
The Blue State Model: How the Democrats Created a "Liberalism of the Rich" - pron
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176121/
======
themgt
A major problem I see in the US, compared to basically anywhere else in the
world I've lived, is sprawl. Seemingly every other developed country has done
a much better job of having the vast majority of people live in at least
medium-density areas, which has all sorts of benefits, especially a lower cost
of infrastructure/public transportation, and encouraging mixed-use development
with small owner-operated businesses and markets within walking distance
serving day-to-day needs.

All of this helps encourage a more communal, broad-based and functioning
working/middle class economy. Whereas the US tends to have a huge divide
between high-density "downtown" area and then low density suburbs to exurbs,
mixed with island apartment complexes and served almost solely by massive
chain stores.

I remember moving back to the US from France and landed in one of those
terrible cookie-cutter apartment complexes, and one day walking to the central
mail box I thought to myself: "I am walking farther to get my mail in the US
than I did in France to get to a grocery store, bakery, meat shop or tram
line."

The nearest place I could buy any food was a gas station with processed crap
and soda, 3/4 of a mile away. In France I could walk a block to a mini-market
with tons of fresh vegetables, cheese and fresh-baked still-warm bread.

~~~
ajmurmann
Zoning rules in the US are one thing I will never understand. Especially since
it is very anti market and the US seems to believe on a free market more than
most countries. I wonder if it has to do with suburbs of American cities being
much more planned than most other city areas. Planned residential areas in
Europe suffer from the same problems. Maybe the US just had more planned
instead of grown areas?

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Maybe the US just had more planned instead of grown areas?

You don't know the half of it.

Suburban sprawl was national policy during the Cold War. The idea was to
spread out the population to reduce the damage a nuclear weapon could do.

They did it on purpose.

~~~
nyolfen
source? i was under the impression it had more to do with a convergence of car
culture and white flight

~~~
AnthonyMouse
[http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/Cold.War.Urban.Vulnerab...](http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/Cold.War.Urban.Vulnerability.pdf)

------
maxander
Part of me wants to be a loyal Bostonian and defend my hometown- most of the
evils described in the article could be found in any other state, Republican-
or Democrat-run alike. But the point about innovation rhetoric does strike
true.

The "innovation district" is full of big pharma and etc companies that would
have had an easy time finding offices anywhere; most of the time when the
i-word is trotted out, its because someone is either offering tax breaks to
some giant corporation to entice them to grace us with their presence, or
launching some gaudy public cheerleading event that no one really cares about.

But substantial issues relating to the "creative class"? Such as, for
instance, _effective public transit_? Suddenly the state and city can't spare
a dime; its not a "priority"; students and post-car intellectuals (and,
incidentally, the working class) are stuck paying through the nose to get on a
subway that's broken again. Or, taking an Uber because its past midnight.
(Late night service was great for the six months it lasted!)

There are other issues of a similar bent; there's a fight going on in
Somerville (the neighborhood of MIT, Harvard, and Tufts students, now that
Cambridge property deeds come platinum-plated) to allow more than four
unrelated individuals to share a house. And they're facing _fierce
resistance._

Most of us who can head to the west coast at the first opportunity; Boston
would _be_ SF if it wasn't for its outright hostility to the bright minds
pouring out of its universities. The scale of the wasted opportunity is
_staggering._

~~~
jt2190

        > [T]here's a fight going on 
        > in Somerville...to allow more 
        > than four unrelated individuals
        > to share a house. And they're 
        > facing fierce resistance.
    

As they should. The solution is not to cram 17 students into a house. The
solution is to build more housing. Boston is full of slumlords who gouge
students, landlords who resist new development because it would force them to
provide decent living conditions at a reasonable profit.

~~~
wcummings
The law is Boston reads "4 unrelated undergraduates". The fight is to change
the language in Somerville to match (it reads "4 unrelated persons" now). It's
about allowing found-families and co-ops, not students.

~~~
jt2190
Some landlords want to remove any limit on number of tenants occupying a
single unit, related or not. [1]

[1]
[http://somerville.wickedlocal.com/article/20160127/NEWS/1601...](http://somerville.wickedlocal.com/article/20160127/NEWS/160126306)

------
golemotron
This is a complex topic but the article is dead-on. Scott Alexander wrote
years ago that the US has created a divide that he calls Blue Tribe vs. Red
Tribe that is far deeper than Dem vs. Repub - it's cultural.

