In 1899, Thorstein Veblen published The Leisure of the Theory Class. It popularized the terms conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. Veblen, imbued with the austerity of his Norwegian immigrant parents, argued that the rich buy uselessly expensive things and indulge in uselessly expensive leisure activities to assert their superiority over the rest of society. Veblen’s strictures don’t describe American society today: Affluent people work more hours than those with average and low earnings, and increasingly dress casually, even if they’re returning now to downtown offices.
But what an unprecedentedly large number of affluent Americans — defined in polls as white college graduates, living in fashionable city neighborhoods or in comfortable high-end suburbs — have been conspicuously consuming, in their leisure hours and even at work, is politics. And a particular kind of politics, one that was once called “liberal” but is now increasingly dubbed “progressive,” that seeks policies that supposedly will help minorities and the disadvantaged but in many cases are opposed by large percentages of blacks and Hispanics, in some cases almost as much so as by the very large percentage of those included in the enormous subgroup of non-college graduate whites.
Rationales for these policies are readily supplied by progressive think tanks and academics in our nearly unanimously left-wing colleges and universities, by bloggers more or less loosely affiliated with each other, and by originally conservative but now progressive foundations. Theories out of kilter with common sense are advanced and validated by supposedly sophisticated academic research and studies. The result, to turn Veblen upside down, is politics as the leisure of the theory class.
This is the politics increasingly of the Democratic Party, the world’s oldest political party, whose fastest-growing and in many cases dominant constituency is the affluent and highly educated. This affluent constituency is buttressed by low-wage cadres of younger generations indoctrinated on campuses intolerant of dissenting opinions and contemptuous of large masses of their fellow citizens. They have done much to determine the politics of the Biden administration, supported by virtually all members of the narrow Democratic majority of the House of Representatives and by all but one or two of the 50 Democratic members of the Senate. Supported, too, by Democratic officials all over the country: governors in blue states and mayors in big cities, district attorneys and prosecutors in high-crime cities and counties, members of supposedly nonpartisan school boards and supposedly expert commissions.
Now, the results are in. On issue after issue — gun laws, crime control, immigration regulation, voting procedures, macroeconomic policy — politics as the leisure of the theory class has been found wanting. A political constituency with no skin in the game has pushed through policies based on theories that on inspection prove defective.
Before the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, crime was not a national issue. Since the middle 1990s, violent crime had been in decline nationally and in major cities, starting with New York, with an uptick in several cities after Black Lives Matter was founded to protest an incident in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. The weeks after Floyd’s death saw Black Lives Matter go national, with demands to “defund the police” and “mostly peaceful” demonstrations across the nation that turned into violent riots in 500 cities.
Democratic mayors in major cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Portland, and Minneapolis, did, in fact, reduce police funding, even as murders rose at a faster rate than during any year since 1960. Interestingly, this defunding was more popular among liberal, white college graduates than among blacks, the supposed target of police abuses but also more likely than average to be residents of high-crime neighborhoods.
Defunding the police was not the only criminal justice “reform” pushed by theory-minded liberals. Democratic prosecutors in cities including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, many of whom were financed by billionaire George Soros and elected with support from white, noncollege liberals, stopped requiring bail, stopped prosecuting “quality of life” crimes and supposedly minor robberies, and stopped seeking long sentences for violent crimes. These reforms were, in the words of Los Angeles DA George Gascon, “based on data and science that will enhance safety while reducing racial disparities and the misuse of incarceration.”
To many voters, such research seems suspiciously convenient and outweighed by incidents such as the recent shooting of two policemen by a released suspect in Los Angeles County. Criminal justice “reform” theories were plainly rejected when “woke” District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled by voters in overwhelmingly liberal San Francisco on June 7. Gascon, threatened with a recall, may be next. Several of the cities that partially defunded their police departments in 2020 went on to restore some funding in 2021.
