NOTES
Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.
INTRODUCTION
1. See figure 3 in the paper by Andrew Figura and David Ratner, “The Labor Share of Income and Equilibrium Unemployment,” FEDS Notes, June 8, 2015.
2. The poll was taken by the Public Religion Research Institute, dated July 21–August 15, 2014. Seventy-two percent of the people polled said the economy was “still in a recession.” The Dow hit 17,000 in July and August of 2014.
3. These are Piketty-Saez numbers as analyzed by the economist Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute. Josh Bivens, “Taking Redistribution and Growth Seriously,” EPI Briefing Paper (forthcoming), Table 1, p. 45. The economist Emmanuel Saez estimates that the “the top 1% captured 91% of the income gains in the first three years of the recovery” and that the “pre-tax income share” of the top 10 percent hit 50.6 percent in 2012, the highest share since the income tax began. See “Striking It Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (Updated with 2013 Preliminary Estimates),” a paper dated January 25, 2015, and available on the website of the Econometrics Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley.
4. See Philip Longman, “Wealth and Generations,” Washington Monthly, June/July 2015.
5. Sarah Anderson, “Off the Deep End: The Wall Street Bonus Pool and Low-Wage Workers,” Institute for Policy Studies, March 11, 2015.
6. The Center Holds is the title of Jonathan Alter’s second chronicle of the Obama years. Alter, The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies (Simon & Schuster, 2013).
7. Ron Brownstein of the National Journal. This is how he described the “coalition of the ascendant” on MSNBC on November 6, 2008, two days after Obama was elected president.
8. Suskind, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President (Harper, 2011), p. 235.
1: THEORY OF THE LIBERAL CLASS
1. Benton is quoted this way in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Age of Jackson (Little Brown, 1953), p. 125.
2. Brooks Jackson, Honest Graft: Big Money and the American Political Process (Knopf, 1988), p. 35. Jackson describes the House of Representatives this way not merely because of labor’s clout but because it didn’t require much money to be elected to Congress in those days and also because, once elected, incumbents tended to be reelected for years.
3. This is part of the opening sentence of Lasch’s 1965 book, The New Radicalism in America 1889–1963 (W. W. Norton).
4. Charles Derber, William A. Schwartz, and Yale Magrass, Power in the Highest Degree: Professionals and the Rise of a New Mandarin Order (Oxford, 1990), p. 4.
5. Illich, Disabling Professions (Marion Boyars, 1977), p. 17.
6. Derber et al., Power in the Highest Degree, pp. 16–17. On jargon and mystification, see pp. 92–94. “To maintain scarcity [as professions do] implies a tendency to monopoly,” writes the sociologist Magali Larson: “monopoly of expertise in the market, monopoly of status in a system of stratification.” Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (University of California Press, 1977), p. xvii.
7. On “social trustee professionalism,” see Steven Brint, In an Age of Experts: The Changing Roles of Professionals in Politics and Public Life (Princeton, 1996), chapter 2.
8. Frank Fischer, Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise (Sage Publications, 1990), p. 104.
9. Fischer describes technocratic views as follows: “Few technocrats openly argue that democracy per se is wrongheaded; rather, they merely contend that it must be dramatically redefined in hierarchical, elitist terms. Democracy, as traditionally understood, is believed to be simply incompatible with the realities of a complex postindustrial society.” Technocracy, p. 35.
10. The nineteenth-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin warns against “the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones.” The passage is famously quoted in one of Noam Chomsky’s best-known essays, “Intellectuals and the State” (1977).
11. Larson, The Rise of Professionalism, p. 134. On the medical profession in the Age of Jackson, see Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (Basic Books, 1982), chapter 1. “Mystification and concealment” are lines Starr quotes from an indignant newspaper editorial of 1833.
12. I describe it more thoroughly in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, p. 83.
13. I am following here the account of “Professionals Versus Democracy” furnished by political scientist Albert W. Dzur in Democratic Professionalism: Citizen Participation and the Reconstruction of Professional Ethics, Identity, and Practice (Penn State Press, 2008). The classic account of the technocracy’s failure in the Vietnam War is, of course, David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest.
14. Manza and Brooks, Social Cleavages and Political Change (Oxford, 1999), pp. 5, 213.
15. Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class (Nation Books, 2011).
16. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (Crown, 2012), p. 48.
17. Brint, “The Political Attitudes of Professionals,” Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 11 (1985), p. 400. Brint repeats many of these findings in In An Age of Experts:
No more than 40 percent strongly favor current or higher levels of spending on government social-reform programs, and no more than 20 percent indicate significant interest in reducing income inequalities between rich and poor. They trust business far more than labor, and government is often considered more a problem than a solution facing the country. [p. 86]
Brint concludes his 1985 survey as follows: “When economic issues are central, most members [of the professional/“new class”] will ally as junior partners to the higher bourgeoisie.” p. 410.
