Has liberalism abandoned the working class?

While Press details everything Obama has done to disappoint him, political historian Thomas Frank is more interested in why the president disappoints. It’s not that Obama has abandoned liberalism; it’s that liberalism has abandoned the working class. Over the past four decades, Frank argues in his new book “Listen, Liberal,” the Democrats have embraced a new favorite constituency: the professional class — the doctors, lawyers, engineers, programmers, entrepreneurs, artists, writers, financiers and other so-called creatives whose fetish for academic credentials and technological innovation has infected the party of the working class. Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, is a member in excellent standing of this class and a natural protector of it.  “When the left party in a system severs its bonds to working people — when it dedicates itself to the concerns of a particular slice of high-achieving affluent people — issues of work and income inequality will inevitably fade from its list of concerns,” Frank concludes.

There are electoral coalitions, and then there are governing ones. In their campaigns, Obama and the Democrats may reach out to unions, minority groups, millennials and other members of that “coalition of the ascendant” that is supposed to deliver Democratic presidents in perpetuity. But when it’s time for action, Frank writes, Democrats are in thrall to the elite, professional class. And though he says this all began with George McGovern’s campaign in 1972, the primary culprit is not Obama but William Jefferson Clinton.

“Bill Clinton was often described as the leader of his generation,” Frank writes, “but it’s more accurate to say he was the leader of a particular privileged swath of his age group — the leader of a class.” He ran as a populist alternative to George H.W. Bush, but once in office, Frank complains, he bowed to financial markets, globalization, and the professional class and self-serving meritocracy that this Arkansas boy had joined at Georgetown, Oxford and Yale.

For that class, Frank argues, income and wealth inequality is not a problem but an inevitable condition. Those who reach the top ranks of academia or Wall Street — or even Democratic Party politics — fully believe that they’ve earned their perch. “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,” Frank writes. “. . .­ For those who have just lost their home, for example, or who 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.”

This belief system underlies Clinton’s obsession with education and job training as the only ways to engage with global competition. “The world we face today is the world where what you earn depends on what you can learn,” the president-elect said in a December 1992 speech. For the professional class, academic credentialism is everything — the ticket to upper-class income brackets. It is less a strategy for mitigating inequality, Frank charges, than one for rationalizing it.