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 Wal-Mart, 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 Wal-Mart 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 Wal-Mart 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 fund-raising 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, since it implies a technical problem we can solve with a twist of the knobs back in D.C. The nineteenth century understood it better: they called it “the social question,” and for once their polite Victorian euphemism beats ours. This is nothing less than the whole vast mystery of how we are going to live together.
WHY SHOULD THE LIBERAL LISTEN?

It is the Republicans, certainly, who bear primary responsibility for our modern plutocracy. They are the party that launched us on our modern era of tax-cutting and wage-suppressing. They are the ones who made a religion of the market and who fought so ferociously to open our politics to the influence of money at every level. These days Republicans are rolling in deep fantasies of persecution and capitalist authenticity; not only will they not reverse course, but they often seem lost to reason itself. What afflicts them would take an expert in mass psychology to cure.
But it is time we understood that our current situation represents a failure of the Democratic Party as well. Protecting the middle-class society was the Democrats’ assigned historical task, and once upon a time they would have taken to the job with relish. Shared prosperity was once the party’s highest aim; defending the middle-class world was a kind of sacred mission for them, as they never used to tire of reminding us. And to this day, Democrats are still the ones who pledge to raise the minimum wage and the taxes of the rich.
When it comes to tackling the “defining challenge of our time,” however, many of our modern Democratic leaders falter. They acknowledge that inequality is rampant and awful, but they cannot find the conviction or imagination to do what is necessary to reverse it. Instead they offer the same high-minded demurrals and policy platitudes they’ve been offering since the 1980s. They remind us that there’s nothing anyone can do about globalization or technology. They promise charter schools, and job training, and student loans, but other than that—well, they’ve got nothing.
My fifty-year-old thesaurus offers “politician” as a synonym for “opportunist.” But when Mr. Roget first put those two words together way back when, he wasn’t reckoning with today’s high-minded Democrats. Since 1992, Democrats have won the plurality of votes in every presidential election except one. For six of those years, they controlled Congress outright. But on matters of inequality they have done vanishingly little. They have stubbornly refused to change course when every sign said turn: when it would have been good policy to turn, when it would have been overwhelmingly popular to turn, when the country expected them to turn, when it was fully within their power to steer in a different direction.
Yes, I know, Democrats are the good guys, or rather the less bad guys. Many individual Democrats get enthusiastic, five-star approval ratings from me; many more are completely without blame in the narrative that follows. And it is largely thanks to the Democrats that mainstream pundits now feel it’s OK to talk about inequality at all.
But as things have grown worse, income inequality has become an increasingly awkward issue for them. It just doesn’t come naturally in the way that, say, talking about marriage equality now does. Looking back over their actual record, one starts to suspect that there’s a better chance the party will resolve to kick Wyoming out of the union than to do something meaningful to halt the country’s economic breakdown.
This is not because they are incompetent or because sinister Republicans keep thwarting the righteous liberal will. It is Democratic failure, straight up and nothing else. The agent of change isn’t interested in the job at hand. Inequality just doesn’t spark their imagination. It is the point at which their famous compassion peters out.
What I am suggesting is that their inability to address the social question is not accidental. 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.
SNOOZING THROUGH THE LIBERAL HOUR

This is an age of Democratic failure, but what gives the failure its bitter tang is that it is also an age of Democratic triumph—a “Liberal Spring,” as a jubilant New York Times story put it in the summer of 2015. Yes, economic inequality is soaring, nothing can be done on that front, but in other realms these are times of extraordinary Democratic achievement. Gay marriage is legal now, the Confederate flag is coming down all across the Deep South, and America is led today by a black president, a formerly hypothetical scenario that pollsters long ago used to determine someone’s relative liberalism. In 2008, that black candidate’s campaign raised more money from the financial services industry—which is to say, from Wall Street—than did his Republican opponent.
And just cast your eyes over the long list of billionaires and venture capitalists who supported the campaign to legalize gay marriage, say the liberal optimists. Or consider the way the Silicon Valley brass swung into action when the state of Indiana passed a law permitting discrimination against homosexuals. Or how the CEO of the country’s largest chain of coffee shops urged his employees to instruct customers about the evils of racism. In terms of public righteousness, liberals are as conspicuous today as at any time in our history.
What’s more, Democrats in Washington now believe they possess a permanent hold on the presidency, thanks to the country’s demographic shifts. “The coalition of the ascendant” is the phrase journalists began to use in 2008 to describe the Democrats’ victorious and inexorably growing army—“young people, minorities, [and] upper middle class white professionals,” to quote the pundit who coined the locution7—and what it means is that every augury now points the Democrats’ way. Yes, they might lose a Congressional election here and there, but they are the natural majority party now, they think; when they encounter an obstacle, all they have to do is stand by and let the natural process of demographic “ascendancy” work.
Talk about the coalition of the ascendant causes Democratic hearts to race joyfully. For so many years they were the loser party, the wimp faction, the party of McGovern and Carter and Mondale and Dukakis. Now, suddenly, they have been transformed into the dominant party, the rightful occupants of the White House. The righteous will be rewarded, goes the proverb, and to Washington Democrats their advancing ascendancy feels a lot like cosmic justice.
For them it is an awesome vindication. So what if Republicans trounced them in 2010 and 2014? So what if the GOP dominates the state legislatures and both houses of Congress? Democrats now know with the certainty of political science itself that those Republican advances will slowly but surely be reversed. Democrats no longer need to plead, explain, or persuade; henceforth they need merely to wait.
“NOTHING MUCH CHANGED”

Trying to pinpoint where and when the hope drained out of the Obama movement is something of a parlor game for my disgruntled friends. Some say they lost their faith in Obama even before he took office, when he named the bailout architect Tim Geithner as his choice for Treasury secretary and the deregulation architect Larry Summers as his main economic adviser. A big chunk of the public came to believe the fix was in two months into his first term, when a round of bonuses—not reprimands or indictments, mind you, but bonuses—went out to executives of the financial sinkhole known as AIG.
But all that is mere speculation. Thanks to journalistic science, we can now pinpoint the exact moment when the Obama administration formally renounced any intention of making the big historical turn it had been elected to make: it was the meeting between the new president and a roomful of nervous Wall Street CEOs on March 27, 2009. After warning them about the “pitchforks” of an angry public, Obama reassured the frightened bankers that they could count on him to protect them; that he had no intention of restructuring their industry or changing the economic direction of the nation. “Lots of drama,” is how one mogul described the meeting to the journalist Ron Suskind, “but at day’s end, nothing much changed.”8
I clung to the “hope” for a little while longer than that. I can remember the exact moment when I finally gave it up—it was the first time I heard the phrase “grand bargain,” Barack Obama’s pet term for his proposed deficit and tax deal with the Republicans. In a split second I understood the whole thing: that big compromises like this were real to the president, but “change” was not. I had known that Obama had a passion for centrist talk; everyone did. Bipartisan conciliation was the theme of Obama’s famous keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. It was one of the themes of his 2008 stump speech, when he talked so inspiringly about “the politics of addition, not the politics of division.”
What was shocking about all this was to realize that Obama believed these clichés. Consensus, bipartisanship, the “center”: those were the things this admirable and intelligent man was serious about—the kind of stale, empty verbiage favored by Beltway charlatans on the Sunday talk shows. The other things Obama used to say—like when he connected deregulation, corruption, and income inequality in his Cooper Union speech in 2008—those things were just to reel in the suckers. The suckers being the people who could hear the pillars of their middle-class world snapping. The suckers being the people who could see that the system was crumbling and thought maybe we ought to do something about it.
What I realized in the instant when I heard that phrase was that this man, in whom I and so many others had placed such faith, was in fact another ordinary consensus Democrat with ordinary consensus ideas. He believed the same tired partisanship-deploring platitudes as everyone else. Nothing could budge our leadership class from this illusion. Unemployment could hit 50 percent, foreclosures could sweep through entire states, there could be riots in every city in the land, and the TV hosts would still be moaning about how dreadful it is that Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on things.
Which brings us face-to-face with our mystery: how is it that, in our moment of utmost need, a fake crisis like the problem of “extreme partisanship” was able to trump the real deal?
These are not Obama’s shortcomings alone. They are failings of the party he leads. They are, in a word, ours. It’s time to own up.

Let us put the question bluntly. What ails the Democrats? So bravely forthright on cultural issues, their leaders fold when confronted with matters of basic economic democracy. Why? What is it about this set of issues that transforms Democrats into vacillating softies, convinced that the big social question is beyond their control?
The standard explanation is money and the way it runs through politics, adjusting incentives and distorting priorities wherever it flows. The country’s leaders, this theory goes, are the products of a corrupt campaign finance system, their values whacked by the revolving door between Congress and K Street, between the Treasury Department and the banks. While parts of the oligarchy that rules this land and funds our politicians might not really object to something like gay marriage, when it comes to putting big banks into receivership—oh, no. In the land of money, that kind of thing is verboten.
There is plenty of evidence for this theory, and I will present quite a bit of it in the pages that follow.* But the Democrats’ problems go deeper than this. To diagnose their particular malady we must understand that there are different hierarchies of power in America, and while oligarchy theory exposes one of them—the hierarchy of money—many of the Democrats’ failings arise from another hierarchy: one of merit, learning, and status.
Money and merit: sometimes these two systems of power overlap and sometimes they are separate. Occasionally they are in conflict, but more frequently they are allies—contented partners in power.
We lampoon the Republican hierarchy of money with the phrase “the One Percent”; if we want to understand what has wrecked the Democratic Party as a populist alternative, however, what we need to scrutinize is more like the Ten Percent, the people at the apex of the country’s hierarchy of professional status.
PARTY OF THE PEOPLE

Let us start with the institution of the political party itself. There are countless reasons why voters come together in factions and why they register for this party instead of that one: race, ethnicity, region, religion, generation, and gender, to name a few of the categories we like to talk about nowadays. There is another criterion, however, that we sometimes have trouble acknowledging: social class.
Once you start thinking about it, though, the role of class in political parties is obvious, and it goes back to America’s very beginning. In Federalist Paper No. 10, published in 1787, James Madison famously identified “unequal distribution of property” as the main cause of political “faction.” Madison deplored these factions, but he also made them seem, well, natural:

Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views.
“Classes” were thus observed to be the very stuff of faction and parties, and it is a surprisingly short walk from the anti-partisanship of the Federalist Papers to the fulminating, class-based factionalism of U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton, a fiery Democrat in the Jacksonian tradition. “There are but two parties, there never has been but two parties,” Benton thundered in 1835, “founded in the radical question, whether PEOPLE, or PROPERTY, shall govern? Democracy implies a government by the people.… Aristocracy implies a government of the rich … and in these words are contained the sum of party distinction.”1
Benton’s exact phrases may not be familiar these days, but his sentiment certainly is. Democrats have fancied themselves as the “Party of the People” since the beginning, squaring off against what they love to caricature as the party of the high-born. This populist brand-positioning has served them well on many occasions, as Mitt Romney can no doubt attest. On other occasions it has had about as much to do with reality as the theory that the moon is made of green Play-Doh. After all, the Party of the People was also, once, the Party of Slavery and the Party of the Klan.
But the idea of two great parties corresponding to two great economic groups has been accurate enough often enough for the idea to stick. Whatever the class conflict happens to be at a given time—creditors versus debtors, bankers versus farmers, owners versus workers—the Democrats have usually sided with the weak and the downtrodden. For a few reminders of what this sounds like, here is William Jennings Bryan, in his “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896:

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.
And here is Franklin Roosevelt, deploring the rise of “economic royalists” in 1936:

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor—these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship.… Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities. Throughout the Nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly.
Lastly, here is Harry Truman, speaking to farmers at a plowing competition in Iowa in 1948:

The Democratic Party represents the people. It is pledged to work for agriculture. It is pledged to work for labor. It is pledged to work for the small businessman and the white-collar worker. The Democratic Party puts human rights and human welfare first. But the attitude of the Republican gluttons of privilege is very different. The bigmoney Republican looks on agriculture and labor merely as expense items in a business venture. He tries to push their share of the national income down as low as possible and increase his own profits. And he looks upon the Government as a tool to accomplish this purpose.
This was rhetoric, of course, but there was also something real behind it. Working people, or rather, their organizations, once carried enormous clout within the Democratic Party. Thanks to its solid identification with the common folk, Democrats held a majority in the House of Representatives from the early 1930s all the way to the mid-1990s, with two short GOP interludes. “It was a proletarian House of Lords,” is how one political journalist has described that body in the late 1960s.2
Today, the American class divide is starker than at any time in my memory, and yet Congress doesn’t seem to know it. Today, the House of Representatives is dedicated obsessively to the concerns of the rich—to cutting their taxes, to chastising their foes, to holding the tissue box as they cry about the mean names people call them.
How is this possible? Just about everyone not among the top tier of the income distribution these days expresses a kind of bitter cynicism about our financial overlords. Regardless of party, everyone is furious about the Wall Street bailouts. Books about the disappearing middle class have gone from the fringe to the mainstream. Our economy has been reliving the 1930s; why hasn’t our politics?
The answer is staring us in the face, if we care to see it. Yes, social class is still all-important in politics, just like Madison, Benton, Bryan, and Truman thought it was. And yes, the Democrats are still a class party. In fact, they show admirable concern for the interests of the social class they represent.
It’s just that the class they care about the most doesn’t happen to be the same one Truman, Roosevelt, and Bryan cared about.
THE HIGH-BORN AND THE WELL-GRADUATED

In his syndicated New York Times column for November 21, 2008, David Brooks saluted president-elect Obama for the savvy personnel choices he was then announcing. This was before Brooks had become one of the president’s favorite columnists; before the fabled “bromance” between the two men burst into the raging blaze of mutual admiration it would one day become. But the spark was there already.
It was the educational pedigree of the then-forming Team Obama that won the columnist’s esteem. Nearly every person Brooks mentioned—the new president’s economic advisers, his foreign policy advisers, even the first lady—had collected a degree from an Ivy League institution, more than one in most cases. The new administration would be a “valedictocracy,” Brooks joked: “rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes.”
Brooks has been obsessed with the tastes and habits of the East Coast meritocracy for as long as I’ve been reading him, and though he sometimes mocks, he always comes back to his essential conviction, the article of faith that makes a writer like him fit so comfortably at the Times: the well-graduated are truly great people. And on that day in 2008 when Brooks beheld the incoming Obama crew, with their Harvard-certified talent—Lord!—he just about swooned. “I find myself tremendously impressed by the Obama transition,” he wrote. Why? Because “they are picking the best of the Washington insiders”: “open-minded individuals” who are “not ideological” and who exhibit lots of “practical creativity.” They were “admired professionals,” the very best their respective disciplines had to offer.
Brooks did not point out that choosing so many people from the same class background—every single one of them, as he said, was a professional—might by itself guarantee closed minds and ideological uniformity. Nobody else pointed this out, either. We always overlook the class interests of professionals because we have trouble thinking of professionals as a “class” in the first place; like David Brooks, we think of them merely as “the best.” They are where they are because they are so smart, not because they’ve been born to an earldom or something.
Truth be told, lots of Americans were relieved to see people of talent replace George W. Bush’s administration of hacks and cronies back in 2008. Those were frightening times. Still, if we want to understand what’s wrong with liberalism, what keeps this movement from doing something about inequality or about our reversion to a nineteenth-century social pattern, this is where we’re going to have to look: at the assumptions and collective interests of professionals, the Democratic Party’s favorite constituency.
The historian Christopher Lasch—a kind of cosmic opposite of David Brooks—wrote in 1965 that “modern radicalism or liberalism can best be understood as a phase of the social history of the intellectuals.”3 My goal in this book is to bring Lasch’s dictum up to date: the deeds and positions of the modern Democratic Party, I will argue, can best be understood as a phase in the social history of the professionals.
Who are professionals? To begin with, they are not the same thing as Lasch’s “intellectuals.” His category is made up mainly of writers and academics; it is defined by the critical stance they take toward the workings of society. There aren’t really enough intellectuals to make up a distinct social class, in the way that term is traditionally used.
“Professionals,” on the other hand, are an enormous and prosperous group, the people with the jobs that every parent wants their child to grow up and get. 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.
Professionals are a high-status group, but what gives them their lofty position is learning, not income. They rule because they are talented, because they are smart. A good sociological definition of professionalism is “a second hierarchy”—second to the main hierarchy of money, that is—“based on credentialed expertise.”4 Which is to say, a social order supported by test scores and advanced degrees and defended by the many professional associations that have been set up over the years to define correct practice, enforce professional ethics, and wage war on the unlicensed.
Another distinguishing mark of the professions is their social authority. Ivan Illich, a critic prominent in the 1970s, once defined professionals by noting their “power to prescribe.”5 Professionals are the people who know what ails us and who dispense valuable diagnoses. Professionals predict the weather. They organize our financial deals and determine the rules of engagement. They design our cities and draw the traffic patterns through which the rest of us travel. Professionals know when someone is guilty of a moral or criminal misdeed and they also know precisely what form of retribution that culpability should take.
Teachers know what we must learn; architects know what our buildings must look like; economists know what the Federal Reserve’s discount rate should be; art critics know what is in good taste and what is in bad. Although we are the subjects of all these diagnoses and prescriptions, the group to which professionals ultimately answer is not the public but their peers (and, of course, their clients). They listen mainly to one another. The professions are autonomous; they are not required to heed voices from below their circle of expertise.
In this way the professions build and maintain monopolies over their designated fields. Now, “monopoly” is admittedly a tough word, but it is not really a controversial one among sociologists who write about the professions. “Monopolizing knowledge,” according to one group of sociologists, is a baseline description of what professions do; this is why they restrict entry to their fields.6 Professions certify the expertise of insiders while negating and dismissing the knowledge-claims of outsiders.
Specialized knowledge is, of course, a necessity in this complicated world of ours. From ship captains to neurosurgeons, modern society depends heavily on people with technical expertise. And so nations grant professionals their elevated status, the sociological theory continues, in exchange for a promise of public service. The professions are supposed to be disinterested occupations or even “social trustees”; unlike other elements of society, they are not supposed to be motivated by profit or greed. This is why we still find advertising by lawyers and doctors somewhat off-putting, and why Americans were once shocked to learn that radio personalities took money to play records they didn’t genuinely like: because professionals are supposed to answer to a spirit more noble than personal gain.7
With the rise of the postindustrial economy in the last few decades, the range of professionals has exploded. To use the voguish term, these are “knowledge workers,” and many of them don’t fit easily into the old framework. They are often employees rather than independent practitioners, taking orders from some corporate manager instead of spending their lives in private practice. These modern professionals aren’t workers per se, and they aren’t capitalists either, strictly speaking. Some professions share certain features with these other groups, however. The accountants at your neighborhood tax preparation chain, for example, are sometimes just scraping by. And teachers are often union members, just like blue-collar workers. At the other end of the scale, certain lucky professionals in Silicon Valley happen to be our leading capitalists. And the gulf between professional hedge fund managers and the rich folks whose money they invest is small indeed.
As these last two examples suggest, the top ranks of the professions are made up of highly affluent people. They are not the billionaire Wal-Mart clan, but they have a claim to leadership nevertheless. These two power structures, one of ownership and the other of knowledge, live side by side, sometimes in conflict with one another but usually in comity.
The concern of this book is not investigating the particular expertise of any given profession, but rather the politics of professionalism in a larger sense. As the political scientist Frank Fischer writes in Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise, professionalism is more than an occupational category; it is “a postindustrial ideology.”8 For many, it provides an entire framework for understanding our modern world.
As a political ideology, professionalism carries enormous potential for mischief. For starters, it is obviously and inherently undemocratic, prioritizing the views of experts over those of the public.9 That is tolerable to a certain degree—no one really objects to rules mandating that only trained pilots fly jetliners, for example. But what happens when an entire category of experts stops thinking of itself as “social trustees”? What happens when they abuse their monopoly power? What happens when they start looking mainly after their own interests, which is to say, start acting as a class?
“RULING IN THE NAME OF KNOWLEDGE”10

Americans have pondered these questions before. The professions’ claims of superior authority and of a monopoly on the power to prescribe rubbed early Americans the wrong way, and in the first decades of the Republic the country reacted harshly against them. In the Jacksonian period, a time of profound anti-aristocratic feeling, “the ideology of merit clashed in America with the ideological egalitarianism of the political system,” as the sociologist Magali Larson writes. It was impossible to reconcile equality, Americans believed, with the professional ideal of a legally sanctioned clique of experts. Cartels and monopolies were in bad odor back then, and the public rebelled against the professions as attempts to maintain aristocratic entitlement through “mystification and concealment,” as an 1835 newspaper put it. Many states in those days took the revolt against professionalism so far as to repeal medical licensing requirements.11
The anti-professional spirit persisted for decades. The Farmers’ Alliance and the Knights of Labor, two nineteenth-century workers’ organizations, specifically excluded lawyers from membership. I myself have seen a Populist-inspired sculpture garden in western Kansas in which a figure labeled “Labor” is crucified by statues representing the professions: “Doctor,” “Preacher,” “Lawyer,” “Banker.”12
Amid the enormous strikes and the sudden, catastrophic recessions of the Gilded Age, however, a group of reformers who came to be known as “progressives” came to see professionalization as a positive thing—indeed, as the only hope for a society being torn apart in the war between capital and labor. Professionals, recast now as an enlightened managerial class, were supposed to bring about an industrial peace that would be impossible under the profit motive alone. The progressives of this period could be frankly and openly elitist on the subject: Herbert Croly, the author of the seminal work The Promise of American Life and later a founder of the New Republic, openly advocated for a sort of neo-aristocratic order led by “exceptional” citizens, and left-wing critics ranging from Thorstein Veblen to R. H. Tawney imagined capitalism tamed by professional expertise.
The progressives had a point. Many of the industrial world’s problems were—and are—highly technical ones that require the attention of well-trained experts. Markets could obviously not be counted on to bring about democratic solutions to the scourge of exploitation, layoffs, and workplace injuries. There were no easy, Jeffersonian ways around these problems.
For many years the progressive ideal seemed like a brilliant success. Franklin Roosevelt’s “brain trust,” for example, still stands today as a symbol of the liberal possibilities of professionalism, as do the New Deal’s many interventions in the workings of the market. Economies could be managed, at least in part; world wars could be planned and won; an assortment of consumer goods could be essentially guaranteed to each and every member of the broad middle class. The administration of FDR was something of a golden age for government-by-professionals, although (as we shall see) one that was different in important ways from our current regime of rule-by-expert.
Let me confess here a nostalgia for the managerial professionalism that I have just described. It was, after all, the system that administered the country’s great corporations, its news media, its regulatory agencies, and its welfare state in the more benevolent years of the American Century. Here and there, in certain corners of our national life, this older organizational form still survives, keeping our passenger jets from exploding and our highway bridges from collapsing.
But generally speaking, that system of professionalism was long ago subverted and transformed into something different and more rapacious. Today we live in a world of predatory bankers, predatory educators, even predatory health care providers, all of them out for themselves. The corruption of the professions is a grand story in its own right, and one that parallels the story told in this book: it starts at roughly the same time, it features a number of the same characters, and so on. With a few exceptions, however, it is not my subject here.
What concerns us instead are popular attitudes toward the professions, and by the 1970s they were definitely starting to sour. “Technocracy” was the new term for describing the reign of professionalism, and its connotations were almost entirely negative. Rule-by-expert, it began to seem, excluded rule-by-the-people. It was dehumanizing and mechanical. In a technocracy, the important policy decisions were made in faraway offices that were insulated from the larger whirl of society. The people making the decisions identified far more with society’s rulers than they did with the ruled, and their decisions often completely ignored public concerns. Busing was one of the era’s classic examples of failed technocratic overreach; another was the Vietnam War, a catastrophic intervention in which tens of thousands of working-class Americans were sent to their deaths—not to mention the vast death toll among the Vietnamese themselves—largely because foreign-policy professionals in Washington were unwilling to listen to voices from outside their discipline, bearing uncomfortable news.13
The problems of technocracy were never solved. Instead technocracy became a way of life, with its own mass constituency. Today, as we are so often reminded, we live in a “postindustrial” age, and in this advanced state of civilization, the demand for expertise has become enormous. Knowledge industries such as software, finance, communication, surveillance, and military contracting are the vital economic sectors of our time, and the corporate world has proceeded to bulk up with armies of middle managers, efficiency experts, laboratory scientists, and public-relations specialists.
As the professional-managerial class grew, its political alignment also changed. Between the Eisenhower era and today, professionals undertook a mass migration from the Republican to the Democratic Party, for reasons that will become apparent as we proceed. In fact, according to the sociologists Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks, professionals went from being the most Republican social formation in the country in the 1950s to being the most Democratic by the mid-Nineties.14
Professionalism is “postindustrial ideology,” and today the Democrats are the party of the professional class. The party has other constituencies, to be sure—minorities, women, and the young, for example, the other pieces of the “coalition of the ascendant”—but professionals are the ones whose technocratic outlook tends to prevail. It is their tastes that are celebrated by liberal newspapers and it is their particular way of regarding the world that is taken for granted by liberals as being objectively true. Professionals dominate liberalism and the Democratic Party in the same way that Ivy Leaguers dominate the Obama cabinet. In fact, it is not going too far to say that the views of the modern-day Democratic Party reflect, in virtually every detail, the ideological idiosyncrasies of the professional-managerial class.
Liberalism itself has changed to accommodate its new constituents’ technocratic views. Today, liberalism is the philosophy not of the sons of toil but of the “knowledge economy” and, specifically, of the knowledge economy’s winners: the Silicon Valley chieftains, the big university systems, and the Wall Street titans who gave so much to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. Liberal thinkers dutifully return the love, fussing over their affluent, highly educated sweethearts with all manner of flattering phrases: these high-achieving professionals are said to be the “wired workers” who will inherit the future, for example. They are a “learning class” that truly gets the power of education. They are a “creative class” that naturally rebels against fakeness and conformity. They are an “innovation class” that just can’t stop coming up with awesome new stuff.
The phrase I will apply to them in the pages that follow is the “liberal class,” a designation I borrow from the radical writer Chris Hedges, although with a pretty big caveat.15 The premise of Hedges’ book on the subject, Death of the Liberal Class, is that the cohort behind liberal politics is disappearing or has lost its nerve. He writes to mourn their passing; I write to protest their triumph.
POP TECHNOCRACY

