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NYRB, OCTOBER 13, 2016 ISSUE
Can We Have a ‘Party of the People’?
Nicholas Lemann
Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century
by Daniel Oppenheimer
Simon and Schuster, 403 pp., $28.00
The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and
Fractured America
by Steve Fraser
Basic Books, 291 pp., $27.50
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
by Thomas Frank
Metropolitan, 305 pp., $27.00
Thomas Frank
As a reviewer of political books, I get a lot of them unbidden in the
mail. I remember vividly, one day in 2003, opening a package from a
publisher, finding Arianna Huffington’s anticorporate screed Pigs at the
Trough, and thinking: finally, after all these years, somebody has moved
from right to left! Through the 1990s, Huffington had been a fairly
dutiful Republican—at one point, even a Republican political wife. She
enthusiastically supported the impeachment of Bill Clinton. As late as
2000 she was presenting herself as a kind of militant,
pox-on-both-your-houses centrist. But now, as usual, her timing was
impeccable. Soon she had founded The Huffington Post, which has amassed
an online audience on the left that exceeds that of almost all the
mainstream news organizations.1 (And it may be a harbinger of something
else, I’m not sure what, that Huffington has just announced she will be
leaving Huffington Post to run a “corporate and consumer well-being
platform” called Thrive Global.)
For most of the three decades preceding Huffington’s conversion, moving
from left to right, or at least from left to less left, was far more
common than the other way around. Ex-Communists used to ask, “What was
your Kronstadt?,” referring to the 1921 uprising against the Bolsheviks
that presented one of the first occasions to become disillusioned with
them, to be followed by many others. American domestic liberalism
provided people looking for Kronstadts with a long series of
opportunities, beginning in the mid-1960s. These included, for example:
the Black Power movement, for those who thought Martin Luther King Jr.’s
“I Have a Dream” speech fully and exclusively represented the thinking
of black America; and the crushing defeat of George McGovern’s
presidential campaign in 1972, for those who planned to run for office
(like Bill and Hillary Clinton). Also, after the fall of the Soviet
Union and the rise of Silicon Valley at home, many liberals began to
think of capitalism in a far more broadly positive way than had been
typical in American liberalism. That wasn’t as dramatic a change as
moving from right to left, but because it involved many more people, it
had a large effect on the location of the political consensus.
Elected officials are still wary about calling themselves “liberal,” but
this year the momentum seems to be strongly in the direction that
Huffington sensed was coming. The big surprise of the Democratic primary
season was how well Bernie Sanders did, and Hillary Clinton has moved a
couple of notches to the left in response, for example in turning
against the Trans-Pacific Partnership and in proposing a very generous
new federal program to reduce tuition at public universities. But “left”
is not a neat category. Donald Trump and Sanders share a number of
positions and rhetorical gestures, including opposition to free trade
agreements and harsh criticism of Wall Street. (Indeed, Trump’s
nomination seems to be a Kronstadt for many conservatives.) In his
acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, Trump predicted that
Sanders’s supporters will vote for him. Sounding a lot like Sanders, he
said, “Big business, elite media, and major donors are lining up behind
the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged
system in place.”
This year’s Republican platform calls for the reinstatement of the
Glass-Steagall Act, which is the 1933 law that separated commercial and
investment banking—signed by Franklin Roosevelt, repealed by Bill
Clinton in 1999. This was an often-repeated Sanders position, but
Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic platform, don’t agree. The platform
merely calls for Glass-Steagall to be “updated and modernized.”
Countries with parliamentary systems can have social-democratic parties,
nationalist parties, green parties, ethnic parties, business parties,
regional parties, religious parties, feminist parties, agricultural
parties, and so on, which can fall into and out of coalitions with one
another. The United States has a peculiarly durable two-party system
that makes this process invisible because it takes place behind a
deceptive façade that presents to the world one party for liberals and
one for conservatives. Figuring out where American politics is moving
ideologically requires establishing better definitions than thinking
merely in the most broad and obvious terms that the two parties offer us.
Daniel Oppenheimer’s Exit Right is a collection of six profiles of men
who moved from left to right—before, during, and after the period when
it seemed as if everybody were moving from left to right. They are an
odd assortment. Three of Oppenheimer’s subjects—Whittaker Chambers,
James Burnham, and David Horowitz—were “on the left” in a truly
life-encompassing way. Chambers and Burnham were Communists, as were
Horowitz’s parents. Of the other three, one, Christopher Hitchens, would
at times have called himself a Marxist (but unlike the others, after
conversion he never became a real movement conservative); Ronald Reagan
was for some years a standard-issue New Deal Democrat, like most
Americans of his generation and background; Norman Podhoretz published
some left-wing writers in the early years of his editorship of
Commentary, but even before his well-known switch to conservatism in the
late-1960s he had written attacks on the Beats, Hannah Arendt, and James
Baldwin, which wouldn’t have been the program of typical leftists, or
even liberals, of the day.
