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

by Frank, Thomas

  As first lady in the 1990s, Hillary Clinton went on to enthuse about some respectable something called the “Politics of Meaning” and was profiled in the New York Times Magazine as “Saint Hillary,” a woman who “would like to do good, on a grand scale, and she would like others to do good as well.” In a presidential primary debate in 2015, she announced, “I’m not taking a back seat to anybody on my values [and] my principles.”*

  If you’re like me, all this talk of rock-solid principles makes you immediately wonder what those principles are. Young Hillary was “known” for them; she had no intention of ever conceding them; she takes second place to nobody in honoring them; but what they actually were is always left unspoken. The “politics of meaning,” yes, we remember hearing that phrase, but meaning what? What did it all mean?

  NO CEILINGS

  Nothing is more characteristic of the liberal class than its members’ sense of their own elevated goodness. It is a feeling that overrides any particular inconsistency or policy failing—the lousy deeds of Bill Clinton, for example, do not reduce his status in this value system. Still, it is not merely the shrill self-righteousness that conservatives love to deplore. Nor is it simply the air of militant politeness you encounter in places like Boston or Bethesda. It is more rarefied than that, a combination of virtue and pedigree, a matter of educational accomplishment, of taste, of status … of professionalism.

  When this value system judges Hillary to be a woman of high idealism, what is being referenced might more accurately be called the atmosphere of acute virtue—of pure, serene, Alpine propriety—through which her campaign and, indeed, her person seems to move at all times.

  I myself got a whiff of this intoxicating stuff on International Women’s Day in March 2015, when I attended a Clinton Foundation production at the Best Buy theater in New York City called No Ceilings. The happening I am describing wasn’t a campaign event—the 2016 race had not started at that point—nor was it a panel discussion, as there were no disagreements among participants or questions from the audience. Instead, it was a choreographed presentation of various findings having to do with women’s standing in the world. But if you paid attention, it provided a way to understand Hillary’s genuine views on the great social question before the nation—the problem of income inequality.

  Onto the stage before us came Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s heiress apparent; Melinda Gates, the wife of the richest man in the world (the event was a coproduction with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation); various foundation executives; a Hollywood celebrity; a Silicon Valley CEO; a best-selling author; an expert from Georgetown University; a Nobel Prize winner; and a large supporting cast of women from the third world. Everyone strode with polished informality about the stage, reading their lines from an invisible teleprompter. Back and forth, the presenters called out to one another in tones of gracious supportiveness and flattery so sweet it bordered on idolatry.

  In her introduction to the event, for example, the TV star America Ferrera, who has appeared at many Clinton events both philanthropic and political, gave a shout-out to the “incredible women who have brought us all here today” and the “amazing girls” whose conversation she had been permitted to join. Then Chelsea Clinton, who announced herself “completely awed” by the “incredible swell of people and partners” who had participated in some event the previous day, invited us to harken to the “inspiring voices of leaders, of communities, of companies, of countries.”13

  Those were just the first few minutes of the event. It kept on like that for hours. When someone’s “potential” was mentioned, it was described as “boundless.” People’s “stories” were “compelling,” when they weren’t “inspiring,” or “incredible,” or “incredibly inspiring.” A Kenyan activist was introduced as “the incomparable.” A man thanked Hillary Clinton for her leadership, and Hillary Clinton in turn thanked someone for saying that women were harmed more by climate change than were men.

  The real star of this show was the creative innovator, the figure who crops up whenever the liberal class gets together to talk about spreading the prosperity around more fairly. In this case, the innovations being hailed were mainly transpiring in the third world. “Every year, millions and millions of women everywhere are empowering themselves and their communities by finding unique, dynamic, and productive ways to enter the workforce, start their own businesses and contribute to their economies and their countries,” said Chelsea Clinton, introducing an “inspiring innovator and chocolatier” from Trinidad.

  Melinda Gates followed up the chocolatier’s presentation by heaping up even more praise: “She was an amazing businesswoman, you can see why we all find her so inspiring.” Then, a little later on: “Entrepreneurship is really vital to women.… It’s also their ability to advance into leadership roles in corporations. And corporations play such a big role in the global economy.”

  They sure do. The presence of Melinda Gates should probably have been a clue, but still I was surprised when the rhetoric of idealistic affirmation expanded to cover technology, meaning social media. Participants described it as one of the greatest liberators of humanity ever conceived. Do I exaggerate? Not really. Hear, again, the words of America Ferrera:

  We’re hearing these stories for the first time because of a new thing called social media.… Twenty years ago, in many communities across the world, women and girls were often virtually silenced, with no outlet and no resources to raise their voices, and with it, themselves. And that’s huge. One out of every two people, 50 percent of the world’s population, without a voice. Social media is a new tool to amplify our voices. No matter which platform you prefer, social media has given us all an extraordinary new world, where anyone, no matter their gender, can share their story across communities, continents, and computer screens. A whole new world without ceilings.