To protest their triumph? Why would a person of vivid pink sentiments like me object to the ascendancy of any liberal group? What difference does it make if the driving force behind Democratic victory comes from below or from on high?
Put it a different way: what does it mean when the dominant constituency of the left party in a two-party system is a high-status group rather than the traditional working class?
One thing we know for sure that it means is soaring inequality. 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.
We know this, for starters, because this is exactly what has happened. Issues of income inequality have been recontextualized so thoroughly in our time that certain Democrats even have trouble understanding what their forebears of the 1930s and ’40s meant when they talked about the subject. For our modern liberals, it is obvious that careers should be open to talent and it is an outrage when barriers of any kind prevent the able from rising to the top.
Another term for this understanding of equality is meritocracy, which is one of the great, defining faiths of the professional class. Meritocracy is about winners, and ensuring that everyone has a chance to become one. “The areas in which the left has made the most significant progress,” writes the journalist Chris Hayes, “—gay rights, inclusion of women in higher education, the end of de jure racial discrimination—are the battles it has fought or is fighting in favor of making the meritocracy more meritocratic. The areas in which it has suffered its worst defeats—collective action to provide universal public goods, mitigating rising income inequality—are those that fall outside the meritocracy’s purview.”16
Another reason we know that a party of professionals will care little about inequality is because professionals themselves care little about it. While this segment of the population tends to be very liberal on questions of civil liberties and sexual mores, the sociologist Steven Brint tells us that professionals are “not at all liberal on economic and equality-related issues.” On anything having to do with organized labor, as we shall see, they are downright conservative.17
The problem with such broad-brush generalizations about any social stratum, of course, is that there are lots of exceptions, and a group of educated and often sophisticated individuals naturally contains lots of honorable folks who care sincerely about society’s well-being. Many of them understand the madness of a deregulated market system as it spins out of control. But in a sweeping sociological sense, professionals as a class do not get it. This is because inequality does not contradict, defy, or even inconvenience the logic of professionalism. On the contrary, inequality is essential to it.
Professionals, after all, are life’s officer corps. They give the orders; they write the prescriptions. Status is essential to professionalism; according to sociologist Larson, achieving a more exalted level in life’s hierarchy is “the most central dimension of the professionalization project.” What she means is that inequality is what it’s all about. Sometimes the privileges accorded to the professions are enshrined in law—not just anyone is allowed to step into a courtroom and start pleading before a judge, for example—and even when they aren’t, they are maintained by artificial scarcity, by what Larson called, in her classic 1977 book on the subject, a “monopoly of expertise.”18
Meritocracy is what makes these ideas fit together; it is “the official professional credo,” according to one group of sociologists—the conviction that the successful deserve their rewards, that the people on top are there because they are the best.19 This is the First Commandment of the professional-managerial class.
These days meritocracy has come to seem so reasonable that many of us take it for granted as the true and correct measure of human value. Do well in school, and you earn your credential. Earn your credential, and you are admitted into the ranks of the professions. Become a professional, and you receive the respect of the public plus the nice house in the suburbs and the fancy car and all the rest. Meritocracy makes so much sense to us that barely anyone thinks of challenging it, except on its own terms.
For President Barack Obama, for example, belief in meritocracy is a conviction of the most basic sort. “Obama’s faith lay in cream rising to the top,” writes Jonathan Alter in his account of the early days of the Obama presidency. The president believed this, Alter continues, for the most personal of reasons: because this was the system that had propelled him to the top. “Because he himself was a product of the great American postwar meritocracy,” Alter continues, “he could never fully escape seeing the world from the status ladder he had ascended.”
Obama proceeded to fill his administration with the graduates of the most prestigious universities and professional schools, in turn causing David Brooks to feel such optimism for the country. “At some level,” Alter writes, “Obama bought into the idea that top-drawer professionals had gone through a fair sorting process, the same process that had propelled him and Michelle to the Ivy League, and were therefore in some way deserving of their elevated status.”20
What this doctrine means for the politics of income inequality should be clear: a profound complacency. 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 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.
There is no solidarity in a meritocracy. The very idea contradicts the ideology of the well-graduated technocrats who rule us. As we shall see, leading members of the professional class show enormous respect for one another—what I will call “professional courtesy”—but they feel precious little sympathy for the less fortunate members of their own cohort—for the adjuncts frozen out of the academic market for tenure, for colleagues who get fired, or even for the kids who don’t get into “good” colleges. That life doesn’t shower its blessings on people who can’t make the grade isn’t a shock or an injustice; it’s the way things ought to be.21
This has all sorts of important consequences for liberalism, but let us here take note of just one before proceeding: professionals do not hold that other Democratic constituency, organized labor, in particularly high regard. This attitude is documented in study after study of professional-class life. One reason for this is because unions signify lowliness, not status. But another is because solidarity, the core value of unions, stands in stark contradiction to the doctrine of individual excellence that every profession embodies.22 The idea that someone should command good pay for doing a job that doesn’t require specialized training seems to professionals to be an obvious fallacy.
THE PANACEA OF EDUCATION

It is not a coincidence that the two most successful Democratic leaders of recent years—Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—were both plucked from obscurity by prestigious universities. Nor is it surprising that both of them eventually signed on to a social theory in which higher education is the route to individual success and to national salvation as well.
Educational achievement is, after all, the foundation of the professions’ claim to higher status. It should not surprise us that the liberal class regards the university as the greatest and most necessary social institution of all, or that members of this cohort reflexively propose more education as the answer to just about anything you care to bring up. College can conquer unemployment as well as racism, they say; urban decay as well as inequality. Education will make us more tolerant, it will dissolve our doubts about globalization and climate change, it will give us the STEM skills we need as a society to compete. The liberal class knows, as a matter of deepest conviction, that there is no social or political problem that cannot be solved with more education and job training. Indeed, the only critique they will acknowledge of this beloved institution is that it, too, is not meritocratic enough. If we just launch more charter schools, give everyone a fair shot at the SAT, and crank out the student loans, then we will have done all it is humanly possible to do.
To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you’ll need in the society of the future. Take inequality. The real problem, many liberals believe, is that not enough poor people get a chance to go to college and join the professional-managerial elite. Driving this point home is the object of report after report from the Hamilton Project, a Democratic think tank that is named, tellingly, for the original advocate of an American ruling elite.23 Other leading members of the liberal class have flogged the point relentlessly over the years. A sampling:
• “If there is an income divide in America it is over education,” wrote Democratic media strategist Bill Knapp in the Washington Post in 2012, “and this makes sense: People who are better educated should make more money.”24
• “What I fundamentally believe—and what the president believes,” Arne Duncan, Obama’s secretary of education, told a reporter in 2012, “is that the only way to end poverty is through education.”25
• “The best way by far to improve economic opportunity and to reduce inequality is to increase the educational attainment and skills of American workers,” declared Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to the graduating class at Harvard in 2008, a group much perturbed by inequality.26
• Thomas Friedman, Obama’s other favorite newspaper columnist, comes back to the subject again and again. “The biggest issue in the world today is growth, and, in this information age, improving educational outcomes for more young people is now the most important lever for increasing economic growth and narrowing income inequality,” he wrote in 2012. “In other words, education is now the key to sustainable power.”27

To the liberal class this is a fixed idea, as open to evidence-based refutation as creationism is to fundamentalists: if poor people want to stop being poor, poor people must go to college.
But of course this isn’t really an answer at all; it’s a moral judgment, handed down by the successful from the vantage of their own success. The professional class is defined by its educational attainment, and every time they tell the country that what it needs is more schooling, they are saying: Inequality is not a failure of the system; it is a failure of you.
This way of thinking about inequality offers little to the many millions of Americans—the majority of Americans, in fact—who did not or will not graduate from college. It dismisses as though a moral impossibility the well-known fact that there have been and are places in the modern world where people with high school diplomas can earn a good living—like, say, the northern states of the USA between 1945 and 1980 or the Germany of today.
Then there are disturbing reports like the recent study showing that, in terms of wealth, black and Hispanic college graduates actually “fared significantly worse” in the late recession than did members of those groups who hadn’t gone to college. The people in question were the ones who did everything right, who went through life the way our society instructs us to, and they were punished for it.28
And that’s only the beginning of the problems. Who is to say that a college degree by itself is the silver bullet? In the arms race of merit, perhaps it’s getting straight As that makes you worthy, or going to a “good school,” or studying the STEM subjects, or not wasting time on the STEM subjects. Even then, the education panacea offers nothing to the ones who check every box and who still find, after they graduate, that there are simply no jobs out there, or that the jobs that exist pay poorly.
But nothing can dissuade the leaders of the liberal class from this faith—not the many scandals reverberating through the universities, not the much-discussed misery that has engulfed high-achieving humanities PhDs, not the crushing weight of the student loans, not the perverse fact that the quality of American higher ed has declined while its price tag has grown so massively.
Nor can the leaders of the professional class see the absurdity of urging everyone else to do exactly as they themselves did to make their way to the top. It is as if some oil baron were to proclaim that the unemployed could solve their problems if they just found good places to drill for oil. Or if some mutual-fund manager were to suggest that the solution to inequality was for everyone to put their savings in the stock market.
THE PATHOLOGIES OF PROFESSIONALISM

