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September 1, 2006
Guest Columnist
Rendezvous With Oblivion
By THOMAS FRANK

Over the last month I have tried to describe conservative power in
Washington, but with a small change of emphasis I could just as well have
been describing
the failure of liberalism: the center-left's inability to comprehend the
current political situation or to draw upon what is most vital in its own
history.

What we have watched unfold for a few decades, I have argued, is a broad
reversion to 19th-century political form, with free-market economics
understood
as the state of nature, plutocracy as the default social condition, and,
enthroned as the nation's necessary vice, an institutionalized corruption
surpassing
anything we have seen for 80 years. All that is missing is a return to the
gold standard and a war to Christianize the Philippines.

Historically, liberalism was a fighting response to precisely these
conditions. Look through the foundational texts of American liberalism and
you can find
everything you need to derail the conservative juggernaut. But don't expect
liberal leaders in Washington to use those things. They are "New Democrats"
now, enlightened and entrepreneurial and barely able to get out of bed in
the morning, let alone muster the strength to deliver some
Rooseveltian stemwinder
against "economic royalists."

Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical
Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our
modernized
liberal leaders offer - that is, when they're not gushing about the glory of
it all at Davos - is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those
flattened
by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of
the situation and to try to understand how we might retrain or re-educate
ourselves so we will fit in better next time.

This last point was a priority for the Clinton administration. But in "The
Disposable American," a disturbing history of job security, Louis Uchitelle
points
out that the New Democrats' emphasis on retraining (as opposed to broader
solutions that Old Democrats used to favor) is merely a kinder version of
the
19th-century view of unemployment, in which economic dislocation always
boils down to the fitness of the unemployed person himself.

Or take the "inevitability" of recent economic changes, a word that the
centrist liberals of the Washington school like to pair with
"globalization." We
are told to regard the "free-trade" deals that have hammered the working
class almost as acts of nature. As the economist Dean Baker points out,
however,
we could just as easily have crafted "free-trade" agreements that protected
manufacturing while exposing professions like law, journalism and even
medicine
to ruinous foreign competition, losing nothing in quality but saving
consumers far more than Nafta did.

When you view the world from the satisfied environs of Washington - a place
where lawyers outnumber machinists
27 to 1
and where five suburban counties rank among the
seven wealthiest in the nation
- the fantasies of postindustrial liberalism make perfect sense. The reign
of the "knowledge workers" seems noble.

Seen from almost anywhere else, however, these are lousy times. The
latest data
confirms that as the productivity of workers has increased, the ones
reaping the benefits are stockholders.
Census
data tells us that the only reason family income is keeping up with
inflation is that more family members are working.

Everything I have written about in this space points to the same conclusion:
Democratic leaders must learn to talk about class issues again. But they won't
on their own. So pressure must come from traditional liberal constituencies
and the grass roots, like the much-vilified bloggers. Liberalism also needs
strong, well-funded institutions fighting the rhetorical battle. Laying out
policy objectives is all well and good, but the reason the right has
prevailed
is its army of journalists and public intellectuals. Moving the economic
debate to the right are dozens if not hundreds of well-funded Washington
think
tanks, lobbying outfits and news media outlets. Pushing the other way are
perhaps 10.

The more comfortable option for Democrats is to maintain their present
course, gaming out each election with political science and a little
triangulation
magic, their relevance slowly ebbing as memories of the middle-class
republic fade.

Thomas Frank, a guest columnist, is the author, most recently, of "What's
the Matter With Kansas?''

Copyright 2006
The New York Times Company

I absolutely love this man.

Miriam V.