The "Liberal" Class: The Dark Side of Meritocracy

I just finished Thomas Frank's Listen Liberal on audio and am now depressed. Dr. Frank, as always, lays out the way it is and after several books analyzing the ideological underpinnings of Republican voters and their leaders he has turned his keen eye on the Democrats. It is not a pretty sight. Frank's book is subtitled "what happened to the party of the people?" His answer is that the Democratic Party has been taken over by a variety of liberal that holds itself as the highest expression of that ideology. Frank has termed this gaggle of professionals "the liberal class" and leaders like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton are at the top. What distinguishes this faction within the party from others is their slavish devotion to meritocracy, which on it's face is a good thing, we need competence and expertise in government. But meritocracy values education above all else, which has led to disdain for all other pursuits, and therefore the "liberal class" has no interest in working people or their issues. This in turn has lead to the greatest explosion of inequality in America since the Civil War, or perhaps ever.

And that is a real problem, to put it mildly. This is basically what people are getting at when they complain that the two major parties in America are equally bad. This is also how the once proud "Party of the People" has simply become the "lesser of two evils". Usually, the word "spineless" was always at the forefront of criticism from the left, but cowardice is not the explanation Frank uses to describe how the Democratic elite abandoned it's traditional constituency of working people. Well, not abandoned completely, Frank points out in gloomy fashion that during the 2012 presidential campaign the issues of working class people were brought to the forefront to attack Mitt Romney but quickly faded away again.

No, the reason the Democratic Party abandoned working people and are all wrong about the overarching issue of the day, wealth and income inequality, is that professionals that make up the elite within that party don't care anymore. Education, namely the elite private university you went to and how well you did there, is the only thing that matters. Instead of the crude materialism of the right wing kleptocracy, we have an oligarchy of intellect and character. But neither one cares particularly about the needs of working people. Frank echoes Noam Chomsky a bit on this issue, though while Chomsky traces (or attempts to trace, he is not an historian after all) the meritocratic elite back to the founding of the republic, Frank located a specific moment in time when the Democratic Party killed the New Deal and sought the attentions of the highly educated.

The tumultuous political year 1968 has been brought up numerous times this election season, especially before Trump became the presumptive nominee and there was a very real possibility of a contested convention. Back then it was the Democrats who had a crazy (to put it mildly) convention in Chicago, and out of it came the McGovern commission that reformed the nomination process. These reforms ensured that delegates to the convention reflected the demographics of America but set off a series of changes locking organized labor and working people out of positions of influence, according to Frank. Who needs those uncultured racist, sexist, uneducated union types anyway? The new Democratic ideal was the highly educated professional liberal, the one that is inclusive of gender and ethnicity, all others need not apply.

When these elite professionals have gained class consciousness and deal only with each other it is not difficult to see how they would then condescend to their inferiors, which Frank goes over in excruciating detail. An article he wrote on billionaire liberalism over two years ago had stuck in my head and I was miraculously able to find it in the pit of despair that is Salon's archive. Here he describes the Mugwump by quoting and paraphrasing the great Richard Hofstadter. The Mugwump is as committed to cleaning up government as he is to disciplining the poor, fighting corruption and making the working classes behave, and he the Mugwump is in a privileged position of wealth and influence to make his will known. This is what people hate about "liberals", what Frank talked about with regards to Michael Bloomburg:

If that description hits uncomfortably close to home, well, good. We’ve returned to the Gilded Age, laissez-faire is common sense again, and Victorian levels of inequality are back. The single greatest issue of then is the single greatest issue of now, and once again people like Bloomberg—a modern-day Mugwump if ever there was one—have nothing useful to say about it, other than to remind us when it’s time to bow before the mighty. Oh, Bloomberg could be relentless in his mayoral days in his quest for sin taxes, for random police authority, for campaigns against sugary soda and trans fats. But put a “living wage” proposal on his desk, and he would denounce it as a Soviet-style interference in private affairs.

Gone are the campaigns to organize workers on the shop floor, in are the campaigns against smoking. Gone are the push for real laws to redress inequality, in are the glorious exhortations to free trade. Yes, the elite liberal wants those disgusting people at Wal-Mart to shape up. They naturally gravitate towards that bastion of professional greatness (ho ho) in high finance.

For the most part, Frank does not even go into how this problem of a Democratic elite on the wrong side of so many issues about inequality can be solved in Listen, Liberal. But this article at least lights the way. We, the working people of America, have faced this professional class betrayal before during the long Gilded Age before the New Deal. All we need to do is look at how working people got together before and fought for their rights and their piece of the American Dream. After all, this "liberal" class is but one faction within the party, there must be a way to peel them away from identifying with all the other factions that are killing the country and the economy. We have to go back to square one and learn what it takes to persuade our own leaders. If Bernie Sanders' campaign anything it was this.