0:33

Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My

0:35

name is Doug Hinwood, a challenge to orthodoxy today,

0:37

two guests, the Lee Geismar

0:39

and Brent Siebel in a long

0:41

single segment talking about professional class

0:43

liberalism, followed by a brief reprise

0:45

of a 2019 interview with Gabriel

0:47

Winant for some further historical context.

0:50

Maybe it's just the world I live in,

0:53

but for years now it's been hard to

0:55

avoid criticism of the professional managerial class, a

0:57

.k .a. the PMC. The term was coined

0:59

by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in a pair

1:01

of essays from 1977. Their

1:03

original definition, we define that professional managerial

1:06

class is consisting of salaried mental workers

1:08

who do not own the means of

1:10

production and whose major function in the

1:13

social division of labor may be described

1:15

broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture

1:17

and capitalist class relations. Close

1:20

quote. That's a broad category

1:22

and includes lawyers, doctors, architects, middle

1:24

managers, social workers, nurses, and teachers

1:26

and many more. While the

1:28

Aaron Reich's original analysis was rich and

1:30

complex, the concept has been

1:32

banalized into an epithet by the likes of Catherine

1:35

Lew and Amber Frost, one that

1:37

signals their contempt for their own stratum

1:39

in a misplaced allegiance to a partly

1:41

-fantastic working class. To the Frost

1:43

-Lew tendency, the PMC is the base for

1:45

what they dismiss as identity politics. Things

1:48

are more complicated than that, as is what

1:50

they call identity politics, but that's a separate

1:52

issue. In recent decades, the PMC

1:54

has been splitting into a true elite,

1:56

partners in law and accounting firms, for

1:58

example, who can really rake it in,

2:01

and a much less elite, often poorly

2:03

paid and insecurely employed group like university

2:05

adjuncts. Even public school teachers

2:07

operating under a regime of constant

2:09

budgetary tightness are experiencing downward mobility.

2:12

Brent Siebel and Lily Geismar have a much more

2:14

precise view of the PMC and its politics, which

2:17

they call professional class liberalism, shunning

2:19

the loaded PMC term. They're

2:22

just now with a collection of 15

2:24

essays, Mastery and Drift, professional class liberals

2:26

since the 1960s, published by the University

2:29

of Chicago Press. Professional class

2:31

liberalism was the dominant strain of the

2:33

Clinton and Obama presidencies, a

2:35

politics that seemed successful at the time,

2:37

but whose disappointments contributed to the rise

2:39

of Trump. Brent is an associate

2:42

professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, and

2:45

Lily, who's been on this show a couple

2:47

of times before, is a professor of history

2:49

at Claremont McKenna College. Brent Siebel and Lily

2:51

Geismar. Your title alludes to

2:53

Walter Littman's drift and mastery. Why the

2:55

illusion and why the reversal? What

2:58

Littman was grappling with in the

3:00

teens, the book came out in

3:02

1914, was this period of profound

3:04

corporate consolidation and what he defined

3:06

as social drift. There wasn't a

3:09

political or democratic response yet that

3:11

was up to the task of

3:13

managing these massive corporate and manufacturing

3:15

forms. And he was a student

3:18

of the scientific and professional revolutions

3:20

that had been happening in universities

3:22

and culture more broadly. And his

3:24

idea essentially was that if you

3:27

could get a set of scientific

3:29

technical experts to manage society

3:31

at the level of the

3:33

political and within firms, you

3:35

could plan your way rationally

3:37

out of the sort of

3:39

social discontents of the era.

3:42

And part of what we argue is

3:44

that by the 1970s, this vision had

3:46

sort of captured both the sort of

3:48

substance of liberalism in a certain way,

3:51

but also the growing ranks of those

3:53

who identified as liberals had become the

3:55

sort of technical professional experts. And yet,

3:58

by the time we're writing today, we

4:00

seem very much to be socially adrift

4:02

again. And so the question was, how

4:04

do these things relate, both in terms

4:06

of continuity and discontinuity? I'll just

4:08

say one thing. I mean, I think also the

4:11

other part is this idea of Lipman watching as

4:13

kind of, I mean, in some ways a response

4:15

to things like inequality, but also like frustrations with

4:17

certain versions of mass politics and sort of seeing

4:20

this as an alternative to those kinds of things.

4:22

I mean, some of it's like things like the

4:24

machine politics, but just these more sort of popular

4:26

visions and sort of wanting the classic kind of

4:29

progressive search for control. In

4:31

some ways we're looking at how the,

4:33

I would say two parts, a similar

4:35

kind of what this vision has done

4:38

to mass politics, but also how far

4:40

we've taken technocracy that the pendulum has swung

4:42

really far into just to just reiterate to

4:44

Brent's point has really come to kind of

4:47

define liberalism in many kinds of ways. And

4:49

that's one of the things we really were

4:51

trying to sort of understand in the book,

4:53

like how this version of this sort of

4:56

technocratic vision, but also this kind of new

4:58

professional class has really become the core to

5:00

what modern liberalism is. As a personal experience,

5:03

I was for several years on something called

5:05

the Cabalist, which was... email discussion lists for

5:07

elite journalists, elite liberal journalists, and pundits. I

5:09

was invited on as a diversity hire playing

5:12

the leftist. It didn't really turn out well.

5:14

But watching them talk among themselves for a

5:16

few years, I was really impressed by their

5:19

contempt for and fear of the mob. The

5:21

mob is driven by irrationality and bigotry. They

5:23

have a fear of the right that expressed

5:25

itself, not by wanting to fight it, but

5:28

to avoid provoking it, and a deep belief

5:30

in expert governance by regulators, judges, technocrats. Your

5:32

book is an exploration of that cultural formation.

5:35

Could you talk something about that worldview and where it comes from?

5:38

As Lily said, I mean, there's there's a sort

5:40

of deep genealogical tie all the way back to

5:42

the progressive era that Lipman. captures. But

5:44

I think the other really formative moment

5:46

is, of course, the 1960s and into

5:49

the 1970s. And you have these mass

5:51

movements of students, the civil rights movement,

5:53

more radical movements as well. In

5:56

certain respects, many of the liberals who we

5:58

write about, that foundational

6:00

baby boom generation that defines so much

6:03

of what the book is about, many

6:05

of them I think shared ostensibly

6:08

some of the social goals of the

6:10

civil rights movement, of the anti -war

6:12

movement against Vietnam, but had both personal

6:14

proclivities against those sort of mass or

6:16

more radical approaches to politics, but I

6:18

think also had a sort of key

6:20

insight, which was that those movements didn't

6:22

really affect the shape of the Vietnam

6:24

War. There was an alternative mode to

6:26

politics that might be more internalist and

6:28

so we talk about Ralph Nader in

6:31

one of the chapters by Sarah Milov

6:33

and Will Schiller, the idea that these

6:35

massive political institutions may be less susceptible

6:37

to mass political movements and so what

6:39

you really need to do is train

6:41

up, get your degree and either you

6:43

know sue the bastards or move into

6:45

the regulatory agencies. There is very much

6:47

an alternative vision of political change that's

6:49

at the heart of a lot of

6:51

these chapters and I think that's a

6:53

key part of what we're trying to

6:55

sort of elevate here is understanding that

6:57

relationship to democracy and mass movements. And

7:00

I should just add in, I think one

7:02

of the things that highlight is that in

7:04

some ways it's both like a class project

7:06

or class orientation, but also sort of a

7:08

generational orientation. And so one of

7:10

the things that we saw is this key

7:13

kind of transformation that happens is this rise

7:15

of people who have been trained at elite

7:17

universities and then have gone on to professional

7:19

schools in law, business, public policy.

