Listen, your party is the “neo” kind of liberal

THE NEW York Times headline on July 28 said it all: "After Lying Low, Deep-Pocketed Clinton Donors Return to the Fore."

Nicholas Confessore and Amy Chozick's article proceeded to document the myriad ways in which corporations, from the Wall Street firm Blackstone Group to for-profit college giant Apollo Education Group, peddled influence at fancy parties around Philadelphia during the Democratic National Convention.

Yes, that Democratic convention. The same one that featured dozens of speakers denouncing Wall Street and crushing student debt? Whose presidential nominee pledged to get big money out of elections?

Turns out that "it's business as usual," as Libby Watson of the Sunlight Foundation told the Times writers.

Author Thomas Frank wouldn't be surprised by this latest glimpse of how the Democratic Party does business. His Listen, Liberal is an engaging and witty demolition of the party, especially its modern post-New Deal incarnation.

THE DEMOCRATS don't see it as a contradiction to issue election-year platitudes about supporting "working families" while courting millions from the "rocket scientist" financial engineers behind the Wall Street hedge funds or the self-styled "disrupters" who run for-profit educational corporations.

As the GEICO TV ad might say, "It's what they do."

To Frank, this provides much of the explanation for why the Obama presidency has been such a disappointment for those who believed in candidate Obama's message of "hope and change" eight years ago.

In 2008, the economy was melting down, taking free-market orthodoxy with it. The Democrats swept to power in Congress and the White House. If there was ever a time that the conditions were ripe for a bold reformist program--which would have been massively popular--this was it.

Yet it didn't happen. Two years later, the Tea Party Republicans took back the House in the midterm elections, and the administration deepened its commitment to austerity and the search for a "grand bargain" for bipartisan support to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Frank rehearses the standard liberal excuses for Obama's failures, quoting the president himself about how hard it is to get things done ("It's hard to turn an ocean liner"). Frank then proceeds to knock these down, one by one.

He shows convincingly how, using only executive action, Obama could have unwound the Bush administration bailouts for the Wall Street bankers and pressed bankruptcy judges to reduce or wipe out the mortgage holders' debt. At the very least, he could have refused to allow executives from the insurance giant AIG to collect their multimillion-dollar bonuses from the taxpayers' dime.

Instead, Obama and his Treasury team of Ivy Leaguers on leave from Wall Street reassured the banksters that he was on their side. Frank reprises the critical scene from Ron Suskind's 2010 book Confidence Men: A description of a high-level meeting that began with Obama warning Wall Street that "my administration is the only thing between you and pitchforks"--and ended with a relieved CEO telling Suskind that Obama "could have ordered us to do just about anything, and we would have rolled over. But he didn't--he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob."

As Frank concludes:

Having put so much faith in his transformative potential, his followers need to come to terms with how non-transformative he has been. It wasn't because the ocean liner would have been too hard to turn, or because those silly idealists were unrealistic; it was because [the administration] didn't want to do those things.

HOW DID the Democrats come to power amid the worst crisis since the Great Depression and basically operate according to the same-old-same-old model? In trying to explain this, Frank lands on an explanation that is inadequate--more on that below--despite the insights it offers.

To him, the Obama team, like Bill Clinton before him--and probably Hillary Clinton after--couldn't conceive of a different course because they approached problems from their vantage point as wealthy, highly educated professionals.

Like the whiz kids on Wall Street or health care industry policy wonks, they appreciated complex solutions that balanced multiple interests while generally preserving the status quo. Think of Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial reform, whose enforcement regulations are still being written six years after its passage.

The roots of this worship of professional expertise and support for market-based policies, according to Frank, can be found in party operatives' desire to build a new Democratic coalition to replace the New Deal coalition of the 1930s through the 1960s. From George McGovern's early 1970s "new politics" to the Democratic Leadership Council's "new Democrats" of the 1980s and 1990s, these figures sought to distance the party from organized labor in favor of the "new middle class" of credentialed professionals.

Voting statistics show that college graduates still tend to be Republican territory more than Democratic. But there's little doubt that a middle-class ideology of "social liberalism and fiscal conservatism" reigns supreme in the Democratic Party today.

To show this in full bloom, Frank considers the state of Massachusetts and the city of Boston as exemplars. Both depend heavily on the "knowledge industries" of higher education, finance and health care. And both have been Democratic bastions for generations.

If the Democratic mayors of Boston and a Democratic-dominated statehouse hand out tax breaks to corporations, enact anti-labor pension "reforms," and promote charter schools or amenities catering to middle-class professionals, it isn't because Republicans forced them to. It's because the Democrats actually believe this stuff, and profit from it.

In this "blue state model," Frank writes:

Boston is the headquarters for two industries that are steadily bankrupting middle America: big learning and big medicine, both of them imposing costs that everyone else is basically required to pay and yet which increase at a pace far more rapid than wages or inflation. A thousand dollars a pill, thirty grand a semester: the debts that are gradually choking the life out of people where you live are what has made this city so very rich.

Left behind are places like Lynn, Massachusetts, a once thriving industrial town, now depopulated and deindustrialized--"engineered by Republicans and rationalized by Democrats," Frank writes. Or Decatur, Illinois, which Frank revisits 20 years after he had reported on the "War Zone" labor battles that dramatized the death of the American dream for thousands of blue-collar unionized workers

In the mid-1990s, Frank writes:

Decatur was far away from Washington, and its problems made no impression that I could detect on Bill Clinton's wise brain trust. The New Economy was dawning, creativity was triumphing, old industry was evaporating, and those fortunate enough to be among the ascendant were absolutely certain about the direction history was taking.

