take back the Democratic Party from the corrupt elites who have made it the tool of the one percent. Thomas Frank's "Listen Liberal" puts it nicely:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-scheer/scheer-intelligence-thoma_b_9499772.html
<edit>
F: Yeah, that’s the key word, is meritocracy. Or, you know, the different word for it is professionalism. So what I looked at is, why has the Democratic Party—why haven’t they been more aggressive on the subject of inequality? Why do they do things like, you know, the Clintons’ welfare reform? By the way, he did that in 1996; this is simultaneous with the series of bank deregulations that he’s doing. So he’s cracking down on poor people—you know, they passed the big omnibus crime law in 1994—cracking down on the poor, and at the same time letting Wall Street do whatever it wanted. You know, giving them unprecedented freedom; the law is not going to be enforced on these people anymore. These are Democrats that did this, it’s not Republicans. And they did it wholeheartedly. So the question is, why do they do things like that? And so you know, it’s a historical mystery. So I went back, and the answer that I finally came up with is, because, is that the Democratic Party itself has changed. And in particular, what’s changed about them is the social class that they answer to, that they respect, that they come from OK? And this is—the social class—you know, we used to identify Democrats with workers, with organized labor, with the sons of toil, blue collar—whatever you want to call it, right? But that changed, and beginning in the 1970s, Democrats began to identify themselves with the professional class. And they have all sorts of really nifty ways of describing that group of people, very flattering ways. And you’ve heard some of these. Remember, the “symbolic analysts” was one; “wired workers” is one; the “creative class” is one they use a lot right now. But this is basically, this is the group that Democrats idolize; this is the group that they, from where their support comes; and it’s also the group from which leading Democrats themselves are drawn. So they have internalized the way this certain stratum of society view the world. They’ve internalized that; it’s very natural to them, and the centerpiece of that way of viewing the world is meritocracy. You get what you deserve, and what you deserve is defined by how you did in school.
RS: Yeah, but it also means, of course, that you’ve succeeded through dint of hard work, and not by selling out, not by betraying the people you came from, not by accepting benefits. So you know, if your son-in-law has a hedge fund that’s not doing well, but he’s making a lot of money, it’s not because Lloyd Blankfein helped him out; it’s not because they want to curry favor with the Clintons. No; he’s just finding his measure, and he’ll get it.
TF: [Laughs] I know what you’re talking about there. That’s not exactly the direction I was going to go in. What I was going to say is that, as a group, professionals are very interesting. So basically, you see what I’m getting at here, is I’m saying that the Democrats are a political party—they’re a class party. OK? They’re a party that has internalized, I mean completely and utterly, one hundred percent, have internalized the world view of a particular social class, OK? And one of the peculiar things about that—so they look at people like hedge fund managers on Wall Street, or Wall Street bankers. And they see those people as colleagues, as classmates; as friends, even. And this is just in the last 20 years; in the old days, as you know, Robert, Democrats habitually regarded Wall Street as the arch-fiend, you know. You look at Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman or William Jennings Bryan, these guys always, forever denouncing Wall Street—well, with Bill Clinton, and even before Bill Clinton, Democrats came to see it kind of differently. This is the creative class; this is a creative industry, they’re making these really nifty derivative securities, they’re addressing risk, there’s all this wonderful complexity going on. And so they see something like Wall Street and the meltdown there—you know, the complete collapse on Wall Street—and they’re like, oh, how can we help? How can we help? The idea that Wall Street was engaged in, like, world historic fraud is not an idea that occurs to them naturally, or that is even acceptable to them.
more...
= new reply since forum marked as read