Today it is extremely common for someone in the "blue tribe" to know no one
who is in the "red tribe" \- people who (to use a few stereotypes) are
Christian, enjoy NASCAR, and unabashedly eat at chain restaurants. People in
either tribe don't encounter each other daily and as a result both tribes have
little understanding of each other's worlds or the number of people who are
not in their tribe.

Inequality is deeply problematic and there are no easy solutions. Liberalism
recognizes this. The problem is that the tribal line now runs along an
economic fault line. Red tribe hasn't been doing well - red states are full of
disadvantaged people. Worse, because of identity politics they have been made
"the other" and rendered relatively voiceless.

Liberalism can champion the disadvantaged but it has to approach them with
solutions. As technological displacement of workers continues it is hard to
see what they will be.

I am blue tribe but I flinch when I see my colleagues in the tech industry
complain about things like the injustice of having to go to a whiteboard in an
interview to get a job in a Crèche-like work environment with play-balls while
people outside the industry are lucky to get jobs driving cars, cleaning
tables, or lifting boxes without health insurance. We don't see our own sense
of entitlement. It is transparent to others despite our liberal signaling.
This isn't going to be a pretty ride.

~~~
Grishnakh
>Inequality is deeply problematic and there are no easy solutions. Liberalism
recognizes this.

No, it doesn't. The article points this out very eloquently. Bernie Sanders
recognizes it, but he doesn't speak for most liberals, who are all excited to
vote for Hillary and Goldman Sachs.

(And before anyone downvotes me for directly bashing a political candidate, go
read the article; I'm just repeating what the article says. Don't like it,
downvote the whole article.)

>We don't see our own sense of entitlement. It is transparent to others
despite our liberal signaling. This isn't going to be a pretty ride.

This is absolutely right. As the article says, this is exactly why Trump is so
popular right now: he's playing directly to the working class that's lucky to
get a job lifting boxes without health insurance. The mainline Democrats are
not: they're telling everyone how wonderful the economy is, how unemployment
is at record-low levels, how wonderful Obamacare is, etc. All those platitudes
aren't helping actual working-class people at all, and they're not seeing any
of these benefits.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I'm an outsider to this, but Obamacare seems like a tentative half-step
towards a sane healthcare system like the rest of the developed world has. And
as far as I can tell the only reason it's a half-step is because the red-tribe
has been convinced for decades that it would help African Americans and so
voted for people who worked against it.

Trump could be seen as these red-tribe members realising they'd been duped,
but it could also be seen as the Republicans losing control of the racism they
cultivated to win those votes in the past.

~~~
kombucha2
To me it felt like a complete betrayal of what most people, who were for it,
wanted. Most people I know regard it as a failure or at best a mess. I know I
certainly had a very different system in mind. I will say that it seems to
have benefited some however.

~~~
Grishnakh
It seems to have helped some lower-income people in some states get coverage
they couldn't afford otherwise, with the downside that everyone else's
insurance rates have skyrocketed and the insurance companies have had record
profits.

The whole thing was a stupid idea by a right-wing thinktank. It tries to help
by establishing a cap on profits and spreading the costs around by requiring
everyone to be insured, but it depended on states increasing their Medicaid
eligibility, which red states did not. It did nothing to actually decrease the
cost of care.

I consider it a mess, not a complete failure. The problem is that we only have
one candidate who's serious about fixing the situation, and it's unlikely he's
going to get his party's nomination. His competitor thinks this system is
wonderful and defends it. On the other side, one guy wants to repeal it
altogether and just screw over anyone who can't afford insurance, and with the
other guy no one really knows what he's going to do because he keeps changing
his position, though he did say something in favor of universal healthcare a
while back, but his current website has switched to some standard lame
Republican ideas about letting insurance companies compete over state lines,
so they'll all just move to the least-regulated state like Wyoming.

------
rayiner
> What Massachusetts liberals pine for, by and large, is a more perfect
> meritocracy -- a system where the essential thing is to ensure that the
> truly talented get into the right schools and then get to rise through the
> ranks of society.

This rings true, and explains a couple of the key failings of modern American
society. Liberals' wholesale embrace of meritocracy combined with their
traditional alignment with public unions has manifested in this bizarre
fixation with education. Education has become the sole means for achieving
traditional liberal goals within the framework of meritocracy. That trend has
directly resulted in the college bubble: a society where everybody spends
inordinate amounts of money getting an education that for most of them is a
waste if time.

More fundamentally, the leadership of the liberal establishment doesn't seem
to really believe in the idea of a flat, egalitarian society. Among the
liberal elite in San Francisco, D.C., Boston, etc, there is an intense disdain
for the folks who form the backbone of the middle class in other
industrialized countries: non-college educated blue and white collar workers.
In places like Germany, you can get a white collar job and live a middle class
life with just 16 years of formal education. In the U.S., even the liberals
don't seem to think that is a desirable state of affairs.