7:21

And that gives a particular vision. how

7:23

to manage things, I mean the way

7:25

the actual kinds of versions of training

7:27

and of like a deep commitment to

7:30

the principles of meritocratic individualism that then

7:32

become translated into all these other kinds

7:34

of areas and especially into kinds of

7:36

forms of governance. The question

7:38

around journalism is actually super fascinating and there's a

7:40

chapter in the book by Dylan Gottlieb about the

7:42

changes that happen in journalism. he's sort of looking

7:44

and unpacking the idea of liberal lead of journalism,

7:47

but that actually is something that happens. And

7:49

so I think that like what you're describing

7:51

is an interesting question because it's like actually

7:53

where they're creating a sort of circular realm

7:55

of covering these kinds of projects. I don't

7:57

know if they were on the listserv, but

7:59

like the New Republic of the 90s to

8:02

me is like a symbol of that where

8:04

they're like amplifying this kind of particular vision

8:06

in various different forms. I want that like

8:08

listserv. I wish

8:10

you'd saved it. I would be so curious

8:12

what they were talking about. I do have

8:14

some things I saved, but I did not

8:17

save it systematically enough. And you're sworn to

8:19

secrecy. I'm violating the cannons of their ethics

8:21

by even mentioning it, but I really ended

8:23

up not liking these people very much. Some

8:25

of them I do. personally, but

8:28

as a formation of very bad politics.

8:31

But another thing that, relatedly, looking at

8:33

that world, both through that list and

8:35

your work, and also just watching politics

8:37

over the last several decades, is

8:40

the utter lack of interest in political

8:42

organizing that these groups have. For example,

8:44

the reproductive rights movements bogged down by

8:46

a language of choice, drawn from consumer

8:48

marketing, never really asserting anything in a

8:50

kind of strong rights way, never

8:53

really getting very passionate about it, being

8:55

much more oriented towards litigation and lobbying

8:57

than actual popular organization. I used

8:59

to have a neighbor who was the president of

9:01

New York City Planned Parenthood, and I once asked

9:03

her why they didn't organize the clients to defend

9:05

the right to abortion, and she said

9:08

it's too private a matter. Compare that to

9:10

the Christian Right, which is organizing through churches,

9:12

lobbying groups, or Republican Party on this issue.

9:15

Just absolute lack of interest in organization. What

9:17

do you make of that? One of the

9:19

chapters that comes immediately to mind when you

9:22

mention those dynamics is Karen Taney's chapter on

9:24

disability rights and one of the things that

9:26

she's looking at there is the way in

9:28

which the construction of disability rights in the

9:31

nineteen seventies and these demands for disability rights

9:33

did in fact start from some popular movements

9:35

and organizers but very quickly as it becomes

9:37

a sort of matter of governance you know

9:40

cost benefit analysis emerges as a way of

9:42

delineating these rights and one of the things

9:44

that i think really comes through in Karen's

9:46

chapter as well as some of the other

9:49

chapters. is the ways in which contemporary liberalism,

9:51

to your point, is very much about these

9:53

procedural rights rather than sort of substantive rights,

9:55

making sure that individuals have their day in

9:58

court or their ability to litigate, to sue.

10:00

But there's a profound wariness about

10:03

that outside movement. And I think

10:05

that moment of the 1970s is

10:07

really important here, this moment of

10:09

fiscal crisis of the state, of

10:11

the entrenched industrialization. And there's

10:13

a sort of generational. concerned that

10:15

the democratic system itself was being overloaded with

10:17

demands by welfare rights organizers, you know, the

10:19

Gray Panthers and the Black Panthers and all

10:21

these groups making demands on the states. And

10:23

so if you can come up with procedural

10:26

means by which people can feel as though

10:28

they're getting something close to a right, maybe

10:30

you can sort of limit that sort of

10:32

mass political form of making more substantive demands

10:34

on the state. I would say a couple

10:36

of things like I think the question of

10:38

sort of like this professionalization of actual movements

10:41

is a really important one. But I also

10:43

think and one the things we're looking at

10:45

is like the ways in which this sort

10:47

of technocratic vision comes into governance, but it

10:49

also becomes like a political movement too. One

10:51

of the things that some of the chapters

10:53

and this is a sort of combination of

10:56

Gillilay Kohler -Hausman and then a chapter by

10:58

Tim Schenck look at is like the ways

11:00

in which that idea also comes to affect

11:02

the ways in which Democrats or liberals are

11:04

thinking about the electorate and this idea of

11:06

like what Gillilay calls like sculpting the electorate,

11:09

which is an anxiety. about post the 1965

11:11

Voting Rights Act about mass democracy too. And

11:13

so you want to have these very targeted

11:15

ideas of who is voting, who is participating,

11:18

that then actually has cascading of political effects

11:20

on the Democratic Party itself and who is

11:22

part of its coalition. If you're doing this

11:25

micro -targeting, which is also about the sphere

11:27

of mass organization, that affects

11:29

who's participating. And I hate to

11:31

make it hyper -present just, but

11:33

we're very much seeing the consequences

11:35

of that today. kind of full

11:37

-scale approach. I think that's happening in a lot of

11:39

different fronts, including I think organizations like, I don't want

11:41

to call out Planned Parenthood, but you did, so I

11:43

will. Blame

11:45

me for it, yes. But who have

11:48

taken that kind of approach as well.

