Review of Thomas Frank, "Listen Liberal"

In this book the author takes another stab at one of the biggest paradoxes of American politics – why the political parties in the US do not represent the interests of their largest constituencies.  The short answer that Frank gives to this question is “betrayal of the working and the middle classes” by the leadership of both parties.  His previous work that gained international recognition, “What is the Matter with Kansas?” explores the process of capturing the “angry white voters” by the Republican Party leaders by manipulating anti-elite feelings (anti-liberal elite, to be more exact) of this group of voters.  In this book, he extends his exploration to trace how that group of voters was pushed away from the Democratic Party that used to represent their interests under the “New Deal” arrangement. 

Frank traces the roots of this process to the Vietnam War era struggles, when the anti-war protests created a rift within the party between the pro-war blue collar labor and their unions and the anti-war students and intellectuals.  The loss of the 1968 election to Richard Nixon sent the Democratic Party leadership on a long soul searching quest, in which the new social forces represented by professional and academic elites wrestled the control of the party from the labor unions and tied it to the socio-economic classes created by the “New Economy” – financial professionals and information technology specialists.  This process was finalized by Clinton administration that performed one of the most spectacular turn-arounds in modern American history –the open abandonment of social protections favoring the poor and passage of the free trade agreement that eliminated large number of well-paying blue collar jobs (which the Clinton administration called “counter-scheduling”) coupled with deregulation of financial markets that opened the door for financial speculation, and massive subsidies for “innovation economy,” that is, information technology and big pharma.

These policies continued under Obama administration, which abandoned the campaign promise of “hope” for the notion of “pragmatism,” which according to Frank is a subterfuge masquerading policy choices favoring the elites as historical or technological inevitability.  Despite his pro-working and middle class rhetoric, Obama filled his administration with experts of one particular mold – graduates of elite universities.  In sharp contrast to FDR, who picked experts from various backgrounds, often representing unorthodox opinions, Obama’s “expertocracy” was the paragon of professional orthodoxy and right thinking.  Frank explains this selection of experts by Obama, and Clinton’s, own personal histories – both men were of humble origins and propelled to the top of social hierarchy by elite university education.

Social science explanations of historical evens range between two polar opposites – voluntaristic and deterministic.  The voluntaristic narratives, also known as “great men history”, attribute the causes of the events they try to explain to the preferences and choices made by individuals, especially those in leadership positions.  The deterministic narratives, by contrast focus on impersonal factors – institutions, international relations, modes of production, natural events and the like that set the stage and define the roles for individual actors to play.  Of course, in reality both factors must be taken into account.  As Karl Marx aptly observed “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Frank’s narrative falls on the voluntaristic side.  His explanation of why the Democratic Party does not represent the interests of its largest constituency is grounded in the moral judgment of its leadership.  The judgment that prefers “meritocracy” or social hierarchy built on the claim to superiority based on (actual or claimed) knowledge to social solidarity, which is the underlying principle of organized labor. The remedy that Frank offers is voluntaristic as well – it explicitly denies the possibility of any change in the US political party structure and calls for a moral transformation of party leadership consisting in the abandonment of the sense of moral superiority linked to college credentials. 

For someone who spent his entire adult life in the academia, Frank’s analysis certainly rings true.  This institution is filled with “stuffed shirts” who raise to the top by becoming adept in what passes for “right thinking” at the moment, hiding their lack of originality under obscure technical jargon, and collecting handsome rent from their credentials, titles, and positions.  Allowing this bunch near the halls of power can indeed be risky.  As William F. Buckley quipped “I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”  Yet this moral explanation and moral remedy that Frank offers is somewhat disappointing when we consider the fact that similar transformations occurred in socialist and social democratic parties in many European countries as well.  This coincidence cannot be simply explained by the change of heart of the people leading those parties.  We must look into the structural determinants.

What structural elements are missing from Frank’s narrative, then?  One clue can be found in his bibliography – despite impressive documentation of his claims, his bibliography misses a rather obscure work by Walter Karp titled “Indispensable Enemies”.  This book attempts to answer the same question as Frank’s work does – why the US political parties do not represent the interests of their constituents – but the answer it provides emphasizes the structure of the party system rather than preferences of their leaders.  Karp’s explanation is a variant of what is known as Robert Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy” which in essence claims that the leadership of an institution is first and foremost concerned about its own power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself.  In case of US political parties, the party bosses are more concerned with keeping their control of their respective parties than with winning elections, and they tacitly cooperate by excluding any challenge to their leadership by dividing up their respective turfs in which they maintain their respective monopolies.  Paradoxical as it may sound, such behavior is well known outside politics where it is referred to as oligopoly or niche seeking. 

Karp’s thesis offers a much better explanation of the abandonment of the working class and middle class constituents by both parties than the preference for meritocracy claimed by Frank.  Even from Frank’s own account of the Democratic Party’s ‘soul searching’ in the aftermath of Humphrey’s defeat in 1968 it is evident that that the emerging party leadership was not afraid of losing a series of elections (McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis) before they could cement their hold on the party under Clinton.  Clearly, a party whose leadership’s main goal is to win elections would not make such a cardinal mistake as losing elections for 20 years by abandoning their core constituency.  Likewise, Obama’s abandonment of the “hope” promise led to a spectacular loss of both houses of Congress and numerous state legislatures, but that did not persuade the party leadership to change the course.  Au contraire, they are determined to keep the course and undermine any challenge to the party leadership (cf. Sanders).  This is not the behavior of a general who wants to win a war (cf. Robert E. Lee), but of one who wants to keep his position in his own army (cf. George Brinton McClellan).

Taking into account Karp’s explanation of partisan politics would also offer a far more dramatic finale for Frank’s book.  Instead pleading for a moral change in the existing party leadership, a more effective solution would be to replace that leadership with a new one by using the same gambit of counter-scheduling as Clinton did against labor, and voting against Hillary Clinton in November.  That would surely result in the electoral loss for the Democrats in the coming election, but it would certainly help to wrestle the control of the party from the leaders who “betrayed” their main constituents.  Perhaps this is not the road that Frank, and many life-long Democrats for that matter, are willing to travel, but it certainly makes a better and more uplifting story - one that gives the downtrodden masses, whose side Frank takes, a promise of doing something about the problem instead of pleading their superiors, hat in hand, for a change of heart.