What Liberalism Has Become

The progressive website Naked Capitalism provides a links page everyday which I have found useful lately in so far as this has been an Outstanding Year in Flatland (see most of the posts I've written in the past 6 months.)

Today's links include an excellent article called What Liberalism Has Become. That article cited an Amazon review of Thomas Frank's new book Listen Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened To the Party of the People?

The theme in all cases is that classic Democratic "liberals" actually represent and embody America's elites. No argument here. In fact, that's been a major revelation for millions of people this year. I thought you might find some of that Amazon review interesting. Here it is, with some emphasis added. I also made a few edits for clarity.

[Frank's] explanation of why the Democratic Party does not represent the interests of its largest constituency is grounded in the moral judgment of its leadership. That judgment prefers “meritocracy” or social hierarchy built on the claim to superiority based on (actual or claimed) knowledge rather than social solidarity, which is the underlying principle of organized labor.

Frank 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 rise 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?

That is always the right question to ask — what is missing?

One clue can be found in his bibliography — despite impressive documentation of his claims, his bibliography misses a rather obscure, to be sure, work by Walter Karp titled “Indispensable Enemies”.

This book attempts to answer the same question as Frank’s work does — why don't the US political parties represent the interests of their constituents? — but the answer it provides emphasizes the structure of the party system rather than the [moral] preferences of party leaders.

Karp’s explanation is a variant of what is known as Robert Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy” which in essence claims that...

Here it is.

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 consecutive 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 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 McClellan).

That completes the interesting part. Here's the obligatory hope, which involves swapping out one set of ruling elites for another in the Democratic Party.

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 wrest 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  to their superiors, hat in hand, for a change of heart.

Don't hold you breath waiting for a "change of heart."

Have a nice weekend.

 

Comments

[Benjamin David Steele]

That was a good review. I sometimes enjoy book reviews more than the books themselves. But I did read some of Frank's book. From what I read, most of it was depressingly familiar material. It's a decent book about liberalism by a liberal. But I think we ultimately need to be thinking further outside the box and most definitely we need to question our long held assumptions. I've been trying to shake up my own thinking lately.