Some people collect baseball cards, and others collect race horses, but I collect books that rethink liberalism. I’ve got books with titles like The Next Left and The New Liberalism, Who Needs the Democrats? and They Only Look Dead, stretching all the way from the mid-sixties right up to the present. If you spend enough time with these tomes you become a connoisseur of the genre, savoring the way each era’s intellectuals envision a new liberal majority; how, like war-game generals, they assemble different groups to form imaginary coalitions; how they identify their errors (the diagnoses change but, deliciously, the self-flagellation stays the same). After a while, you can smell an invocation of Herbert Croly five pages in advance. And just by looking at a book’s cover you can predict how early its author will cite the Gautreaux program, the HUD operation that successfully moved Chicago welfare mothers to the suburbs.
For most of the past decade, my collection has allowed me to explore the joys of higher Schadenfreude (I still happily reread a 1983 volume entitled Rethinking Liberalism that holds up the nuclear-freeze movement as the cornerstone of the coming progressive era). But the past few years have presented conservative connoisseurs with a dilemma. This is a golden age of liberal reinterpretation. Virtually all of the best progressive rethinking books of the past half century have been written in the 1990s, by E. J. Dionne, Michael Tomasky, Stanley Greenberg, Dick Morris (in his own way), and others. And lately the politicians seem to be paying attention. The Clinton administration has unleashed a flurry of proposals that draw, at least superficially, from this new literature. In recent weeks, the Clintonites have moved to expand Medicare, create new child-care programs, multiply job- training programs, raise the minimum wage — all policy initiatives that get bruited about by the current crop of rethinkers. So while the intellectual rewards to be gained from the literature of liberal revivalism are greater than ever, the aficionado’s Schadenfreude is endangered. These books are too good. Perhaps the Democratic party is growing a brain.
That would be a problem for the Republicans. GOP types are willing enough to concede that the Democrats, especially Bill Clinton, can be tactically smart. But most conservatives are still sure that liberalism is intellectually bankrupt. History is flowing our way, goes the right-wing mantra; it’s just a question of hurrying it along. But maybe that isn’t so. Maybe with an era of federal surpluses in sight, historical breezes really have shifted. Maybe conservatives will find themselves facing a headwind, bracing against an intellectually revived foe.
In the old days, liberal rethinking suffered from a series of debilitating flaws. Most authors couldn’t cede any moral legitimacy to American conservatism, didn’t know anything about the American Right, and couldn’t explain conservatism’s rise. (They guessed it had something to do with Ronald Reagan’s charm or Lee Atwater’s malevolence.) Furthermore, many of the writers had guilty consciences about people to their left. They knew the Democratic party had moved too far left for the voters. But they couldn’t quite bring themselves to make a principled case against the Left, and something about them still smacked of the graduate-student group home, the Greenpeace bumper sticker, the used Volvo. Finally, there were just too many rethinkers. Liberals were asked to redefine their creed every few weeks. Robert Reich alone seemed to produce a redefining book every month, sometimes applauding globalism, sometimes opposing it, sometimes celebrating Japan, sometimes deploring it. So despite all the verbiage, no liberal vision cohered. The incessant reappraisals used to make liberalism seem like a person who had had his face lifted 27 times; all the natural contours were gone.
These flaws have now been at least partially corrected. The editors of the Nation may still believe that everybody who disagrees with them is scum, but the best new liberal rethinkers, like Dionne, Tomasky, Greenberg, John Judis, Jacob Weisberg, Alan Brinkley, and Harold Meyerson, are fair and sophisticated about American conservatism. They’ve read the conservative sources and they understand the reasons for conservative successes. They don’t think we’re just a bunch of greedheads adept at playing the race card.
