CONCLUSION
Trampling Out the Vineyard
Were you to draw a Venn diagram of the three groups whose interaction I have tried to describe in this book—Democrats, meritocrats, and plutocrats—the space where they intersect would be an island seven miles off the coast of Massachusetts called Martha’s Vineyard.
A little bit smaller in area than Staten Island but many times greater in stately magnificence, Martha’s Vineyard is a resort whose population swells each summer as the wealthy return to their vacation villas. It is a place of yachts and celebrities and fussy shrubbery; of waterfront mansions and Ivy League professors and closed-off beaches. It is also a place of moral worthiness, as we understand it circa 2016. The people relaxing on the Vineyard’s rarefied sand are not lazy toffs like the billionaires of old; in fact, according to the Washington Post, they have “far higher IQs than the average beachgoer.” It is an island that deserves what it has. Some of its well-scrubbed little towns are adorned in Victorian curlicues, some in the severe tones of the Classical Revival, but whatever their ornament might be they are always clad in the unmistakable livery of righteous success.1
It is ever so liberal. This is Massachusetts, after all, and the markers of lifestyle enlightenment are all around you: Foods that are organic. Clothing that is tasteful. A conspicuous absence of cigarette butts.
Here it is not enough to have a surgically precise garden of roses and topiary in the three-foot strip between your carefully whitewashed house and the picket fence out front; the garden must also be accessorized with a sign letting passersby know that “this is a chemical-free Vineyard lawn, safe for children, pets, and ponds.”
It is ever so privileged, ever so private. This is not Newport or Fifth Avenue, where the rich used to display their good taste to the world; the Martha’s Vineyard mansions that you read about in the newspapers are for the most part hidden away behind massive hedges and long, winding driveways. Even the beaches of the rich are kept separate from the general public—they are private right down to the low-tide line and often accessible only through locked gates, a gracious peculiarity of Massachusetts law that is found almost nowhere else in America.2
Over the last few decades, this island has become the standard vacation destination for high-ranking Democratic officials. Bill Clinton started the trend in 1993 and then proceeded to return to Martha’s Vineyard every year of his presidency except two—after presidential puppeteer Dick Morris took a poll and convinced Bill it would be more in keeping with the mood of the country if the first family visited a National Park instead.
Barack Obama, the next Democrat to occupy the White House, mimicked Clinton in policy decisions and personnel choices, and so it made sense to do exactly as his predecessor had done in vacation destinations. Obama, too, has spent all his presidential holidays on Martha’s Vineyard with one exception—the year he ran for reelection and needed to burnish his populist image. When you research the place, you keep bumping into cozy details like the following: the Martha’s Vineyard estate where Obama stayed in the summer of 2013 belonged to one David Schulte, a corporate investment adviser and Clinton intimate who met Bill at Oxford and Hillary at Yale, where Schulte was editor of the Yale Law Journal.3
People on Martha’s Vineyard sometimes say that politicians choose to vacation among them because the residents here are so blasé about celebrity that it’s no big deal, a president can just ride his bike down the street and no one cares. It’s a nice thought, but I suspect the real reasons Democratic politicians like to come here are even simpler. First of all, there’s security. Martha’s Vineyard is an island; it is remote by definition and difficult to travel to. People in many parts of the country have never even heard of it.
Then there’s the money. What has sanctified the name of Martha’s Vineyard among Democratic politicians are the countless deeds of fund-raising heroism that have graced the island’s manicured golf courses, its quaint hotels, and its architecturally celebrated interiors. During the summer season, when the island’s billionaires have returned like swallows to the fabulous secluded coastal estates they own, there are fundraisers every night of the week. Often these are thrown for the benefit of worthy charitable causes, not politicians, but of course it is the political fundraisers that make the headlines.