11:50

I mean, so that there's like this

11:52

on all fronts. I will just add,

11:54

and we can talk about this more,

11:56

but another piece of this is this

11:59

hostility and moving away from organized labor

12:01

as a model. And so this is

12:03

like this version of democratic liberal politics

12:05

is very much agnostic, if not opposed

12:07

to labor. Yeah, and I'm going to

12:10

just add one point, maybe two quick

12:12

points there too. I think the consumerist

12:14

model of citizenship that you were hinting

12:16

at there, Doug, I think is a

12:18

really sort of underappreciated component of how

12:20

the new Democrats, DLC Democrats were thinking

12:23

about policy as fees for services rather

12:25

than taxes, right? So that sort of

12:27

model becomes maybe not the dominant metaphor,

12:29

but it becomes a really prominent one

12:31

in how liberals are thinking about organizing

12:34

the delivery of social goods. Yeah, I

12:36

was struck by the way some years

12:38

ago, the New York City Transit Authority

12:40

went from referring to subway riders as

12:42

passengers or riders to customers. The market

12:44

model is just taking over everything you

12:47

say in the intro. They have particular

12:49

ideas about the social and political primacy

12:51

of the state and practices of governance,

12:54

but in an ongoing but contextually specific search

12:56

or social rapprochement with capitalism are the foundational

12:58

characteristics of liberalism. That attempt to be at

13:01

once a popular party or that has to

13:03

have some kind of popular appeal with a

13:05

fundamental allegiance to capital, it seems to be

13:07

the central contradiction of this social formation. One

13:10

of the questions is, like, that's one of

13:12

the core contradictions of modern liberalism itself. And

13:14

so you can think about that going back,

13:16

you know, through the New Deal. But you

13:19

see this manifestation really play out in the

13:21

1970s and beyond. We can see this particular

13:23

constellations playing out time and time again. So

13:25

that would be how I would sort of

13:28

think about it. It's like a longstanding question,

13:30

but then it really does kind of manifest

13:32

in new ways. One of the

13:35

other things that Lily and I have

13:37

been really committed to is it's not

13:39

just that it's a rapprochement with capitalism,

13:41

but it's really core to liberalism, at

13:43

least going to the New Deal, is

13:45

the idea that the market and capitalism

13:47

can be harnessed or worked through for

13:49

social ends. that

13:52

it's not just a partner with the state,

13:54

but that it actually can become a fundamental

13:56

means by which the state is going to

13:58

organize the production of a more equal society

14:01

or the delivery of certain health insurance, certain

14:03

social goods like that. And so I do

14:05

think that if the sort of crass idea

14:07

about conservatism or free market conservatism is that

14:10

it's trying to sort of liberate capital, I

14:12

do think that there is a liberalism as

14:14

a sort of governing force seeks to work

14:16

through capital and with capital in really important

14:18

ways. Yeah, it's almost like a harnessing of

14:21

capitalism. And that's something like I left behind

14:23

talks about this a lot, but it comes

14:25

in this book too. And it does come

14:27

at this sort of technocratic vision that markets,

14:29

that you sort of see that markets are

14:32

more efficient and they're more transparent and all

14:34

of these kinds of language that sort of

14:36

speaks to some of the ways it aligns

14:38

with a kind of particular kind of technocratic

14:41

vision that comes out. And I think that

14:43

goes back to like the sort of idea

14:45

of like applying a cost benefit analysis, which

14:47

is also about a kind of embrace of

14:49

market thinking too. So it's both about this

14:52

idea of like we can use capitalism to

14:54

do good but if we like apply these

14:56

market ideas to the function of government that

14:58

will make government more efficient and effective as

15:00

well. Okay I want to talk about several

15:03

of the chapter's specific issues. In turn here

15:05

I'm starting with philanthropy. Philanthropy is very central

15:07

to this kind of liberalism. It's structurally condescending

15:09

based in the social preferences of the liberal

15:12

rich, structurally anti -democratic a lot of ways

15:14

that the program officers decide what should be

15:16

done and not the public. It's strange. It

15:18

occupies some kind of liminal zone between the

15:20

state and the private, given all the legal

15:23

indulgence it enjoys. So yeah, talk

15:25

about this role of philanthropy in shaping this

15:27

consciousness and this political formation. It is this

15:29

fusion of this idea of using capitalism to

15:31

do good. And so you're doing this redefinition.

15:34

And then I think one of the things

15:36

that's fascinating is the state and Lila Berman's

15:38

wonderful chapter. talks about this and is part

15:40

of her larger book, but all the ways

15:42

in which the state is sort of allowed

15:45

for it in various different capacities. But I

15:47

think the other part in it that's important,

15:49

and this is another theme that runs through

15:51

the work, is there's so much association with

15:53

like the sort of liberalism as big government,

15:56

but there's also within it is this these

15:58

sort of themes of a certain kind of

16:00

state skepticism and working like outside of the

16:02

state. And so you see through philanthropy an

16:04

idea of like you like working through in

16:06

some ways the private sector to deliver on

16:09

certain kinds of social goods and so there's

16:11

a long history of using philanthropy for that

16:13

and as you said I mean what this

16:15

does increasingly is really does sort of build

16:17

up the non -profit sector in various different

16:20

ways but it also allows for a lack

16:22

of democratic accountability which is fascinating in terms

16:24

of the liberal ideas of like efficiency and

16:26

transparency because it's like actually completely like it's

16:28

a completely unaccountable system. the

16:32

bit in that chapter about the USAID,

16:34

which is very much in the news

16:36

these days. And it was structurally designed

16:38

to carry out its programs through a

16:40

private sector and voluntary agencies. And

16:43

then that giving over of a

16:45

lot of power and initiative to

16:47

NGOs got adopted by the World

16:50

Bank and in the Clinton era

16:52

became very much a substitute for

16:54

state activity and thought to be

16:56

more efficient, more market driven, more

16:59

flexible. People don't really appreciate

17:01

the value value that so many liberals

17:03

apply to NGOs and private activity as

17:05

opposed to supposedly publicly accountable bodies. And

17:07

not just values, I mean, pioneered it.

17:09

I mean, and that's really what the

17:12

chapter you're mentioning by Stephen Masekira is

17:14

interested in, is the ways in which

17:16

this new deal generation sort of goes

17:18

out into the world and brings these

17:20

public -private partnership models of projecting American

17:23

power abroad. One of the things that

17:25

I think when we're thinking about sort

17:27

of change over time here that's really

17:29

important to capture, both in the philanthropy

17:31

chapter that Lila Cora and Berman wrote

17:34

and Stephen Masekira's, Is there is an

17:36

idea that the philanthropists or consultants are

17:38

going to do experimental or they're going

17:40

to try out ideas that might ultimately

17:42

be brought under the public domain you

17:45

think about the war on poverty which

17:47

is very much pioneered by the Ford

17:49

Foundation in the early nineteen sixties and

17:51

even late nineteen fifties. And as you

17:53

said i mean one of the things

17:56

that starts to happen here is that.

17:58

through the sort of emergence of this

18:01

philanthropy industrial complex, the contractor industrial complex,

18:03

they become viewed as ostensibly more efficient

18:05

or less bureaucratically weighty alternatives to creating

18:08

an agency that's going to have congressional

18:10

appropriations annually that have to be haggled

18:12

over. And so instead we can just

18:15

outsource this stuff and call it a

18:17

day, call it a program. When I

18:19

wrote my Hillary Clinton book, which is

18:22

not fan mail by any means. I

18:25

was struck by the contrast between

18:27

the Clinton Foundation, the book does

18:29

mention the Clinton Foundation is really

18:32

exemplary in this area, their efforts

18:34

to relieve AIDS in Africa with

18:36

PEPFAR, George Bush's state -driven program,

18:39

and the NGO, the Clinton Foundation's efforts

18:41

were really mild and symbolic in their

18:43

channel, like, you know, get drug companies

18:45

to do the right thing for a

18:47

little PR, whereas the Bush

18:49

program mobilized a large amount of public money

18:51

and has done remarkable things now

18:53

being unknown by the Trump administration, but

18:56

they did remarkable things to control AIDS

18:58

in Africa. The scorn for the public

19:00

sector is really not an accurate judge

19:02

of how effective it can be. That's

19:05

absolutely right. And I think you see

19:07

that state skepticism lurking in a whole

19:09

range of our chapters. And I think

19:11

one of the things that we try

19:14

to point to in the introduction is

19:16

that there's a wariness that is sort

19:18

of genealogically liberal. about the construction of

19:20

large state power and this is something

19:22

i've written about extensively in some of

19:24

my work you know that it's there

19:26

in the new deal that you want

19:28

to do things as locally as possible

19:30

you want to structure a market for

19:33

housing like that's what redlining was right

19:35

we want to ensure the market not

19:37

delivered housing directly and so to say

19:39

that neoliberalism is a sharp break with

19:41

the mid -century and earlier forms of

19:43

liberalism would be to miss the ways

19:45

in which it's in some ways an

19:47

amplification or acceleration of certain of those

19:49

anti -status tendencies. And then

19:51

fast forward to the 60s, they're doing the

19:54

same thing with urban development. Absolutely. I

19:56

think the question of the through life,

19:58

and you can see in the Clinton

20:00

era as this kind of version of

20:03

this politics in all kinds of ways.