~~~
Futurebot
It's worse because 1) even with the "best and brightest" in charge, we've had
one disaster after another and 2) the "meritocracy" we have is horribly broken
on its own terms. Making the meritocracy we imagine _should_ exist would
require fairly radical reforms in terms of taxes, redistribution, college
funding and regulation, youth economic and educational support, and a whole
host of other interventions that supporters of the present establishment find
anywhere from distasteful to anathema.

"In public life, our pillar institutions and the elites who run them play the
mechanic’s role. They are charged with the task of diagnosing and fixing
problems in governance, the market, and society. And what we want from
authorities, whether they are mechanics, money managers, or senators, is that
they be competent—smart, informed, able—and that they not use their authority
to pursue a hidden agenda or personal gain. We now operate in a world in which
we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities, and the
consequences of this simple, devastating realization is the defining feature
of American life at the end of this low, dishonest decade. Elite failure and
the distrust it has spawned is the most powerful and least understood aspect
of current politics and society."

"..what we’ve seen time and time again is that the two aren’t so neatly
separated. If you don’t concern yourself at all with equality of outcomes, you
will, over time, produce a system with horrendous inequality of opportunity.
This is the paradox of meritocracy: It can only truly come to flower in a
society that starts out with a relatively high degree of equality. So if you
want meritocracy, work for equality. Because it is only in a society which
values equality of actual outcomes, one that promotes the commonweal and
social solidarity, that equal opportunity and earned mobility can flourish."

\- Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites

There's a good reason social mobility in places like Denmark is so high
compared to the US; they do meritocracy better.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
You should go ahead and read Thomas Frank's book that he pulled this article
from. He spends an entire chapter on how regulators and economists from the
well-graduated "meritocratic" elite simply aren't held to any kind of
empirical standard whatsoever. When they're wrong, they consider it as a
civilizational mistake. It's only other people who can be individually
incorrect and responsible for intellectual mistakes.

------
darawk
I'm genuinely curious: what is the alternative here? Keep taxis around?
Encourage people to take more manufacturing jobs? These don't seem like
sustainable or viable alternatives. Over the coming years, all jobs are going
to require an element of creativity, innovation, and probably some degree of
higher education (not necessarily university-based, but some form of
specialized, knowledge-intensive learning).

This is something that is inevitable, and it's coming up fast. To the extent
that we subsidize and protect dying industries to maintain the jobs of their
workers, we hinder their retrainment in new professions and further entrench
the inefficiencies of the past. In even the medium term, this is nothing but
harmful.

Now, I think there are things that probably can and should be done to help
these people get into new jobs. Subsidizing retraining and education,
providing interim assistance to help them get through these periods, and maybe
eventually even a universal basic income (fundamentally the economics of this
probably don't make sense quite yet, but I think they will in the future). But
what is fundamentally not ok, what is never ok, is shielding dying industries
under the aegis of employment.

~~~
lsiebert
I think the alternative (and we can debate whether it's the right choice) is
to regulate companies like Uber that are monopsonies for a segment (in this
case Uber is the only buyer of Uber drivers, and works to reduce the
elasticity of labor supply so drivers will stay with Uber). That could take
the form of a minimum wage for drivers, or regulation that establishes a
separate market for drivers that ridesharing platforms would need to all use.

The issue is not the job loss, but that the benefits of the disruption accrue
not only accrue mainly with the employer, but are less valuable to the
employer and the economy then the loss of taxable income and stable jobs. The
Wikipedia page
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony)
isn't a bad read.

