​The Liberal Meritocracy at Work

Liberal meritocracy in action. Slick new buses like these ferry high tech workers to and from Bay Area jobs, using city bus stops as pickup points. The city gets "a pittance" for each "stop event" while the city's less-connected citizens get no right at all to ride them (source).

by Gaius Publius

Thomas Frank has made the point many times that the modern Democratic Party has abandoned the working class, and indeed most of the middle class, and that today its true constituency is really just the "professional" class, the upper 10%, more or less.

That makes a kind of sense if, cynical electoral financing decisions aside, people who actually run the Democratic Party inhabit a culture that considers only the "smart" and "accomplished" truly deserving. Consider the constant praise from mainstream Democrats, for example, of the "entrepreneurial" or "creative" class and how these wannabe billionaires — riders of Google Buses in San Francisco, a kind of alt-transportation system to which only high tech workers have access — can be counted on to lift the rest of the country out of the depths and into a new age of job creation (in China).

There could not be a more striking example of this kind of meritocracy than the following email from the Podesta Wikileaks archives (h/t commenter John Wright in this Naked Capitalism thread). It was sent from Clinton supporter and UC Berkeley Professor Brad DeLong during the primary season to Clinton supporter and Center for American Progress chief Neera Tanden:

From:brad.delong@gmail.com
To: ntanden@americanprogress.org
CC: john.podesta@gmail.com
Date: 2015-07-31 15:42

Subject: So my 25-year-old Michael DeLong has applied for a Firearms Safety Policy job at CAP…

Dear Neera (and John)—

So my 25-year-old Michael DeLong has applied for a Firearms Safety Policy job at CAP…

I think he is a very, very strong candidate on the merits, given what he has been doing in Portland at Ceasefire Oregon in the three years since he graduated from Reed College, and how effective he has been there. But I find myself somewhat anxious [that] somebody already in Washington and with better connections might crowd him out…

May I beg you to reassure me?

Yours,

Brad DeLong

When the working class does this, of course, it's called nepotism. I'm sure at Neera Tanden's level it's called "networking."

There were several notes about DeLong's son's job availability sprinkled among the Podesta emails that involved Professor DeLong, and it's certainly true that fathers and mothers everywhere have attempted to ease their children's entry into the job market by asking for a boost from friends. I don't fault the act.

What makes this stand out, though, is not DeLong's interest in seeing his son hired, but his stated fear that his son would be lose his slot at CAP, not to someone better qualified, but to someone better connected.

Thus the "meritorious" competition seems recognized as not between the talented and connected; just between the connected. "I find myself somewhat anxious [that] somebody already in Washington and with better connections might crowd him out… May I beg you to reassure me?"

A small thing perhaps, and certainly not a strike against DeLong for asking. Every father should love his children, and DeLong's son does sound accomplished.

Nevertheless, this is a striking reminder of what concepts like "democracy" and "rights" mean to mainstream (Clinton wing and Obama wing) Democrats as a group, as they struggle with the problem of offering to the rest of us — or working to deny it — the same "rights" that the Party elite and its servicing ecosystem already enjoy as privileges of class, like access to affordable, quality medical care.

Schedule note: I'll be reading but not writing for about two weeks, restarting after Labor Day.

GP