Oppenheimer’s sensibility is more literary than political—he’s mainly
interested in his characters’ ideological evolution as revealing
something about them personally, not about their times. In the opening
pages of Exit Right he writes: “It is easy to disparage other people’s
politics by psychologizing, historicizing, biologizing, or sociologizing
them. The harder and more important truth to admit is that everyone’s
politics are resonating on all of these frequencies.” But that standard,
to which Oppenheimer scrupulously adheres in his six profiles, tends to
keep the focus on his subjects’ inner lives rather than on the outside
world. Although Oppenheimer hints that he is a liberal, he tries hard to
leave his own views out of the book; still, Exit Right implicitly
depends, in many instances, on the idea that becoming conservative is
something to be explained on personal grounds, not as a reasoned
response to events, and his stories emphasize family tragedies,
betrayals, mentorships gone awry, and spiritual crises.
Here, for example, is the way Oppenheimer describes Leon Trotsky’s
appeal to James Burnham: “He told a story—a brilliant, beautiful, absurd
story—that bound together the heroic past and beleaguered present into
the only kind of narrative structure that his ego could bear to carry.”
Oppenheimer is a diligent researcher, and he also describes the external
causes of his subjects’ disillusionment. Burnham, who later became the
chief ideologue of the early National Review, was drawn to Trotsky
rather than Stalin, and, after some agonizing, joined the tiny American
Workers Party, rather than the Communist Party USA, in the early 1930s.
Burnham wound up arguing with, and then breaking with, Trotsky himself.
Events like the Nazi–Soviet nonaggression pact and the subsequent Soviet
invasion of Poland from the east led him to quit the Workers Party in
1940. Chambers joined the Communist Party, but his disillusionment began
even earlier than Burnham’s, with Stalin’s trials and executions of his
prominent rivals in the mid-1930s. He left the Party in 1938.
Each of Exit Right’s profiles ends at the moment of the subject’s
disillusion and conversion. This, too, serves to keep the focus on the
personal; it shuts the door on the possibility of examining the
particular variety of conservatism, the vision of a good society, that
each man wound up professing. Oppenheimer’s subjects all wrote their own
political autobiographies, and, while drawing on them, he seems
especially, or even principally, interested in them as writers. At the
end of the book he asserts that the best political writing is done “by
someone who is in tension” between impulses—who is “writing from within
the tension.”
That definition puts political writing based on certainty on a lower
plane, even if certainty about crucial political realities, like
Stalinism and anti-Stalinism, would seem necessary. Most of the
conservative writings of David Horowitz, who was disillusioned
principally by the murder of a friend by the Black Panthers in 1974, are
crudely ideological and not very interesting, but the best-known
conservative books by Chambers and Burnham, Witness (1952) and The
Managerial Revolution (1941), have stood up better than what they wrote
during their left-wing days.
Explaining why American politics became more conservative during the
last quarter of the twentieth century isn’t the task Oppenheimer set for
himself, but it is exactly what Steve Fraser, in The Limousine Liberal,
and Thomas Frank, in Listen, Liberal, have set out to do. Both of them
write from the left, and both argue that the shift to the right since
the last part of the twentieth century was anything but a natural,
spontaneous response—by voters, intellectuals, politicians, or anybody
else—to what was happening in the world. Instead, it was a change
engineered by adept professionals within the major political parties.
At first glance Fraser’s and Frank’s books appear to be quite different.
Fraser’s focuses on how the conservative stereotype of its title was
used to persuade Democratic voters to switch parties, and Frank’s is an
angry denunciation of moderate, market-oriented Democrats like Bill
Clinton for tearing the party asunder from its historic roots.
But the books have a great deal in common. Both Fraser and Frank are
economic liberals who see the New Deal, and its labor-centered
coalition, as the natural state of the Democratic Party. If the
Republicans today are not simply the party of the top half of the income
distribution and the Democrats the party of the bottom half, that, for
them, is odd and disturbing, since the fundamental purpose of the
Democrats is to represent the economic interests of the least-well-off
Americans. This corruption of the Democrats’ mission happened for
reasons of social class and culture. Though he doesn’t use the specific
phrase, Frank is no less interested than Fraser in limousine
liberals—they’re the people he thinks have ruined the Democratic Party.