Political fund-raisers for Democrats, that is. In terms of partisanship, everyone is pretty much on the same page here. The only moment in recent years to cause the billionaires of Martha’s Vineyard to feel pangs of political unease was 2007, when both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were hitting the sweet spot of the liberal class. Both politicians showed up here to raise money, sometimes within a few days of each other. Who would line up with whom? Tensions ran high. Tycoon turned against tycoon. On Martha’s Vineyard, declared the New York Times, the presidential race “is dividing old loyalties, testing longtime friendships and causing a few awkward moments at the island’s many dinner parties.” The struggle between the two Democrats made situations fraught at resort communities across the country, the paper allowed. “But perhaps nowhere is the intensity as great as on the Vineyard because of its history, the pedigree of its residents and those residents’ proximity to power.”4
In the summer of 2015, all that fratricidal stuff was over. The Obamas and the Clintons were again sharing the island, but the mood was happy. This time, Hillary Clinton’s fund-raising operations could proceed without any real competition. Both first families went peacefully to Vernon Jordan’s birthday party, an important annual event in the Democratic calendar. Bill and Barack even played a round of golf together. And Hillary was the beneficiary of a fundraiser cosponsored by her admirer, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, an honest-to-god member of Europe’s most famous family of Gilded Age banker-aristocrats.5
THE LAND THAT LIBERALS FORGOT
Back in 1975, when Martha’s Vineyard was in the course of being gentrified from a working-class fishing community to what it is today, Tom Wolfe published a humorous story in which he told how “Media & Lit. people” from New York had started vacationing on that island, and how they were initially shunned by the flamboyantly preppy “Boston people” who then dominated the resort’s summer scene. But then the two groups start to mingle, and a sort of revelation comes. At a cocktail party one day in the mid-1970s, Wolfe’s narrator, an unnamed New York author, sees “a glimmer of the future”:
something he could barely make out … a vision in which America’s best minds, her intellectuals, found a common ground, a natural unity, with the enlightened segments of her old aristocracy, her old money … the two groups bound together by … but by what?… he could almost see it, but not quite … it was presque vu … it was somehow a matter of taste … of sensibility … of grace, natural grace.6
Today the melding of money with the literary sensibility is, in certain circles, an accomplished fact, and sometimes the perversity of the thing is capable of slapping you right in the face. I was reminded of this as I strolled through one of the polished, stately towns on Martha’s Vineyard and came across a shop selling reproductions of old T-shirts and sports memorabilia and the like. On the outside wall of the shop hung a poem by Charles Bukowski, because of course nothing goes better with tasteful clothing than transgressive poetry. It’s about the horror of blue-collar life, about how dehumanizing it is to do the kind of work that no one who passes by here ever does anymore:
I think of the men
I’ve known in
factories
with no way to
get out—
choking while living
choking while laughing
When I think of the men I’ve known in factories, I think of those locked-out workers I met in Decatur, Illinois, in the early days of the Clinton administration. What concerned them was not so much the existential frustration of blue-collar work as it was the fraying of the middle-class promise. Although they were “out,” they weren’t particularly interested in staying out; they would have been ha
ppy to go back in provided their jobs were safe and paid well. They wanted to live what we used to think of as ordinary lives.
In a scholarly paper about social class published in 1946, the sociologist C. Wright Mills found that “Big Business and Executives” in Decatur earned a little more than two times as much as the town’s “Wage Workers” did.7
In 2014, the CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, a company that dominates Decatur today, earned an estimated 261 times as much as did average wage workers. The CEO of Caterpillar, the focus of one of the Decatur “war zone” strikes I described in Chapter Three, made 486 times as much.8 Caterpillar’s share price, meanwhile, is roughly ten times what it was at the time of the strike.
Other changes to sweep that town since the war zone days of the 1990s are just as familiar, just as awful. For one thing, Decatur’s population has shrunk by about 12 percent since back then. Despite this outflow of people, as of early 2015 the place still had the highest unemployment rate in the state of Illinois. As a few minutes of Internet clicking will tell you, Decatur’s own citizens now rank their town extremely low on certain quality-of-life metrics; in a photographic guide to Decatur meant to promote tourism, the photographer recounts being threatened in a park while taking pictures.9
The two-class system that those men-in-factories spoke of during the strikes has pretty much come to pass. I mean this not only in the sense that Wall Street traders are very rich, but in the highly specific way that the two-tiered system the Caterpillar workers were protesting has been installed in workplaces across the country; as a result, younger workers will never catch up to the pay earned by their seniors no matter how many years they log on the job.
In 2015 I went back to Decatur to catch up with veterans of the war zone like Larry Solomon, who had been the leader of the local United Auto Workers union at the Caterpillar plant. He went back in after the strike ended but retired in 1998. When I met Solomon in his tidy suburban home, he talked in detail about the many times he got crossways with management in days long past; about all the grievances he filed for his coworkers over the years and all the puffed-up company officials he recalls facing down.
Think about that for a moment: a blue-collar worker who has retired fairly comfortably, despite having spent years confronting his employer on picket lines and in grievance hearings. How is such a thing possible? I know we’re all supposed to show nothing but love for the job creators nowadays, but listening to Solomon, it occurred to me that maybe his semi-adversarial attitude worked better. Maybe it was that attitude, repeated in workplace after workplace across the country, that made possible the middle-class prosperity that once marked us as a nation.
“We were promised, all during the time we worked at Caterpillar, that when you retire, you’re going to have a pension and full benefits at no cost to you,” Solomon recalled. He told about a round of contract negotiations he and his colleagues attended in the 1960s during which a management official complained, “We already take care of you from the cradle to the grave. What more could you want?”
Today, that old social contract is gone—or, at least, the part of it that ensured health care and retirement for blue-collar workers. Now, as Solomon sees it, companies can say, “We want your life, and when your work life is over, then good-bye. We thank you for your life, but we’re not responsible for you after we turn you out.”
