The Problem with Democrats

From "Can We Have a ‘Party of the People?" by Nicholas Lemann, New York Review of Books, October 13, 2016.

…Explaining why American politics became more conservative during the last quarter of the twentieth century…is exactly what Steve Fraser, in The Limousine Liberal, and Thomas Frank, in Listen, Liberal, have set out to do. …For [Fraser and Frank], the fundamental purpose of the Democrats is to represent the economic interests of the least-well-off Americans. [But] this [purpose has been corrupted by "limousine liberals"], …well educated, confident, and more closely attuned to issues like racial justice, environmentalism, feminism, human rights abroad, and cultural tolerance than to the economic welfare of laboring people in the United States.

…The current leaders of the Democratic Party know their form of liberalism is somehow related to the good fortune of the top 10 percent. Inequality, in other words, is a reflection of who they are. It goes to the very heart of their self-understanding. …Highly educated “professionals”…think of themselves as meritocratic and virtuous—indeed, superior—and as having transcended any fundamental opposition between capital and labor that may once have existed. …According to Frank, [they] tend to regard other participants in politics as self-interested. [But] they [believe their own views] “are based on reasoned analysis and universal values.”

…Chief among their views…is the profoundly anti-working-class idea that a good society should honor “individual excellence” and mistrust solidarity. They tend to argue that…free trade and other forms of deregulation are in tune with inevitable and irresistible modernizing forces, to which resistance is prejudiced and futile. The result has been “something truly unfortunate: the erasure of economic egalitarianism from American politics.” And as (or, more accurately, because) this has happened, the professionals have prospered. …[Frank criticizes] the professionals’ invocation of “innovation” as the solution to every problem in society…

[But] what [he] finds most maddening…is their unwillingness to believe that a core purpose of politics is to redistribute money and power, or to understand that social and economic structures are human-made, not natural. …[For liberals, the goal] is not to reduce economic equality but “to defeat the Republicans, that unthinkable brutish Other” whose voters don’t believe in gay marriage or gun control or legal abortion or the threat of climate change.

…Fraser and Frank…help explain why voters in both parties (and also abroad) have powerfully forced the economic dissatisfaction of working people to center stage, in ways that the people running the parties hadn’t expected. A dominant complaint has been against the trend of a small minority at the top being the overwhelming beneficiaries of economic growth.

From "Listen, Liberal" and "The Limousine Liberal," by Beverly Gage, The New York Times Book Review, April 26, 2016.

…In his new book, the social critic Thomas Frank [argues] that liberals in general — and the Democratic Party in particular — should look inward to understand the sorry state of American politics. …The Democratic elite has abandoned the party’s traditional commitments to the working class…[and] corrupted…the Democratic Party.

…In Frank’s view, liberal policy wonks are part of the problem, members of a well-educated elite that massages its own technocratic vanities while utterly missing the big question of the day: “…the whole vast mystery of how we are going to live together.”

…Frank argues that the Democratic Party — once “the Party of the People” — now caters to the interests of a “professional-managerial class” consisting of lawyers, doctors, professors, scientists, programmers, even investment bankers. These affluent city dwellers and suburbanites believe firmly in meritocracy and individual opportunity, but shun the kind of social policies that once gave a real leg up to the working class. [Their attitude is] “you get what you deserve, and what you deserve is defined by how you did in school.” …[But policies that embody this view] aren’t working, and unless something dramatic happens, Americans are heading for a society in which a tiny elite controls most of the wealth, ­resources and decision-making power.

The problem, in Frank’s view, is [that] leading Democrats actually don’t want to reduce inequality because they believe that inequality is the normal and righteous order of things. [For example], Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, former Treasury secretary, and former chief economist of the World Bank, [said that] “One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be treated.”

…Fraser agrees with Frank that the Democratic Party can no longer reasonably claim to be the party of the working class or the “little man.” Instead, he argues, the Republican and Democratic parties now represent two different elite constituencies, each with its own culture and interests and modes of thought. …[They reflect] two different ways of relating to the world — one cosmopolitan and interconnected, the other patriarchal and hierarchical. Neither one, however, offers much to working-class voters.

Obama…let the [financial crisis of 2008] go “to waste,” according to Frank, tweaking around the regulatory edges without doing anything significant to change the economic balance of power. …Obama “saved a bankrupt system that by all rights should have met its end.”

…Things will probably continue to get worse. “The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way,” he writes. “There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country….”