~~~
jdminhbg
Uber has a monopsony on Uber drivers in the same way that Apple has a monopoly
on selling Apple devices, which is to say, not for any useful definition of
the term. Plenty of Uber drivers also drive for e.g. Lyft.

~~~
lsiebert
Uber drivers aren't consumers, they are independent contractors. The better
metaphor would be IOS developers.

------
Animats
Here's the other extreme - the liberalism of the working class, the Union
Pacific Railroad. 150 years in business. 40,000 employees. 86% belong to a
union. 20% are military veterans. UP claims 3 million hours a year of training
time for their employees, and that's all paid time.

It's not an easy life. Here's a recruiting video.[1] They open by showing
workers in a railroad yard in Chicago at 5:47 AM in a snowstorm. Management
training starts with jobs like that. They show a management training session
on how to deal with conflict. There's a lot of travel. One of the trainees
says "UP operates in 23 states, and I went to 21 of them in my first year."

It's the total opposite of the "brogrammer" culture. Not only does UP hire
many women, the women go out in the field, wearing all the heavy protective
gear and doing hard work. UP is insistent about this.[2] It helps that they're
a union shop, where employee discipline is formal. And this is in a culture
much more macho than programming.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMViWazEYoc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMViWazEYoc)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVH8pASu-
og](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVH8pASu-og)

------
x0054
My wife refers to this problem as the Alan Shore Democrats (Alan Shore from
Boston Legal TV Show). People who care about the plight of the working poor,
but then you find out that they only do so to appease the poor so they don't
rise up and revolt against the status quo.

It's the politics of fear. Democrats yell "Vote for me, I will keep those evil
republicans from making abortion and being gay illegal." And the Republicans
yell "Vote for me, I will keep those sodomites and baby killers in check."
They paint the other side as evil, split the poor people in half, and stay in
power. The truth is, they desperately need each other, because, if people
stopped hating their neighbor for a second, and turned around, they might
realize that they are being fucked by their elected officials on both sides.

~~~
vacri
They might even realise that you can't have only two parties represent a
population of 300 million people in a multicultural society spread all the way
across a continent, sea-to-sea.

------
dang
Url changed from [http://billmoyers.com/story/the-blue-state-
model/](http://billmoyers.com/story/the-blue-state-model/), which points to
this.

This is a political story that has a chance of clearing the 'unusually
interesting' bar so let's give it a try. Frank's model of the 'professional
class' (a.k.a. top 10%) as the key socioeconomic faultline is an interesting
one that deserves a good discussion. If the thread turns into partisan or
ideological bickering, we'll demote it. Let's stay substantive.

~~~
jt2190
The central premise of the article is faulty: That Democratic policies (or
"Innovation Liberalism") created the divide between the wealthy and the
working class in Massachusetts, when in fact it has always been the opposite:
The divide was already there, and the party in power serves to maintain it
while playing lip service to some ideals.

~~~
dang
You may be right, but an article with a faulty central premise can still be
interesting and worth discussing. It would be better to post your observation
as a top-level comment and better still to make it engage more with the
specific claims of the OP.

(It's also possible that that's not really Frank's central premise, given that
this is a excerpt from a book on a larger topic.)

------
haberman
> Like so many other American scenes, this one is the product of decades of
> deindustrialization, engineered by Republicans and rationalized by
> Democrats. [...] Even the city’s one real hope for new employment
> opportunities --- an Amazon warehouse that is now in the planning stages --
> will serve to lock in this relationship. If all goes according to plan, and
> if Amazon sticks to the practices it has pioneered elsewhere, people from
> Fall River will one day get to do exhausting work with few benefits while
> being electronically monitored for efficiency, in order to save the affluent
> customers of nearby Boston a few pennies when they buy books or electronics.

Let me get this straight. The elite are bad for taking away working class jobs
in industrial sectors (jobs which could be so brutal to workers that they
basically spurred the invention of the labor unions). But they are also bad
when they create new working class jobs.

