Listen, liberal, or, What ever happened to the party of the people?

260 Pages·2017·1.41 MB·English

by  Frank

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About the Author
Copyright Page

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It is doubtless important to the good of nations that those who govern have virtues or talents; but
what is perhaps still more important to them is that those who govern do not have interests contrary
to the mass of the governed; for in that case the virtues could become almost useless and the talents
fatal.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba
Winthrop)

McGeorge Bundy, then, was the finest example of a special elite, a certain breed of men whose
continuity is among themselves. They are linked to one another rather than to the country; in their
minds they become responsible for the country but not responsive to it.
—David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 1972
INTRODUCTION
Listen, Liberal
There are consequences to excessive hope, just as there are to other forms of
intemperance. One of these is disillusionment, another is anger, and a third is
this book.
For a generation, Democratic politicians have talked of “hope” as though it
were their unique selling proposition, a secret ingredient they had that no other
major-party brand could offer.
Today those same Democrats express annoyance at the suggestion that anyone
could really have taken them seriously on this hope business. It is hard to
govern, they say; you can’t get everything you want from politics. Ordinary
citizens are beyond disillusioned, though. It has been nine years since the last
recession began, and whether the country is in a recovery or a slump or even a
galloping bull market makes no difference to them anymore.
According to official measurements, the last few years have been a time of
brisk prosperity, with unemployment down and the stock market up.
Productivity advances all the time. For those who work for a living, however,
nothing seems to improve. Wages do not grow. Median income is still well
below where it was in 2007. Workers’ share of the gross national product (as
opposed to the share taken by investors) hit a record low in 2011—and then it
stayed there right through the recovery. It is there to this day; economists now
regard its collapse as a quasi-permanent development.1
In the summer of 2014, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average hitting all-time
highs, a poll showed that nearly three-quarters of the American public thought
the economy was still in recession—because for them, it was.2
There was a time when average Americans knew whether we were going up
or going down—because when the country prospered, its people prospered, too.
But these days, things are different. From the middle of the Great Depression up
to 1980, the lower 90 percent of the population, a group we might call “the
American people,” took home some 70 percent of the growth in the country’s
income. Look at the same numbers beginning in 1997—from the beginning of
the New Economy boom to the present—and you find that this same group, the
American people, pocketed none of America’s income growth at all. Their share
of the good times was zero. The gains they harvested after all their hard work
were nil. The upper 10 percent of the population—the country’s financiers,
managers, and professionals—ate the whole thing. The privileged are doing
better than at any time since economic records began.3
To be a young person in this economy, just out of school and starting to feel
the burden of now-inescapable student loans, is to sense instinctively the
downward slope that most of us are on these days. People who are twenty-five
today are doing worse than people of that age ten years ago, and much worse
than people who were twenty-five back in 1996.4 The same is true, incidentally,
of people who are thirty-five, forty-five, and probably fifty-five, but for the
young this reversal of the traditional American trajectory is acutely painful: they
know that no amount of labor will ever catapult them into the ranks of the
winners.
At the other end of the social ladder, meanwhile, it is all upside all the time. In
2012, corporate profits (measured as a share of gross domestic product) hit their
highest level on record. In 2014, according to a much-discussed think tank
report, the total of all the bonuses handed out on Wall Street was more than
twice as much as the total earned by every person in the country who worked
full-time for the minimum wage.5 Measured in terms of wealth—of property and
investments, stocks and bonds—matters are even more perverse. One
particularly lucky American family, in fact, has as much wealth as does 40
percent of the American population. The main accomplishment of the six
individuals who make up this fortunate bunch was to inherit shares in WalMart,
the retailer that has sucked the life out of thousands of middle-American towns.
Sucked the wealth out of those towns and spent it on the six WalMart heirs’
tasteless mega-mansions, their degrees from prestigious colleges, their fancy
racecars, and their sports teams. They own a bank, a ballet company, an art
gallery (where you can see Norman Rockwell’s painting of Rosie the Riveter),
and of late the WalMart bunch have begun “reforming” the public schools your
kids go to.
Should all this go on—and it will—those kids of ours are going to be educated
on certain matters far better than we ever were. They will know to laugh at the
old middle-class promise—retirement, pension, a better life than the previous
generation had—because it is propaganda so transparent it sounds like
something the Soviet Union used to put out. They will understand that this isn’t
a commonwealth; it’s a workhouse.
And that’s where we are, eight years post-hope. Growth that doesn’t grow;
prosperity that doesn’t prosper. The country, we now understand, is simply no
longer arranged in such a way as to make its citizens economically secure.
A while ago I spoke at a firefighters convention in the Pacific Northwest,
talking as I always do about the ways we have rationalized these changes to
ourselves. Firefighters are the sort of people we honor for their bravery, but they
also happen to be blue-collar workers, and they have watched with increasing
alarm what has been happening to folks like them for the last few decades …
watched as the people formerly known as the heart and soul of this country had
their lives taken apart bone by bone. They themselves still make a decent living,