20:05

You see a lot of continuity in

20:07

building up this kind of hostility to

20:09

the state and what the state can

20:11

do, even as they're trying to make

20:13

it more technocratic in various different kinds

20:16

of ways. They weren't envisioning doge, but

20:18

that this is actually a continuation of

20:20

doges building on a longstanding tradition of

20:22

state skepticism that has been bred by

20:24

liberals as much as. conservatives. Dojus,

20:27

Clintonism on psychedelics. Yeah,

20:29

exactly. Like it was a quaint version of Al Gore

20:31

standing out, you know, with the red lot, like with

20:33

all the things he was like taking out and they

20:35

were reinventing government. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly

20:38

that. Yeah, the reinventing government project, which was

20:40

like at a much smaller scale. But that

20:42

was actually like a huge part of what

20:44

they ran on and was like a big

20:46

part of the first, you know, what they

20:48

were doing in the first term and, you

20:50

know, the visions of like the era is

20:52

big government. It's over. All of that does

20:54

like lay the foundations for a lot of

20:56

what we're seeing right now. One thing I

20:58

want to flag there though that I think

21:00

is really important context for the ways that

21:03

as we're saying this sort of like genealogical

21:05

features of liberalism's emphasis on efficiency or limiting

21:07

government is the political economic context in which

21:09

these ideas are being sort of redeployed right

21:11

and so in the new deal you've got

21:13

a strong focus on. the industrial sector, partnering

21:15

with the big corporate form of the era,

21:17

which were much more sort of nationally and

21:19

locally rooted. And by the time you get

21:21

to the 1990s and you've got Clinton, you

21:24

know, is David Stein's chapter in the

21:26

book. emphasizes there's a real concern for

21:28

Wall Street. There's an overriding concern for

21:30

bond markets, interest rates, and that those

21:33

become the sort of master sectors in

21:35

terms of liberals' ideas about what the

21:37

economy is capable of and who they

21:39

want to work through and for. And

21:41

so I wouldn't say that anything that

21:43

Musk is doing is particularly liberal at

21:45

the moment, but I think the way

21:48

in which that's being articulated through a

21:50

sort of Silicon Valley ethos is really

21:52

significant as well and marks a key

21:54

difference. with some of those earlier periods.

21:56

That's the voice of Brent Siebel. I'm

21:59

talking to him and Lily Geismar about the

22:01

book they edited, Mastery and Drift, published by

22:03

the University of Chicago Press. Now

22:05

here's Lily. I mean, I hope this is

22:08

the last time we talk about Elon Musk,

22:10

but I was going to say that I

22:12

think that... It may not be a little

22:14

avoided, but it should be like a new

22:16

drinking game. Another chapter actually that I I've

22:18

been thinking a lot about in the last

22:20

month is actually the is on my mark

22:23

enough about the computerization of welfare and this

22:25

idea of using the welfare system and this

22:27

idea I mean both it's about this kind

22:29

of Anti -welfare vision of of trying to

22:31

find people who are cheating the system But

22:33

also the importance of computerization and what that

22:35

did to the state which I think the

22:38

chapter does really powerfully and I was thinking

22:40

as with Musk saying like you control the

22:42

computers You control everything but that actually also

22:44

comes from like some of this kind of

22:46

like these liberal ideas even though he sees

22:48

himself very much as like anti -liberal in

22:50

so many ways. And just to put a

22:52

fine point on that, I think just to

22:55

give the listeners a little bit of a

22:57

taste of what Mark Aidenoff is up to

22:59

in that chapter, what he's showing is that

23:01

the increased technological capacity, the interoperability of welfare

23:03

systems across state lines enables state welfare administrators

23:05

to not just deliver welfare payments through computerization,

23:07

which might limit. the soft

23:09

-hearted local welfare administrator from giving

23:12

too many benefits or admitting somebody

23:14

onto the rolls inappropriately. But it

23:16

also enables them to garnish the

23:18

wages of the quote unquote deadbeat

23:20

dads who might not even live

23:22

in the state anymore. And so

23:24

it actually changes substantively the idea

23:26

of welfare as an entitlement for

23:28

someone to something that might, to

23:30

go back to that cost -benefit

23:32

analysis, that might be offset by

23:34

extracting resources from someone else. And

23:36

so that technological development

23:38

actually plays a fundamental role in

23:41

rearticulating or changing what we thought

23:43

of as a sort of substantive

23:46

right. A

24:07

close examination of his approach to activism reveals

24:09

to be anything but inclusive or based on

24:11

mass participation. He was offered

24:13

initiatory activism with a small number of highly

24:15

educated professional elites in charge. Many of them

24:17

very well off because he was paying him

24:20

virtually nothing at all, so they needed mommy

24:22

and daddy's money. How does Ralph Nader, who

24:24

I think to most people is a good

24:26

guy, how does he fit into this story?

24:28

There's a number of ways, like I think

24:30

that the kind of version of nadirism is

24:32

so sort of central to the kind of

24:34

transformations of liberalism that are going on. It's

24:36

often sort of forgotten in kind of political

24:39

history. And I think that both Myloff and

24:41

Schiller, and then there's also a book by

24:43

Paul Saban, sorry, about Ralph Nader that came

24:45

out a couple of years ago. For our

24:47

purposes, I mean, is the his particular vision

24:49

of the state and this idea of trying

24:51

to root out various different forms of corruption,

24:53

thinking about regularity capture. But I think also

24:55

about who the actual Interns

24:57

or is really important and that

25:00

this inculcation of a particular worldview

25:02

that becomes like hugely influential going

25:04

forward and so the very story

25:06

you told about the kind of

25:08

people who are working for Ralph

25:10

Nader is actually like ethnographically who

25:12

we're describing in a lot of

25:14

the parts other parts of the

25:16

book out of Ivy League law

25:18

schools and With some inheritance mean,

25:21

I think this idea that, too, that you could

25:23

have this small group of people that comes out

25:25

of it. And I think that there's an interesting

25:27

thing of, like, these are people who are slightly

25:29

younger than the quintessential, like, anti -war protesters. But,

25:31

like, this was the thing to do if you

25:33

were, like, ambitious, but also committed.