18. Larson, The Rise of Professionalism, pp. xvii, 236.
19. Derber et al., Power in the Highest Degree, p. 174.
20. Alter, The Promise: President Obama, Year One (Simon & Schuster, 2010), p. 64.
21. This idea is explained by Jeff Schmidt in Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p. 208.
22. “The narcissistic individualism of professionals, each chasing a private career in a library or laboratory cubicle, impedes professional class solidarity.” Derber, p. 182. Nearly every book I read about professionals included some account of their hostility to blue-collar workers and organized labor. Cf. Larson, p. x; Derber, p. 188; or the classic, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (Pantheon, 1989), chapter 3.
23. A helpful index to the Hamilton Project’s many papers on higher ed and inequality can be found here: http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/hamilton_project_work_on_higher_education_policy_proposals_to_promote_/
24. Knapp, “Middle Class Is Moving Forward, Not Backward,” Washington Post, January 15, 2012.
25. Duncan, quoted in Paul Tough, “What Does Obama Really Believe In,” New York Times Magazine, August 15, 2012.
26. Bernanke, “Remarks on Class Day, 2008,” at Harvard University, http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20080604a.htm. I count Bernanke as an honorary member of the liberal class thanks to his service as Barack Obama’s Fed Chairman.
27. Friedman, “My Secretary of State,” New York Times, November 27, 2012. For more examples of this kind of talk, see Hayes, Twilight of the Elites, pp. 48–49.
28. William R. Emmons, Bryan J. Noeth, “Why Didn’t Higher Education Protect Hispanic and Black We
alth?,” In the Balance (a publication of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) #12, 2015.
29. Freidson, as quoted in Larson, The Rise of Professionalism, p. xii.
30. Galbraith, “How the Economists Got It Wrong,” The American Prospect, December 19, 2001.
31. See Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds, pp. 21–24.
32. On this subject, see Yves Smith, ECONned (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
33. Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics (Penguin, 1964); Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here (Public Affairs, 2013), pp. 135–39; Dzur, Democratic Professionalism, p. 87.
34. Callahan acknowledges that the recent alignment of certain very rich people with the Democrats won’t help to advance every single liberal issue, but it will help with many of them. “Right now, though, class warfare is a losing proposition,” he writes. “Our better hope is that a creative new progressive politics can enlist the growing ranks of rich liberals in proactive efforts to reduce inequality and diminish their own prestige.” Callahan, Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America (John Wiley, 2010), p. 284.
35. According to historian Morton Keller, Obama took 51 percent of the campaign contributions of the financial industry that year. See Obama’s Time (Oxford, 2014), p. 77.
36. Callahan, Fortunes of Change, pp. 36–37.
2: HOW CAPITALISM GOT ITS GROOVE BACK
1. In his Making of the President book for 1968, the journalist Theodore White wrote that “Labor’s support and labor’s money had been essential to every Democratic national campaign since 1936—but never did those who lead labor perform more effectively, more skillfully, with greater impact, than in 1968. In the near-miracle of the [Hubert] Humphrey comeback in October, no single factor was more important than the army of organized labor, roused to the greatest political exertion of its history.” White, The Making of the President 1968 (Atheneum, 1969), pp. 425–426. What moved the unions to such an effort, per White, was the alarming white-backlash campaign of George Wallace.
2. Here is how White characterized the change: “The new reforms had by 1972 given categorical representation to young people, to women, to blacks—but yielded no recognition at all, as a category, to men who work for a living.” The Making of the President 1972 (Harper Perennial, 2010), p. 38.
3. Ibid.
4. Shafer calls this a “circulation of elites, the replacement of one group of specialized political actors with another of noticeably different origins, values, and ways of pursuing politics.” Specifically: “The old coalition was based in blue-collar constituencies, while the newer version was white-collar from top to bottom.” Byron Shafer, Quiet Revolution: The Struggle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics (Russell Sage Foundation, 1983), pp. 7, 8, 530.
5. This is Shafer’s larger point in Quiet Revolution: Whenever they were permitted to choose personnel or rules or testimony, the Democrats in charge of the McGovern Commission steered the process of party reform in this desired direction. The labor unions, which were underrepresented in the first place, basically boycotted the proceedings, making it that much easier for the reformers.
6. This was the period of what Barbara Ehrenreich calls “The Discovery of the Working Class,” i.e., the media’s erroneous “discovery” that the working class was racist and conservative and pro-war. See Fear of Falling, chapter 3.
7. On the McGovern campaign, see Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (The New Press, 2010). On McGovern’s relative performance among “highly skilled professionals” and working-class voters, see John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority (Scribner, 2002), p. 38. On McGovern’s appeal in Massachusetts, see Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, 2015).
8. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, pp. 235–6.