Fraser’s book covers the entire span of the twentieth century, and
Frank’s is mainly about the period from the 1990s onward, so they also
go together sequentially. Although Fraser says the first person to use
the term “limousine liberal” was Mario Procaccino, the Democratic
machine’s candidate who used the label against John Lindsay in the 1969
New York City mayor’s race, a better name for his subject would be
“right-wing populism” (his term), and that goes back a long way.
Fraser’s account encompasses such figures as Father Charles Coughlin,
Joe McCarthy, Phyllis Schlafly, and George Wallace—all people who built
a substantial following of white working-class conservatives by playing
to resentment of elite, affluent liberals. “What has given the metaphor
of the limousine liberal its stamina,” Fraser writes,
has been its ability to collect together a disparate array of
discontents, anxieties, and sentiments aroused by the advent of modern
corporate and finance capitalism, cosmopolitan living, consumer culture,
and the growth of a supervisory state that helps keep the whole
mechanism running.
It becomes clear after the opening passages that Fraser actually does
not consider the limousine liberal to be a mythological figure—instead,
the idea is “part myth, part social reality.” Limousine liberals are
well educated, confident, and more closely attuned to issues like racial
justice, environmentalism, feminism, human rights abroad, and cultural
tolerance than to the economic welfare of laboring people in the United
States. Procaccino was not entirely wrong about his opponent, Fraser admits:
Lindsay’s liberalism accepted organized labor as a fact of modern life,
but treated it with none of the sympathy it exhibited for the
marginalized poor. Nor did it feel at home having to share power; it
preferred to bestow it with all the sense of dependency and gratitude
such a gift implicitly entailed.
Right-wing populism, Fraser observes, has been intermittently left-wing
on economic issues. Father Coughlin used to rail against Wall Street’s
cozy relationship with the Federal Reserve. Then, during the long
decades of the cold war, as Fraser points out, “hostile talk about
capitalism…was virtually verboten,” so there was a long interlude when
“social” issues of race, religion, and sexual mores came to the fore
within right-wing populism. When the Tea Party emerged in the aftermath
of the 2008 financial crisis, one of the elements in its stew of
resentments, along with race and immigration, was discontent with the
Federal Reserve’s having rescued the “too big to fail” banks. The Tea
Party wound up being so focused on dislike of the first black president,
and so generously funded by the Koch brothers and other rich donors,
that its economic-populist strain was easy to miss. But now the Trump
campaign, with its claims that trade agreements hurt American workers,
has shown that a mix of economic nationalism and nativism is once again
possible on the right.
Fraser argues that it’s misleading to think of business as being
uniformly on one side or the other of the war between right-wing
populists and limousine liberals. What he calls “family capitalism,” run
by dynastic owner-operators, tends to be right-wing (think of Koch
Industries); corporate capitalism, with its credentialed and salaried
managers, is more liberal (think of Apple Inc.). Businesses in the
Sunbelt tend to be to the right of businesses in the Northeast and Midwest.
In this complicated picture, the allegiance of working-class voters is
up for grabs in a way that would once have been inconceivable, and it’s
also not clear which of the two parties is their logical home today,
especially if you understand such voters as being motivated by cultural
as well as economic calculations. Thus far, they seem to be very roughly
divided by race (whites Republican, minorities Democratic), by sex
(heterosexual men Republican, women and LGBT people Democratic), and by
employment sector (heavy industry Republican, services Democratic).
To Thomas Frank, all of these realignments were harmful, because by
taking the primary focus of politics away from the issues of
working-class income and employment they resulted in increases in
inequality that were not only large but also entirely unnecessary. It
is, he writes, a
Democratic failure, straight up and nothing else…. The current leaders
of the Democratic Party know their form of liberalism is somehow related
to the good fortune of the top 10 percent. Inequality, in other words,
is a reflection of who they are. It goes to the very heart of their
self-understanding.
Frank’s collective villain is highly educated “professionals,” who
“undertook a mass migration from the Republican to the Democratic Party”
beginning in the 1950s:
In addition to doctors, lawyers, the clergy, architects, and
engineers—the core professional groups—the category includes economists,
experts in international development, political scientists, managers,
financial planners, computer programmers, aerospace designers, and even
people who write books like this one.
These people, by his account, think of themselves as meritocratic and
virtuous—indeed, superior—and as having transcended any fundamental
opposition between capital and labor that may once have existed. (They
aren’t so different from the elite-liberal collective antiheroes of such
previous books as The Managerial Revolution, Michael Young’s The Rise of
the Meritocracy, and Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites.)