25:35

Like, you believed in this cause. One

25:37

of the things about Nader is, like, you

25:39

believe that you're doing good. And that was

25:42

really inspiring to this whole generation of elite

25:44

law students. The other piece of this

25:46

that I think is really important that we shouldn't overlook

25:48

is is the way in

25:50

which, you know, there may be sort

25:53

of a libertarian strand in Nader. I

25:55

totally buy that. But I also think

25:57

that, you know, on some level, he

25:59

shares a new left critique of corporate

26:01

liberalism and the ways in which the

26:04

large corporations in the mid -century years

26:06

from the automakers to the military contractors

26:08

had captured the regulatory state and the

26:10

congressional appropriations in really important ways, this

26:13

sort of litigious insider way of

26:16

approaching it I think did strike

26:18

people as potentially more effective than

26:20

the sort of outside game. which

26:23

did bring us pluralism, did bring us

26:25

these big unions, which for many of

26:27

the new left and many of the

26:29

students of this generation were just as

26:31

complicit in the war and were just

26:33

as sclerotic and hyperbureaucratized as the state

26:36

and as these corporations have become. And

26:38

so the political culture was in such

26:40

flux in the 60s and early 70s

26:42

that I think it's really important to

26:44

capture that. It's funny you mentioned unions,

26:46

because I recall I was writing an

26:48

article on deregulation, a history of deregulation,

26:50

many, many years ago, and I read

26:53

some of the Nader's Readers books, and

26:55

I was struck by how anti -union they were.

26:58

I think particularly the trucking deregulation one

27:00

was all about how the unions are

27:02

part of the whole monopolistic structure, and

27:04

it made me uncomfortable as a union

27:07

supporter. to read that, but I guess

27:09

that does fit into the sensibility. And

27:11

then the later new Democrats would be

27:14

very distant from or even hostile to

27:16

unions. There's a whole history to be

27:18

written, I think, about the new directions

27:20

movement in labor in the 70s and

27:22

80s. that, you know,

27:24

I think Nelson Liechtenstein and Judith Stein

27:27

touch on and is there in McElevy's

27:29

writing, of course, but I think, you

27:31

know, a big part of the labor

27:33

politics of the 1970s were sort of

27:35

insurgent struggles for democracy in the unions.

27:38

And that is not something that I think

27:41

has been totally aired among scholars and the

27:43

left as well. But I do think there's

27:45

the question, too, of the issue of the

27:47

continuities of someone like Nader to some aspects

27:50

of who to become the new Democrats. And

27:52

there is a kind of lineage of tracking

27:54

many of the people who worked for Nader

27:56

to then go into the Clinton administration to

27:59

be admiring of certain aspects of that politics.

28:01

So it's not as much of a break

28:03

as it might seem. And I do think

28:05

a lot of it does have to do

28:07

with this kind of hostility to a certain

28:10

kind of what. I mean, that unions are

28:12

big, that they are a drag on certain

28:14

kinds of efficiencies. not just about, I think

28:16

there's a political vision in terms of actual

28:19

electoral politics, but it's also about what unions

28:21

stand for in terms of a political economy,

28:23

too, that you see the roots of in

28:25

this early 70s moment. One of the most

28:28

outspoken critics of the bailout of Chrysler in

28:30

the early 80s was none other than Robert

28:32

Reich. Now, Rice is all over the

28:34

place politically. It's really hard to track him. Something

28:37

that runs throughout this, a

28:39

thread that runs throughout all

28:41

this is the centrality of

28:43

smarts. Obama loved smarts. He

28:46

opposed the invasion of Iraq because it was

28:48

a dumb war. He doesn't oppose all wars,

28:51

just dumb wars. But yeah, what about this

28:53

valorization of smarts that's so important to these

28:55

characters? Brent counted how many times

28:57

he used it. I

28:59

did not do that. It was in

29:01

a David Brooks column, speaking of smarts.

29:04

Yeah, he used it over 900 times

29:06

in office to describe his politics as

29:08

smart governance, smart policies, things like that.

29:11

In his chapter, Dylan Gottlieb gets

29:13

into this. There's the whole sort

29:15

of protomatic, glaceous style of journalists

29:17

that's emerging in the 1990s who

29:19

are not only sort of fashioning

29:21

themselves as policy experts within the

29:24

bounds of what seems politically or

29:26

fiscally possible. They'll constantly sort

29:28

of remind us about the hard choices

29:30

that are going to have to be

29:32

made. But they're the ones who can

29:34

actually understand these convoluted Rube Goldberg -like

29:36

policy structures that are being created. And

29:39

to give them a degree of

29:41

credit here, when you're working in a

29:43

hyper -polarized congressional setting where you're

29:45

not likely to get massive buy -in

29:47

for big appropriations, figuring out these

29:49

nudges as cast they might call them

29:52

or other ways of delivering programs through

29:54

the market do have a certain sort

29:56

of ingeniousness to them. But what they

29:59

are not is visible, moral, or clear

30:01

forms of politics. Yeah,

30:03

and you can sell them as smart because you

30:05

can say something that's hyper -technical and hyper -smart

30:07

is like that's a smart version of it. So that's

30:09

some of what we see happening. And so in some

30:12

ways, I mean, what we came to is that like

30:14

Obama is so much the kind of apotheosis of this

30:16

vision. And so this idea of

30:18

him using the term smart governance as much

30:20

as he did really does symbolize this particular

30:22

kind of approach. And Nicole Hammer has a

30:24

chapter in the book about the kind of

30:26

Obama years, which highlight those those kinds of

30:28

things as kind of his culmination of a

30:30

lot of this kind of thinking. But I

30:32

think to Brent's point, absolutely like this idea

30:34

of like, this is the way it sort

30:36

of becomes packaged and sold, which is in

30:38

some ways also leads to a certain degree

30:40

of alienation. and frustration that we start to

30:42

also see play out against this kind of

30:45

approach. Almost by definition. I

30:47

mean, the idea of the smart, savvy

30:49

politico is somebody who is fundamentally on

30:51

the inside and knows how the inside

30:53

works. And all of you rubes on

30:55

the outside, you know, just trust

30:57

us that we're going to deliver the right outcome

30:59

for you eventually. There was

31:01

quite an evolution of the structure

31:03

of feeling from Clinton to Obama.

31:05

Clinton was very much a fusive,

31:07

libidinal, really great person -to -person

31:09

politics. Obama is all about

31:12

being detached and cerebral and cool, and

31:14

he was not very good at person

31:16

-to -person politics, so I don't know.

31:18

It's not a formula for political popularity.

31:20

I think it's worth mentioning Daniel Wiggins

31:22

chapter as well, which speaks to this

31:24

sort of deep what she calls state

31:26

skepticism among African American liberals, you know,

31:28

dating back to the to the Reconstruction

31:30

era and after. And I think part

31:32

of what she's tapping into there, we

31:34

mentioned, you know, the welfare

31:36

rights movement and the and the explosion

31:39

of demands on the state in the

31:41

1970s is there's I think what part

31:43

of what Obama internalized was this idea

31:45

that there was an assumption among the

31:47

pundit class, among conservatives, certainly. that the

31:49

arrival of Obama necessarily means that we're

31:51

gonna get a massive new welfare state.