9. I am relying here on the description of Rick Perlstein, who writes of Hart’s attitude toward old-school Democrats: “He held them in open contempt.” See The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Simon & Schuster, 2014), p. 317. Upon Hart’s retirement from politics after a 1987 sex scandal, E. J. Dionne wrote that Hart’s significance arose from “his success in breaking … the bond to the New Deal politics of the 1930’s that has slowed the party in recent years.” Dionne, “The Hart Legacy: He Broke Democrats’ Link With Politics of New Deal,” New York Times, May 12, 1987.
10. Miller Center, University of Virginia, “Interview with Alfred E. Kahn,” December 10–11, 1981, available on the Miller Center’s website.
11. I have written about this phenomenon so many times it makes me feel old just thinking about it. For a summary, see http://www.salon.com/2014/11/23/thomas_frank_phony_spin_even_fox_news_wont_buy.
12. The political scientist is Vicente Navarro. All of the quotations in this paragraph are drawn from the fourth edition of Leuchtenburg’s book, In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Barack Obama (Cornell, 2015, Kindle edition).
13. Manifesto: Charles Peters, “A Neoliberal’s Manifesto,” Washington Monthly, May, 1983. “The solutions of the thirties”: Randall Rothenberg, The Neo-Liberals: Creating the New American Politics (Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 27, italics in original; “Our hero”: Charles Peters’ manifesto. See also Robert M. Kaus, “The Trouble with Unions,” Harper’s Magazine, June 1983.
14. On the DLC’s corporate backing, see Robert Dreyfuss, “How the DLC Does It,” The American Prospect, December 19, 2001. Otherwise, I am following here the account of the DLC outlined by Kenneth S. Baer in Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (University Press of Kansas, 2000); Baer emphasizes the importance of working-class voters in the DLC’s early thinking. “Forgotten Democrats” appears on p. 97. “Higher socioeconomic status Democrats” is a phrase used in the once-famous 1989 manifesto, “The Politics of Evasion,” written for the group by the political scientists William Galston and Elaine Kamarck and available online at http://www.progressivepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Politics_of_Evasion.pdf.
15. The DLC’s 1990 manifesto (signed by its chairman, Bill Clinton) was called the New Orleans Declaration; its 1991 iteration was called the New American Choice Resolutions. Both are summarized in Baer, Reinventing Democrats.
16. Baer calls this the period of the DLC’s “‘futurist’ outlook,” p. 167. Michael Rothschild, “Beyond Repair: The Politics of the Machine Age Are Hopelessly Obsolete,” The New Democrat, July/August 1995.
17. Galston and Kamarck, “Five Realities That Will Shape 21st Century Politics,” Blueprint, Fall 1998.
18. The story of the DLC’s final, disastrous triangulation during the George W. Bush administration is told in Ronald Brownstein’s The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (Penguin, 2008), chapter 9.
3: THE ECONOMY, STUPID
1. Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath (Random House, 1990), p. xx.
2. Donald Barlett and James Steele, America: What Went Wrong? (Andrews McMeel, 1992), p. xi.
3. The first two quotations are drawn from a New York Times article on “Clinton’s Standard Campaign Speech,” dated April 26, 1992. The third comes from a Clinton speech delivered in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in January of 1992. Watch it here: http://www.c-span.org/video/?24051-1/clinton-campaign-speech.
4. On the influence of Reich’s book, see Bob Woodward, The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House (Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 20.
5. Defining productivity as gross output per hour and wage growth as real hourly compensation of production workers, with data for both from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. See Susan Fleck, John Glaser, and Shawn Sprague, “The Compensation Gap: A Visual Essay,” Monthly Labor Review,
January 2011. There are, of course, other ways to define these categories.
6. The East Coast professor was Paul Lazarsfeld of Columbia University. See John Summers, “Perpetual Revelations: C. Wright Mills and Paul Lazarsfeld,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, November 2006.
7. Steven K. Ashby and C. J. Hawking describe the work-to-rule campaign and its effects in Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement (University of Illinois Press, 2009), chapter 4. The results are described on p. 57.
8. My article on the struggles in Decatur, which I coauthored with David Mulcahey, was called “This Is War”; it appeared in the Chicago Reader on January 20, 1995. A similar description of the twelve-hour rotating shift can be found in Ashby and Hawking, p. 64.
9. Don Fites, quoted in Stephen Franklin, Three Strikes: Labor’s Heartland Losses and What They Mean for Working Americans (Guilford Press, 2001), p. 42.
10. Louis Uchitelle, “Union Leaders Fight for a Place in the President’s Workplace of the Future,” New York Times, August 8, 1993.
11. The quotation from Plankenhorn originally appeared in Frank and Mulcahey, “This Is War.”
12. Martin Walker, The President We Deserve: Bill Clinton, His Rise, Falls, and Comebacks (Crown, 1996), p. 61. By “foreign,” I believe Walker meant foreign to Britain.
13. On the Baird nomination, see Robert Kuttner’s column for January 22, 1993, “Zoe Baird: Feminist Legal Titan”; I read it on the website of the Baltimore Sun. Page wrote about “Yuppie Crimes” in the Chicago Tribune, January 17, 1993.
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? Page 24