Powell Memo
presidential nomination campaigns. See also elections, presidential
1984
2007–8
2015–16
President We Deserve, The (Walker)
Primary Colors (Klein)
Pritzker, Penny
privatization
professional class
Bill Clinton and
Carter and
creative class and
defined
Democrats’ shift to
Hillary Clinton and
Massachusetts and
NAFTA and
Obama and
Social Security and
virtue and
Wall Street and
Progressivism
Promise of American Life, The (Croly)
public employees
public schools
Qaddafi, Muammar
Qualcomm
Quayle, Dan
race and racism
Raimondo, Gina
Rainbow Coalition
Reagan, Ronald
Rector, Ricky Ray
Reed, Bruce
regulation. See also deregulation
innovation vs.
Reich, Robert
Republican Party. See also specific elections and individuals
Bill Clinton and
blue-collar voters and
Congress and
containing
crash of 2008 and
creative class and
culture wars and
deindustrialization and
elections and
Hillary Clinton and
inequality and
mass incarceration and
meritocracy and
NAFTA and
Obama and
professionals and
rich and
Social Security and
Wall Street and
Reuters
revolving door
Rhode Island
Rise of the Creative Class, The (Florida)
Roaring Nineties, The (Stiglitz)
Rockefeller, Jay
Rolling Stone
Romney, Mitt
Roosevelt, Eleanor
Roosevelt, Franklin
Roosevelt, Theodore
Rothschild, Lynn Forester de
Rubin, Robert
Russert, Tim
Ryan, Paul
Salinas, Carlos
San Francisco
savings and loans crisis
Schmidt, Eric
Schmidt, Jeff
Schulte, David
Seattle
Secret Service
Securities and Exchange Commission
Sentencing Commission
Shafer, Byron
sharing or gig economy
Sheehy, Gail
Silicon Valley. See also technocracy
Sister Souljah
60 Minutes (TV show)
Snoop Dogg
Snowden, Edward
social class
Democrats and
political parties and
social question and
two-class system
Social Innovation Compact
Social Security
privatization of
Social Security Commissions
Solomon, Larry
South by Southwest (SXSW)
Sperling, Gene
Sperling, John
Stanford University
Stanislaw, Joseph
startups
State Department
State New Economy Index
STEM skills
Stenholm, Charles
Stiglitz, Joseph
stimulus of 2009
stimulus spending, Bill Clinton and
stock market. See also financial crisis of 2008–9; and specific indexes
Crash of 1929
stock options
student loans
subprime mortgages
Summers, Larry
surveillance
Suskind, Ron
symbolic analysts
Syria
TaskRabbit
Tate & Lyle lockout
Tawney, R. H.
taxes
Bill Clinton and
capital-gains
Carter and
Cuomo and
marginal rate
Massachusetts and
Obama and
Social Security and
taxi drivers
teachers
Teach for America
Teamsters Union
Tea Party
technocracy
Technocracy and The Politics of Expertise (Fischer)
Techtopus scandal
TED talks
Teixeira, Ruy
telecommunications
Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)
Ten Percent
Third World
Time
To Save Everything, Click Here (Morozov)
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
Treasury Department
Truman, Harry
Trump, Donald
Truth in Sentencing
Tsongas, Paul
Twilight of the Elites (Hayes)
Twitter
Uber
unemployment
UNICEF innovation team
United Auto Workers (UAW)
United Nations
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
U.S. House of Representatives
Energy and Commerce Committee
U.S. Senate
U.S. Supreme Court
University of Massachusetts, Lowell
University of Phoenix
University of Wisconsin
USA Today
Veblen, Thorstein
venture capital
Verveer, Melanne
Vietnam War
Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (1994)
Vital Voices Foundation
Volcker, Paul
Wacquant, Loïc
Walker, Martin
Walker, Scott
Wallace, George
Wallace, Henry
Wall Street. See also banks; financial crisis of 2008; stock market
bailouts and
Bill Clinton and
blue states and
compensation
Democrats and
deregulation and
Dodd-Frank and
financialization and
fraud and
Hillary Clinton and
Obama and
Social Security and
Wall Street Journal
Wal-Mart
Wap, Fetty
Warburg Pincus firm
Warren, Elizabeth
Washington Monthly
Washington Post
Watergate scandal
Weisberg, Jacob
Welfare Reform Act (1996)
Wellesley College
Wells Fargo
WeWork
White, Theodore
White Collar (Mills)
White House Conference on the New Economy (2000)
White House Counsel
White House Travel Office
Whitewater scandal
Who Owns the Future? (Lanier)
Why doesn’t Microfinance Work? (Bateman)
Wolfe, Tom
Woman in Charge, A (Bernstein)
Woodward, Bob
Work of Nations, The (Reich)
Works Progress Administration (WPA)
WorldCom-MCI merger
World War II
Yale University
Law Journal
Yergin, Daniel
YouTube
Yunus, Muhammad
yuppies
Zuckerberg, Mark
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book owes a tremendous debt to my two researchers, Alex Kelly and Zachary Davis, who did so much capable work on s
o many different subjects. The first round of thanks also includes the people who helped me with the passages of this book that were first published elsewhere: Dave Daley at Salon, Chris Lehman at Bookforum, and James Marcus and the crew at Harper’s.