31:53

And part of, I have to believe

31:56

on some level that his, that sort

31:58

of bloodless affect that you mentioned is

32:00

in part of a bit of political

32:02

theater there to sort of try to

32:04

signal that no, no, I'm not Jesse

32:06

Jackson. I'm not calling for re

32:08

-industrialization. And in fact, I am the insiders,

32:10

insiders here. And you need not worry about

32:13

me overreaching in that way. I'm reasonable. I

32:15

mean, there's a sort of idea of being

32:17

reasonable, which is another kind of way of

32:19

thinking about like a synonym for smart. Both

32:21

of them are so, you know, have so

32:23

many sort of different sides to them, but

32:25

there is that kind of hyper like that.

32:28

There's the Clinton campaigner, but there's also that

32:30

hyper technical part of Clinton too. I mean,

32:32

he looked like any kind of like that.

32:34

I mean, there's such a wonkiness to his.

32:36

Oh, I remember him announcing the human genome

32:38

project. He was just really into that. You

32:40

can see that very much playing out. I

32:42

mean, those are the multiple sides. And I

32:45

will say like one of the things is

32:47

like in many ways, this project is actually

32:49

like a generational one and are coming of

32:51

age politically in the eras of Clinton and

32:53

Obama that this is like. this is the

32:55

version of liberalism that we know and have

32:57

tried to kind of, and this is through

33:00

all of our writers who have sort of

33:02

come of the same kind of cohort of

33:04

like trying to understand both its dominance, but

33:06

also it's like it's sort of fundamental limitations.

33:08

It's in some ways like watching these two

33:10

administrations play out that have like that sort

33:12

of motivated this book in a lot of

33:14

ways. One other point I want

33:17

to add there about Obama that I think

33:19

is worth pointing out. He's in

33:21

some ways the ideal Democratic candidate

33:23

in the age of the political

33:25

consultant that Julie Kohler -Hausman and

33:27

Tim Schenke write about. The politics

33:29

of evasion that the you know

33:31

the k mark engalston memo advising

33:33

the new democrats of late nineteen

33:35

eighties to not overtly appeal for

33:37

black voters support is sort of

33:39

famous at this point. But there's

33:41

a way in which i think

33:43

obama sort of internalize that concern

33:46

that if we go too hard

33:48

for mobilizing african -american voters explicitly.

33:50

we're going to push white people out of the coalition. And

33:53

so there's a way in which Obama,

33:56

by not appealing directly to African American

33:58

voters, but nevertheless galvanizing their support, became

34:00

sort of the perfect candidate for that

34:03

kind of deracinated vision of political mobilization.

34:05

And then in the second term, when

34:07

he dared to point out that some

34:10

of these kids that cops are killing

34:12

look like his own, you

34:14

know, that was it. I mean, that was all

34:16

he had to say to sort of prove, you

34:19

know, on some level, the pollster is correct. And

34:21

so that, again, speaks to his studied and really

34:23

considered timidity around some of these issues. Well, he

34:25

also went out of his way to insult black

34:27

people a lot of the time. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

34:31

So in the 70s, Irving Crystal

34:34

and the Neocons mount a critique

34:36

of the new class, an intellectual

34:38

elite that dominated society, according to

34:40

them. This is a line that's persisted

34:42

on the right today. Many of

34:44

these screens were published by elite outlets

34:46

and funded by right -wing foundations, but

34:49

let's leave that aside. But in this

34:51

move, shareholders and CEOs recede from interest

34:53

and are replaced by Ivy League elitists.

34:56

Now there's some truth to this, but a rather

34:58

selective one. truth

35:00

and falsehood of this whole neocon new class

35:02

analysis. It's an interesting question too because it's

35:04

like we and one of the other sort

35:06

of inspiration for this came from like the

35:09

ways in which like the the PMC turn

35:11

actually there's a long saying critique of that

35:13

on from the right but you start to

35:15

also see it come emerge and in the

35:17

from the left at various different moments became

35:19

like reconstituted. following the 2016 election of that

35:21

terminology. And so in some ways, part of

35:23

what we are trying to do actually is

35:25

to sort of think through why this has

35:27

caused so much ire. And I think you're

35:29

right. I mean, in some ways, it's a

35:31

question of like, is this the right place

35:34

to be directing a lot of critique and

35:36

blame? Like as you're not thinking about sort

35:38

of targeting it towards other kinds of elite

35:40

actors. And this becomes a kind of easy

35:42

target. But I think we did want to

35:44

kind of think about what this vision has.

35:47

brought um and how this particular like

35:49

what it means to have this particular

35:51

group of people so hold the kind

35:53

of particular place over the left side

35:55

of the political spectrum for so long

35:57

and one of the things that's done

35:59

actually too is to like crowd out

36:01

the actual left in various different ways

36:04

that it kind of like we've seen

36:06

that happen too and that goes back

36:08

to the kind of story of how

36:10

labor movements don't help hold the place

36:12

that they do in the democratic constellation

36:14

after the 1970s onward. When we're thinking

36:16

about the conservative versus the left critique

36:18

of the PMC. mean, I think one

36:20

of the things that I think is

36:23

really important to note is on some

36:25

level, I actually think the conservative critique

36:27

is more on the money. What they're

36:29

pointing out is that these managerial elites

36:31

are abrogating capital's property rights in a

36:33

certain fundamental way to the direction and

36:35

the use of their capital, the enjoyment

36:37

of their capital. And that

36:40

the left critique of the PMC, I

36:42

think the Ehrenreichs get this correctly, but

36:44

I think when we think about this

36:46

the way that it becomes a sort

36:49

of affective or cultural critique of the

36:51

PMC, misses their involvement in capitalism itself.

36:53

And I think one of the things

36:55

that we try to point to in

36:57

the introduction is that you can't disassociate

37:00

this class formation, these ideas about the

37:02

law, about economics from the sort of

37:04

broader capitalist structures within which they're operating.

37:06

And so part of what we're trying

37:09

to do is to locate philanthropy, to

37:11

locate the media, to locate public

37:13

interest law shops in this sort of

37:15

broader class formation that is arising at

37:17

a particular moment in capitalist development as well.

37:20

I think one of the things I

37:22

think to build on it too is

37:24

like we also wanted to take seriously

37:26

their self -conception and this faith. I

37:28

mean this goes to the back to

37:30

circle back. What about this vision of

37:32

harnessing capitalism to do good and this faith

37:34

and like what they're doing is fundamentally

37:36

good and that is so baked into

37:38

so many aspects of like what we

37:40

we call them professional class liberals of

37:42

their self -conception and vision is. One

37:45

of the things the Aaron Rice I think got really

37:47

right when they named the PMC in that in those

37:49

those first two essays. was that

37:51

they talked about how this emergent class believed

37:53

that their interests were identical to the interests

37:55

of society at large. And that's a really

37:58

dangerous thing. That's a really dangerous thing politically

38:00

to not see other classes, social experiences out

38:02

there in the world. That PMC label can

38:04

be very misleading in that it includes elite

38:06

lawyers who really are servants of capital, but

38:09

also teachers and nurses with credentials who are

38:11

more and more of the working class of

38:13

today. So I don't know that that label

38:15

can cause a lot of problems. I tend

38:17

to like pick. topics to study of like

38:20

terms that are really like, un -precise, like,

38:22

imprecise, like the same thing of like, so,

38:24

you know, verbs or things that are like

38:26

neoliberal. I mean, there's all of these terms

38:29

and I think actually like, there's a lot

38:31

of ways about professional class because that does

38:33

speak to like a much, like you can

38:35

put a lot of different people in there.

