Boston Review recently hosted a virtual roundtable featuring contributors to a new collection of essays, Mastery and Drift: Professional-Class Liberals since the 1960s, published by University of Chicago Press. A full video of the event is below. The transcript that follows is of the second half of the event, with moderated discussion. It has been lightly edited for clarity.
On February 18, in his inaugural memo as newly elected chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin was candid in his diagnosis. “When I talk about the state of the Democratic Party,” he wrote, “I often speak about the impact of perceptions—what voters see, feel, and sense. I believe the canary in the coal mine for what happened on November 5 was the recent showing that, for the first time in modern history, Americans now see the Republicans as the party of the working class and the Democrats as the party of the elites.” He continued: “We have to take seriously the job of repairing and restoring the perceptions of our party and our brand. It’s time to remind working Americans—and also show them every day—that the Democratic Party always has been and always will be the party of the worker.”
But is this just a matter of mistaken perceptions? And is the work of repair just a matter of rebranding? In Mastery and Drift, edited by historians Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer, the contributors suggest that the matter runs far deeper. On their collective read, the fate of the contemporary Democratic Party and the broader web of institutions in which it’s embedded is tied up in a much longer term and more fundamental emergence and transformation of what they call “professional-class liberalism” since the 1960s.
Of course, talk of this development isn’t new. The American right has long crowed about the overweening influence of liberal elites for several decades. And in the wake of the defeat of the Clinton campaign in 2016, many intellectuals on the left revived a ’70s-era analysis of the so-called “professional-managerial class” as a critique of the Democratic establishment. Mastery and Drift—the title a deliberate inversion of Drift and Mastery, Walter Lippmann’s seminal 1914 treatise on American liberalism—avoids such polemics in favor of a longer and more searching historical perspective.
Across the volume’s fifteen chapters, the authors explore areas as diverse as philanthropy, consulting, health care, welfare, race, immigration, economics, and foreign policy. Across all these domains, they contend we can distinguish two major trends from the 1960s. First is the rising prominence of a new generation of professional-class liberals: lawyers, economists, policy experts, nonprofit executives, pollsters, political consultants, journalists, and more, driven especially by the major expansion of graduate and professional education over this period. Second is the emergence of a distinctive form of liberal governance: the fetishism of expertise and pragmatism, a kind of techno-optimism and abiding faith in data-driven policy—or as the editors put it, a “deep satisfaction at finding sophisticated and, for citizens, difficult-to-comprehend legal and technical policy fixes.” It is a markedly technocratic imaginary of governance, one that suited the sensibilities and maybe even the interests of this new professional class. But it’s also one that broke markedly with the sweeping and sometimes structural reforms of earlier generations of American liberalism, and one that arguably appears increasingly exhausted and inadequate in the face of the overlapping crises engulfing us today.
Within the American historical profession, much attention in the last few decades has been devoted to the rise of American conservatism: its distinctive roots and singular success, particularly since the 1980s. And certainly, the policy priorities of this current administration, despite all its populist rhetoric and its trenchant attacks on the administrative state, suggests that history remains vitally important for making sense of our present. But as the authors of this volume submit, the obverse of this conservative rise is the civic disembedding of American liberalism and its circumscription to a large, if demographically narrow, slice of elite professionals. From this perspective, yet another Democratic Party PR rebranding exercise might not be fully adequate to the task. Historians don’t like making predictions, but at the very least, the impact of the seismic developments charted in the volume are sure to define a terrain of struggle for the foreseeable future.
—Simon Torracinta, contributing editor
Simon Torracinta: Both the introduction and many of the book’s contributions compare post-Sixties professional-class liberalism to earlier forms of liberalism: late-nineteenth-century African American ideas of racial uplift, Progressive Era liberalism, corporate liberalism, the Cold War liberalism of midcentury. What is distinctive about this post-1960s moment? What is new versus what is old?
Nicole Hemmer: Recently, historians have focused on pulling out the connections between what was happening in the 1950s and 1960s and what came after. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, for instance, talks about how much of the formula for neoliberal housing was built into the Great Society—a time we think of as the triumphant moment of liberalism.