I was told—they are some of the last unionized blue-collar workers who do—but
they can see the inferno coming their way now, as their colleagues in other parts
of the country get their contracts voided and their pensions reduced.
After I spoke, a firefighter from the Seattle area picked up the microphone.
Workers had been watching their standard of living get whittled away for
decades, he said, and up till now they had always been able to come up with
ways to get by. The first adjustment they made, he recalled, was when women
entered the workforce. Families “added that income, you got to keep your boat,
or your second car, or your vacation, and everything was OK.” Next, people ran
up debt on their credit cards. Then, in the last decade, people began “pulling
home equity out,” borrowing against their houses. “All three of those things have
kept the middle class from having to sink down into abject poverty,” he said. But
now all three coping mechanisms were at an end. There were no more family
members to send to work, the expiration date had passed for the home-equity
MasterCard, and still wages sank. His question was this: “Is there a fourth
economic savior out there, or do you think that maybe we have reached the
end?”
I had no good answer for him. Nobody does.
WHAT HAPPENED AT THE TURNING POINT
That these things are happening under the watch of the Democrats, the political
party that was once such a militant defender of workers and the middle class,
makes the triumph of inequality that much more startling.
This latest Democratic administration started so auspiciously, too, with a hero
who was going to put things right. Do you remember what that felt like? The
hundreds of thousands who would congregate to hear Barack Obama speak back
in the dark days of 2008; the throng of revelers in Grant Park on the night he
won; the million spectators who stood on the Mall in Washington to witness his
inauguration.
The cool and eloquent champion arrived in a capital gripped by panic.
Poisoned financial instruments had by that time killed several banks, countless
hedge funds, and the savings of the nation. The investment banks that had
survived had run to the government for help. A vast bailout was under way.
Portents of fresh disaster were in every headline. The economic course on which
we had traveled since the early 1980s was obviously finished. Deregulation had
opened the floodgates; instant-millionaire paydays had removed every incentive
to behave ethically; and an epidemic of fraudulent finance had duly swamped the
system. All this was as plain as the line of desperate depositors out in front of
IndyMac Bank. Now something was going to be done about it.
Our new president stepped up to fulfill his promise. He was living, breathing
evidence that our sclerotic system could still function, that we could rise to the
challenge, that we could change course.
It was the perfect opportunity for transformation. All the stars were in
alignment. The president had carefully surrounded himself with some of the
brightest minds of our time. Congress was controlled overwhelmingly by
members of his own party. The public was prepared to back him in the most far-
reaching reforms. History had dealt Barack Obama four aces. He could not lose.
Yet that is pretty much what happened. The crisis went to waste. The hero we
put behind the wheel didn’t heed the GPS device telling him to turn. He saw the
warning lights flashing, and he heard that disturbing pounding under the hood,
but he kept right on going.
To say “the center held,” as one of his biographers does, is an optimistic way
to describe Barack Obama’s accomplishment.6 Another would be to say he saved
a bankrupt system that by all rights should have met its end. America came
through an economic debacle, an earthquake that shook people’s faith to the
ground. Yet out of it, the system emerged largely unchanged. The predators
resumed operations. Everything pretty much stayed the same.
OPPORTUNITY COST
This is a book about the failure of the Democratic Party—about how they failed
when the conditions for success were perfect.
It is not another collection of familiar Beltway gripes—complaints about
gridlock in Washington, or how appalling it is that Americans are so polarized.
The failure I’m referring to is bigger than that. With the exceptions of global
warming and the Soviet threat, it is the greatest public problem we have faced in
our lifetimes.
President Obama himself has said that inequality is the “defining challenge of
our time.” That is a sweeping statement, but think about it for a moment and you
realize it isn’t anywhere near sweeping enough. “Inequality” is shorthand for all
the things that have gone to make the lives of the rich so measurably more
delicious, year on year for three decades—and also for the things that have made
the lives of working people so wretched and so precarious.
It is visible in the ever-rising cost of health care and college; in the coronation
of Wall Street and the slow blighting of wherever it is you live; in the dot-com
bubble, in the housing bubble, in whatever bubble is jazzing the business pages
as you read this. You catch a glimpse of it when you hear about the bankruptcy
your neighbor had to declare when his child got sick. Or when you read about
the lobbying industry that drives D.C., or the election fundraising system, which
allows a single Vegas billionaire to personally choose the acceptable candidates
for a major political party. “Inequality” is a euphemism for the Appalachification
of our world.
“Inequality” is what we say when we describe how the relationship of the very
wealthy to the rest of us has come to approximate the relationship of Louis XVI
with the peasantry of eighteenth-century France. Inequality is about you working
harder than ever before while others work barely at all and yet are prospered by
the market god with every imaginable blessing. Inequality is about the way
speculators and even criminals get a helping hand from Uncle Sam while the
Vietnam vet down the street from you loses his house. Inequality is the reason
some people find such significance in the ceiling height of an entrance foyer or
the hop content of a beer while others will never believe in anything again.
Inequality is not an “issue,” as that term is generally used; it is the eternal
conflict of management and labor, owner and worker, rich and poor—only with
one side pinned to the ground and the other leisurely pounding away at its
adversary’s face. “Inequality” is not even the right word for the situation, really,