Mr. Frank who brought us the incredible _What’s the Matter with Kansas?_ and _The Wrecking Crew_ has now finally turned his learned, capable lens on the Democratic Party. I’ve been waiting for this for years, and his new book does not disappoint. The full book title is: “Listen, Liberal What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?”
The timing for this book is totally perfect— since obviously there’s more or less a war going on in Bloggo world, this election cycle, on just what a good “Democrat” is and what does the party stand for. reading Frank’s book will help you understand why some of us here occasionally use the phrase “new Democratic party” to describe how the party was moved significantly to the right the last thirty years or so— and how Bill Clinton played a large role in this shift. here’s an excerpt:
In Robert Reich’s understanding of the world circa 1991, not a whole lot could be done for that part of the population who worked in blue-collar jobs. In the future, people would either have to become servants of the symbolic analysts or become symbolic analysts themselves. Reich assured us that the latter was possible, if we dedicated ourselves to spending more on education, infrastructure, and job training. Unlike other dominant classes in history, there was technically no limit on the number of people who could join this favored cohort, who could grow up and “sell symbolic-analytic services worldwide.” In theory, everyone could become a yuppie.
A more serious objection is that Reich’s plan to put people on the path to symbolic analysis simply missed the point. The problem of inequality was more fundamental than upgrading the jobs people did. During the ’92 campaign, one of Clinton’s best lines had been that Americans were “working harder for less”; what he was acknowledging when he said this was one of the basic facts of the decades-long inequality debate: that worker productivity was going up but wages were not.
This was—and remains—essential to the inequality problem. Before the late 1970’s, productivity and wage growth had always increased in unison—as workers made more stuff, they earned more money. But by the early 1990’s, the two had clearly separated. Workers made more stuff than ever before, but they no longer prospered from what they made. Put differently: Workers were working as hard and as well as ever; they simply weren’t reaping the profits from it. Wall Street was. This was a massive and fundamental disorder, but one thing it was not was a failure of education. Had the problem been one of inadequate worker skills, productivity would not have been increasing so fast.
Note: U.S. worker production and productivity _wayyyyy_ up the last thirty years. and worker income growth? Nearly _zero_ for thirty years. that’s a big problem.