Professionals, according to Frank, tend to regard other participants in
politics as self-interested. They consider that “their views are based
on reasoned analysis and universal values.” For him they make up “‘a
second hierarchy’—second to the hierarchy of money, that is—‘based on
credentialed expertise.’” Chief among their views, Frank writes, is the
profoundly anti-working-class idea that a good society should honor
“individual excellence” and mistrust solidarity. They tend to argue that
the kinds of market-oriented policies Frank hates, like free trade and
other forms of deregulation, are in tune with inevitable and
irresistible modernizing forces, to which resistance is prejudiced and
futile. The result has been “something truly unfortunate: the erasure of
economic egalitarianism from American politics.” And as (or, more
accurately, because) this has happened, the professionals have prospered.
Many liberal writers have called attention to a memo that Lewis Powell
Jr., on the eve of his nomination to the Supreme Court in 1971, wrote to
the president of the US Chamber of Commerce, proposing a long-term
strategy of conservative and Republican institution-building to
counteract the dominance of liberalism. The enactment of the ideas in
the Powell memo is one frequent explanation for the rise of conservatism.
Frank puts considerable blame instead on a manifesto written in the same
year by a prominent Washington Democrat, Fred Dutton, titled Changing
Sources of Power. It called on the Democratic Party to reorient itself
from blue-collar to white-collar workers, from the high school–educated
to the college-educated, and from the middle-aged to the young.
Implicitly this meant downgrading the importance of economic issues in
the Democratic pitch to voters. After Dutton’s manifesto came wave after
wave of “New Democrats” like Gary Hart, whose stump speech, Frank
reminds us, was called “The End of the New Deal,” and who “made his name
denouncing old-fashioned, working-class politics in favor of a more
tech-friendly vision.”
By far the worst of these, to Frank, was Bill Clinton: “What he did as
President”—NAFTA, welfare reform, poking at the inviolability of Social
Security, and so on—“was beyond the reach of even the most diabolical
Republican.” (Barack Obama, to Frank, is merely disappointing, not
malign. And the prospect of Hillary Clinton’s winning the presidential
election recently elicited this comment from Frank, in The Guardian:
“‘Jobs’ don’t really matter now in this election, nor does the debacle
of ‘globalization,’ nor does anything else, really. Thanks to this
imbecile Trump, all such issues have been momentarily swept off the
table while Americans come together around Clinton, the wife of the man
who envisaged the Davos dream in the first place.”)
Frank writes in a tone of angry sarcasm, and he knows his primary
targets well enough that his collective portrayal of them has a real
sting. Here is part of an extended aria on the professionals’ invocation
of “innovation” as the solution to every problem in society, for example:
Innovation was the driving force behind [the] new era, sometimes
personified by Wall Street, on other occasions by Silicon Valley. The
place where the magic happened was “the ideopolis”: the postindustrial
city, where highly credentialed professionals advised clients, taught
college students, wrote software, cracked mortgage-backed securities—and
were served in turn by an army of retail greeters and latte foamers who
were proud to share their betters’ values.
What Frank finds most maddening about the professionals is their
unwillingness to believe that a core purpose of politics is to
redistribute money and power, or to understand that social and economic
structures are human-made, not natural. “Government could easily have
prevented or at least mitigated every single one of the developments I
have described,” he writes; and a little later, “in a democracy we can
set the economic table however we choose.”
The professionals he writes about prefer to imagine themselves as
inhabiting a world in which everybody, not just them, wins, and the
unifying cause is not to reduce economic equality but “to defeat the
Republicans, that unthinkable brutish Other” whose voters don’t believe
in gay marriage or gun control or legal abortion or the threat of
climate change.
Would it have been possible to maintain the Democratic Party in an
essentially New Deal configuration, eighty years after the New Deal?
Frank writes on the assumption that the answer is a resounding yes, so
much so that he doesn’t take it on himself to explain in detail how that
would look today. In any event he’s right, and Fraser is too, that both
parties have changed substantially in composition and ideology since the
great days of Franklin Roosevelt. (Neither of them makes much of what
may be the biggest change, which came after the Democrats forced civil
rights on the South; this led the white electorate there to switch from
overwhelmingly Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican.)
One way to understand the professional, or limousine, liberals is to see
them as comparable to the old, and vanished, liberal wing of the
Republican Party, now reborn as a visible and influential wing of the
Democratic Party. If John Lindsay was indeed the original limousine
liberal, it’s worth remembering that he switched from Republican to
Democratic in 1971, just as much of the rest of the country was moving
in the opposite direction. The wealthy Upper East Side district he
represented in Congress before he was mayor is now Democratic, like many
former liberal Republican redoubts in and near the big cities. This is
likely to be the first presidential election since such things have been
measured in which the Democratic candidate wins a majority of the votes
of college-educated whites.