What I found, both in this book and in my own work, is that the liberalism that comes after the 1960s is so much smaller—its visions are smaller, its ideas of state capacity are smaller. And that does not necessarily lead inherently to neoliberalism, but the liberalism that remains seems to me to be very cramped in terms of its goals and its vision.
Brent Cebul: I think it’s exactly right that the visions are smaller. But it’s also the case that the state is so much bigger: the population of the country is so much bigger; spatially, the range of projects the state is carrying out is so much bigger. And that begs for a certain degree of expertise. This was the case in past decades, too—we can point to the role of lawyers in FDR’s “Brain Trust,” for example—but these experts were working at the beginning of the growth of the state. And I think one of the biggest constraints that professional-class liberals after the 1960s are working under is the nature of the state itself: the path dependency, the agencies, all of this stuff.
It’s important to take the complexity of the state apparatus and these liberals’ self-conception of doing good at face value—I think that really matters. But it also really matters how that intention is being articulated. In many cases, it is being articulated through economics, through the law, through the sorts of incremental, highly technical, very specific types of knowledge that are required to do a lot of this big state work. So on some level, I think what’s missing is a moral vision that can galvanize and call for a reorganizing of the state in macro terms and not just micro terms.
Lily Geismer: There is also a need to rebuild the liberal-left coalition. There are great chapters in the book by Julilly Kohler-Hausmann and Timothy Shenk about the role of pollsters and other kinds of voting experts in sculpting the electorate: deciding who matters and doesn’t matter in terms of who’s part of the coalition. That shift hugely shaped liberalism after the 1960s, and it contributes electorally and politically to the new professional-class orientation as well. This is also a period where you see liberalism make a real divorce from both left organizations like unions and the aspirations that defined other moments of the liberal project, particularly the New Deal. There is a lack of real concern about the meanings of organized labor, for instance.
Dylan Gottlieb: We could call this new orientation a post–New Left liberalism. It has been injected with skepticism about the state and its overwhelming power that is also directed at labor unions and large corporations—Nader is a perfect example. It’s a rejection of totalizing, dominating large institutions. It’s very much of the New Left, but stripped of the New Left’s radical politics. It’s an orientation that can be expressed culturally—toward alienating institutions and stultifying jobs, or toward a government that’s oppressive and inefficient.
And who is its hero? It’s a new type of protagonist: a technocrat who can cut through sclerotic institutions and produce change, to declare on the stump that the New Deal is over. These figures are using some of the tools of the state to work toward foreshortened ends—not necessarily to the utopian horizons of the New Left. But even if they’ve abandoned some of the ends, they retained that tinge of anti-statism and anti-institutionalism that can manifest as a right neoliberalism for some or a liberal neoliberalism for others.
Simon Torracinta: One common theme many of the contributions trace is liberals’ skepticism of the untrammeled exercise of state power, or cautiousness about using the state. Where does that skepticism come from? What are its roots? And how does it shape this particular liberal governance that you’ve been describing so far?
Danielle Wiggins: In my chapter, I discuss its particular expression in Black politics. I use the term “state skepticism” to describe what I see as an impulse that is underscoring this politics of self-help and this kind of enduring preference for private sector–driven social welfare and Black politics. The people I’m describing—Black professional liberals—are not completely anti-statist. Compared with Black nationalists and Black conservatives, who are anti-statist, Black professional-class liberals in government and civil rights organizations are constantly demanding aggressive state intervention into the structures of racial inequality. But at the same time, they have a very pragmatic awareness of the harms of the liberal state: its history of abandonment, its overt forms of violence, and its constant interventions to uphold Jim Crow capitalism.
So Black activists across the political spectrum, even those that are working within the state apparatus by the time we get to the post-1960s, recognize that Black folks can’t depend on the state because it’s the very same liberal state that has shored up white political and economic rights through—not only at the expense of, but through—the exclusion and exploitation of Black people. And so, in contrast to some of the other kind of state skepticism that we see among other professional-class liberals, Black professional-class liberals’ state skepticism is grounded not in a critique of the excesses of the Great Society or the inefficiencies of midcentury liberalism, but instead a critique of liberalism’s limitations and violences.
