for example, the state’s senate included only six Republican members out of forty—a lopsided normal that is, among other things, an almost perfect mirror image of the Kansas state senate.

  Politically speaking, the cult of the knowledge economy goes back a long way in Massachusetts. Many, if not all, of the state’s leading politicians have done their part boosting for it over the years, celebrating startups and professing their admiration for the creative class.