Having people of talent run the vast federal apparatus is clearly a desirable thing. The EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ought to be under the direction of people who know what they’re doing, as surely as qualified engineers should design our bridges and historians should be the ones who teach history.
But what are we to make of our modern-day technocracy, a meritocracy of failure in which ineffectual people rise to the top and entire professions (accountants, real-estate appraisers, etc.) are roiled by corruption scandals?
The answer is that the professional ideology brings with it certain predictable, recurring weaknesses. The first of these pitfalls of professionalism is that the people with the highest status aren’t necessarily creative or original thinkers. Although the professions are thought to represent the pinnacle of human brilliance, what they are actually brilliant at is defending and applying a given philosophy. In Disciplined Minds, an important description of the work-life of professionals, the physicist Jeff Schmidt tells us that “ideological discipline is the master key to the professions.” Despite the favorite Sixties slogan, professionals do not question authority; their job is to apply it. This is the very nature of their work and the object of their training, according to Schmidt; by his definition, professionals are “obedient thinkers” who “implement their employers’ attitudes” and carefully internalize the reigning doctrine of their discipline, whatever it happens to be.29
In addition, the professions are structured to shield insiders from accountability. This is what defines the category: professionals do not have to listen. They are the only occupational group, as the sociologist Eliot Freidson put it many years ago, with “the recognized right to declare … ‘outside’ evaluation illegitimate and intolerable.”30
Exhibit A of these interlocking pathologies is economics, a discipline that often acts like an ideological cartel set up to silence the heterodox. James K. Galbraith has written a classic description of how it works:

Leading active members of today’s economics profession … have joined together into a kind of politburo for correct economic thinking. As a general rule—as one might expect from a gentleman’s club—this has placed them on the wrong side of every important policy issue, and not just recently but for decades. They predict disaster where none occurs. They deny the possibility of events that then happen.… No one loses face, in this club, for having been wrong. No one is disinvited from presenting papers at later annual meetings. And still less is anyone from the outside invited in.31
Professional economists screw up again and again, and no one cares. The only real accountability they face is from their endlessly forgiving peers in economics departments across the country. Granted, economics is an extreme case, but its thoroughgoing application of the right to disregard criticism has made it a kind of fascinating anti-profession, a brotherhood of folly rather than of expertise.
The peril of orthodoxy is the second great pitfall of professionalism, and it’s not limited to economics. Every academic discipline with which I have some experience is similar: international relations, political science, cultural studies, even American history. None of them are as outrageous as economics, it is true, but each of them is dominated by some convention or ideology. Those who succeed in a professional discipline are those who best absorb and apply its master narrative.32
Our modern technocracy can never see the glaring flaw in such a system. For them, merit is always synonymous with orthodoxy: the best and the brightest are, in their minds, always those who went to Harvard, who got the big foundation grant, whose books are featured on NPR. When the merit-minded President Obama wanted economic expertise, to choose one sad example, he sought out the best the economics discipline had to offer: former treasury secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers, a man who had screwed up time and again yet was shielded from the consequences by his stature within the economics profession.
Look back to the days when government-by-expert actually worked and you will notice an astonishing thing. Unlike the Obama administration’s roster of well-graduated mugwumps, the talented people surrounding Franklin Roosevelt stood very definitely outside the era’s main academic currents. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closest confidant, was a social worker from Iowa. Robert Jackson, the U.S. Attorney General whom Roosevelt appointed to the Supreme Court, was a lawyer who had no law degree. Jesse Jones, who ran Roosevelt’s bailout program, was a businessman from Texas with no qualms about putting the nation’s most prominent financial institutions into receivership. Marriner Eccles, the visionary whom Roosevelt appointed to run the Federal Reserve, was a small-town banker from Utah with no advanced degrees. Henry Wallace, who was probably the nation’s greatest agriculture secretary, studied at Iowa State and came to government after running a magazine for farmers. Harry Truman, FDR’s last vice president, had been a successful U.S. senator but had no college degree at all.
Even Roosevelt’s Ivy Leaguers were often dissenters from professional convention. John Kenneth Galbraith, who helped to run the Office of Price Administration during World War II, spent his entire career calling classical economics into question. Thurman Arnold, the Wyoming-born leader of FDR’s Antitrust Division, wrote a scoffing and derisive book called The Folklore of Capitalism. Just try getting a job in Washington after pulling something like that today.
A third consequence of modern-day liberals’ unquestioning, reflexive respect for expertise is their blindness to predatory behavior if it comes cloaked in the signifiers of professionalism. Take the sort of complexity we saw in the financial instruments that drove the last financial crisis. For old-school regulators, I am told, undue financial complexity was an indicator of likely fraud. But for the liberal class, it is the opposite: an indicator of sophistication. Complexity is admirable in its own right. The difference in interpretation carries enormous consequences: Did Wall Street commit epic fraud, or are they highly advanced professionals who fell victim to epic misfortune? As we shall see again and again, modern-day liberals pretty much insist on the latter view, treating Wall Street with extraordinary deference despite all that went on during the last decade. This is no doubt due, in part, to Wall Street’s enormous political contributions. But anyone seeking to understand this baffling story must also take note of the widely shared view among Democrats that Wall Street is a place of enormous meritocratic prestige, on a level equivalent to a high-end graduate school. Wall Street’s veneer of professionalism is further buttressed by its complicated technical jargon, which (like other disciplines) the financial industry uses to protect itself from the scrutiny of the public.33
One final consequence of the ideology of professionalism is the liberal class’s obsessive pining for consensus. I have already mentioned President Obama’s remarkable zeal for bipartisan agreement; as we shall see, this is not his passion alone. Most of the Democratic leadership has shared these views for decades; for them, a great coming-together of the nation’s educated is the obvious objective of political work.
This obsession, so peculiar and yet so typical of our times, arises from professionals’ well-known disgust with partisanship and their faith in what they take to be apolitical solutions.34 If only they could bring Washington’s best people together, they believe, they could enact their common-knowledge program. That the Obama administration chose to fritter away months and even years pursuing this fantasy—with its health care proposal, with its deficit-reduction commission—could probably have been predicted based strictly on the educational pedigree of the president’s cabinet choices. Not to be too reductionist here, but it was all a class performance. It was the essence of professionalism.
ON THE LIBERALISM OF THE RICH

I am pressing on a sensitive point here. Democrats cherish their identification as the Party of the People, and they find it unpleasant to be reminded that affluent professionals are today among their most dedicated supporters. Democrats’ close relationship with the successful is not something they advertise or even discuss openly.
Exceptions to this rule are rare. One of the few works I know of that seems to approve, albeit with reservations, of liberalism’s alliance with a segment of the upper crust is the 2010 book Fortunes of Change, written by the philanthropy journalist David Callahan.35 The premise of his argument is that our new, liberal plutocracy is different from plutocracies of the past because rich people today are sometimes very capable. “Those who get rich in a knowledge economy,” the journalist tells us, are well-schooled; they often come from the ranks of “highly educated professionals” and consequently they support Democrats, the party that cares about schools, science, the environment, and federal spending for research. It is not a coincidence, Callahan continues, that “some of the biggest zones of wealth creation are near major universities.” The smart get richer and the dumb get … Republicans, I guess.
If we accept this equation between wealth and educational accomplishment, it begins to seem unremarkable that, in 2008, hedge funds and investment banks made Barack Obama the first Democrat to outraise his Republican opponent on Wall Street.36 There’s a simple reason that financial firms rallied to the Democrat on that occasion, Callahan suggests: because people on Wall Street, being very smart and very well-educated, are natural liberals. As the journalist reminds us, financial companies these days are populated not by “jocks” but by “quants,” by people who are familiar with “new financial products for managing risk or structuring debt, such as derivatives.”
As an example, Callahan points us to the D. E. Shaw Group hedge fund, which was founded by a man with a PhD from Stanford who gives enormous sums to Democratic candidates and who also employed former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers for a few years between Summers’s gig as president of Harvard and his next gig running President Obama’s National Economic Council. Callahan quotes at length from D. E. Shaw’s recruiting materials:

Our staff includes a number of Rhodes, Fulbright, and Marshall Scholars, Putnam Fellows, and the winners of more than 20 medals in the International Math Olympiad. Current employees include the 2003 U.S. Women’s Chess Champion, a Life Master bridge player, and a Jeopardy winner, along with a number of writers, athletes, musicians, and former professors. Over 100 of our employees hold PhDs, almost 40 are entrepreneurs who previously founded their own companies, and approximately 20 percent are published authors whose work ranges from highly technical papers in specialized academic journals to award-winning mystery novels.
To this honor roll of intellectual and financial achievement, Callahan appends the following observation: “This is definitely not the Sarah Palin demographic.”37
No. But neither is it a demographic with any particular concern for the fate of working people.

chapter 11
We have now observed several instances of the cycle of enthusiastic idealism that propels modern Democratic politics, as well as the lagging cycle of disappointment that invariably follows it. Both cycles are highly predictable given the economic desperation of ordinary Americans—and so is the next stage in the process: the transfer of this passionate idealism to Hillary Clinton. It is, as they say, her turn. After losing to Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries in 2008, she waited patiently for the years to pass, serving as his secretary of state, doing good works with the Clinton Foundation, and now she gets both to run for the presidency and to be the vessel of liberal hopes. It is to her that we will all soon look for our salvation.
As Hillary Clinton has no doubt noticed, the circumstances of 2016 present a striking similarity to the ones that put her husband in the White House in 1992. Again Americans are outraged at the way the middle class is falling to pieces and at the greed of the people on top. The best-seller lists are once again filled with books about inequality. Today Americans are working even harder for even less than when Bill Clinton made “working harder for less” his campaign catchphrase. The way Hillary Clinton—the way any Democrat—will play such a situation is extremely easy to guess.
“You see corporations making record profits, with CEOs making record pay, but your paychecks have barely budged,” Hillary declared in June 2015, launching her presidential campaign. “Prosperity can’t be just for CEOs and hedge fund managers.” On she talked as the months rolled by, pronouncing in her careful way the rote denunciations of Wall Street that were supposed to make the crowds roar and the financiers tremble.
That those financiers and hedge fund managers do not actually find Hillary’s populism menacing is a well-established fact. Barack Obama’s mild rebukes caused Wall Street to explode in fury and self-pity back in 2009 and 2010; the financiers pouted and cried and picked up their campaign donations and went home. But Hillary’s comments provoke no such reaction. Only a few days before she launched her campaign, for example, John Mack, the former CEO of Morgan Stanley, was asked by a host on the Fox Business channel whether her populist talk was causing him to reconsider his support for her. On the contrary: “To me, it’s all politics,” he responded. “It’s trying to get elected, to get the nomination.”1
“None of them think she really means her populism,” wrote a prominent business journalist in 2014 about the bankers and Hillary. The Clinton Foundation has actually held meetings at the headquarters of Goldman Sachs, he points out. He quotes another Morgan Stanley officer, who believes that “like her husband, [Hillary] will govern from the center, and work to get things done, and be capable of garnering support across different groups, including working with Republicans.”2
How are the bankers so sure? Possibly because they have read the memoirs of Robert Rubin, the former chairman of Citibank, the former secretary of the Treasury, the former co-head of Goldman Sachs. One of the themes in this book is Rubin’s constant war with the populists in the Party and in the Clinton administration—a struggle in which Hillary was an important ally. Rubin tells how Hillary once helped him to get what he calls “class-laden language” deleted from a presidential speech and also how she helped prevent the Democrats from appealing to “class conflict” in a general election—on the grounds that it “is not an effective approach” to the “swing voters in the middle of the electorate.”3
Trying to figure out exactly where Hillary Clinton actually stands on political issues can be crazy-making. As a presidential candidate, for example, she says she deplores the revolving door between government and Wall Street because it destroys our “trust in government”—a noble sentiment. When she ran the State Department, however, that door spun on a well-lubricated axis. As a presidential candidate, she opposes Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, as do I; as secretary of state, however, she helped negotiate it. As a presidential candidate in 2008, she claimed to oppose NAFTA, the first great triumph of the (Bill) Clinton administration; not only had she supported it earlier, but as a U.S. senator, she had voted for numerous Bush administration free-trade treaties.4
The same is true nearly wherever you look. The great imprisonment mania of the 1990s, for example: As first lady, Hillary’s appetite to incarcerate was unassuageable. “We need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders,” she said in 1994, kicking off a bloodthirsty call for more three-strikes laws. On another day, seven years later, Senator Hillary Clinton could be found urging law students to “Dare to care about the one and a half million children who have a parent in jail.”5 Even the well-being of poor women and children, Hillary’s great signature issue in her youth, had to hit the bricks when the time arrived in 1996 for welfare reform, a measure she not only supported but for which she says she lobbied.6
As a presidential candidate in 2008, Hillary liked to identify herself with working-class middle Americans; as a lawyer in Arkansas in the Eighties, however, she was a proud member of the board of directors of Wal-Mart, the retailer that has acted on middle America like a neutron bomb. As a student leader in the Sixties, she opposed the Vietnam War; as a senator in the Bush years, she voted for the Iraq War; as a presidential candidate, she has now returned to her roots and acknowledges that vote was wrong.
On the increasingly fraught matter of the sharing economy—the battle of Silicon Valley and Uber versus the workers of the world—Hillary actually tried to have it both ways in the same speech in July 2015. She first said she approved of how these new developments were “unleashing innovation,” but also allowed that she worried about the “hard questions” they raised. That was tepid, but it was not tepid enough. Republicans pounced; they harbored no reservations at all about innovation, they said. Hillary’s chief technology officer was forced to double down on her employer’s wishy-wash: “Sharing economy firms are disrupting traditional industries for the better across the globe,” she wrote, but workers still needed to be protected. This dutiful inhabitant of Hillaryland then rushed to remind “the tech community” of the ties that bound them to the Democrats: immigration, environment, and gay marriage. Republicans? Ugh: “very few technologists I know stand with them.”7
Times change. Politicians compromise. Neither is a sin. The way Hillary herself puts it is that while her principles never waver, “I do absorb new information.”8 Still, her combination is unique. She is politically capricious, and yet (as we shall see) she maintains an image of rock-solid moral commitment. How these two coexist is the mystery of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“I’M GOOD, I’M GOOD, I’M GOOD”