More important, most of the current liberal rethinkers do not have a no- enemies-to-the-left mindset. On the contrary, for many, the primary task is to distinguish liberalism from the cultural left, to drive a wedge between the political and economic progressivism they defend and the identity politics of the culturati. The best new liberal rethinkers have undisguised disdain for the liberal elites of the sixties, seventies, and eighties who, seduced by the comforts of the campus, so indulged in transgressive-lifestyle theorizing that they lost touch with ordinary people. A proper liberalism, these rethinkers say, jettisons all that elitist stuff and focuses on the real-life concerns of the middle class.
A series of theoretically inclined liberals like Todd Gitlin (ambivalently), Theda Skocpol, Arthur Schlesinger, and Michael Tomasky (forcefully) have mounted assaults on the cultural left’s identity politics. These writers tend to argue for a return to Enlightenment universalism and against the sectarian nationalisms of the multicultis. They invoke Thomas Paine, Voltaire, the Declaration of the Rights of Man. They emphasize the rights and duties that unite people, not the race and gender differences that divide them.
In the sacred troika of race, class, and gender, the post-sixties liberal elites put class a distant third. Most of the new liberal thinkers, by contrast, put class first. Magazines like Mother Jones, the Nation, and the American Prospect now expend much of their ink on working-class economic anxieties: wage stagnation, downsizing, and the minimum wage. Today’s liberal rethinkers are more concerned with union organizing than with Rigoberta Menchu, bell hooks, or Robert Redford. As Betty Friedan wrote recently in the New Democrat, “I sense the need for a paradigm shift beyond feminism, beyond sexual politics, beyond identity politics altogether. . . . There’s a mounting sense that the crises we are now facing . . . can no longer be seen in terms of gender.”
Having learned from Christopher Lasch, the new rethinkers project genuine respect for middle-class and working-class values. You can now find liberal writers who do not automatically heap scorn on the Promise Keepers. You can read an entire issue of a liberal magazine these days without anyone telling you that the Ozzie and Harriet nuclear family never existed and wasn’t any good anyway. Law-and-order talk is no longer automatically seen as code language for racism.
You wouldn’t know it from watching the president, but many liberal thinkers are even having second thoughts about affirmative action. (As you read this literature, it’s crucial to remember that whatever the Democratic brain may say, the Democratic body obeys its own imperatives.) Magazines like Mother Jones, the Progressive, and even Ms. have argued that the emphasis on affirmative action has taken liberalism off in the wrong direction, separating liberal thinkers from their working-class roots. An influential figure here is sociologist William Julius Wilson, who concludes that affirmative action has done almost nothing to help the poor. Wilson does not come out foursquare against affirmative action — he thinks current programs should be made more flexible — but he does argue that economic inequality is more important than racial discrimination. The correct strategy for liberals, he writes, is to pursue redistributive economic policies that unite working Americans across racial lines.
Many liberal thinkers, then, are trying to accomplish in the realm of ideas what Clinton accomplished in the realm of presidential politics. They seek to perform highbrow Sister Souljah repudiations and thereby to distance themselves from the cultural left and reestablish their credibility with the middle class. This sets up an odd paradox. These days, conservatives have political power and dream of gaining cultural power. The liberals have cultural power and would repudiate it in hopes of gaining political power. Which goes to show that in the intellectual-activist world, nobody is ever happy.
The recent liberal rethinking has crystallized into a coherent storyline. According to this tale, the key fact of contemporary life is the transition from an industrial economy to a menacing global Information Age economy. American workers are now forced to compete with low-wage Chinese workers. Families have to work longer and harder just to stay in place. Educated elites prosper as never before, but for the bottom two-thirds or three- quarters of Americans (different writers have different numbers), life is rough. This creates an opportunity: The Democratic party, these rethinkers argue, should forget about the upscalers and rebuild its majority from the bottom up.
This premise underlies two different streams of thinking. One is a macroeconomic liberalism, which focuses on wages and workplace issues; the other, a family-security liberalism, which emphasizes social and parental issues. The two streams are different in mood and give priority to different policies, but politicians like Ted Kennedy and Dick Gephardt blend them freely in their platforms.
