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Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

Page 29

by Frank, Thomas


  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

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  United Auto Workers (UAW)

  United Nations

  Universal Declaration of Human Rights

  U.S. House of Representatives

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  U.S. Senate

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  University of Massachusetts, Lowell

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  Veblen, Thorstein

  venture capital

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  Vietnam War

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  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 MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  * 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.

 

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