Book Review: Listen, Liberal -or- What Ever Happened To The Party Of The People?

By Thomas Frank

When Barack Obama was sworn in as the forty fourth president of the United States, on a cold January morning in 2009, the country was descending into a financial crisis the likes of which had not been seen since the Great Depression of 1929. Back then, Franklin Delano Roosevelt embarked on a sweeping legislative agenda in order to do battle with the economic malaise that had led to nearly one in four Americans being unemployed. Relief, recovery and reform was the medicament that Roosevelt prescribed. The financiers responsible for the crisis were thrown in jail, tough new regulations were imposed on the financial sector and a massive federal jobs program built roads and bridges that led to a quarter century of great prosperity. Barack Obama was faced with a situation that was every bit as serious as the one FDR had confronted eighty years previously, his party controlled both houses of congress and the American people clamored for bold reforms. Having assumed the mantle of leadership during this pivotal time in American history, Obama could have done what FDR did, what needed to be done, yet that transformative change never came to be. It is easy to blame others, republicans first and foremost, but Thomas Frank lays the blame squarely at the Democrats themselves. In Listen, Liberal, he tells the sad tale of how the party of the people lost their way when they adopted a more affluent and tech-savvy constituency.

For nearly five decades after FDR ushered in his New Deal, the Democratic party was the party of Americas emerging middle class. It was the party of unions, Medicare and Social Security. Their leaders were progressive firebrands tougher than a two-dollar steak, who berated and harangued their opponents until they finally got what they wanted. Ralph Nader and other activists forced Richard Nixon to create the Environmental Protection Agency, Lyndon Johnson wasn’t afraid to twist arms if necessary when passing the legislation for his Great Society, and of course there was FDR himself, who bragged that he welcomed the hatred of the economic royalists. The Democrats of today do not oppose these royalists and their allies in congress, instead they have pretty much surrendered and are meekly hoisting a white flag, Frank writes with a palpable sense of disgust.  

How can this be, you might ask? Towards the end of the nineteen seventies, something changed within the Democratic party. In the aftermath of the 1968 election, which a demoralized democratic party lost to Richard Nixon (for the details of this period see the review of Pat Buchanan´s The Greatest Comeback), the party squabbled amongst itself as to how they were to move forward. Standing amidst the rubble, various groups of democrats, such as the McGovern Commission and the Democratic leadership council, agreed that it was time to abandon the New Deal and kick organized labor to the curb. Instead the party started to cater towards a new constituency, that Frank characterizes as the” Liberal Class”. Highly educated professionals such as doctors, lawyers and computer programmers, the liberal class represents the top ten percent of the United States population, and they are certainly not feeling the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. The magical recipe to success for the 1990s and beyond was innovation, a word parroted and bandied about by just about anyone in the liberal class with a form of reverential awe. In a meritocracy, the cream inevitably rises to the top, as happened with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Frank delves deeply into both of their presidencies and finds striking similarities between them. They are the two democrats who have held office since their party ditched the New deal, and so to study them is to study what has happened to the party of FDR.

The card carrying members of Clinton and Obama´s party are highly qualified knowledge workers who vacation at Martha´s Vineyard, a small Island of the coast of Massachusetts where 41 and 44 themselves can often be found enjoying a round of golf. It is where, Frank asserts with caustic wit, the executives of the tech industry rubs shoulders with Hollywood stars and competes to see who´s thatched roof cottage has the largest organic vegetable plot. Meanwhile workers in rural Massachusetts a few miles away trod forlornly among the decrepit ruins of factories whose production has long since moved to China. The liberal class are eager to give microloans to subsistence farmers in Burundi, but their compassion stops well short of providing good middle class jobs at home. As Bill Clinton once said “What you can earn depends on what you can learn”, and Frank would argue it´s pretty clear the new order of democrats doesn’t value the skills of someone who has been operating the spinning jenny at a textile mill for forty years. If you don´t have the right academic credentials and don´t know how to develop the next hot app, then you have only yourself to blame for staring down the barrel of inequality.

Both Clinton and Obama were both born into humble circumstances yet they were plucked out of obscurity and went on to attend the nation´s most prestigious universities. They surrounded themselves with the alumni of Ivy League universities and favored the financial industry and tech companies over labor unions. While Obama´s top advisors all come from pretty much the same prestigious universities, FDR´s famous brain trust brought together a ragtag band from all walks of American lives. People that Obama and Clinton would never have touched even with a set of pliers were let into the halls of government and enacted bold reform that transformed the country. Henry Wallace may have been the finest agriculture secretary there ever was, and may have single handedly saved the agricultural industry in the United States, but before FDR appointed him he went to Iowa State and wrote a monthly farmer´s almanac. In Obama and Clinton´s view, those who graduate from an Ivy League school are the best of the best, period. They are the cream that has risen to the top, and no one else need apply. That unfortunately means that they are only ever going to get someone who is adept at thinking inside the box. People who have climbed to the top of the greasy pole because they were are at internalizing the orthodoxy of their respective fields. They are professionals, people who Frank describes as those who jealously guard their credentials and trumpet their expertize.

It is because of this love of expertize that we see the complexity of Obama´s Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill. While FDR enacted the Glass- Steagall act to build a wall between Wall Street and your local savings bank around the corner, Dodd-Frank is many thousands of pages long and nearly incomprehensible. While Harry Truman dreamed of universal health care, Obama brought us the Affordable Care Act, which is if anything more complicated than Dodd-Frank, yet doesn’t guarantee coverage to all Americans. In the olden days, if the trading patterns of a bank were too complex, this was seen as an indication of fraud, and you would have had a Democrat yelling himself hoarse over the need for reform. These days, however, this is just a sign of their sophistication.

Therein, Listen, Liberal argues, lies the explanation to the fact that Obama never acted as decisively as he could have done. It wasn´t because he was scared of the big bad banks and their CEO, it was because he admired them. After all, if he jailed a Wall Street executive, that would make for some awkward conversation at the golf club the next time he visited Martha´s Vineyard. When this love of professionalism and meritocracy is combined with an assumption that the poor and downtrodden have nowhere else to go anyway, it becomes a recipe for disaster.

Thomas Frank´s book is a must read for those with an interest in politics. For Democrats it may be a bitter pill to swallow, but the soul searching that it offers is absolutely crucial heading into a hotly contested election year.