Jeff Faux, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, is a leading spokesman for macroeconomic liberalism. He suggests that the Democratic party should tell the country: “The American dream is fading. More Americans will have to work harder to prevent their living standards from failing further. People now under 35 years of age are doing worse than their parents. On our current path, the future generations will do even worse.”
Then, just as all America is reaching for the gas pipe because life is so depressing, the Democratic party should step forward with a series of big solutions. The macroeconomic liberals assume that the globalization of the economy and the free flow of capital and jobs are not inevitable facts of history. They believe that international trade and investment can and should be regulated. Governments should assert power over financial markets (which tend to withdraw capital from nations that pursue socialist policies, like Mitterrand’s France). Diplomats should negotiate social charters that set basic labor and environmental standards to be met as a prerequisite for trade. Macroeconomic liberals believe that central banks worry too much about inflation and so strangle growth and job creation. The central banks should loosen up.
Domestically they are neo-New Dealers. They believe in big public-works projects, a higher minimum wage, massive retraining schemes, jobs programs to guarantee full employment, and nationalized health care. They are not averse to tax simplification — Dick Gephardt has a plan — but they passionately defend progressive taxation.
This line of thinking is present in all the global-economy stories in the Nation and the American Prospect. It is tirelessly explicated not only by Faux’s EPI, but also by Robert Borosage’s coalition, Campaign for America’s Future, and the many offshoots of the AFL-CIO. Its spokesmen include Robert Kuttner, John Judis, John Sweeney, Linda Chavez-Thompson, Richard Trumka, Robert Reich, Alan Brinkley, and literally thousands of others. This argument informs Richard Gephardt’s proto-presidential campaign and the coalition that defeated fast-track trade authority.
The family-security liberals, on the other hand, concentrate less on people as workers and economic beings and more on Americans as parents and social beings. This is liberalism with a softer, more feminine face. Stanley Greenberg, who was Clinton’s pollster in 1992 and is Tony Blair’s now, states the core notion of family-security liberalism this way:
People are working longer hours, rarely getting real raises, and can’t keep up. Democrats want to help families succeed in this period of change. We should ensure expanded access to education and college. We should help parents keep their kids safe and help with family leave and flextime. We should ensure that people have adequate health insurance and secure retirement. In this period of change, families need somebody on their side.
This stream of liberalism emphasizes government not so much as the great employer or redistributor of income, but as a buffer, offering families safety and security in the midst of the stresses of the Information Age economy. If the macroeconomic liberals talk in the gruff voice of John Sweeney, the family-security liberals sometimes sound as soothing as Mr. Rogers.
Though fewer writers explicate the family-security message (Harvard’s Theda Skocpol is one), liberal pollsters and politicians love it. They appreciate its non-threatening language and its appeal to married women voters. It’s easy to find family-security plans of action if you cruise around the Web sites of the Democratic party. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, for example, put together a program in 1996 called “Families First. ” When the Clinton administration wears its liberal-activist face, as it is doing now, it eagerly promotes its family-security proposals.
Strategically, all of the current liberal rethinkers, whether of the macroeconomic or the family-security branch, are populists. They believe there is an inchoate majority out there waiting to be tapped. The Democratic party, they are convinced, could mobilize this majority if it would just break with the big donors, the Robert Rubin fiscal types, the Dick Morris triangulators, the entitlement-cutting Democratic Leadership Council moderates, and instead aggressively promise the working class big programs. In the short run, they hang their hopes on the labor movement. They’d like to see more grass-roots organizing and class-warfare rhetoric. As Barney Frank argued in his 1992 book Speaking Frankly: What’s Wrong With the Democrats and How to Fix It, the Democrats should worry about values and the cultural issues only to neutralize Republican attacks. That accomplished, they should play on economic anxiety and family insecurity. They should be willing to offend the college-town enlightened liberals and upper-middle-class deficit hawks in order to make plain to the middle class that the Democrats are true populists. Eventually, middle-class Americans, enraged by wage stagnation, widening inequality, and the injustices of the global economy, will revolt. Liberal populism will prevail.