Crime is not the only thing that is raging out of control. So is immigration. No line got greater cheers for Donald Trump in 2016 than his vow to build a “beautiful wall” on the southern border, and no Trump line aroused more fury among liberals. Less noticed was an initial surge of mostly ineligible asylum-seekers across the Rio Grande, which was stopped by Trump’s negotiation of a “Remain in Mexico” policy with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Enter the Biden administration, quickly stopping wall construction and scuttling Remain-in-Mexico. Anyone purported to be seeking asylum is admitted, often flown to the Northeast, and, sometimes, given an easily ignored order to attend a hearing. Official numbers tell an alarming though surely understated story. Southern border crossings fell under 50,000 a month in mid-2019 and throughout 2020, then zoomed to 160,000 a month in 2021 and have plateaued there every month. Border apprehensions from October to March stayed under (sometimes far under) 400,000 from 2012 to 2020. They soared to 1,000,000 in the six months ending March 2022.
Liberals who for years have lamented the plight of immigrants seem unfazed by what looks like the addition of more than a million new illegal immigrants in 18 months. The only principled basis for this policy is the view, surely shared by larger percentages of the leisure class than are willing to admit it, that the American border should be open, that Emma Lazarus’s “Give us your poor” poem carved into the base of the Statue of Liberty should be the guiding principle of immigration law.
For those unwilling to call for open borders publicly, the theory behind the Biden policy appears to be that Trump was betraying America’s tradition of welcoming immigrants and that any surge at the southern border could be solved by assigning Kamala Harris to reform dysfunctional societies in Central America. But recently large percentages of those waved through the southern border are from Haiti, the Middle East, and other even more distant locales.
Overall, this out-of-control inrush is a reversal of a benign post-2008 trend. The great recession that year saw a drop down toward zero of relatively low-skill immigrants from Mexico and Latin America. The 2010s saw a much smaller inflow of relatively high-skill immigrants — the kind who politicians on all sides of the immigration issue say they want. Now, thanks to the Biden policy, the United States will, for the first time in more than a decade, have a fast-growing illegal immigrant population again.
Polling shows that the strongest support for something approaching open borders immigration (or at least opposition to restrictions) comes not from Hispanic or Asian voters, even though the majority of recent immigrants are of those ethnicities, but from relatively affluent, white college graduates. That is, most often people with little or no personal stake in immigration. Their issue positions amount to conspicuous consumption by those for whom politics is a leisure activity far removed from the consequences.
If the leisure class’s theories seem to have little room for any limits on immigration short of an open borders policy, liberal politicians seem to have little room for any limits on access to voting — at least in politically marginal states. Case in point: Georgia, a heretofore Republican state that voted narrowly for Joe Biden and where the Republican legislature and governor rolled back some of the procedures they’d put in place in response to the COVID emergency. “Jim Crow 2.0,” cried Biden, who summoned up memories of Bull Connor, George Wallace, and Jefferson Davis (all Democrats, not that it matters). Amid this and other cries of “voter suppression,” Major League Baseball yanked the All-Star Game from Atlanta. Young readers may not realize how far removed from reality the comparison was. Reducing the number of drop boxes for ballots and banning the mailing of unsolicited absentee ballots, the two main provisions of the Georgia law, are nothing like the discriminatory and violent means by which black people in much of the South, including many parts of Georgia, were barred from voting at all before passage of the federal Voting Rights Act in 1965.
If the Georgia law was intended to suppress turnout, it failed: More than 1.9 million Georgians voted in the June 14 primary, far more than the 1.2 million voting in the corresponding primary in 2018. But the opposition to these laws, like the opposition to requiring picture identification for voting, is a matter of theory, not practice. Polls show large majorities of all groups favor a picture ID requirement, and, interestingly, nonwhites seem more in favor than partisan Democrats. That suggests that for many who approach politics as a leisure activity, opposing a widely supported measure such as requiring picture ID is a form of conspicuous consumption, virtue-signaling on behalf of supposed victims — the large majority of whom actually find the measure unobjectionable.
One area of public policy long affected by theory is economic policy. Since the 1930s, there have been vigorous debates over whether increasing or decreasing government spending will tend to produce optimal levels of employment and whether increasing or decreasing interest rates by central banks will do so. Inevitably, there is disagreement, among economists, among actors in financial markets, and between political parties.
