Thomas Frank: How the Democrats Created a "Liberalism of the Rich"

[marmar]

The Blue State Model
How the Democrats Created a "Liberalism of the Rich"

By Thomas Frank


When you press Democrats on their uninspiring deeds -- their lousy free trade deals, for example, or their flaccid response to Wall Street misbehavior -- when you press them on any of these things, they automatically reply that this is the best anyone could have done. After all, they had to deal with those awful Republicans, and those awful Republicans wouldn’t let the really good stuff get through. They filibustered in the Senate. They gerrymandered the congressional districts. And besides, change takes a long time. Surely you don’t think the tepid-to-lukewarm things Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have done in Washington really represent the fiery Democratic soul.

So let’s go to a place that does. Let’s choose a locale where Democratic rule is virtually unopposed, a place where Republican obstruction and sabotage can’t taint the experiment.

Let’s go to Boston, Massachusetts, the spiritual homeland of the professional class and a place where the ideology of modern liberalism has been permitted to grow and flourish without challenge or restraint. As the seat of American higher learning, it seems unsurprising that Boston should anchor one of the most Democratic of states, a place where elected Republicans (like the new governor) are highly unusual. This is the city that virtually invented the blue-state economic model, in which prosperity arises from higher education and the knowledge-based industries that surround it.

The coming of post-industrial society has treated this most ancient of American cities extremely well. Massachusetts routinely occupies the number one spot on the State New Economy Index, a measure of how “knowledge-based, globalized, entrepreneurial, IT-driven, and innovation-based” a place happens to be. Boston ranks high on many of Richard Florida’s statistical indices of approbation -- in 2003, it was number one on the “creative class index,” number three in innovation and in high tech -- and his many books marvel at the city’s concentration of venture capital, its allure to young people, or the time it enticed some firm away from some unenlightened locale in the hinterlands.

Boston’s knowledge economy is the best, and it is the oldest. Boston’s metro area encompasses some 85 private colleges and universities, the greatest concentration of higher-ed institutions in the country -- probably in the world. The region has all the ancillary advantages to show for this: a highly educated population, an unusually large number of patents, and more Nobel laureates than any other city in the country. .................(more)

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176121/tomgram%3A_thomas_frank%2C_the_inequality_sweepstakes/#more

[FreakinDJ]

1. Who can afford those colleges certainly not the working class

[Baobab]

15. Hasn't Mr. Frank heard about "neoliberalism" which is the global movement by the very wealthy

to reverse the gains made in the latter part of the 20th century. Both US parties are led by neoliberals right now.

[PatrickforO]

2. Really good article, and very true.

I've heard speakers saying that if a region wants to be economically successful it had better embrace innovation. (Whatever that means, I always thought).

Now, I know what it means. The person who starts a new software company in their garage is valued far and away above someone who has worked in a factory building real things that the American people purchase. In fact, these new Dems hasten to ship those jobs offshore.

We have been cruelly betrayed.

[Baobab]

16. Maker movement

There is a lot of creativity in making things yourself and there may be money in it too.

And don't get the mistaken impression that the neoliberals care one bit for small or medium sized companies. Everything they do tells us they don't.

So lets be realistic here, THEY don't "embrace innovation" they are terrified of it. If they embraced innovation they would encourage learning more instead of saddling the country with debt. If they embraced innovation they would do everything possible to make it easy for people to start companies not prolong the agony of a health care system that is literally designed to make it harder for people to start companies.

[tk2kewl]

3. Last 4 paragraphs seem to describe the Clintonites...

At a 2014 celebration of Governor Patrick’s innovation leadership, Google’s Eric Schmidt announced that “if you want to solve the economic problems of the U.S., create more entrepreneurs.” That sort of sums up the ideology in this corporate commonwealth: Entrepreneurs first. But how has such a doctrine become holy writ in a party dedicated to the welfare of the common man? And how has all this come to pass in the liberal state of Massachusetts?

The answer is that I’ve got the wrong liberalism. The kind of liberalism that has dominated Massachusetts for the last few decades isn’t the stuff of Franklin Roosevelt or the United Auto Workers; it’s the Route 128/suburban-professionals variety. (Senator Elizabeth Warren is the great exception to this rule.) Professional-class liberals aren’t really alarmed by oversized rewards for society’s winners. On the contrary, this seems natural to them -- because they are society’s winners. The liberalism of professionals just does not extend to matters of inequality; this is the area where soft hearts abruptly turn hard.

Innovation liberalism is “a liberalism of the rich,” to use the straightforward phrase of local labor leader Harris Gruman. This doctrine has no patience with the idea that everyone should share in society’s wealth. What Massachusetts liberals pine for, by and large, is a more perfect meritocracy -- a system where the essential thing is to ensure that the truly talented get into the right schools and then get to rise through the ranks of society. Unfortunately, however, as the blue-state model makes painfully clear, there is no solidarity in a meritocracy. The ideology of educational achievement conveniently negates any esteem we might feel for the poorly graduated.