There is definitely a problem for working class people today. Maybe it feels
better for people to believe that it's because today's politicians and
business leaders are uniquely malfeasant. But it's not really accurate.
Technology changes the picture and we have to figure out how to respond to
that. Read about the Ludlow Massacre and try and tell me that industrial
America was "the good old days."

------
ScottBurson
_At a 2014 celebration of Governor Patrick’s innovation leadership, Google’s
Eric Schmidt announced that “if you want to solve the economic problems of the
U.S., create more entrepreneurs.”_

I'm a Bernie Sanders supporter, but I totally agree with Eric Schmidt here. In
fact, I would go so far as to say that the growing incubator/accelerator
industry, of which YC is at the vanguard, is one of the most hopeful,
encouraging things happening in the world today. I think it's ridiculous that
Paul Graham has to defend himself against charges of exacerbating inequality,
when he's done as much as anyone to start the economy down a new path.
(Disclosure: I have not applied to YC or any other accelerator, but I might in
the future.)

So -- is this too much of a contradiction, to be what this author calls an
"innovation liberal" while supporting a populist/socialist candidate?

Economic change, of the kind the US is now going through, is always wrenching
and painful; there are always people on the back side of the curve who suffer.
I think the challenge for government is to craft policies that support the
changes, and those driving them, while not excessively punishing those left
behind.

I think that broadly, the pendulum in the US has swung too far in the
direction of minimizing the safety net in support of individual
responsibility, and the surprising success the Sanders campaign is having --
Bernie himself did not think, a year ago, that he could get as far as he has
-- shows that the public mood is starting to swing back the other way. I think
that's healthy, to a point, and that's why I'm supporting him.

Let's not make this a discussion about Bernie, though. I recognize he is not
perfect, and I'm not even 100% certain he would make a good President. I just
think the issues he is raising deserve a larger hearing.

~~~
jeremyt
It always puzzles me to hear people say that they think the social safety net
"pendulum" has been swinging too far in the direction of personal
responsibility.

By any measure, social safety net spending is significantly higher than it has
ever been. News comes out every day of some new government mandate like paid
parental leave, paid personal days, etc.

The minimum wage is creeping higher every day.

Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare spending has never been higher.

We just passed a massive, expensive, entitlement known as Obamacare, which
provides (or was supposed to) health insurance to everyone in America.

Obama, during his first term, passed a massive expansion of government-
subsidized student loans.

We are in the process of a significant expansion of home loans for low income
and people with dodgy credit.

Except for the very limited, bipartisan, welfare reform under President
Clinton (which has since basically been reversed), I'm not aware of any
shrinking of the welfare state that has happened in the last 20 years.

~~~
ScottBurson
> The minimum wage is creeping higher every day.

Not in constant dollars [0]. It peaked in 1968. It's a bit lower than that now
-- if you accept the official inflation estimates, which some argue are
understated.

> Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare spending has never been higher.

True, though as a percentage of GDP, Social Security hasn't increased that
much since 1975 -- it reached 4% then, and is around 5% now. [1] I'll let you
look up the numbers on Medicare and Medicaid.

The situation with the ACA is complicated -- it is costing some money in the
short run, but (a) it's less than originally projected, and (b) more
importantly, it does seem to be curbing healthcare inflation (something is,
anyway).

All that said, your point that the welfare state hasn't been shrinking,
either, is a fair one. Perhaps it's fairer to say -- as I think the OP is
arguing -- that economic conditions, particularly since the Great Recession,
and especially the fact that the middle class has been shrinking in recent
years, put us in a situation where the need for the safety net is arguably
greater than it had been until recently.

[0] [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/23/5-facts-
abou...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/23/5-facts-about-the-
minimum-wage/)

[1]
[http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/social_security_spending...](http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/social_security_spending_by_year)

------
fiatmoney
You can understand a lot of "progressive" policy as devoted to screwing the
white working class as hard as possible (and in fact a lot of the white
working class does see it through that lens, which is why, eg, Trump sees such
support from that demographic). For instance:

\- Hollowing out icky manufacturing & extraction-sector jobs, while ensuring
maximal support for FIRE & "knowledge sector" jobs via IP protections & lax
regulations.

\- Importing vast amounts of cheap labor to compete for service-sector jobs.

\- Ensuring that "live in an expensive neighborhood" is the only mechanism to
ensure your children go to vaunted "good schools" (or even safe schools).