38:37

And I think one of the things that

38:40

happens is that like the ways in which

38:42

actually you're, you're creating a broad category of

38:44

people whose interests are not always aligned. So

38:46

there's actually a lot of class slippage within

38:48

that. It's different to be like a partner

38:51

at a law firm to like a contingent

38:53

faculty member teaching, you know, of classes for

38:55

$5 ,000 each. So I think it was

38:57

in some ways the term about being sort

39:00

of educated captures both of those groups, but

39:02

it gets a very different kind of class

39:04

-based experience. We use this more precise term

39:06

of professional class liberal because I think the

39:08

PMC can have some of those pitfalls. Okay,

39:11

we're running low on time, so let's bring...

39:13

this towards a conclusion. You don't

39:15

have a grand conclusion to this. You didn't

39:17

write a concluding chapter on somewhat what this

39:19

all means. He did a very nice introduction,

39:22

but not a what this all means kind

39:24

of consideration towards the end. And

39:26

also, this is written before the dawn of

39:28

Trump, too. And we're seeing now James Carville

39:31

telling the Dems to roll over and play

39:33

dead and Hakeem Jeffries counseling them to lie

39:35

low and wait for the midterms. They have

39:37

neither ideas nor energy, no

39:39

capability to rise to the severity of

39:41

the challenge. that the Trump musk, I'm

39:43

sorry, I bring his name up again,

39:45

the Trump musk regime presents, it

39:48

looks almost like Trump has really

39:50

busted up this formation. So

39:52

what is going to happen to it? It

39:54

seems really not up to the challenges of

39:57

the present. One thing I will

39:59

say, I mean, I think there's at least

40:01

two things to point to. I think one,

40:03

I wouldn't give Trump all the agency in

40:06

busting up this formation. I think there are

40:08

a whole series of structural crises around technology.

40:11

climate, massive inequality that we would be facing

40:13

whether Trump was in the White House or

40:15

not. And one of the

40:17

things that's just clear is that this

40:20

inside game is simply not up to

40:22

the task of organizing the kinds of

40:24

political formations that are going to be

40:26

essential to dealing with these crises. And

40:28

so I think one thing that we

40:30

see is that this hyper -particularistic way

40:32

of thinking about organizing a coalition, this

40:35

timidity, and

40:37

this unwillingness to to trust the masses

40:39

and to cultivate mass publics is going

40:41

to be the thing that leads to

40:43

massive change among the left liberal coalition.

40:45

It's no coincidence that the people who

40:48

are out there doing rallies right now

40:50

are Bernie Sanders and AOC. It's not

40:52

anybody else. We didn't write a conclusion,

40:54

but we did write a piece for

40:56

a document this fall about Bidenism. and

40:58

the ways in which the kind of

41:00

Bidenism, but I think you can see

41:02

it very much played out actually in

41:04

some of the reactions to Bidenism amongst

41:06

the Harris campaign. We didn't

41:08

get into this, and maybe it

41:10

was too traumatic for everyone to

41:12

talk about. But the Harris campaign

41:14

represented these instincts in so many

41:17

ways. And very

41:19

badly. Very badly. It's almost

41:21

like the worst possible version of all of this.

41:23

So I do think that the question that Brennan's

41:25

bringing up of the responses to that of being

41:27

really important, and I think the other side of

41:29

this is also a recognition, so both in terms

41:31

of the actual ways of doing politics that have

41:33

come up and the limitations to that, but also

41:35

some of the ways of thinking about governance and

41:38

this small, hyper -technical versions of governance, which I

41:40

do think have led to a suspicion, if not

41:42

a hostility to the state. also need to be

41:44

sort of so fundamentally rethought, and that's another place

41:46

for this to happen. So in some ways, watching

41:48

what is happening by Trump and Musk has actually

41:50

opened up a possibility for thinking of alternative

41:52

of what governance could be and

41:55

that's what like that's one

41:57

thing that gives me

41:59

hope. The book shows us in

42:01

all these different chapters but

42:03

this like this was a

42:05

deliberate process of of remaking

42:07

liberalism and its transformation and like

42:09

that is possible so our

42:12

hope is like that can

42:14

happen again. Those were Lily

42:16

Geismar and Brent Siebel, of Mastery and Drift

42:18

from the University of Chicago Press.

42:20

You're listening to Behind the News on Jacob

42:22

and Radio. My name is Doug Henwood,

42:24

back after a musical break. Music

42:42

Music Music

43:13

Music Some

43:26

of the first movement of the

43:28

string quartet number four by Dmitri

43:31

Shostakovich performed by the Sorrel Quartet. I've

43:33

got a little time left over so I

43:35

thought I'd fill it with a bit

43:37

from a 2019 interview on the with

43:39

Gabriel Weynant, an associate professor of history at the

43:41

University of Chicago and a contributor to

43:43

the Siebel -Geismar Collection. Apologies for the poor

43:45

audio quality. The term professional

43:48

managerial class, the PMC, is

43:50

all over the place.

43:52

What about the history of

43:54

this idea? Where did it

43:56

come from? Well, the idea

43:58

of the PMC is old

44:00

kind of precursors going

44:02

back into the early 20th

44:04

century debates in Europe in particular

44:06

in Germany, and then in the kind of Trotskyist

44:08

world trying to make sense of what had happened

44:10

to the Russian Revolution and how it became bureaucratized.

44:12

But in this country, it's formulated in the form

44:14

in which we know it today in the 1970s.

44:17

And the actual phrase comes from Barbara and John

44:19

Ehrenreich in a pair of essays that they wrote

44:21

in the late 1970s in the journal Radical America.

44:23

And they wrote those essays to try to diagnose

44:25

what had gone wrong with the new left and

44:27

to try to provide a kind of material analysis

44:29

of that and then try to path forward. What

44:31

was this formation? You know, in

44:33

the 19th century, there had been what was

44:35

often called the old middle class, which is

44:38

like shopkeepers, craftsmen, and that had been destroyed

44:40

by capitalism as Marx predicted. But then 20th

44:42

century society didn't polarize into two classes. Instead,

44:46

what they call monopoly capitalism

44:48

that is the capitalism organized

44:50

into large corporations run by

44:52

managers as opposed to owners

44:54

monopoly capitalism created and depended

44:56

upon this new stratum the

44:58

PMC to carry out a

45:00

series of functions most fundamentally

45:02

to control the working class

45:04

and to supervise production and

45:06

accumulation and to reproduce social

45:08

relations writ large what kind

45:10

of occupations we're talking about

45:12

here teachers, social workers, scientists,

45:14

engineers, managers, nurses, doctors, academics,

45:16

and so on, credentialed professionals.