The one thing about Hillary that everyone knows and on which everyone agrees is how smart she is. She is an accomplished professional, a brilliant leader of a brilliant generation, a woman of obvious intelligence.
Rather than investigate her record, biographies of Hillary Clinton read like high-achieving résumés. They tell us about her accomplishments in high school in the Chicago suburbs, how she was student-body president at Wellesley College, what she said in her bold graduation speech in 1969, and how that speech was covered by Life magazine, which was in turn excited by the “top students” around the country who were rebelling even as they graduated. Then: the fine law schools into which Hillary was accepted, her deeds at the Yale law review, how she made the shortlist of lawyers invited to work on the Nixon impeachment inquiry, and how she could easily have bagged a partnership at a prestigious law firm but—in a risky gambit marveled at by everyone who writes about her—how she chose instead to move to Arkansas and join forces with that other prominent leader of the Sixties generation, Bill Clinton, who had managed to compile an impressive résumé in his own right.
Her biographers write about Hillary this way because her successes in the upper reaches of the meritocracy are what make her a leader. Indeed, Hillary talks this way herself. In 2001, when she was a U.S. senator from New York, she was still telling the story of how she made the hard choice between Yale and Harvard law schools. The theme of her 2008 presidential campaign was opening the most important job in the world to talent. As secretary of state in the Obama years, she repeated many times her belief that “talent is universal, but opportunity is not.” It is her motto, her credo, her innermost faith: that smart people are born free but everywhere they are in chains, prevented by unfair systems from rising to the top.9 Meritocracy is who she is.
The other persistent refrain in accounts of Hillary Clinton’s life is her dedication to high principle. Again, all her biographers agree on this, everyone knows it is true. The way Hillary negotiates between high-minded principle and the practical demands of the world is a theme that weaves itself into her story just as growth and self-actualization flavor biographies of her husband. It comes naturally to everyone who thinks about her, and it has since the very beginning, since her college commencement speech in 1969 rebuked those who thought of politics as “the art of the possible” rather than “the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.”
“Hillary always knew what was right,” declares biographer Gail Sheehy. “Over the long haul,” observes biographer David Brock, “she had no intention of conceding the substantive issues or bedrock principles to the other side.” Her 2008 campaign adviser Ann Lewis once described Hillary’s political philosophy with this inspirational-poster favorite: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”10
“Hillary’s ambition was always to do good on a huge scale,” writes biographer Carl Bernstein of her college years, “and her nascent instinct, so visible at Wellesley, to mediate principle with pragmatism—without abandoning basic beliefs—seemed a powerful and plausible way of achieving it.”11
That’s some slippery stuff right there, but you get the feeling that Bernstein is doing his best. After all, describing someone’s “ambition to do good on a huge scale” is like analyzing the harmonies of the spheres: it’s not easy. And it gets even less easy when Bernstein’s heroine goes to Yale Law School. There, the journalist writes, “she was a recognizable star on campus, much discussed among the law school’s students, known as politically ambitious, practical, and highly principled.”12
As first lady in the 1990s, Hillary Clinton went on to enthuse about some respectable something called the “Politics of Meaning” and was profiled in the New York Times Magazine as “Saint Hillary,” a woman who “would like to do good, on a grand scale, and she would like others to do good as well.” In a presidential primary debate in 2015, she announced, “I’m not taking a back seat to anybody on my values [and] my principles.”*
If you’re like me, all this talk of rock-solid principles makes you immediately wonder what those principles are. Young Hillary was “known” for them; she had no intention of ever conceding them; she takes second place to nobody in honoring them; but what they actually were is always left unspoken. The “politics of meaning,” yes, we remember hearing that phrase, but meaning what? What did it all mean?
NO CEILINGS

Nothing is more characteristic of the liberal class than its members’ sense of their own elevated goodness. It is a feeling that overrides any particular inconsistency or policy failing—the lousy deeds of Bill Clinton, for example, do not reduce his status in this value system. Still, it is not merely the shrill self-righteousness that conservatives love to deplore. Nor is it simply the air of militant politeness you encounter in places like Boston or Bethesda. It is more rarefied than that, a combination of virtue and pedigree, a matter of educational accomplishment, of taste, of status … of professionalism.
When this value system judges Hillary to be a woman of high idealism, what is being referenced might more accurately be called the atmosphere of acute virtue—of pure, serene, Alpine propriety—through which her campaign and, indeed, her person seems to move at all times.
I myself got a whiff of this intoxicating stuff on International Women’s Day in March 2015, when I attended a Clinton Foundation production at the Best Buy theater in New York City called No Ceilings. The happening I am describing wasn’t a campaign event—the 2016 race had not started at that point—nor was it a panel discussion, as there were no disagreements among participants or questions from the audience. Instead, it was a choreographed presentation of various findings having to do with women’s standing in the world. But if you paid attention, it provided a way to understand Hillary’s genuine views on the great social question before the nation—the problem of income inequality.
Onto the stage before us came Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s heiress apparent; Melinda Gates, the wife of the richest man in the world (the event was a coproduction with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation); various foundation executives; a Hollywood celebrity; a Silicon Valley CEO; a best-selling author; an expert from Georgetown University; a Nobel Prize winner; and a large supporting cast of women from the third world. Everyone strode with polished informality about the stage, reading their lines from an invisible teleprompter. Back and forth, the presenters called out to one another in tones of gracious supportiveness and flattery so sweet it bordered on idolatry.
In her introduction to the event, for example, the TV star America Ferrera, who has appeared at many Clinton events both philanthropic and political, gave a shout-out to the “incredible women who have brought us all here today” and the “amazing girls” whose conversation she had been permitted to join. Then Chelsea Clinton, who announced herself “completely awed” by the “incredible swell of people and partners” who had participated in some event the previous day, invited us to harken to the “inspiring voices of leaders, of communities, of companies, of countries.”13
Those were just the first few minutes of the event. It kept on like that for hours. When someone’s “potential” was mentioned, it was described as “boundless.” People’s “stories” were “compelling,” when they weren’t “inspiring,” or “incredible,” or “incredibly inspiring.” A Kenyan activist was introduced as “the incomparable.” A man thanked Hillary Clinton for her leadership, and Hillary Clinton in turn thanked someone for saying that women were harmed more by climate change than were men.
The real star of this show was the creative innovator, the figure who crops up whenever the liberal class gets together to talk about spreading the prosperity around more fairly. In this case, the innovations being hailed were mainly transpiring in the third world. “Every year, millions and millions of women everywhere are empowering themselves and their communities by finding unique, dynamic, and productive ways to enter the workforce, start their own businesses and contribute to their economies and their countries,” said Chelsea Clinton, introducing an “inspiring innovator and chocolatier” from Trinidad.
Melinda Gates followed up the chocolatier’s presentation by heaping up even more praise: “She was an amazing businesswoman, you can see why we all find her so inspiring.” Then, a little later on: “Entrepreneurship is really vital to women.… It’s also their ability to advance into leadership roles in corporations. And corporations play such a big role in the global economy.”
They sure do. The presence of Melinda Gates should probably have been a clue, but still I was surprised when the rhetoric of idealistic affirmation expanded to cover technology, meaning social media. Participants described it as one of the greatest liberators of humanity ever conceived. Do I exaggerate? Not really. Hear, again, the words of America Ferrera:

We’re hearing these stories for the first time because of a new thing called social media.… Twenty years ago, in many communities across the world, women and girls were often virtually silenced, with no outlet and no resources to raise their voices, and with it, themselves. And that’s huge. One out of every two people, 50 percent of the world’s population, without a voice. Social media is a new tool to amplify our voices. No matter which platform you prefer, social media has given us all an extraordinary new world, where anyone, no matter their gender, can share their story across communities, continents, and computer screens. A whole new world without ceilings.
“Techno-ecstatic” was the term I used to describe rhetoric like this during the 1990s, and now, two crashes and countless tech scandals later, here it was, its claims of freedom-through-smartphones undimmed and unmodified. This form of idealism had survived everything: mass surveillance, inequality, the gig economy. Nothing could dent it.
Roughly speaking, there were two groups present at this distinctly first-world gathering: hard-working women of color and authoritative women of whiteness. Many of the people making presentations came from third-world countries—a midwife from Haiti, a student from Afghanistan, the chocolate maker from Trinidad, a former child bride from India, an environmental activist from Kenya—while the women anchoring this swirling praise-fest were former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the wealthy foundation executive Melinda Gates.
What this event suggested is that there is a kind of naturally occurring solidarity between the millions of women at the bottom of the world’s pyramid and the tiny handful of women at its very top. The hardship those third-world women have endured and the entrepreneurial efforts they have undertaken are powerful symbols of the struggle of American professional women to become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies (one of the ambitions that was discussed in detail at the event) or of a woman to be elected president.
GOOD THINGS ARE GOOD

That was my first experience of the microclimate of virtue that surrounds Hillary Rodham Clinton. The mystic bond between high-achieving American professionals and the planet’s most victimized people, I would discover, is a recurring theme in her life and work.
But it is not her theme alone. Regardless of who leads it, the professional-class liberalism I have been describing in these pages seems to be forever traveling on a quest for some place of greater righteousness. It is always engaged in a search for some subject of overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness with which it can identify itself and under whose umbrella of virtue it can put across its self-interested class program.
There have been many other virtue-objects over the years: people and ideas whose surplus goodness could be extracted for deployment elsewhere. The great virtue-rush of the 1990s, for example, was focused on children, then thought to be the last word in overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness. Who could be against kids? No one, of course, and so the race was on to justify whatever your program happened to be in their name. In the course of Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book, It Takes a Village, the favorite rationale of the day—think of the children!—was deployed to explain her husband’s crime bill as well as more directly child-related causes like charter schools.
You can find dozens of examples of this kind of liberal-class virtue-quest if you try, but instead of listing them, let me go straight to the point: This is not politics. It’s an imitation of politics. It feels political, yes: it’s highly moralistic, it sets up an easy melodrama of good versus bad, it allows you to make all kinds of judgments about people you disagree with, but ultimately it’s a diversion, a way of putting across a policy program while avoiding any sincere discussion of the policies in question. The virtue-quest is an exciting moral crusade that seems to be extremely important but at the conclusion of which you discover you’ve got little to show for it besides NAFTA, bank deregulation, and a prison spree.
This book is about Democrats, but of course Republicans do it too. The culture wars unfold in precisely the same way as the liberal virtue-quest: they are an exciting ersatz politics that seem to be really important but at the conclusion of which voters discover they’ve got little to show for it all besides more free-trade agreements, more bank deregulation, and a different prison spree.
CHAMPION OF THE ONE TRUE INTERNET