\- Devoting recurring two-minutes-hates to attacking their cultural symbols.

------
cs702
The main claim is that today's liberal establishment has no patience with the
idea that everyone should share in society’s wealth.

Instead, what today's liberal establishment really pines for, the author
writes, is _a more perfect meritocracy_.

Unfortunately, there is no solidarity in a perfect meritocracy, for the
ideology of meritocracy negates any esteem society's winners might feel for
poorly educated, low-achieving losers.

Rings True.

------
jt2190
The article reverses the cause and effect of Massachusetts' divide between the
wealthy and the worker in order to lay the cause at the feed of the Democratic
Party. Take the examples: Universities, Banks, and Large Companies (Mills in
the past, Pharma today) were dominant well before the Democratic Party become
dominant [1], and were not somehow made powerful as the result of Democratic
policies alone. We've really always has a "________ of the rich", where the
blank is either "liberalism" or "conservatism" depending on the current party
in power.

------
srtjstjsj
This is Bill Clinton-esque "neoliberalism", right?

socially liberal, economically oligarchist, to contrast with the Repbulicans
socially conservative economically oligarchist.

------
anon4this1
"The Oxfam report An Economy for the 1%, shows that the wealth of the poorest
half of the world’s population has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010, a
drop of 38 percent. This has occurred despite the global population increasing
by around 400 million people during that period. Meanwhile, the wealth of the
richest 62 has increased by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.76tr. The
report also shows how women are disproportionately affected by inequality – of
the current ‘62’, 53 are men and just nine are women."

OK so assume these top 62 people give all their money to the poor. 1.76
trillion is distributed among 3.5 billion people giving $502 each. the average
net worth of these people goes from $500 to about $1000. 1 year later what
will have happened? probably not much. These people will increase consumption
somewhat, some might invest a bit, but mostly the money will just disappear.

Huge swathes of the population have minimal net worth, like many of my
friends, and live happy, comfortable lives. If they had an extra $500 they
would spend it quick. This isn't the rule obviously, and there is a lot of
poverty, but these statements don't really quite give a true picture of the
issue.

~~~
Maarten88
If 3.5 billion people were to spend $500 quick, that would give an enormous
economic boost globally. Most of those people would probably spend it wisely,
improve their lives considerably, start businesses etc.

I read it has been shown that simply giving money to the poorest people is a
very effective way of stimulating the economy.

~~~
anon4this1
I know when I was broke, working crappy jobs and in debt, $500 would basically
have put a small dent in my credit card, and not much else.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk has $16 billion dollars and hes making significant
strides towards colonizing mars and slowing global warming.

------
brownbat
Politics is the mindkiller.

It opens with the assumption that everyone shares the author's policy
prescriptions.

How can anyone write about politics and think that it's full of issues with
only one obvious answer? Is it through screening all interactions to avoid
anyone with different opinions?

And there's no reason to single Frank out on this. Why does almost everyone on
both sides of the aisle write and talk about politics in exactly this way?

------
pink_dinner
It's always interesting to see rich liberal cities like San Francisco because
there is really no middle class. You are either making lots of money in IT or
some other business or you can't afford your rent and are barely scraping by.

You don't see this as much in cities that are not as liberally run.

~~~
godzillabrennus
Detroit is a city historically run by Democrats and is a very affordable.
Chicago is relatively affordable and historically is run by Democrats.

There will continue to be going to be growing levels of income inequality as
automation continues to increase. Either we focus on solving that (Minimal
Viable Income sounds like a plan) or we face a true million man March on DC.

Something has to change.

~~~
masterleep
Detroit is more or less a smoking crater at the moment, and Chicago is a
smoking crater to come. For that you can thank the wise, forward-thinking
stewardship of the Democrats.

~~~
SwellJoe
That's a simplistic interpretation of the facts. Detroit is a burned out shell
of a city for a wide variety of reasons; very few of those reasons have much
to do with local politicians. Trade agreements at the national level probably
tell as much of the story as any individual element. But, strategic failures
of US car makers also plays a role. And, a rapidly evolving global economic
environment also plays a role.

Certainly there has been mismanagement of the city of Detroit, sometimes on an
absurd and possibly criminal scale. But, to chalk it all of to "Democrats did
this" is...well, it leaves a whole lot of the story out.

Note that I'm not a Democrat and not defending politicians in any general
case. But, I do think it's silly to make the claim that local Democrats caused
Detroit's decline, when there are clearly so many other factors in the story.