This is a curious phenomenon, is it not? A blue state where the Democrats maintain transparent connections to high finance and big pharma; where they have deliberately chosen distant software barons over working-class members of their own society; and where their chief economic proposals have to do with promoting “innovation,” a grand and promising idea that remains suspiciously vague. Nor can these innovation Democrats claim that their hands were forced by Republicans. They came up with this program all on their own.

[Cryptoad]

4. this gave rise to teh Neo-Progressives

who seem to be Rich White Kids rebelling against their Republican Parents?

[Spitfire of ATJ]

11. I've known those types. Whining about daddy locking up their trust fund until they're 18.

[cprise]

13. Don't forget the black Welfare Queens and the anti-war bedwetters

...and all the other fallacious smears conservatives use. Very high quality, reality-based stuff.

Have the Third Way Dems sick the FBI on them some more, too.

[zalinda]

5. For those of you who would like to listen instead

Here is an interview with Thomas Frank by Thom Hartmann

I listened to it the other day and I now understand Clinton supporters.

Z

[MisterP]

6. this was also in "Blue Sky Dream"--how Reagan's aero"space" and IT

were made into booms only by hollowing out manufacturing and creating the Rustbelt, rewarding the South and West at the expense of the Midwest and Northeast

[jwirr]

7. And this article explains why W could graduate from Harvard.

Our colleges are as likely to teach liberalism of the rich now as it once was to teach the liberalism of JFK.

I remember riding home in a bus at the University of Iowa and listening to several economic students discussing their class for that day. I wanted to get sick.

The philosophy of the Chicago Boys and the Koch Bros has infiltrated education to the point that most of us do not matter anymore. Just the rich.

Very sad that the state that worked for democracy in the Revolutionary War is working to destroy it now.

[Elmer S. E. Dump]

17. Eventually they will be taken care of.

[Skwmom]

8. Sadly true. n/t

[Spitfire of ATJ]

9. Here they act like they're up against the moocher class.

[mountain grammy]

10. While we pride ourselves on innovation and entrepreneurship, the truth is,

many people just work for a living, and their work benefits someone. The problem is, workers have been so devalued by those who reap the rewards, they can no longer earn a living providing those rewards. This is, of course, no accident because capitalism puts all the value on profit and no value on the production of profit.

[cprise]

14. Truth also is that most innovations today are money-making schemes

first and foremost. That distorts their utility in ways that are not obvious, but come back around to bite average citizens in the ass (esp. in the sense that citizens are converted into powerless consumers).

There is also the trend where research itself is becoming mostly the domain of private corporations and billionaire investors.

[appalachiablue]

12. Native son Thomas Frank's book talk on 'Listen, Liberal' at the Kansas City, KS

Public Library on March 24. Outstanding lecture and Q & A with the engaged audience. 38 mins., well worth it.

Thomas Frank speaks in depth on the new book, 'Listen, Liberal' at his hometown Kansas City, Kansas Public Library on March 24, 2016. Includes a question and answer session with the audience. 38 mins., well worth it.

KANSAS CITY, MO, March 24, 2016

Author and Kansas City native son Thomas Frank returned to his hometown to talk about what's wrong with the Democratic Party in support of his new book 'Listen, Liberal'.
Following on the tradition of his popular book 'What's the Matter with Kansas' which carefully chronicled how the Republican Party of Lincoln has been seduced and deliberately taken over by extremist ideologues of the far right, Frank now makes the case that the Democratic Party has also been taken over by a type of conservative ideology that, while not promoting economic inequality, certainly rationalizes it.

While Republican "establishment" figures revere the accumulation of wealth as a sign of 'winning' which somehow makes them automatically somehow qualified --or entitled-- to govern, The Democratic "establishment" believes that the world is a 'meritocracy' where the elites of the 'professional class' are best suited to govern based on their superior educational attainment and connections.
Frank asserts that the two political parties dominated by societal elites have systemically failed the workers in America, resulting in a space for populism to naturally grow into.
The Democratic Party under the leadership of President Bill Clinton turned its back on its working class and middle class roots while attempting to expand and capture the professional class. Claiming that 'they have no place else to go,' the Democrats have also been responsible for policies that increased income inequality and increased the economic insecurity of white working class people. Some of these people have found a new place to go. They have now left the building. Many of them can now be seen following a pied piper named Trump.

The broken two party political system that has largely seen the hereditary moneyed elites-- who thought they could control the working class with a mix of social conservatism, phony fiscal fears and tax voodoo, and foreign fear mongering-- fight with the intellectual professional class elites who thought they could control the working class because 'they have no place else to go', is giving way to an authoritarian populism embodied by a narcissistic reality TV caricature of success likely to be the next Republican Presidential nominee.

Video recorded in Kansas City on March 24, 2016 at the Plaza Branch of the Kansas City Public Library (http://www.kclibrary.org/) by the Working Journalist Press (http://www.workingjournalistpress.com/).