Nicole Hemmer: I would add that by the time you get to the Obama years, you’ve had thirty to forty years of conservative governance since the 1970s. And I do think that liberals, if they didn’t entirely imbibe all of the conservatives’ critiques of government, certainly imbibed some of them. There was also some skepticism about how well they could sell big government to the American people. That leads to policies like the Obama administration’s idea of “nudges”—the idea that you can create preferences for people, push people in a certain direction, without having direct government intervention. The government is going to take a kind of paternalistic role in pointing you toward the things they think are good for you, but in a way that is unobtrusive—so it wouldn’t look like government was doing anything. And of course, this was very cheap, because they didn’t want to spend money on anything.
Brent Cebul: One point that I think is really important historically as well, and that I think is something that liberals after the 1970s are also grappling with in the project of political memory, is just how much of the New Deal and midcentury state relied on structuring markets and not actually doing big public delivery of public goods (with the exceptions of things like confiscatory top marginal tax rates and social security and certain regulatory features). So much of how the New Deal state worked was by insuring markets, by working through private intermediaries. The Cold War military Keynesian state was the classic example of that. Part of the difficulty that post-1960s liberals and conservatives have—and this is, frankly, what Elon Musk and Donald Trump are facing right now—is that when we talk about limiting big government, what we’re actually limiting are expenditures that work through private or subnational intermediaries.
That makes for a sort of shadowboxing political climate where you can see on the page that the government spends a lot of money—that there are a lot of grant officers, contractors, and supervisors, as Stephen Macekura’s chapter shows—but the state itself both is there and isn’t there. That makes for a sort of spiraling, anti-statist, hyper-privatization rhetoric, when in fact, that was often how the liberal state functioned historically. And this also makes it very difficult for liberals to point to moments of robust public sector action in the past.
I’ve written about Bill Clinton’s pretty dramatic calls for industrial policy in the early 1990s. And the best he could come up with as a precedent for what he was trying to do was the highway system. I think that’s another piece of this—there’s a deeper continuity that has made the political imagination far narrower than it might otherwise be.
Lily Geismer: Not to make everything hyper-presentist, but I do think we should reckon with the fact that liberals have contributed to the modern-day version of state skepticism for a number of different reasons and in a number of ways. We should not just blame this on Musk and Trump coming in and doing this all of a sudden. It is a continuous narrative, and part and parcel of the particular version of professional-class liberalism that had a lot of dominance in the 1990s through the Obama administration: a liberalism that believed in the simultaneous existence of both technically savvy approaches to government on the one hand and market approaches to make government more efficient on the other. There is an interesting duality there—and one that is much more of a continuity story with than a clean break from what’s happening right now.
Simon Torracinta: I’m going to pivot to some questions from the audience. First, is professional-class liberalism necessarily a form of neoliberalism, given the evolution of the global capitalist economy after the 1970s—Bretton Woods, free trade, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, etc.? We might broaden the question in general by asking: What do you see in this volume as speaking to or differentiating from histories of neoliberalism?
Brent Cebul: I don’t think that professional-class liberalism is necessarily a component of neoliberalism. We try to lay that out clearly in the book’s introduction. I think in any governing apparatus as complex and ambitious as the U.S. state continues to be, you’re going to need public-spirited, well-trained experts. But I think—and you see these parallels in Western Europe and other developed nations—is that as the ranks of these professionally trained experts have emerged, what you’ve seen is a simultaneous winnowing of the political imagination among liberals.
This is part and parcel of the class composition of the institutions they’re a part of. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s got to be a part of a neoliberal project, but it means that those institutions that they’re a part of need to be subordinated within a broader moral and sociopolitical vision. And so I don’t think we’re ever going to simply get rid of professional-class liberals (though Musk and Trump are certainly trying to do it). Instead, I hope we can attach their mastery to a much more robust social vision.
