| LISTEN, LIBERAL Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? Thomas Frank New York: Metropolitan Books, January 2016 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
|||
| ISBN-13 978-1-62779-539-5 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-62779-539-1 | 305pp. | HC | $27.00 | |
It is often said that politics is the art of the possible. Today, however, the politics of America's Congress revolve around removing possibilities from politics, at least with regard to the major problems of the time: immigration, climate change, unequal justice and education, and most of all the lopsided economic inequality which mimics that of the Gilded Age. The last decade has seen no improvement in Americans' earning power — unless those Americans were already wealthy.
"In 2014, according to a much-discussed think tank report, the total of all the bonuses handed out on Wall Street was more than twice as much as the total earned by every person in the country who worked full-time for the minimum wage. Measured in terms of wealth—of property and investments, stocks and bonds—matters are even more perverse. One particularly lucky American family, in fact, has as much wealth as does 40 percent of the American population." (page 3) *
* * "And that's where we are, eight years post-hope. Growth that doesn't grow; prosperity that doesn't prosper. The country, we now understand, is simply no longer arranged in such a way as to make its citizens economically secure." (page 3) *
* * "That these things are happening under the watch of the Democrats, the political party that was once such a militant defender of workers and the middle class, makes the triumph of inequality that much more startling." (page 5) – Pages 3 & 5 |
Frank notes correctly that professionals are essential to running modern technological society. He also notes the pitfall of professionalism: it fosters its own class division: learned versus ignorant. To put it in Trumpian terms, professionals are winners and those who haven't made it to professional grade — what Frank calls the "well-graduated" — are losers.1
The problem, in other words, is that these liberal professionals have coalesced into adult versions of the sort of cliques we knew in high school. They may speak the proper platitudes, but they have no heart or zeal to fight for working-class folks as traditional Democrats did. Rather, they push through policies which benefit others like themselves: the cultured, wealthy liberals.
The watchwords they use tell the story: higher education is the key to personal success, just as continual innovation is key to the success of society as a whole; and globalization is the inevitable wave of the future. As Bill Clinton put it in a December 1992 speech:
"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." – Page 69 (emphasis added by Frank) |
Thomas Frank has been telling us why the Republican Party bears the blame for this in his books since One Market Under God (October 2000). But now he points out the equally obvious other side to the coin. Democrats, with some notable exceptions,2 have done little to change matters.
He begins with Bill Clinton's major achievements:
Now we remember that it was Bill Clinton's administration that deregulated derivatives, deregulated telecom, and put our country's only strong banking laws in the grave. He's the one who rammed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through Congress and who taught the world that the way you respond to a recession is by paying off the federal deficit. Mass incarceration and the repeal of welfare, two of Clinton's other major achievements, are the pillars of the disciplinary state that has made life so miserable for Americans in the lower reaches of society. He would have put a huge dent in Social Security, too, had the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal not stopped him. If we take inequality as our measure, the Clinton administration looks not heroic but odious. – Page 84 |
Hillary Clinton supported NAFTA as secretary of state, which was her duty. She called the broadly similar Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) then in the works as the gold standard of trade agreements, which was her option. It is now fairly clear that NAFTA benefited only the managerial class. Frank summarizes its results.
"The predictions of people who opposed the agreement turned out to be far closer to what eventually came to pass than did the rosy scenarios of those 283 economists and the victorious President Clinton. NAFTA was supposed to encourage U.S. exports to Mexico; the opposite is what happened, and in a huge way. NAFTA was supposed to increase employment in the U.S.; a study from 2010 counts almost 700,000 jobs lost in America thanks to the treaty. And, as feared, the agreement gave one class in America enormous leverage over the other: employers now routinely threaten to move their operations to Mexico if their workers organize. A surprisingly large number of them—far more than in the pre-NAFTA days—have actually made good on the threat." – Pages 87-88 |
Bill Clinton has apologized, calling it a mistake. His wife now says she will revamp the TPP to make sure it does not cost Americans their jobs. President Obama, however, still defends it wholeheartedly. Frank describes his administration as, if anything, even more caught up in the professionalism clique, and friendly to Wall Street, with many players from it in key administration positions.
Previous books by Thomas Frank that I have read laid on the takedowns of right-wing delusion and duplicity too thick. This one is different: more serious in tone, which I find a refreshing change. But of course he is arguing now for a change in course by people he deems redeemable; he was not doing that for the Republicans, and justifiably so. In terms of scholarship, Listen, Liberal is as good as those earlier books: conclusions are thoroughly documented in an extensive set of endnotes, and there is a good index. It reads well in the main, but I found chapters 10 & 11 somewhat repetitious.
Frank's point, quite simply, is that it is time for Democrats to become once again the party of the people, to restore the middle class — and hence the nation entire — to prosperity.3 So I judge this book a must-read because of the importance of the onrushing, very consequential election.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.