The Clinton Foundation event gives us context in which to understand Hillary’s most important moment as a maker of policy—her four years as Barack Obama’s secretary of state. Although her purview was foreign policy, we can nevertheless see from her deeds at State how she thinks and the ways she intends to tackle inequality. The themes should be familiar by now: the Internet, innovation, and getting everyone hooked up to the financial industry.
In emphasizing these aspects of her tenure at the State Department, I do not mean to brush off the better-known diplomatic triumphs that Hillary Clinton engineered, like the international effort to isolate Iran. Nor do I mean to soft-pedal her better-known diplomatic failures, like the cataclysmic civil war in Libya, a conflict Clinton worked so hard to stoke that the Washington Post in 2011 called it “Hillary’s War.”14
The concern of this book is ideas, not diplomacy, and the first of the big ideas Hillary Clinton proposed at State was what she called “Internet Freedom.” This was to be the very “cornerstone of the 21st century statecraft policy agenda,” according to a State Department press release, and Secretary Clinton returned to the principle frequently. In a high-profile speech in January of 2010, she declared that, henceforth, the United States “stand[s] for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas.” Committing ourselves to defending this unified Internet from all who would censor it, she continued, was a logical extension of what Franklin Roosevelt had been after with his Four Freedoms; it wasn’t all that much different from the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, either. To Clinton it was a matter of direct moral simplicity: open expression on the Internet equals freedom; evil regimes are those that try to suppress that freedom with things like “a new information curtain.”15
Understanding the Internet as a force of pure nobility is a revered pundit tradition in the United States, and in the days when Clinton declared humanity’s Internet Freedom, those ideals were on the lips of every commentator. In the summer of 2009, the Iranian regime had violently suppressed a series of enormous street protests—protests that, the American pundit-community immediately determined, had been as much a testament to the power of Twitter as they were about any local grievance having to do with Iran itself. The so-called Twitter Revolution fit neatly into the beloved idea that new communications technologies—technologies invented or dominated by Americans, that is—militate by their very nature against dictatorships, a market-populist article of faith shared everywhere from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.16
Then there was the economic side of the single, unified Internet, and it, too, was all about liberation. For the “people at the bottom of the world’s economic ladder,” Hillary Clinton averred on that day in 2010, the Internet was a savior. She declared that a connection to it was “an on-ramp to modernity.” The fear that the Internet might create “haves and have-nots” was false, she continued; she knew of farmers in Kenya who were using “mobile banking technology” and of “women entrepreneurs” somewhere else in Africa who were getting “microcredit loans” and she also knew about a doctor who used a search engine to diagnose a disease.17 I guess she hadn’t heard about what was happening to journalists or musicians or taxi drivers in her own country, but I quibble; as long as this technology was free, anyone could see that it pushed in one direction only, and that was up.
Clinton spent much of her time as secretary of state leading the fight for this noble cause. “States, terrorists, and those who would act as their proxies must know that the United States will protect our networks,” she said in 2010. At a conference in The Hague in 2011, she took the stage to warn against evil regimes that “want to create national barriers in cyberspace” and to sympathize with business leaders facing tough questions like “Is there something you can do to prevent governments from using your products to spy on their own citizens?” She was introduced on that occasion by Google’s Eric Schmidt, who praised her as “the most significant secretary of state since Dean Acheson”; Hillary reciprocated by calling Schmidt a “co-conspirator” and welcomed the participation of his company, which she said was “co-hosting” the freedom-ringing proceedings.18
As everyone would soon learn with the help of a National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden, to understand the Internet in terms of this set-piece battle of free speech versus censorship was to miss the point entirely. There’s something else the Internet makes it easy for governments to do—something called “mass surveillance,” and, we later learned, the very government Hillary Clinton served was the one doing it. Not some despot in Damascus. Not some terrorist in Tripoli. Her government.
Her government didn’t care what you posted in the chat room or whether you talked on your phone all day long—they just wanted to watch and listen as you did. They recorded people’s calls. They read people’s email. They spied on the president of Mexico. They spied on French business leaders. They listened to the phone calls of some thirty-five world leaders. They hacked the cellphones of entire nations. They spied on low-level foreign diplomats in order to swindle them at the bargaining table.
Hillary Clinton never really had to confront these issues. She stepped down as secretary in February of 2013, while the first news stories about mass surveillance appeared four months later.* And maybe this is the wrong way to judge her crusade for Internet Freedom in the first place. Maybe access to the Internet was all people needed, somewhere on earth, to pull themselves up into prosperity.
Take the case of Western intervention in Libya, which her State Department once regarded as something of a triumph. According to a 2011 State Department press release, the Libya intervention showed how we could achieve “post-conflict stabilization using information networks”:

A leadership team at the ministry formed a plan called “e-Libya” to increase Internet access in the country and leverage this information network as a tool to grow new businesses, deliver government services, improve education, and interconnect Libyan society. Since the Qaddafi regime denied Internet access to more than 90% of Libyans, the potential for positive social, political, and economic change through access to information networks is considerable. The State Department led a delegation of experts to Tripoli to provide concrete expertise in network architecture, law and policy, e-commerce, and e-government for the e-Libya plan. It may become a model for “digital development” through technical knowledge exchange and partnerships across the public and private sectors.19
And then: Libya sank into civil war, with armed factions, outrageous brutality, and fleeing refugees. Making a stand for Internet Freedom sounded like a noble goal back in 2011—a cheap way to solve Libya’s problems, too—but in retrospect it was hardly sufficient to quell the more earthly forces that roiled that unhappy land.
“THE HILLARY DOCTRINE”

The other great diplomatic initiative during Hillary Clinton’s years as secretary of state was to recast the United States as the world’s defender of women and girls. This was the so-called Hillary Doctrine—a virtue-quest of the most principled kind.20 The one superpower was no longer to be an overbearing hegemon or a bringer of global financial crisis.
The secretary described the elements of the Hillary Doctrine in 2010 at a TED conference, that great agora of the liberal class. “I have made clear that the rights and the roles of women and girls will be a central tenet of American foreign policy,” she said, “because where girls and women flourish, our values are also reflected.”* It is, Clinton continued, “in the vital interests of the United States of America” to care about women and girls. Here was her reasoning: “Give women equal rights, and entire nations are more stable and secure. Deny women equal rights, and the instability of nations is almost certain.” Here was her conclusion: “the subjugation of women is therefore a threat to the common security of our world and to the national security of our country.”21
I was a little bit alarmed when I heard Secretary Clinton speak these phrases in her deliberate way. Ordinarily, the words “vital interest” and “national security,” when combined like this, suggest strong stuff: that the U.S. has a right to freeze assets, organize embargoes, and maybe even launch airstrikes—in this case, I suppose, against countries that score poorly on the gender-equality scale.
Not to worry. Like so many of the administration’s high-minded initiatives, this one turned out to be pretty mundane: the Hillary Doctrine was concerned largely with innovation, with foundations and private companies who would partner with us to do things like “improve maternal and child health,” “close the global gender gap in cellular phone ownership,” “persuade men and boys to value their sisters and their daughters,” and “make sure that every girl in the world has a chance to live up to her own dreams and aspirations.”22
Above all, the Hillary Doctrine was about entrepreneurs. It was women-in-business whose “potential” Hillary Clinton wished to “unleash”; it was their “dreams and innovations” that she longed to see turned into “successful businesses that generate income for themselves and their families.”23
Let us note in passing that, although the Hillary Doctrine sounded idealistic, it actually represented no great change in U.S. foreign policy. Its most obvious application was as a justification for our endless wars in the Middle East, which had commenced as a response to the terrorism of 9/11 and were now mutating into a campaign against sexism. Indeed, the principals of the Bush administration themselves sometimes cast their war with radical Islam as a feminist crusade, and the Hillary Doctrine merely picked up where the Bush Doctrine left off.24
But let’s not be too quick to brush the whole thing off as empty propaganda. Among other things, the Hillary Doctrine helps us understand what Hillary really thinks about the all-important issue of income inequality. Women entrepreneurs as the solution for economic backwardness is not a new idea, after all. It comes directly from the microfinance movement, the poverty-fighting strategy that has been pushed by the World Bank since the 1990s, and Hillary’s idea brings with it an entire economic philosophy. For starters, it is closely connected with the World Bank’s larger project of “structural adjustment,” in which countries were required to reform their economies in the familiar market-friendly ways—privatizing, deregulating, and downsizing—and, on the bright side, Western organizations would help those countries’ poor people with microloans.
It is hard to overstate the attraction of microlending to the liberal class, or at least to that part of it working in the foreign-aid sector. Microlending, such people came to believe, was the magic elixir for the disease of poverty, the financial innovation that would save the third world. Foundations embraced it. Thousands of careers were built on it. Billions of dollars were spent advancing it. The United Nations declared 2005 the “International Year of Microcredit.” Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who popularized microlending, won a Nobel Prize in 2006. Three years later, Barack Obama gave Yunus the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
It was all so simple. While national leaders busied themselves with the macro-matters of privatizing and deregulating, microlending would bring the science of markets down to the individual. Merely by providing impoverished individuals with a tiny loan of fifty or a hundred dollars, it was thought, you could put them on the road to entrepreneurial self-sufficiency, you could make entire countries prosper, you could bring about economic development itself.
What was most attractive about microlending was what it was not, what it made unnecessary: any sort of collective action by poor people, coming together in governments or unions. The international development community now knew that such institutions had no real role in human prosperity. Instead, we were to understand poverty in the familiar terms of entrepreneurship and individual merit, as though the hard work of millions of single, unconnected people, plus cellphones, bank accounts, and a little capital, were what was required to remedy the third world’s vast problems. Millions of people would sell one another baskets they had made or coal they had dug out of the trash heap, and suddenly they were entrepreneurs, on their way to the top. The key to development was not doing something to limit the grasp of Western banks, in other words; it was extending Western banking methods to encompass every last individual on earth.25
Microlending is a perfect expression of Clintonism, bringing together wealthy financial interests with rhetoric that sounds outrageously idealistic. Microlending permits all manner of networking, virtue-seeking, and profit-taking among the lenders while doing nothing to change actual power relations—the ultimate win-win.
Bill Clinton’s administration made microlending a proud point of emphasis in U.S. foreign policy, and Hillary has been a microlending enthusiast since her first days on the national stage. She promoted it as a form of female empowerment in a famous 1995 speech she made in Beijing and she supported microlending efforts wherever the first family traveled in the 1990s—there’s even an exhibit on the subject at the Clinton Presidential Library that shows Hillary giving a speech in the Gaza Strip in front of a sign that reads, “Women’s Empowerment Through Micro Lending.” In 1997 she cohosted a global Microcredit Summit in Washington, D.C., replete with the usual third-world delegations. Hillary’s own remarks on that occasion were unremarkable, but those of the president of the Citicorp Foundation were well worth remembering. Here is what he said to the assembled saviors of the third world:

Everyone in this room is a banker, because everyone here is banking on self-employment to help alleviate poverty around the world.
At the closing session of the summit, bankers joined national leaders singing “We Shall Overcome.”26
In the decade that followed, the theology of microlending developed a number of doctrinal refinements: the idea that women were better borrowers and better entrepreneurs than men; the belief that poor people needed mentorship and “financial inclusion” in addition to loans; the suggestion that they had to be hooked up to a bank via the Internet; the discovery that it was morally OK to run microlending banks as private, profit-making enterprises—many of the arguments that I had heard at the No Ceilings conference, expressed in the unforgettable tones of international female solidarity.
These ideas were the core of the Hillary Doctrine. Hillary’s ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, Melanne Verveer, declared in 2011 that “financial inclusion is a top priority for the U.S. government” and announced her terrible chagrin that “3 billion people in the world remain unbanked; the majority of them are women.” Hillary’s undersecretary for democracy and global affairs, Maria Otero, came to State from one of the biggest American microlending institutions; in her official U.S. government capacity, she expressed her joy at how microfinance had evolved “from subsidized microloans to a focus on self-sufficiency, to an emphasis on savings, to a full suite of financial products delivered by commercial regulated banks” and how all this had “affirmed the capacity of the poor to become economic actors in their own right.” Hillary herself proudly recalls in her memoirs how the State Department rebuilt Afghanistan by handing out “more than 100,000 small personal loans” to the women of that country.27
These are fine, sterling sentiments, but they suffer from one big problem: microlending doesn’t work. As strategies for ending poverty go, microlending appears to be among the worst that has ever been tried, just one step up from doing nothing to help the poor at all. In a carefully researched 2010 book called Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work?, the development consultant Milford Bateman debunks virtually every aspect of the microlending gospel. It doesn’t empower women, Bateman writes; it makes them into debtors. It encourages people to take up small, futile enterprises that have no chance of growing or employing others. Sometimes microborrowers don’t even start businesses at all; they just spend the loan on whatever. Even worse: the expert studies that originally sparked the microlending boom turn out, upon reexamination, to have been badly flawed.
Nearly every country where microlending has been an important development strategy for the last few decades, Bateman writes, is now a disaster zone of indebtedness and economic backwardness. When the author tells us that

the increasing dominance of the microfinance model in developing countries is causally associated with their progressive deindustrialization and infantilization
he is being polite. The terrible implication of the facts he has uncovered is that what microlending achieves is the opposite of development. Even Communism, with its Five Year Plans, worked better than this strategy does, as Bateman shows in a tragic look at microloan-saturated Bosnia.28
There’s a second reason the liberal class loves microfinance, and it’s extremely simple: microlending is profitable. Lending to the poor, as every subprime mortgage originator knows, can be a lucrative business. Mixed with international feminist self-righteousness, it is also a bulletproof business, immune to criticism. The million-dollar paydays it has brought certain microlenders are the wages of virtue. This combination is the real reason the international goodness community believes that empowering poor women by lending to them at usurious interest rates is a fine thing all around.29
GLOBALIZED COMPASSION MARKETS

The only entrepreneur who really matters here—Hillary herself—did extremely well by doing so much good. Companies needing a stiff shot of whitewash fell over one another to enlist in her State Department’s crusade for “Solutions for Good.”30 The investment bank Goldman Sachs “partnered” with the State Department in 2011 to give out business school scholarships to women entrepreneurs from Latin America. The following year, Clinton’s old friends at the low-wage retailer Wal-Mart announced a $1.5 million gift to State’s Women Entrepreneurship in the Americas program (“the effort will support the dreams of up to 55,000 potential women entrepreneurs,” the company boasted).31 Exxon was on board, too, helping State to register women-owned businesses in Mexico.
The figure of the female third-world entrepreneur, rescued from her “unbanked” state by Wall Street–backed organizations, mentored by her friends in the American professional class, expressing herself through social media—to this day it remains among the most cherished daydreams in the land of money. Everyone is infatuated with her—the foundations, the State Department, the corporations. Everyone wants to have his picture taken with her. Everyone wants to partner with everyone else to advance her interests and loan her money.
The professionals’ fantasies blend seamlessly one into another. The ideas promoted by the Goldman Sachs “10,000 Women Project,” for example, are not really different from those of Hillary’s own Vital Voices Foundation or Coca-Cola’s “#5by20” initiative or even the conscientious statements you find in State Department press releases. People move from one node of this right-thinking world to another and no one really notices, because the relocation signifies no meaningful change. They give one another grants and prizes and named chairs; they extol one another’s ideas and books; they appear together with their banker pals on panel discussions in Bali or maybe Davos; and they all come together to fix Haiti, and then to fix Haiti again, and then to fix Haiti yet again.
Hillary herself eventually moved from State to the Clinton Foundation, where she presided over a dizzying program of awards for the usual people, grants for some genuinely good causes, and the organizing of great spectacles of virtue like the one I attended in New York, a costly praise-o-rama featuring many of the very same people who worked for her in government.
What I concluded from observing all this is that there is a global commerce in compassion, an international virtue-circuit featuring people of unquestionable moral achievement, like Bono, Malala, Sting, Yunus, Angelina Jolie, and Bishop Tutu; figures who travel the world, collecting and radiating goodness. They come into contact with the other participants in this market: the politicians and billionaires and bankers who warm themselves at the incandescent virtue of the world-traveling moral superstars.32
What drives this market are the buyers. Like Wal-Mart and Goldman Sachs “partnering” with the State Department, what these virtue-consumers are doing is purchasing liberalism offsets, an ideological version of the carbon offsets that are sometimes bought by polluters in order to compensate for the smog they churn out.
At the apex of all this idealism stands the Clinton Foundation, a veritable market-maker in the world’s vast, swirling virtue-trade. The former president who stands at its head is “the world’s leading philanthropic dealmaker,” according to a book on the subject.33 Under his watchful eye all the concerned parties are brought together: the moral superstars, the billionaires, and of course the professionals, who organize, intone, and advise. Virtue changes hands. Good causes are funded. Compassion is radiated and absorbed.
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.
WHAT’S MISSING FROM THIS PICTURE?

One of the motifs of that Clinton Foundation event I attended on International Women’s Day in 2015 was the phrase “Not There,” a reference to the women who aren’t present in the councils of state or the senior management of powerful corporations. The foundation raised awareness of this problem by producing visuals in which fashion models disappeared from the covers of popular magazines like Vogue, Glamour, SELF, and Allure. According to a New York Times story on the subject, the Clinton people had gone to a hip advertising agency to develop this concept, so that we would all understand that women were missing from the high-ranking places where they deserved to be.
There was an even grander act of erasure going on here, but no clever adman will ever be hired to play it up. International Women’s Day, I discovered when I looked it up, began as a socialist holiday, a sort of second Labor Day on which you were supposed to commemorate the efforts of female workers and the sacrifices of female strikers. It is a vestige of an old form of feminism that didn’t especially focus on the problems experienced by women trying to be corporate officers or the views of some mega-billionaire’s wife.
However, one of the things we were there in New York to consider was how unjust it was that women were underrepresented in the C-suites of the Fortune 500—and, by implication, how lamentable it was that the United States had not yet elected a woman president.
There was no consideration—I mean, zero—of the situation of women who work on the shop floors of the Fortune 500—for Wal-Mart or Amazon or any of the countless low-wage employers who make that list sparkle. Working-class American women were simply … not there. In this festival of inclusiveness and sweet affirmation, their problems were not considered, their voices were not heard.
Now, Hillary Clinton is not a callous or haughty woman. She has much to recommend her for the nation’s highest office—for one thing, her knowledge of Washington; for another, the Republican vendetta against her, which is so vindictive and so unfair that I myself might vote for her in November just to show what I think of it. A third: her completely average Midwestern suburban upbringing, an appealing political story that is the opposite of her technocratic image. And she has, after all, made a great effort in the course of the last year to impress voters with her feelings for working people.
But it’s hard, given her record, not to feel that this was only under pressure from primary opponents to her left. Absent such political force, Hillary tends to gravitate back to a version of feminism that is a straight synonym of “meritocracy,” that is concerned almost exclusively with the struggle of professional women to rise as high as their talents will take them. No ceilings!
As I sat there in the Best Buy theater, however, I kept thinking about the infinitely greater problem of no floors. On the train to New York that morning I had been reading a book by Peter Edelman, one of the country’s leading experts on welfare and a former friend of the Clintons. Edelman’s aim was to document the effect that the Clintons’ welfare reform measure had on poor people—specifically on poor women, because that’s who used to receive welfare payments in the days before the program was terminated.
Edelman was not a fan of the old, pre-1996 welfare system, because it did nothing to prepare women for employment or to solve the problem of daycare. But under the old system, at least our society had a legal obligation to do something for these people, the weakest and most vulnerable among us. Today, thanks to Hillary and her husband, that obligation has been cancelled and we do almost nothing. The result, Edelman maintains, has been exactly what you’d expect: extreme poverty has increased dramatically in this country since Bill Clinton signed welfare reform in 1996.
For poor and working-class American women, the floor was pulled up and hauled off to the landfill some twenty years ago. There is no State Department somewhere to pay for their cellphones or pick up their daycare expenses. And one of the people who helped to work this deed was the very woman I watched present herself as the champion of the world’s downtrodden femininity.
Sitting there in gilded Manhattan, I thought of all the abandoned factories and postindustrial desolation that surround this city, and I mused on how, in such places, the old Democratic Party was receding into terminal insignificance. It had virtually nothing to say to the people who inhabit that land of waste and futility.
But for the faithful liberals at the Clinton Foundation gathering in New York, none of that mattered. The party’s deficit in relevance to average citizens was more than made up by its massive surplus in moral virtue. Here, inside the theater, the big foundations and the great fashion magazines were staging a pageant of goodness unquestionable, and the liberal class was swimming happily in its home element.
They knew which things were necessary to make up a liberal movement, and all of the ingredients were present: well-meaning billionaires; grant makers and grant recipients; Hollywood stars who talked about social media; female entrepreneurs from the third world; and, of course, a trucked-in audience of hundreds who clapped and cheered enthusiastically every time one of their well-graduated leaders wandered across the screen of the Jumbotron. The performance of liberalism was so realistic one could almost believe it lived.