Winning this group over has helped the Democrats financially and
electorally, but in politics any mass defection has a strong effect on
both the party the defectors left and on the party they joined. Gaining
southern and evangelical voters (two overlapping categories) helped the
Republicans win elections; but those Republican gains entailed adopting
policies on issues like abortion and guns that drove many of the party’s
educated liberals into the arms of the Democrats—who then moved right on
economic issues by way of accommodating them. According to the website
OpenSecrets.org, the five organizations whose employees contributed the
most to the Obama campaign in 2012 were the University of California,
Microsoft, Google, the US government, and Harvard. Those are exactly
where one would find the people Fraser and Frank are talking about. None
of their institutions is a hotbed of blue-collar unionist sentiments.2
It is worth noting that since 1983 union membership has fallen from 20.1
percent of the workforce to 11.1 percent.
The phenomenon of a liberal political party that does not make economic
justice its overriding concern, and that includes well-off professionals
in its core constituency, is not simply an aberration of contemporary
American politics. It has existed in the American past—think of the
Liberal Republicans who nominated Horace Greeley for president in 1872,
or Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party in 1912—and now exists
elsewhere in the world, for example in the Congress Party in India or
the Kadima Party in Israel.
People participate in politics for all sorts of reasons. A collection of
essays called The Future We Want, edited by the founder of the socialist
magazine Jacobin and an editor at The Nation, is resolutely uninterested
in ideas that will seem “reasonable.”3 In its pages, various writers
propose entirely eliminating financial markets, police forces, state
governments, the current political parties, and intellectual property
laws. Nonetheless the contributors spend a good deal of energy trying to
persuade people on the left that gay issues, black issues, feminist
issues, and so on are all really about capitalism, because the
oppression of gays, blacks, and women serves corporate interests. That’s
a sign that even many committed radicals don’t see the world as Fraser
and Frank see it. The US may be moving back to the left politically in
the twenty-first century, at least in presidential politics, but that
doesn’t necessarily mean a left that seeks to put economic equality in
the place of honor.
But Fraser and Frank were prescient: publishing in a presidential
election year, but writing before it was clear how the parties’ primary
campaigns would go, they still help explain why voters in both parties
(and also abroad) have powerfully forced the economic dissatisfaction of
working people to center stage, in ways that the people running the
parties hadn’t expected. A dominant complaint has been against the trend
of a small minority at the top being the overwhelming beneficiaries of
economic growth. Recognition of the power of the “one percent” seems to
be a global electoral Kronstadt.
One should be careful, though, about concluding that, starting now, the
Democratic Party will begin the process of reorienting itself in what
Fraser and Frank would consider the proper direction. Even if Donald
Trump loses badly, it’s conceivable that his brand of economic
policy—which is suspicious of the power of the market—could over the
years become the core of a successful Republican Party’s appeal, in the
same way that the ideas behind Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964 helped
lead to Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980, especially if some future
Republican figures out how to decouple Trumpism from its disdainful
rhetoric about race that is guaranteed to keep minority voters loyal to
the Democrats. And the Democrats could remain politically successful
while gradually ceding their identity as (to quote Frank’s subtitle)
“the party of the people” to the Republicans. They might do so by making
the interests of the vast white-collar suburban middle class their
overriding concern, with lessening attention to poorly paid workers,
notwithstanding the urgings of Bernie Sanders.
The American political parties, because they are so big, are necessarily
mésalliances—unlikely matches whose fundamental illogic almost always
causes strains, which periodically become life-threatening crises for
the parties. The New Deal coalition was a mésalliance of workers and
segregationists. The Republican Reagan coalition was a mésalliance of
business and white evangelicals, and this sort of alliance combined to
oppose Obama. The idea of a Democratic Party that is truly consistent
and unified around the fight against inequality—Frank’s ideal—is too
much to hope for, and it may not even be a good idea. Better to have the
Democrats’ prosperous leadership struggling to hold together an unruly
coalition of labor, minorities, and social movements than to trust that
any group leading a unified party won’t turn into just the kind of
self-regarding, self-dealing insiders that Frank so much dislikes.
1
An even earlier switcher than Huffington was Kevin Phillips—circa 1990.
But he was so early that it didn’t seem like the beginning of a trend. ↩
2
One notch above the professional class there has also been a pronounced
switch in party loyalties, at least for this presidential campaign. The
Wall Street Journal reports that so far in 2016, people who work at
hedge funds have given nearly $50 million to Hillary Clintion, and less
than $20,000 to Donald Trump. ↩
3
The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century, edited by Sarah
Leonard and Bhaskar Sunkara (Metropolitan, 2016). ↩
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