Mike Griffin had been another outspoken union activist, in his case during the lockout at Tate & Lyle. We talked about the situation that faces the younger generation in Decatur, people for whom the basic components of middle-class life are growing farther and farther out of reach. Though they might not always get it politically, Griffin said, those workers can most definitely see how screwed they are. “One of the things that they do understand is that they got shit jobs with shit wages and no benefits and no health insurance,” he told me.
And they understand that they’re working two and three jobs just to get by, and a lot of them can’t own anything, and they understand seeing mom and dad forced into retirement or forced out of their job, now they’re working at Hardee’s or McDonald’s to make ends meet so they can retire in poverty. People understand that. They see that.
YOU! HYPOCRITE LECTEUR!
This book has been a catalogue of the many ways the Democratic Party has failed to tackle income inequality, even though that is the leading social issue of the times, and its many failures to get tough with the financial industry, even though Wall Street was the leading culprit in the global downturn and the slump-that-never-ends. The larger message is that this is what it looks like when a leftish party loses its interest in working people, the traditional number one constituency for left parties the world over.
But we should also acknowledge the views of the people for whom the Democrats are all you could ask for in a political party. I am thinking here of the summertime residents on Martha’s Vineyard—the sorts of people to whom the politicians listen with patience and understanding. No one treats this group as though they have “nowhere else to go”; on the contrary, for them, the political process works wonderfully. It is responsive to their concerns, its representatives are respectful, and the party as a whole treats them with a gratifying deference.
For them, the Democrats deliver in all the conventional ways: generous subsidies for the right kinds of businesses, a favorable regulatory climate, and legal protection for their innovations. Hillary Clinton’s State Department basically declared access to certain Silicon Valley servers to be a human right.
Then there are the psychic deliverables—the flattery, for starters. To members of the liberal class, the Democratic Party offers constant reminders that the technocratic order whose upper ranks they inhabit is rational and fair—that whether they work in software or derivative securities they are a deserving elite; creative, tolerant, enlightened. Though it is less tangible, the moral absolution in which Democrats deal is just as important. It seems to put their favorite constituents on the right side of every question, the right side of progress itself. It allows them to understand the war of our two parties as a kind of cosmic struggle between good and evil—a struggle in which they are on the side of light and justice, of course.
For people in the group I have been describing, there’s nothing dysfunctional or disappointing about Democratic politics; it feels exactly right. And what is rightest and most inspiring about it is the Democrats’ prime directive: to defeat the Republicans, that unthinkable brutish Other. There are no complexities to make this mission morally difficult; to the liberal class, it is simple. The Democratic Party is all that stands between the Oval Office and whomever the radicalized GOP ultimately chooses to nominate for the presidency. Compared to that sacred duty, all other issues fade into insignificance.
Let me acknowledge that I sometimes feel this way, too. It is true that Donald Trump seems outrageous and that Ted Cruz is a one-man wrecking crew, and I think it would be a terrible thing if they or any of the rest of the Republican lineup were to capture the nation’s commanding heights.
But even when it comes to containing the Republicans—the area where the Democratic Party’s mission is so clear and straightforward—it has not been a great success. Despite their highly convincing righteousness, despite their oft-touted demographic edge, and even despite a historic breakdown of the GOP’s free-market ideology, the Democrats have been unable to suppress the Republican challenge. The radicalized Republican Party seems to be conquering the nation, one state legislature at a time. What I saw in Kansas eleven years ago is now everywhere.
Even if Democrats do succeed in winning the presidency in 2016 and the same old team gets to continue on into the future, it won’t save us. While there are many great Democrats and many exceptions to the trends I have described in this book, by and large the story has been a disappointing one. We have surveyed this party’s thoughts and deeds from the Seventies to the present, we have watched them abandon whole classes and regions and industries, and we know now what the
results have been. Their leadership faction has no intention of doing what the situation requires.
It is time to face the obvious: that the direction the Democrats have chosen to follow for the last few decades has been a failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health. “Failure” is admittedly a harsh word, but what else are we to call it when the left party in a system chooses to confront an epic economic breakdown by talking hopefully about entrepreneurship and innovation? When the party of professionals repeatedly falls for bad, self-serving ideas like bank deregulation, the “creative class,” and empowerment through bank loans? When the party of the common man basically allows aristocracy to return?
Now, all political parties are alliances of groups with disparate interests, but the contradictions in the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats posture as the “party of the people” even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on.
Yet it will go on, because the most direct solutions to the problem are off the table for the moment. The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way. There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor, the one social movement that is committed by its nature to pushing back against the inequality trend.
What we can do is strip away the Democrats’ precious sense of their own moral probity—to make liberals live without the comforting knowledge that righteousness is always on their side. It is that sensibility, after all, that prevents so many good-hearted rank-and-file Democrats from understanding how starkly and how deliberately their political leaders contradict their values. Once that contradiction has been made manifest—once that smooth, seamless sense of liberal virtue has been cracked, anything becomes possible. The course of the party and the course of the country can both be changed, but only after we understand that the problem is us.
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? Page 23