Dylan Gottlieb: I do think that the relative health of institutions in a shifting political economy is key, too. The decline of unions as the institutional backbone of the Democratic party: that is essential here. The Fordist model of unionized employees who were psychically aligned with liberalism as much as they were deeply embedded in the organizations that mobilized them and created a common project—that does decline. That is an aspect of the postindustrial transformation that we’re tracking: maybe always not explicitly, but it’s in the background.
And in its stead, there are new forms of flexible accumulation—you might say financialization or casualization. Philanthropy takes an increasing role in liberal life (we have a chapter in the book about that). Finance comes to the fore. The journalists I write about in my chapter are in these flexible workplaces where no one is in a union. No one has health insurance. It’s very precarious. And so we can track the decline of the institutions that undergirded the liberal coalition as a kind of parallel story to neoliberalism—it’s certainly related, but it is not the totality of that transformation.
Brent Cebul: And this is all part of a broader project of socially disembedding and fragmenting people. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you couldn’t unionize a white-collar workplace. But under the new terms of work—hoteling, WeWork, flexible spaces—that becomes increasingly hard. These are questions of capital, political economy, management.
Nicole Hemmer: And unions themselves are subject to these same forces. The SEIU, which had been a largely Black and Latino and woman-led union in the early years of Obama’s presidency, is taken over by white, professional-class organizers, and it changes the tenor of the union, and it changes how the union functions and the organizing and connections that are underneath it. You have some unionization happening, but it is also subject to the forces of professionalization that fracture some of the community ties that were so important to making it a strong union to begin with.
Simon Torracinta: We have an anonymous question, which I think is probably stating what a lot of people in the audience are thinking: As Trump and Musk deconstruct the administrative state, the moral and political silence of Democratic Party liberals is deafening. Do you see any resources that contemporary liberalism can bring to the crisis? And I know historians don’t like predicting the future, but I might add to that and ask, how does this history shape the constraints and possibilities of liberalism as it’s responding—or perhaps not responding—to this moment?
Lily Geismer: This is a slightly tangential answer, but hopefully it gets there. When Kamala Harris announced that Tim Walz was going to be her running mate, Brent texted me, “Is our volume doomed? What does this mean?” Ultimately it only proved the book’s point further, because Harris and her staff didn’t actually utilize any of Walz’s populist abilities in the campaign. To me, the Harris campaign perfectly personifies so many of the dimensions of our volume and what we’ve been describing—the ways that these ideas come to shape Democrats and liberals both politically and in terms of their approach to policy.
My hope, in some ways, is that the election loss actually becomes a reckoning, in some capacity: on the one hand, to think about the limitations of this approach, but at the same time, to think about what the state is and can do. How do we continue to have certain forms of state skepticism but also think about the Democratic Party’s and liberalism’s long tradition of governance? The book is hopefully a first step of opening up that kind of conversation.
Brent Cebul: Thinking about the arc from the sixties to today, I think—and this is something that Gabe Winant charts in his conclusion—is that both how historians study politics, but also how liberals thought about politics from the ’70s forward, were very state-centered. Rather than organizing mass publics to go protest somewhere and maybe get arrested, you would, as Sarah Milov and Reuel Schiller’s chapter shows, organize a public interest law shop and sue the bastards, or you would get hired by the regulatory agency. There was a very internalist idea about political change that made the state primary, both in how scholars were thinking about political change but also a whole lot of liberals, too. Voting was enough: as long as you got the right people in there, they would design the right policy, and they would tweak things correctly.
So I’m really puzzled by the fact that in this moment, Hakeem Jeffries and others are basically saying, “Our hands are tied.” Where is their technical mastery of the rules of Congress and Senate? Where is the intricate knowledge of how we can use institutional choke points and leverage to slow things down? Where is that? Even an internal mode of struggle seems absent right now. That, to me, shows the complete political and moral vacuousness of where this has led. We’re going to have to do it ourselves.
Nicole Hemmer: It also strikes me that the contemporary Democratic Party is locked into the logic of an earlier era of politics it cannot escape. Their appeals to work with the Republican administration hearken back to that era when bipartisanship was the best possible thing you could do. This institutionalism has kept the Democratic Party from moving more boldly in the last four years. It does seem like the older version of liberal politics is acting as a set of handcuffs on the current Democratic Party.
