LISTEN, LIBERAL

Nonfiction

Working-stiff workers left behind

LISTEN, LIBERAL

-or- Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?

By Thomas Frank

308 pp. Henry Holt

Reviewed by Dennis C. Rizzo

I suspect Thomas Frank is one of the few people not surprised by the victory of Donald Trump. Clairvoyant? Prophetic? Maybe. Perhaps simply willing to look beyond conventional wisdom and the smug predictions of egocentric pundits. In a little over three hundred pages, Frank explains how the Democratic Party self-destructed, forgot its roots in the working class, and convinced itself that it still stands for the wage earner while pandering to Wall Street and other typically “Republican” entities. I would have been convinced at one hundred pages, but he’s the writer.

Listen, Liberal is written in the style of investigative journalism. This means you are provided with facts, figures and verifiable information in such a way that your eyes don’t glaze over after two pages. I could have dismissed this as yet another in the stream of self-serving diatribes that accompany any US presidential election, except that Frank is a self-described liberal Democrat. That he casts aspersions on his own party makes this analysis meaningful.

Thomas Frank has done a number of these well-researched books. He has taken on the Republicans as well. But it is the eerie prediction he makes at the end of this book (sent to print before the election) that makes me want to believe his ideas.

Despite their highly convincing righteousness, despite their oft-touted demographic edge, and even despite the historic breakdown of the GOP’s free-market ideology, the Democrats have been unable to suppress the Republican challenge. 

The implications for American (and other) political scenes is clear. We have embraced meritocracy and the cult of the expert to an unmanageable extent. Anyone offering a policy or solution that disagrees with that of the highfalutin’ experts is viewed as an outsider. Forty to fifty years of lionizing higher education have given rise to the belief that someone with a university education has (inherently) greater social and economic value than someone without the university education. Likewise, the polarization of professionals into academic echo chambers, replete with jargon and internally defined criteria for participation, assures the professional elite that only their viewpoints will receive validation.

For successful professionals, meritocracy is a beautifully self-serving doctrine, entitling them to all manner of rewards and status, because they are smarter than other people. For people on the receiving end of inequality – for those who have just lost their home, for example, or are having trouble surviving on the minimum wage – the implications of meritocracy are equally unambiguous. To them this ideology says: forget it. You have no one to blame for your problems but yourself. .... That life doesn’t shower its blessings on people who can’t make the grade isn’t a shock or injustice; it’s the way things ought to be.

Because we Western governments have worshipped the expert and professional (with their insistence, of course), politicians find it easy to employ these people as key advisers. There is an easy scapegoat when things go wrong. The result has been that political actions are more often self-fulfilling academic solutions that allow enormous wiggle room and denigrate those who are 1) without a university education and 2) those not in “my” professional circles. In the midst of all of this, the average, working-stiff American has been left behind. Until this past November.

Organized labor was the great force of the Roosevelt years, but it is ‘atomized labor’, cheered for and pushed by Democrats ..., that will forever shape American memories of the Obama years. .... “Crowdworking” is the most startling variation on the theme, a scheme that allows anyone, anywhere, to perform tiny digital tasks in exchange for extremely low pay. .... Before the Internet, it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for ten minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after that ten minutes. But with technology, you can actually find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when you don’t need them anymore. [this last by a major Obama supporter]

The Democratic Party, during its love affair with Bill Clinton, which led many to believe that a second “Camelot” was coming to America, bought into the idea that education defined the person and those persons were entitled to privileges not for the “lesser” masses. It also bought in the reality that money talks – and Wall Street has most of that commodity. Finally, the ‘party of the people’ tossed off the “yoke” of unionism and equality as simply old-fashioned.

The merit mind-set destroyed not only the possibility of real action against inequality; in some ways it killed off the hopes of the Obama presidency altogether. “From the days of the 2008 Obama transition team offices, it was clear the Administration was going to be populated with Ivy Leaguers who had cut their teeth, and filled their bank accounts, at McKinsey, Goldman-Sachs, and CitiGroup,”...

It’s all quite compelling. Listen, Liberal, as political analysis after the fact, works well. It explains what happened. It explains one element of how we’ve become a medieval economy once again. Maybe we all need to read it – and “listen.”