Today, there is an unusually high level of agreement that almost all the experts, the economic theory class, got things wrong. Inflation is raging at levels not seen in America since the early 1980s, with the consumer price index increasing 8.6% over the last 12 months. In retrospect, it seems plain that vast government transfers to individuals, in the $900 billion coronavirus relief bill signed by Trump in December 2020 and the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan signed by Biden in March 2021, ballooned the money supply and increased consumer demand while supply was constrained by COVID restrictions and disruptions.
Only a handful of economists, including Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, predicted that these measures would stoke inflation. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen got it wrong, as they have since admitted, and so did market participants in their anticipations regarding interest rates.
How did economic theorists err so badly? Many noticed that after the 2007-2009 financial crisis and recession, government deficit spending and low interest rates didn’t produce inflation, as many Republicans predicted. Some embraced “modern monetary theory,” the idea that, according to James Whitford and Scott Centorino, “no amount of printing and spending money can cause real problems because the government can always raise taxes on the middle class to pull the devalued money out of the economy.”
But COVID damaged the economy in ways that the housing finance bust didn’t, disabling supply in some but not all sectors and imposing huge income losses on some but not all workers. As the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip summarized, “High demand and restricted supply are interacting in ways that economists struggle to calibrate.” Or, as longtime Democratic adviser Steve Rattner wrote in the New York Times, there was “way too much money sloshing around, particularly when supply problems (at least some of which should have been foreseen but weren’t) emerged.”
For those affluent liberals who see politics as a leisure activity and who, unlike most affluent voters in the 1980s, are quite willing to pay higher taxes in order to advance their liberal stands on cultural issues, massive payments to people were unproblematic virtue-signaling, a form of cost-free conspicuous consumption. This leaves the nation with an unbalanced electorate, a significant share of which is aware it has a concrete interest in greater government spending, but no substantial segment that cherishes a concrete interest in holding down spending.
Cost-free, that is, at least until voters get an idea of what is happening, as they now do every several days when they pull up to the gas pump and look as the digits rise above $100.00. As Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter has noted, polls show climate change as one of liberal Democrats’ primary issue concerns, and in response, the Biden administration strove to damage fossil fuel industries: canceling oil pipelines, reducing oil and drilling on federal lands, discouraging construction of new refineries or liquefied natural gas export terminals, raising required gasoline mileage standards, urging securities regulators and custodians of pension holdings to discourage corporations from investing in fossil fuel production and distribution. The unstated aim, as Obama Energy Secretary Steven Chu intimated, was to raise gasoline prices to European levels in order to discourage consumption and encourage the use of alternate fuels. But now that gas prices at the pump, the most visible indicator of inflation to a large majority of the public, have risen to record levels, the Biden administration is denying that it choked off oil and gas production and that the purpose of its energy policies has been to raise the price, and thereby reduce the consumption, of fossil fuels. As maverick Democratic commentator Josh Barro writes, “Why would voters trust Democrats on the issue? To gain that trust, they need to push for more domestic oil production.”
In recent years, researchers have taken second looks at many prominent academic studies in psychology and have found that they cannot replicate the same results. Since the essence of the scientific method is that empirical results are reproducible, this “replication crisis” undermines the credibility of many theories, including some that have been widely circulated among the general public. Similarly, one may remember that many epidemiologists’ projections of deaths from the coronavirus proved to be wildly off the mark. All of which is a reminder that academic models and scientific theories can never match the variety of human beings and of the world generally. The theories that underlie the political preferences of those for whom politics is a leisure activity have not held up under practice. On the contrary, they have produced out-of-control violent crime, out-of-control illegal immigration, and out-of-control inflation — a combination not seen since the 1970s. That decade was one of political discontent: One president was forced to resign from office, and his two successors were both defeated in the next elections. The politics of the theory class turn out often to be no more functional than Thorstein Veblen believed the conspicuous consumption of the leisure class was. The open question is when and how the nation, and especially those affluent Americans who see politics as a leisure activity and whose political opinions are guided by increasingly fallible theories, will move toward a more concrete, realistic politics, in which different groups vie over rational and realizable goals.
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, a resident fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, and the longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