  “Techno-ecstatic” was the term I used to describe rhetoric like this during the 1990s, and now, two crashes and countless tech scandals later, here it was, its claims of freedom-through-smartphones undimmed and unmodified. This form of idealism had survived everything: mass surveillance, inequality, the gig economy. Nothing could dent it.

  Roughly speaking, there were two groups present at this distinctly first-world gathering: hard-working women of color and authoritative women of whiteness. Many of the people making presentations came from third-world countries—a midwife from Haiti, a student from Afghanistan, the chocolate maker from Trinidad, a former child bride from India, an environmental activist from Kenya—while the women anchoring this swirling praise-fest were former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the wealthy foundation executive Melinda Gates.

  What this event suggested is that there is a kind of naturally occurring solidarity between the millions of women at the bottom of the world’s pyramid and the tiny handful of women at its very top. The hardship those third-world women have endured and the entrepreneurial efforts they have undertaken are powerful symbols of the struggle of American professional women to become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies (one of the ambitions that was discussed in detail at the event) or of a woman to be elected president.

  GOOD THINGS ARE GOOD

  That was my first experience of the microclimate of virtue that surrounds Hillary Rodham Clinton. The mystic bond between high-achieving American professionals and the planet’s most victimized people, I would discover, is a recurring theme in her life and work.

  But it is not her theme alone. Regardless of who leads it, the professional-class liberalism I have been describing in these pages seems to be forever traveling on a quest for some place of greater righteousness. It is always engaged in a search for some subject of overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness with which it can identify itself and under whose umbrella of virtue it can put across its self-interested class program.

  There have been many other virtue-objects over the years: people and ideas whose surplus goodness could be extracted for deployment elsewhere. The great virtue-rush of
the 1990s, for example, was focused on children, then thought to be the last word in overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness. Who could be against kids? No one, of course, and so the race was on to justify whatever your program happened to be in their name. In the course of Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book, It Takes a Village, the favorite rationale of the day—think of the children!—was deployed to explain her husband’s crime bill as well as more directly child-related causes like charter schools.

  You can find dozens of examples of this kind of liberal-class virtue-quest if you try, but instead of listing them, let me go straight to the point: This is not politics. It’s an imitation of politics. It feels political, yes: it’s highly moralistic, it sets up an easy melodrama of good versus bad, it allows you to make all kinds of judgments about people you disagree with, but ultimately it’s a diversion, a way of putting across a policy program while avoiding any sincere discussion of the policies in question. The virtue-quest is an exciting moral crusade that seems to be extremely important but at the conclusion of which you discover you’ve got little to show for it besides NAFTA, bank deregulation, and a prison spree.

  This book is about Democrats, but of course Republicans do it too. The culture wars unfold in precisely the same way as the liberal virtue-quest: they are an exciting ersatz politics that seem to be really important but at the conclusion of which voters discover they’ve got little to show for it all besides more free-trade agreements, more bank deregulation, and a different prison spree.

  CHAMPION OF THE ONE TRUE INTERNET

  The Clinton Foundation event gives us context in which to understand Hillary’s most important moment as a maker of policy—her four years as Barack Obama’s secretary of state. Although her purview was foreign policy, we can nevertheless see from her deeds at State how she thinks and the ways she intends to tackle inequality. The themes should be familiar by now: the Internet, innovation, and getting everyone hooked up to the financial industry.

  In emphasizing these aspects of her tenure at the State Department, I do not mean to brush off the better-known diplomatic triumphs that Hillary Clinton engineered, like the international effort to isolate Iran. Nor do I mean to soft-pedal her better-known diplomatic failures, like the cataclysmic civil war in Libya, a conflict Clinton worked so hard to stoke that the Washington Post in 2011 called it “Hillary’s War.”14

  The concern of this book is ideas, not diplomacy, and the first of the big ideas Hillary Clinton proposed at State was what she called “Internet Freedom.” This was to be the very “cornerstone of the 21st century statecraft policy agenda,” according to a State Department press release, and Secretary Clinton returned to the principle frequently. In a high-profile speech in January of 2010, she declared that, henceforth, the United States “stand[s] for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas.” Committing ourselves to defending this unified Internet from all who would censor it, she continued, was a logical extension of what Franklin Roosevelt had been after with his Four Freedoms; it wasn’t all that much different from the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, either. To Clinton it was a matter of direct moral simplicity: open expression on the Internet equals freedom; evil regimes are those that try to suppress that freedom with things like “a new information curtain.”15

  Understanding the Internet as a force of pure nobility is a revered pundit tradition in the United States, and in the days when Clinton declared humanity’s Internet Freedom, those ideals were on the lips of every commentator. In the summer of 2009, the Iranian regime had violently suppressed a series of enormous street protests—protests that, the American pundit-community immediately determined, had been as much a testament to the power of Twitter as they were about any local grievance having to do with Iran itself. The so-called Twitter Revolution fit neatly into the beloved idea that new communications technologies—technologies invented or dominated by Americans, that is—militate by their very nature against dictatorships, a market-populist article of faith shared everywhere from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.16