All of this is thrillingly audacious. American creeds have usually tried to ride waves of optimism to majority status, but this liberalism aspires to ride pessimism about the global economy. The current political climate encourages incremental measures and symbolic gestures, but the liberal populists describe huge problems and call for sweeping remedies. They aim at nothing less than the regulation of the entire world economy. The liberal populists are standing athwart history and yelling, Stop! What conservative would not feel a frisson of pleasure at such radicalism? For connoisseurs of political writing, this is exciting stuff.
It also, of course, may be nuts. The liberal populists claim that alarming levels of middle-class frustration over wage stagnation and widening inequality are simmering below the surface of American life. But if this frustration exists, it has a funny way of showing itself. Consumer confidence is at a 28-year high. There is relatively little hostility toward the corporate sector. In the last election, Americans said the country was basically on the right track and reelected incumbents in large numbers. Bill Clinton, who preaches that the economy is good and improving and fights for free trade, has the highest approval ratings in the land.
Moreover, the liberal populists utterly misread the populist sentiment that does exist. They assume that working-class Americans were so offended by the cultural liberalism of the Democratic elites, they forgot they actually liked the big-government liberalism the Democratic party was also offering. Get rid of the Woodstock Nation whipped cream, these rethinkers hope, and working families will flock back to the Eugene V. Debs apple pie.
But the evidence suggests that the white middle class rejected liberalism on both economic and cultural grounds. You can spend a lifetime cruising the outlet malls without detecting a single whiff of class consciousness or impulse for collective action. In the 1930s people may have identified themselves with “the common man,” but nobody speaks that language today. Everybody these days thinks he is better than the common man, and nobody sees his destiny linked to that of his fellows. There is scant evidence that great pools of opinion still favor huge government employment programs or global regulation schemes.
In 1996, Stanley Greenberg asked a sample of working-class men and women how they were doing. They consistently overestimated where they stood vis-a- vis the median income. They had no faith in government to help them improve their economic status, but assumed they would have to make any gains on their own, by taking a second job, working overtime, or starting a business. If they had any larger view of society, these people divided the world between those who work and those who live off those who work. As the relentlessly honest John Judis wrote in reporting on Greenberg’s findings, “The workers Mr. Greenberg surveyed retain a commitment to earlier achievements of progressivism, but they have moved dramatically away from collective and institutional approaches.”
This mindset has created a brand of populism all right, but not the kind the liberal rethinkers like. It is a virulently anti-government populism. The liberal rethinkers sometimes argue that the working classes gravitate to people like Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and Rush Limbaugh only because the Democrats are too timid to offer true economic populism. In other words, the working classes seek out the most vicious government bashers because they cannot find the big-government boosters they really want. If this were true, it would amount to false consciousness on a startling scale.
The liberal rethinkers also see the resurgent labor movement as a sign that the middle class may be rediscovering collective action. The AFL-CIO is indeed more aggressive and more intelligently led than it has been for a while. But the liberal populists draw an unwarranted conclusion. They seem to have forgotten that labor’s might comes from compulsory dues, not from rank- and-file fervor for the Democratic party. If the unions were not strong enough to stop Ronald Reagan, they are not strong enough today, with their ranks reduced and still dwindling, to form the basis of a new majority politics. “Who builds this class based liberalism?,” Harold Meyerson asks in a recent survey of liberal books in the American Prospect. “There is a missing link in this scenario — some institution that could promote greater racial solidarity among American workers and could challenge the power of business in Congress, that could help [organize and guide] the party.” The liberal populists lack an agent of change.