Were you to draw a Venn diagram of the three groups whose interaction I have tried to describe in this book—Democrats, meritocrats, and plutocrats—the space where they intersect would be an island seven miles off the coast of Massachusetts called Martha’s Vineyard.
A little bit smaller in area than Staten Island but many times greater in stately magnificence, Martha’s Vineyard is a resort whose population swells each summer as the wealthy return to their vacation villas. It is a place of yachts and celebrities and fussy shrubbery; of waterfront mansions and Ivy League professors and closed-off beaches. It is also a place of moral worthiness, as we understand it circa 2016. The people relaxing on the Vineyard’s rarefied sand are not lazy toffs like the billionaires of old; in fact, according to the Washington Post, they have “far higher IQs than the average beachgoer.” It is an island that deserves what it has. Some of its well-scrubbed little towns are adorned in Victorian curlicues, some in the severe tones of the Classical Revival, but whatever their ornament might be they are always clad in the unmistakable livery of righteous success.1
It is ever so liberal. This is Massachusetts, after all, and the markers of lifestyle enlightenment are all around you: Foods that are organic. Clothing that is tasteful. A conspicuous absence of cigarette butts.
Here it is not enough to have a surgically precise garden of roses and topiary in the three-foot strip between your carefully whitewashed house and the picket fence out front; the garden must also be accessorized with a sign letting passersby know that “this is a chemical-free Vineyard lawn, safe for children, pets, and ponds.”
It is ever so privileged, ever so private. This is not Newport or Fifth Avenue, where the rich used to display their good taste to the world; the Martha’s Vineyard mansions that you read about in the newspapers are for the most part hidden away behind massive hedges and long, winding driveways. Even the beaches of the rich are kept separate from the general public—they are private right down to the low-tide line and often accessible only through locked gates, a gracious peculiarity of Massachusetts law that is found almost nowhere else in America.2
Over the last few decades, this island has become the standard vacation destination for high-ranking Democratic officials. Bill Clinton started the trend in 1993 and then proceeded to return to Martha’s Vineyard every year of his presidency except two—after presidential puppeteer Dick Morris took a poll and convinced Bill it would be more in keeping with the mood of the country if the first family visited a National Park instead.
Barack Obama, the next Democrat to occupy the White House, mimicked Clinton in policy decisions and personnel choices, and so it made sense to do exactly as his predecessor had done in vacation destinations. Obama, too, has spent all his presidential holidays on Martha’s Vineyard with one exception—the year he ran for reelection and needed to burnish his populist image. When you research the place, you keep bumping into cozy details like the following: the Martha’s Vineyard estate where Obama stayed in the summer of 2013 belonged to one David Schulte, a corporate investment adviser and Clinton intimate who met Bill at Oxford and Hillary at Yale, where Schulte was editor of the Yale Law Journal.3
People on Martha’s Vineyard sometimes say that politicians choose to vacation among them because the residents here are so blasé about celebrity that it’s no big deal, a president can just ride his bike down the street and no one cares. It’s a nice thought, but I suspect the real reasons Democratic politicians like to come here are even simpler. First of all, there’s security. Martha’s Vineyard is an island; it is remote by definition and difficult to travel to. People in many parts of the country have never even heard of it.
Then there’s the money. What has sanctified the name of Martha’s Vineyard among Democratic politicians are the countless deeds of fund-raising heroism that have graced the island’s manicured golf courses, its quaint hotels, and its architecturally celebrated interiors. During the summer season, when the island’s billionaires have returned like swallows to the fabulous secluded coastal estates they own, there are fundraisers every night of the week. Often these are thrown for the benefit of worthy charitable causes, not politicians, but of course it is the political fundraisers that make the headlines.
Political fund-raisers for Democrats, that is. In terms of partisanship, everyone is pretty much on the same page here. The only moment in recent years to cause the billionaires of Martha’s Vineyard to feel pangs of political unease was 2007, when both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were hitting the sweet spot of the liberal class. Both politicians showed up here to raise money, sometimes within a few days of each other. Who would line up with whom? Tensions ran high. Tycoon turned against tycoon. On Martha’s Vineyard, declared the New York Times, the presidential race “is dividing old loyalties, testing longtime friendships and causing a few awkward moments at the island’s many dinner parties.” The struggle between the two Democrats made situations fraught at resort communities across the country, the paper allowed. “But perhaps nowhere is the intensity as great as on the Vineyard because of its history, the pedigree of its residents and those residents’ proximity to power.”4
In the summer of 2015, all that fratricidal stuff was over. The Obamas and the Clintons were again sharing the island, but the mood was happy. This time, Hillary Clinton’s fund-raising operations could proceed without any real competition. Both first families went peacefully to Vernon Jordan’s birthday party, an important annual event in the Democratic calendar. Bill and Barack even played a round of golf together. And Hillary was the beneficiary of a fundraiser cosponsored by her admirer, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, an honest-to-god member of Europe’s most famous family of Gilded Age banker-aristocrats.5
THE LAND THAT LIBERALS FORGOT

Back in 1975, when Martha’s Vineyard was in the course of being gentrified from a working-class fishing community to what it is today, Tom Wolfe published a humorous story in which he told how “Media & Lit. people” from New York had started vacationing on that island, and how they were initially shunned by the flamboyantly preppy “Boston people” who then dominated the resort’s summer scene. But then the two groups start to mingle, and a sort of revelation comes. At a cocktail party one day in the mid-1970s, Wolfe’s narrator, an unnamed New York author, sees “a glimmer of the future”:

something he could barely make out … a vision in which America’s best minds, her intellectuals, found a common ground, a natural unity, with the enlightened segments of her old aristocracy, her old money … the two groups bound together by … but by what?… he could almost see it, but not quite … it was presque vu … it was somehow a matter of taste … of sensibility … of grace, natural grace.6
Today the melding of money with the literary sensibility is, in certain circles, an accomplished fact, and sometimes the perversity of the thing is capable of slapping you right in the face. I was reminded of this as I strolled through one of the polished, stately towns on Martha’s Vineyard and came across a shop selling reproductions of old T-shirts and sports memorabilia and the like. On the outside wall of the shop hung a poem by Charles Bukowski, because of course nothing goes better with tasteful clothing than transgressive poetry. It’s about the horror of blue-collar life, about how dehumanizing it is to do the kind of work that no one who passes by here ever does anymore:

I think of the men
I’ve known in
factories
with no way to
get out—
choking while living
choking while laughing
When I think of the men I’ve known in factories, I think of those locked-out workers I met in Decatur, Illinois, in the early days of the Clinton administration. What concerned them was not so much the existential frustration of blue-collar work as it was the fraying of the middle-class promise. Although they were “out,” they weren’t particularly interested in staying out; they would have been happy to go back in provided their jobs were safe and paid well. They wanted to live what we used to think of as ordinary lives.
In a scholarly paper about social class published in 1946, the sociologist C. Wright Mills found that “Big Business and Executives” in Decatur earned a little more than two times as much as the town’s “Wage Workers” did.7
In 2014, the CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, a company that dominates Decatur today, earned an estimated 261 times as much as did average wage workers. The CEO of Caterpillar, the focus of one of the Decatur “war zone” strikes I described in Chapter Three, made 486 times as much.8 Caterpillar’s share price, meanwhile, is roughly ten times what it was at the time of the strike.
Other changes to sweep that town since the war zone days of the 1990s are just as familiar, just as awful. For one thing, Decatur’s population has shrunk by about 12 percent since back then. Despite this outflow of people, as of early 2015 the place still had the highest unemployment rate in the state of Illinois. As a few minutes of Internet clicking will tell you, Decatur’s own citizens now rank their town extremely low on certain quality-of-life metrics; in a photographic guide to Decatur meant to promote tourism, the photographer recounts being threatened in a park while taking pictures.9
The two-class system that those men-in-factories spoke of during the strikes has pretty much come to pass. I mean this not only in the sense that Wall Street traders are very rich, but in the highly specific way that the two-tiered system the Caterpillar workers were protesting has been installed in workplaces across the country; as a result, younger workers will never catch up to the pay earned by their seniors no matter how many years they log on the job.
In 2015 I went back to Decatur to catch up with veterans of the war zone like Larry Solomon, who had been the leader of the local United Auto Workers union at the Caterpillar plant. He went back in after the strike ended but retired in 1998. When I met Solomon in his tidy suburban home, he talked in detail about the many times he got crossways with management in days long past; about all the grievances he filed for his coworkers over the years and all the puffed-up company officials he recalls facing down.
Think about that for a moment: a blue-collar worker who has retired fairly comfortably, despite having spent years confronting his employer on picket lines and in grievance hearings. How is such a thing possible? I know we’re all supposed to show nothing but love for the job creators nowadays, but listening to Solomon, it occurred to me that maybe his semi-adversarial attitude worked better. Maybe it was that attitude, repeated in workplace after workplace across the country, that made possible the middle-class prosperity that once marked us as a nation.
“We were promised, all during the time we worked at Caterpillar, that when you retire, you’re going to have a pension and full benefits at no cost to you,” Solomon recalled. He told about a round of contract negotiations he and his colleagues attended in the 1960s during which a management official complained, “We already take care of you from the cradle to the grave. What more could you want?”
Today, that old social contract is gone—or, at least, the part of it that ensured health care and retirement for blue-collar workers. Now, as Solomon sees it, companies can say, “We want your life, and when your work life is over, then good-bye. We thank you for your life, but we’re not responsible for you after we turn you out.”
Mike Griffin had been another outspoken union activist, in his case during the lockout at Tate & Lyle. We talked about the situation that faces the younger generation in Decatur, people for whom the basic components of middle-class life are growing farther and farther out of reach. Though they might not always get it politically, Griffin said, those workers can most definitely see how screwed they are. “One of the things that they do understand is that they got shit jobs with shit wages and no benefits and no health insurance,” he told me.

And they understand that they’re working two and three jobs just to get by, and a lot of them can’t own anything, and they understand seeing mom and dad forced into retirement or forced out of their job, now they’re working at Hardee’s or McDonald’s to make ends meet so they can retire in poverty. People understand that. They see that.
YOU! HYPOCRITE LECTEUR!

This book has been a catalogue of the many ways the Democratic Party has failed to tackle income inequality, even though that is the leading social issue of the times, and its many failures to get tough with the financial industry, even though Wall Street was the leading culprit in the global downturn and the slump-that-never-ends. The larger message is that this is what it looks like when a leftish party loses its interest in working people, the traditional number one constituency for left parties the world over.
But we should also acknowledge the views of the people for whom the Democrats are all you could ask for in a political party. I am thinking here of the summertime residents on Martha’s Vineyard—the sorts of people to whom the politicians listen with patience and understanding. No one treats this group as though they have “nowhere else to go”; on the contrary, for them, the political process works wonderfully. It is responsive to their concerns, its representatives are respectful, and the party as a whole treats them with a gratifying deference.
For them, the Democrats deliver in all the conventional ways: generous subsidies for the right kinds of businesses, a favorable regulatory climate, and legal protection for their innovations. Hillary Clinton’s State Department basically declared access to certain Silicon Valley servers to be a human right.
Then there are the psychic deliverables—the flattery, for starters. To members of the liberal class, the Democratic Party offers constant reminders that the technocratic order whose upper ranks they inhabit is rational and fair—that whether they work in software or derivative securities they are a deserving elite; creative, tolerant, enlightened. Though it is less tangible, the moral absolution in which Democrats deal is just as important. It seems to put their favorite constituents on the right side of every question, the right side of progress itself. It allows them to understand the war of our two parties as a kind of cosmic struggle between good and evil—a struggle in which they are on the side of light and justice, of course.
For people in the group I have been describing, there’s nothing dysfunctional or disappointing about Democratic politics; it feels exactly right. And what is rightest and most inspiring about it is the Democrats’ prime directive: to defeat the Republicans, that unthinkable brutish Other. There are no complexities to make this mission morally difficult; to the liberal class, it is simple. The Democratic Party is all that stands between the Oval Office and whomever the radicalized GOP ultimately chooses to nominate for the presidency. Compared to that sacred duty, all other issues fade into insignificance.
Let me acknowledge that I sometimes feel this way, too. It is true that Donald Trump seems outrageous and that Ted Cruz is a one-man wrecking crew, and I think it would be a terrible thing if they or any of the rest of the Republican lineup were to capture the nation’s commanding heights.
But even when it comes to containing the Republicans—the area where the Democratic Party’s mission is so clear and straightforward—it has not been a great success. Despite their highly convincing righteousness, despite their oft-touted demographic edge, and even despite a historic breakdown of the GOP’s free-market ideology, the Democrats have been unable to suppress the Republican challenge. The radicalized Republican Party seems to be conquering the nation, one state legislature at a time. What I saw in Kansas eleven years ago is now everywhere.
Even if Democrats do succeed in winning the presidency in 2016 and the same old team gets to continue on into the future, it won’t save us. While there are many great Democrats and many exceptions to the trends I have described in this book, by and large the story has been a disappointing one. We have surveyed this party’s thoughts and deeds from the Seventies to the present, we have watched them abandon whole classes and regions and industries, and we know now what the results have been. Their leadership faction has no intention of doing what the situation requires.
It is time to face the obvious: that the direction the Democrats have chosen to follow for the last few decades has been a failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health. “Failure” is admittedly a harsh word, but what else are we to call it when the left party in a system chooses to confront an epic economic breakdown by talking hopefully about entrepreneurship and innovation? When the party of professionals repeatedly falls for bad, self-serving ideas like bank deregulation, the “creative class,” and empowerment through bank loans? When the party of the common man basically allows aristocracy to return?
Now, all political parties are alliances of groups with disparate interests, but the contradictions in the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats posture as the “party of the people” even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on.
Yet it will go on, because the most direct solutions to the problem are off the table for the moment. The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way. There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor, the one social movement that is committed by its nature to pushing back against the inequality trend.
What we can do is strip away the Democrats’ precious sense of their own moral probity—to make liberals live without the comforting knowledge that righteousness is always on their side. It is that sensibility, after all, that prevents so many good-hearted rank-and-file Democrats from understanding how starkly and how deliberately their political leaders contradict their values. Once that contradiction has been made manifest—once that smooth, seamless sense of liberal virtue has been cracked, anything becomes possible. The course of the party and the course of the country can both be changed, but only after we understand that the problem is us.