John Summers of The Baffler drew my attention to the innovation theme, persuaded me to use Massachusetts as my model blue state, and then helped out enormously during my time there. For their help in understanding Massachusetts, I also wish to thank Noah McCormack, Chris Sturr, Chris Faraone, Elena Letona, John Redford, and Harris Gruman, who was not only a source of information but also of several excellent ideas. Debra Fastino acted as a tour guide to Fall River. Jonathan Soroff provided valuable insights on Martha’s Vineyard. Art and Linda Dhermy spent a day showing me the corporate sights of Decatur, Illinois.
Eric Klinenberg, Kate Zaloom, Tom Geoghegan, and Dave Mulcahey all encouraged me in the early days of the project. Jim McNeill and George Scialabba came through with excellent preliminary edits. Dean Baker was a good sport through my many, many queries to him.
Jeff Schmidt helped me comprehend professionalism; Zillah Eisenstein had special understanding of the character of Hillary Clinton; Brendan Williams explained Obamacare to me; Milford Bateman walked me through the disasters of microfinance; Barry Lynn helped me understand antitrust; Bill Black knew about Dodd-Frank and the decline of professionalism; Peter Edelman gets welfare reform like nobody else; Heather Ann Thompson and Jessica Steinberg were enormously helpful on mass incarceration; Paul Maliszewski helped me track the creative class; and Bill Curry laid out the grand narrative of Democratic failure. Johann Hari had many brilliant suggestions for this book; Chris Shiflett had one big genius insight; Barbara Ehrenreich effortlessly saw through and diagnosed the nonsense latent in any subject I brought to her attention.
Joe Spieler handled my literary affairs with humor and proficiency. Prudence Crowther did a superlative copy edit. Sara Bershtel and Riva Hocherman deserve the biggest helping of gratitude there is, this time for transforming a sprawling manuscript into a proper book. It was one hell of a sprint this time, but thanks to them it got done.
ALSO BY THOMAS FRANK
Pity the Billionaire
The Wrecking Crew
What’s the Matter with Kansas?
One Market Under God
The Conquest of Cool
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THOMAS FRANK is the author of Pity the Billionaire, The Wrecking Crew, and What’s the Matter with Kansas? A former columnist for The Wall Street Journal and Harper’s, Frank is the founding editor of The Baffler and writes regularly for Salon. He lives outside Washington, D.C. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Epigraph
Introduction: Listen, Liberal
1. Theory of the Liberal Class
2. How Capitalism Got Its Groove Back
3. The Economy, Stupid
4. Agents of Change
5. It Takes a Democrat
6. The Hipster and the Banker Should Be Friends
7. How the Crisis Went to Waste
8. The Defects of a Superior Mind
9. The Blue State Model
10. The Innovation Class
11. Liberal Gilt
Conclusion: Trampling Out the Vineyard
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Also by Thomas Frank
About the Author
Copyright
LISTEN, LIBERAL. Copyright © 2016 by Thomas Frank. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.henryholt.com
Library of Congress CIP data for the print edition is available.
e-ISBN 9781627795401
First Edition: March 2016
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
* For a more comprehensive examination of this evidence, especially as it pertains to the Republicans, see my 2008 book, The Wrecking Crew.
* One of the more remarkable occasions on which Clinton uttered this favorite aphorism was while signing a 2000 law that vastly expanded the number of H-1B visas for foreign high-tech workers, thereby diluting the earning power of all those Americans who’d been dutifully learning all those New Economy skills.
* To his credit, Robert Reich has since come around to a version of this viewpoint. For example, see his article, “The Political Roots of Widening Inequality,” published in The American Prospect in Spring 2015.
* I’m not going to go into the third great source of the Clinton myth, which is the man’s legendary personal charm. How can anyone dislike a guy from Hot Springs, Arkansas, whose great ambition as a youth was to be a second Elvis Presley?