  Then there was the economic side of the single, unified Internet, and it, too, was all about liberation. For the “people at the bottom of the world’s economic ladder,” Hillary Clinton averred on that day in 2010, the Internet was a savior. She declared that a connection to it was “an on-ramp to modernity.” The fear that the Internet might create “haves and have-nots” was false, she continued; she knew of farmers in Kenya who were using “mobile banking technology” and of “women entrepreneurs” somewhere else in Africa who were getting “microcredit loans” and she also knew about a doctor who used a search engine to diagnose a disease.17 I guess she hadn’t heard about what was happening to journalists or musicians or taxi drivers in her own country, but I quibble; as long as this technology was free, anyone could see that it pushed in one direction only, and that was up.

  Clinton spent much of her time as secretary of state leading the fight for this noble cause. “States, terrorists, and those who would act as their proxies must know that the United States will protect our networks,” she said in 2010. At a conference in The Hague in 2011, she took the stage to warn against evil regimes that “want to create national barriers in cyberspace” and to sympathize with business leaders facing tough questions like “Is there something you can do to prevent governments from using your products to spy on their own citizens?” She was introduced on that occasion by Google’s Eric Schmidt, who praised her as “the most significant secretary of state since Dean Acheson”; Hillary reciprocated by calling Schmidt a “co-conspirator” and welcomed the participation of his company, which she said was “co-hosting” the freedom-ringing proceedings.18

  As everyone would soon learn with the help of a National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden, to understand the Internet in terms of this set-piece battle of free speech versus censorship was to miss the point entirely. There’s something else the Internet makes it easy for governments to do—something called “mass surveillance,” and, we later learned, the very government Hillary Clinton served was the one doing it. Not some despot in Damascus. Not some terrorist in Tripoli. Her government.

  Her government didn’t care what you posted in the chat room or whether you talked on your phone all day long—they just wanted to watch and listen as you did. They recorded people’s calls. They read people’s email. They spied on the president of Mexico. They spied on French business leaders. They listened to the phone calls of some thirty-five world leaders. They hacked the cellphones of entire nations. They spied on low-level foreign diplomats in order to swindle them at the bargaining table.

  Hillary Clinton never really had to confront these issues. She stepped down as secretary in February of 2013, while the first news stories about mass surveillance appeared four months later.* And maybe this is the wrong way to judge her crusade for Internet Freedom in the first place. Maybe access to the Internet was all people needed, somewhere on earth, to pull themselves up into prosperity.

  Take the case of Western intervention in Libya, which her State Department once regarded as something of a triumph. According to a 2011 State Department press release, the Libya intervention showed how we could achieve “post-conflict stabilization using information networks”:

  A leadership team at the ministry formed a plan called “e-Libya” to increase Internet access in the country and leverage this information network as a tool to grow new businesses, deliver government services, improve education, and interconnect Libyan society. Since the Qaddafi regime denied Internet access to more than 90% of Libyans, the potential for positive social, political, and economic change through access to information networks is considerable. The State Department led a delegation of experts to Tripoli to provide concrete expertise in network architecture, law and policy, e-commerce, and e-government for the e-Libya plan. It may become a model for “digital development” through technical knowledge exchange and partnerships across the public and private sectors.19<
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  And then: Libya sank into civil war, with armed factions, outrageous brutality, and fleeing refugees. Making a stand for Internet Freedom sounded like a noble goal back in 2011—a cheap way to solve Libya’s problems, too—but in retrospect it was hardly sufficient to quell the more earthly forces that roiled that unhappy land.

  “THE HILLARY DOCTRINE”

  The other great diplomatic initiative during Hillary Clinton’s years as secretary of state was to recast the United States as the world’s defender of women and girls. This was the so-called Hillary Doctrine—a virtue-quest of the most principled kind.20 The one superpower was no longer to be an overbearing hegemon or a bringer of global financial crisis.

  The secretary described the elements of the Hillary Doctrine in 2010 at a TED conference, that great agora of the liberal class. “I have made clear that the rights and the roles of women and girls will be a central tenet of American foreign policy,” she said, “because where girls and women flourish, our values are also reflected.”* It is, Clinton continued, “in the vital interests of the United States of America” to care about women and girls. Here was her reasoning: “Give women equal rights, and entire nations are more stable and secure. Deny women equal rights, and the instability of nations is almost certain.” Here was her conclusion: “the subjugation of women is therefore a threat to the common security of our world and to the national security of our country.”21

  I was a little bit alarmed when I heard Secretary Clinton speak these phrases in her deliberate way. Ordinarily, the words “vital interest” and “national security,” when combined like this, suggest strong stuff: that the U.S. has a right to freeze assets, organize embargoes, and maybe even launch airstrikes—in this case, I suppose, against countries that score poorly on the gender-equality scale.