~~~
ScottBurson
Okay, but isn't it fair to say that making the unions too powerful was a key
part of the story? That ultimately greatly damaged Detroit's ability to
compete on the world stage.

Not to say that the automakers weren't also badly run -- they were. There's an
NPR piece about NUMMI that puts some great color on the situation -- ah, here
it is [0]. See especially "Act Two", where GM completely muffs bringing the
NUMMI success to the rest of the company.

[0] [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/561/t...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/561/transcript)

------
paulpauper
What Thomas Frank does not realize, or is ignoring, is that it's still the
'elite' who create jobs, and antipathy towards them won't improve the
situation for the millions who are without work. The reality is, without job
creators, most people wold fail, as the success rate for entrepreneurship is
very low.

~~~
apalmer
Not sure that the whole ideal of job creators really holds up in the light of
day. Or rather job creators as 'elites' with enormous amounts of capitalism
and economies of scale dont drive jobs growth.

I guess its a matter of scale... A single WalMart certainly employs less
people and provides lower salaries than the 20 small businesses it replaces...

If by elite we are including the typical small business owners then yeah they
are job creators...

If by elite we are talking the investor class executive class then not in
aggreememt

~~~
paulpauper
'investor class'

you realize that businesses don't spring out the ground like plants, right.
typically, someone has to invest

~~~
Maarten88
Or something, like a pension fund or a bank... It doesn't have to be someone
rich.

------
Apocryphon
See also:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11462513](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11462513)

~~~
hackuser
A direct link:
[http://www.salon.com/2016/04/02/whats_the_matter_with_dem_th...](http://www.salon.com/2016/04/02/whats_the_matter_with_dem_thomas_frank_talks_bill_clinton_barack_obama_and_everything_in_between_partner/)

------
tzs
Well that was a bit unusual:

> Posted by Thomas Frank

...

> Reading Thomas Frank's new book, _Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to
> the Party of the People?_ [...]

...

> Let me just add that, as Frank makes clear in his brilliant new work [...]

...

> [...] Frank does a typically brainy thing.

You usually don't see people review their own books from a third person
viewpoint, or point out how brilliant or brainy they are. The few times I have
seen that have been in contexts where they were obviously trying to project an
image of a giant ego for humorous purposes. I'm not familiar enough with this
author to know if that's what he's going for in this review, or if he is
seriously praising himself.

~~~
mturmon
Nah, you are mistaken, and the article has led you astray.

The writer who wrote a few introductory paragraphs to the large book excerpt
is not Thomas Frank himself. It's not 100% explicit, but the person writing
these laudatory words is almost certainly Tom Englehart, the editor of
TomDispatch.

I've seen Thomas Frank speak and followed him for many years, since he and
others founded the _Baffler_ in Chicago in the late 80s. He's a Midwesterner
through and through, grew up in suburban Kansas City, and has the
characteristic modesty of the area.

~~~
tzs
That does appear to be the case, based on looking at some other reviews. It
looks like it works like this, at least for authors who are TomsDispatch
regulars:

1\. Author Foo writes a book.

2\. Tom Englehart writes a review, which consists of introductory material and
then a long excerpt from the book.

3\. Englehart's review appears on the site, but it says "Posted by Foo" at the
top. The only mention of Englehart is that it says "Tom" in italics
immediately after the last sentence of the introductory material.

4\. At the bottom it says "Foo, a TomsDispatch regular, is the author of <name
of book>".

5\. At the bottom it says "Copyright <year> Foo".

Basically everything on the page except for that lone italicized "Tom" after
the introductory material makes it look like Foo wrote the review. In the case
where firstname_of(Foo) == "Tom", everything on the page makes it look like
Foo wrote the review.

------
jwatte
Maybe if the Republicans weren't in the pockets of anti science right wing
religious nuts and climate change deniers, the well educated would be more
willing to consider them?

~~~
dang
I'd like to think it's a mark of HN's improvement that unsubstantive, snarky
putdowns turned out to be rare in this thread.