Moreover, the liberal rethinkers are going to find it more difficult than they imagine to jettison the liberal elites. If you look at liberalism from the outside, economic liberalism seems like a flea; it has had relatively little influence on American life over the past quarter century. Elite cultural liberalism, on the other hand, is a giant elephant. It has been massively influential. Employers now worry about getting the right number of women and minorities around the table when they hold a meeting. Journalists casually assume that a senator’s or a cabinet secretary’s mindset can be inferred from her sex. Public schools don’t teach labor history, but they do fall for every multicultural fad under the sun. William Julius Wilson wrote a book called The Declining Significance of Race; yet all around us, American life offers evidence of the declining significance of class.
In part this is because the working class (whatever that means these days) is no longer the most influential group in society. That distinction belongs to the educated upper-middle class. There are now 7 million households in America with incomes over $ 100,000 a year, and their influence on the marketplace, the culture, the media, and the categories of thought is enormous. This mass upper class — even its many liberals — does not think in terms of class conflict. Its members think in bohemian-versus-bourgeois terms (if they think in terms of conflict at all).
Maybe it was possible to build class consciousness at a time when reporters, broadcasters, movie producers, and teachers came from working-class backgrounds. But now these people are college graduates, the children of college graduates even, and they are reading Scott Turow, not John Steinbeck. Maybe you could build a class movement when the Democratic party was staffed by proletarian ethnics organized into urban machines. But now the Democratic party is staffed by lawyers and media consultants.
The upper-middle class has taken over progressive opinion just as it has taken over everything else, and its causes are affirmative action, a tobacco ban, campaign-finance reform, gay rights, global warming, the balanced budget, and multicultural recognition, not class war or trade restrictions. That’s why liberal groups like Greenpeace collapse when they try to move beyond their upper-middle-class base and gin up working-class support. That’s why the politically astute Bill Clinton has decided that race and affirmative action are more salient issues than the class struggle.
There are even signs the liberal rethinkers secretly know that the world has changed and that their vision is out of step with the age. If the global economy really is a menace, and Americans will recognize this someday, then it is in the long-term interest of the Left to distance itself from a Clinton administration deeply implicated in free trade and globalization.
But the liberal populists have little of the adversarial fire that characterized the conservative movement when it was trying to upend its own party’s centrist establishment. Ronald Reagan ran against Gerald Ford in 1976 and energized conservatism. Conservative-movement leaders from the 1970s into the 1990s waged full-throated war on the Republican elites before finally gaining a measure of control over the party.
Liberals, on the other hand, decided not to run anyone against Bill Clinton in 1996, and the liberal argument essentially dropped off the radar screen. Mario Cuomo and Jesse Jackson stood up at the Democratic Convention in Chicago and effectively endorsed the party’s shift to the center. Today, the liberal populists and House Democrats fall in line with the Clintonites every time the administration drops them a few crumbs, like an expansion of Medicare for affluent people and a neoliberal day-care program. Meanwhile, it’s not even clear that the liberal populists will launch a serious campaign against Al Gore in 2000. Dick Gephardt hedges his anti-globalization message to preserve his bona fides with the elites; in any case, some labor leaders apparently are urging him not to run in order to give Gore a clearer shot at victory.
The Left made a few stabs at opposition with its fight against NAFTA and its work to defeat fast-track trade authority. But the liberal populists have been too timid to mount any clear and comprehensive assault on Democratic internationalism. Maybe they believe their own rhetoric about how evil the Republicans are. Maybe they think a Republican president — the possible result of a temporary Democratic split — really would destroy the nation. Maybe the liberals have been down so long they have terminally low expectations. Or maybe the liberal populists have simply been coopted by the Democratic elites. But just possibly, liberals know deep down that liberal populism is not the wave of the future. They write audacious books but practice tepid politics.
Needless to say, most Republicans would like to see the liberal populists take over the Democratic party, because they’re confident the liberals would lead the Democrats to disaster at the polls. The deeper you read even in the smart 1990s literature of rethought liberalism, the more it seems that the liberal populists, in their heart of hearts, believe that too.
David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