AS WITH so much about the Democratic Party today, all this somehow works its way back to the Clintons.

Frank's assessment of Bill Clinton's two terms in office in the 1990s is a crucial antidote to the free-flowing Clinton nostalgia of 2016. Frank says that while he was writing the book:

I would periodically ask my liberal friends if they could recall the progressive laws he got passed, the high-minded policies he fought for--you know, the good things Bill Clinton got done while he was president. Why was it, I wondered, that we were supposed to think so highly of him-- apart from his obvious personal affability, I mean? It proved difficult for my libs...

No one mentioned any great but hopeless Clintonian stands on principle; after all, this is the guy who once took a poll to decide where to go on vacation. His presidency was all about campaign donations, not personal bravery-- he rented out the Lincoln Bedroom, for chrissake, and at the end of his time in office, he even appeared to sell a presidential pardon.

Frank concedes a few small positive efforts by Clinton: a small increase in taxes on the rich, a failed attempt at health care reform. But the biggest initiatives Clinton won were things that would have been considered Republican policies of an earlier era: the 1994 crime bill that put the "New Jim Crow" described by Michelle Alexander into overdrive; the destruction of the federal welfare system; free trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); and various forms of financial deregulation.

Frank notes that Clinton was conducting backdoor negotiations with then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich on a scheme to privatize Social Security. That attempt collapsed during the impeachment battle connected to Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Frank's crucial point is this. It took a Democrat--one skilled in the double-talk of "feeling the pain" of ordinary people and bolstering those "who work hard and play by the rules"--to push through a wish list of conservative policies that not even Ronald Reagan could win. As Frank writes:

What distinguishes the political order we live under now is a consensus, at least in the political mainstream, on certain economic questions--and what made that consensus happen was the capitulation of the Democrats. Republicans could denounce big government all they wanted, but it took a Democrat to declare that "the era of big government is over" and to make it stick. This was Bill Clinton's historic achievement. Under his direction, as I wrote back then, the opposition "ceased to oppose."

MUCH OF what Frank writes will sound very familiar to regular readers of Socialist Worker. But for liberals who might know Frank from his What's the Matter with Kansas? or The Wrecking Crew, Listen, Liberal might feel like a bucket of cold water. Especially for those who might be "ready for Hillary" in 2016.

For my money, the entire book is worth the price of the chapter "Liberal Gilt," where Frank skewers the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation and, by extension, what he calls the "liberal class's virtue quest."

At the center of this chapter is, of course, Hillary Clinton, whose public persona of "doing good" for "women and children" dissolves against a backdrop of her support for ending welfare in the 1990s and pushing poor women in developing countries into debt through "microcredit."

As Secretary of State, Clinton marketed global entrepreneurship and the endless "war on terror" as crusades on behalf of women. Through "partnering" on these initiatives with the Clinton Foundation or the State Department, the likes of Walmart and Goldman Sachs can win praise for their social consciousness--or what Frank brilliantly describes as their "purchasing liberalism offsets":

This is modern liberalism in action: an unregulated virtue-exchange in which representatives of one class of humanity ritually forgive the sins of another class, all of it convened and facilitated by a vast army of well-graduated American professionals, their reassuring expertise propped up by bogus social science, while the unfortunate objects of their high and noble compassion sink slowly back into a preindustrial state.

Frank weaves this analysis around an unforgettable eyewitness account of a Clinton Foundation celebration--held on the socialist holiday of International Women's Day, no less! The event, at midtown Manhattan's Best Buy (now Playstation) Theater, touted entrepreneurship for women in the global South. The Clintons, Melinda Gates, Hollywood stars, fashion magazine editors and Fortune 500 leaders came together for an afternoon of self-congratulation.

YET FOR all that is spot-on in Frank's critique of the Democrats, the book's analysis is flawed on two interrelated points.

First, its theory of the Democrats as a party of educated professionals suffers from what might be called a crude class analysis.

When Marxists argue that the Democrats and Republicans are "capitalist" parties, we don't mean that a cabal of capitalists acts as their puppet masters from behind the scenes. We mean that through various means--from political contributions to expert advice to control of the media--various capitalist interests assure that the mainstream political parties implement policies that allow the capitalist system to thrive and reproduce itself.

Scholars such as Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers have documented why we should understand shifts in the mainstream capitalist parties as shifts in blocs of capital rather than shifts in voting bases. Ferguson has even demonstrated how Obama's support from Silicon Valley is linked to the administration's care and nurturance of the surveillance state.

Frank doesn't cite any of this analysis. Thus, in arguing that the Democrats' current embrace of Silicon Valley neoliberalism is somehow a product of "well-graduated" Democrats' fascination with "complexity," "innovation" and "disruptive" app-driven services like Uber and AirBnB, Frank misses the close integration of the Democratic Party with the capitalist class.

The Democrats may have been capitalism's B-Team over the last generation, but they're not the Washington Generals, forever bested by the Harlem Globetrotters.

Second, understanding the Democrats as a party of Ivy League professionals--and not as one of the two big business parties in the U.S.--implies that it can be reclaimed as the "party of the people" or the party of the "working class," as Frank believes it was in its New Deal heyday.

This characterization forgets that, in many ways, the Democrats were capitalism's A-Team during that period. And if the Trumpization of the Republicans continues, the Democrats may end up as the first-stringers again. The 2016 Clinton campaign certainly hopes so.

Listen, Liberal is a great read for this election season. While Frank concludes that the state of affairs that brought us to Clinton against Trump "cannot go on," he's not sure where to go. Charting that course is a challenge the left faces today.