45:19

And the idea was that these people

45:21

would get a handle on the unruly

45:23

qualities of the proletariat, keep it in

45:25

line and remold it as it was

45:28

needed, and in doing so would reproduce

45:30

capitalist society over time. What

45:32

the Aaron Wrights then said, was this

45:34

class in some ways actually had an

45:36

oppositional consciousness going all the way back

45:38

to the turn of the 20th century.

45:40

Many members of this class saw themselves

45:42

as the ones who actually knew how

45:44

things worked, saw the owners of capital

45:47

as kind of rentiers basically, so

45:49

could conceive of a kind of technocratic

45:51

socialism based on their own social position.

45:54

That's basically the best way of understanding

45:56

what the progressive movement of the early

45:58

20th century was was an effort to

46:01

kind of rationalize society coming from the

46:03

kind of new emergent new professional experts

46:05

to try to put labor and capital

46:08

relations on a more stable basis to

46:10

update democracy and probably eventually gradually to

46:12

transition into socialism. That's not

46:14

the teddy Roosevelt brand. No but people who

46:16

would have been enthusiastic about Teddy Roosevelt. You

46:19

know someone like Jane Adams for

46:21

example. You know, Jane Adams also

46:24

was trying to calm the working

46:26

class, tranquilize it, and to show

46:28

to the working class that maybe

46:30

the rich folks weren't so bad

46:32

after all. Certainly. And at

46:34

the same time, you know, she was, of

46:36

course, genuinely interested in improving working conditions and

46:38

living conditions for working -class people and, you

46:40

know, did have a kind of, I think,

46:42

long -term, a lot of these types of

46:44

characters had a long -term vision of a

46:46

more humane, less kind of market -ruled society.

46:49

The Aaron Wrights look at this and

46:51

they say, This is a kind of

46:53

precedent from which we can understand that

46:55

the PMC is capable of generating an

46:58

oppositional ideology, but it's an oppositional ideology

47:00

which still carries within it a belief

47:02

in the rule of professionals over the

47:04

proletariat. But then they also felt annoyed

47:06

by the demands of profit -making, that

47:08

there's interfering with their rationalization of the

47:10

process of production and distribution. Right. And

47:12

that's in part where the kind of

47:14

oppositional quality, kind of the potential for

47:17

radicalism comes from, right? I want to

47:19

do my science or, you know, I

47:21

have a vision of how the city

47:23

should be laid out. And

47:25

on that basis, I develop a

47:27

criticism of capitalism overall, right? But

47:29

it's not necessarily one that exactly

47:32

imagines the emancipation or rule of

47:34

the working class. And

47:36

so everybody goes back on this and

47:38

they say, this is sort of prequel

47:40

to the same thing that's happened in

47:42

the 1960s. And what the new left

47:45

was, was a movement of the young

47:47

professional managerial class as it's expanded through

47:49

the growth of the universities and the

47:51

military industrial complex. The

47:53

mass university has generated this mass

47:55

student movement whose fundamental basis is

47:57

this kind of opposition. And for

47:59

that reason, the new left has

48:02

been unable to bridge the gap

48:04

with the working class and to

48:06

form the kind of alliance that

48:08

actually could fundamentally transform society. But

48:10

as the 60s progressed, we went

48:12

from the Port Huron statement to

48:14

much more radical activism on campuses,

48:16

but then the black movement went

48:19

from civil rights to real black

48:21

power, disruptive stuff. That also radicalized

48:23

some portion of that student new

48:25

left. Absolutely. By the end

48:27

of the 60s, many of them are becoming

48:29

Marxists or developing real relationships with Marxism in

48:31

one way or another. But then

48:34

there's this whole debate that begins in the late

48:36

60s about who are we? What is our place

48:38

in society? What is, in fact, the class nature

48:40

of our society? In the

48:42

moment, there's kind of a two

48:44

-way split. On one hand, are

48:46

formations like PL, kind of quasi

48:48

-malice formations, which basically say only

48:51

the traditional working class is capable

48:53

of revolution. Given that, we,

48:55

the white student, left. need to

48:57

industrialize ourselves, go take jobs in

48:59

mines and mills and factories, and

49:01

try to kind of spread whatever

49:04

version of Marxism. There's Trotsky as

49:06

to have this going on too,

49:08

obviously. Then on the

49:10

other hand, the revolutionary youth program,

49:12

which takes a much broader kind

49:15

of view of what class division

49:17

in the late 60s looks like,

49:19

basically argues that students of the

49:22

working class Already along with

49:24

the Panthers and all you know all

49:26

kinds of different formations just broadly already

49:28

are a working -class movement The air

49:30

and rags emphasize that the relationship between

49:32

the PMC and the working class is

49:35

objectively one of conflict. Yes. What the

49:37

air and rags say is that There

49:39

is a conflict between the PMC in

49:41

the working class that is fundamental to

49:43

the nature of the PMC it's why

49:45

it exists right is to govern the

49:47

working class on behalf of the ruling

49:50

class which is the actual owners of

49:52

capital this conflict manifest in all kinds

49:54

of ways in the fabric of daily

49:56

life right social workers can be are

49:58

contemptuous of their disrespectful to their clients

50:00

teachers discipline their students on and on

50:03

like this managers obviously discipline workers. The

50:05

middle manager may not be high up the

50:07

social scale, but that's the person that the

50:10

guy in the line experiences most directly. Right.

50:13

Finally, we don't want to throw

50:15

out the professional ideal completely, right?

50:17

You say in your piece, for

50:19

all the cynicism and compromises that

50:21

professional pretensions and gender, professional

50:24

labor does carry a utopian seed. What do

50:26

you mean by that? Professionals

50:28

often have deep identification with positive qualities

50:30

of their work. Something has attracted them

50:32

to this work is meaningful beyond the

50:34

money that they get paid for in

50:36

the status that accrues to them. That's

50:38

true for all kinds of non -professional

50:40

work too, but it takes a

50:43

distinctive form for professionals. That

50:45

is something that the left can

50:47

draw on to mobilize people for emancipatory

50:49

as opposed to repressive causes. I

50:51

think about something like Science for the

50:54

People, for example, which was an

50:56

organization established in the 70s. revitalized recently,

50:58

which, you know, just in Boston where

51:00

I live, there are folks in

51:02

science for the people who are doing

51:05

work around lead remediation and trying

51:07

to actually make the case that the

51:09

state needs to do a better

51:11

job and private real estate developers need

51:13

to kind of pay more basically

51:15

around like livable living conditions, residential conditions

51:18

for working -class people. Now

51:20

that draws on the ideology of being

51:22

in some way on the professional ethic

51:24

of being a scientist, right? When scientists

51:26

actually present themselves as experts who can

51:29

offer a kind of useful testimony around

51:31

this and so on. And that I

51:33

think is something that we can embrace

51:35

and in embracing it actually speed the

51:37

process of realigning elements of the PMC

51:40

with the working class and decomposing the

51:42

overall authority of the PMC. That was

51:44

the historian Gabriel Winant, one of the

51:46

contributors to Mastery in Drift, from a

51:49

2019 interview on this show. That's it

51:51

from me, Doug Henwin. Let's go out

51:53

with this, some more Shostakovich. This from

51:55

the string quartet number six, First Movement,

51:57

performed again by Sorrel. Till next

52:00

week. Bye.