* Hillary was not alone in pushing this strategy. One of the most prominent contributions to the battle for Bill Clinton’s soul was a 1995 Washington Post Magazine article called “Can This President Be Saved?” Among other things, it was filled with exhortations to Clinton to “fight with your old liberal friends.” The Bernstein passage about Hillary at the White House retreat is found on p. 269 of A Woman in Charge; italics are in the original.
* There was no criticism or mockery intended here, as far as I can tell. Woodward seems to have meant this as a straightforward description of the president’s views.
* In the pro-Clinton book Bull Run: Wall Street, the Democrats, and the New Politics of Personal Finance (PublicAffairs, 2000), financial journalist Daniel Gross writes:
The figures of William Jennings Bryan and William Jefferson Clinton, who rose to the national stage one hundred years apart at the head of the same party, make neat bookends—and not just because of the similarity of their names. Rather, Bryan’s enduring legacy was as an antagonist of the “moneyed interests,” a dogma to which the Democratic party held firm for nearly a hundred years. By contrast, one of Clinton’s most enduring legacies may be his party’s accommodation to those same interests. (p. 21)
* In fact, there were numerous Clinton appointees who went on to take jobs on Wall Street. But in Bull Run Daniel Gross described this as virtually a form of charity: “The New Moneycrats [Gross’s term for financiers who support Democrats] have also helped provide jobs for another class of needy people: burned-out Democrats.” (p. 160)
* Commissions pursuing predetermined conclusions and building fake consensus seem to have been something of a specialty of the Clinton White House. Hillary Clinton famously set up a great host of them during her push for health care reform in 1993.
* Any scheme for Social Security privatization will be very expensive. Once the transition to a private system has been made, the contributions of younger workers will go into individual investment accounts rather than the existing system. But the obligations of the existing system to the already retired will continue, requiring some other source of funding. Although I don’t know for sure, my guess is that the shortfall from such a transition would probably have eaten up the budget surplus of the late 1990s and then some, and that this is what Clinton was referring to when he spoke of using the surplus to “save” Social Security.
* According to a 2014 study of the age of mass incarceration, big increases in sentence length have “no material deterrent effect” on crime and do not reduce the crime rate. See The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, a study by the N
ational Research Council of the National Academies, 2014, p 140. Additionally, the violent-crime rate peaked in 1991 and was already on its way down by 1994.
* A Black Lives Matter activist, confronting Hillary Clinton about her husband’s crime policies in August of 2015, used the unfortunate words “unintended consequences” to describe mass incarceration. In fact, it was widely known at the time that the consequence of the crack/cocaine sentencing disparity was the mass incarceration of black drug users. This was one of the reasons the U.S. Sentencing Commission tried to abolish the disparity in 1995, an action that Clinton and the Republican Congress overruled. It was also why the Congressional Black Caucus begged Clinton not to overrule it—and why prison riots erupted when it became clear Clinton was going to sign the bill overruling the recommendations of the Sentencing Commission. In October of 1995, the syndicated columnist Cynthia Tucker wrote a column on the crack/powder sentencing disparity. “Let’s be clear about what these policies have done,” she wrote:
They have filled the nation’s prisons with hundreds of thousands of young black and Latino men whose greatest crime is drug addiction. It is no wonder that one-third of black men in their 20s are under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system. If we treated alcoholics and abusers of powdered cocaine this way, the nation’s prisons would be bulging with white inmates.
* The book was called One Market Under God. The telecom was MCI; thanks to the 1996 deregulation measure, it was permitted to merge with WorldCom, which a few years later blew up in the largest bankruptcy the country had ever seen.
* The Great Divide actually had five authors, a pollster, and two researchers. Sperling’s name came first and was given typographical prominence over the others, however, and the book is customarily attributed to him.
* The Dodd-Frank banking reform law, which the president signed in 2010 and which I shall describe in Chapter Eight, was supposed to remedy this intolerable situation.
* High-profile prosecutions of financial-industry fraudsters would have been healthy and were entirely within Obama’s power even after the Democrats lost Congress. Using Education Department funding to encourage universities to reconsider their out-of-control tuition inflating would also have been transformative. Obama’s Federal Trade Commission could have cracked down on the pharmaceutical companies that have been raising so dramatically the price of certain prescription drugs. On this last topic, see David Dayen, “Why Are Drug Companies Running Amok?,” The Intercept, December 16, 2015.
* I am pleased to report that, like other characters in our story, Summers seemed to change his thinking on inequality after he left government.
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? Page 29