In order to move forward, not only are they going to have to shed those commitments to bipartisanship and institutionalism, but as the administrative state is deconstructed, they’re also going to have to become visionaries. It’s not going to be enough to just hire back a bunch of people—you’re going to have to sell a new vision. If state capacity has been fundamentally destroyed, it’s not enough to just try to breathe life into institutions created in the 1930s. They’re going to have to go back to the drawing board.
Simon Torracinta: One final question. At one time in history, being part of the educated professional class was an American aspiration embraced by many. What do you believe was the tipping point that shifted this aspiration into a source of vitriol and a borderline slur among working-class Americans? In other words, why did it become such a bad thing to be a professional-class liberal? And why have political majorities emerged in rejection of them?
Nicole Hemmer: For one thing, there’s been a seventy-five-year campaign against higher education from the right that has been effective because it’s been amplified through politicians and through their own media. That’s a big part of it.
Brent Cebul: I think it’s important to note that this sort of anti-intellectualism is deeply American. Richard Hofstadter wrote a whole book about it in 1963. But the institutional aspect—namely, the rising costs of higher education—is also really significant. Midcentury liberals in the Johnson administration decided that rather than directly publicly subsidizing the cost of tuition, they were going to structure a debt market for people to borrow to go to college. So it’s not simply that people are anti–higher education; it’s that the bar to higher education has become higher and higher while the economy no longer rewards all the kinds of employment that you might want to pursue with your degree. There’s a structural story here: the people who lead these universities, the people who created these debt markets, were really out of touch with how people were perceiving and experiencing these structures.
Lily Geismer: I think, too, that this particular version of professional-class liberals have a real faith in their own project. They are all people who benefited from it in various capacities, so that’s what you reproduce, and it becomes really problematic. Something that I’ve studied elsewhere is this Democrat and liberal obsession with jobs retraining: the idea that you can restructure the entire economy by offshoring jobs and that people are magically going to go to a community college and suddenly gain access to new jobs.
Dylan Gottlieb: They’ll learn to code.
Lily Geismer: Exactly—everyone’s going to become a coder. That might have sold a little bit in the 1990s, but by this moment, it’s just not a feasible message.
Dylan Gottlieb: I do think there is a shred of truth in some of the critiques from the right, although of course they’re often made in terrible faith and loaded with anti-feminist, anti-immigrant, racist baggage. There is, in fact, a new class that arises in the wake of the postindustrial transformation, and they are a little smarmy about their self-declared superiority. They are winning in the new economy and they’re excited to broadcast that fact through their cultural savoir-faire, through their distinction, through their cultural habits, through what they buy, what they eat, where they live, how their houses are appointed. And that has profound cultural weight and capital that they can accrue.
Meanwhile, those markers come to stand in for the broader inequality that professionals are enjoying. They do sit atop an economic pyramid that is financialized, weighted toward them, and not as open to new entrants as they might believe. The trappings of that world are then displayed and broadcast through cultural expressions—film, TV, social media, journalism—that become targets of derision from those who are left out. Whether there’s a complicated Freudian thing going on, where less-fortunate people simultaneously lust for and disavow those professional-class adornments, we can wonder. But there is something going on there, right? The anti-liberalism of, say, a blue-collar white conservative’s reaction to manifestations of self-superior smarm—we can joke about it, but I think it’s real. Because professional-class liberals do love their credentials, and they have worked quite hard to secure their brownstone in a gentrified neighborhood, and they do shop locally and feel good about it.
These aren’t things that are necessarily politically harmful on their own. But these professional-class liberals have set themselves up for critique from people who articulate their grievances about inequality and elite diversification through a language that is more about attacking liberalism and its pieties than it is about conservatism. Making fun of political correctness becomes a cottage industry, and it has profound political implications for those that find power or take pleasure in that transgressive discourse. And that spirit—it becomes a flag to march on the Capitol under.
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