The Education Of Elizabeth Warren

-by emorejahongkong

 No Rights Reserved

Elizabeth Warren’s path to disrupting the conventional wisdom of bankruptcy law helps explain her failure to break through the conventional wisdom of Presidential politics.

Professor Warren’s 1987-published insights into bankruptcy law were deep, broad and sharp:

“distributional values … [and]… assumptions … garbed in neutral terms, lending an aura of fairness … makes the debate a shadow game that offers little real illumination.”

These insights were enabled by Warren’s outsider status, which continued during most of her long journey from Oklahoma to Rutgers to Houston to Austin to Penn to Harvard Law School-- where most of her peers have spent their entire adult lives in elite academia.

Only in 1992 did Harvard welcome Warren-- despite the extreme contrast between the prestige of Warren’s academic background, and the Ivy-dominated background of most Harvard Law professors. Yes, Harvard was then under longstanding pressure to hire more women-- but not under any reported pressure to make more non-Ivy hires. Reportedly:

“Harvard really did not have a professor interested in personal bankruptcy.”

In other words, during the five years from 1987 to 1992, Warren’s historic breakthrough, in how to study and apply bankruptcy law, did not attract sustained interest from any academic who was teaching at Harvard or any other Ivy League law school. This clear lesson, that elite status narrows perspectives, appears not to have been fully applied, by 2020 candidate Warren, to evaluating her advisors’, or her own, abilities relevant to a Presidential candidacy.

The outsider road of Warren’s legal career contrasts sharply with Warren’s jump from Harvard to a Presidential candidacy-- and not only in speed. Warren’s brief career in electoral politics has been insider-driven: from the Massachusetts’ Democratic Party consensus (driven by Scott Brown’s popularity) that gift-wrapped Warren’s first Senate nomination, to the box-checking political experts who persuaded her of Hillary’s inevitability in 2015, and of Sanders’ beat-ability in 2019.

Warren’s buzzword-obsessed insider-advisors are doubtless to blame for her treating the phrase “middle-class tax increase” so fearfully as to devalue her lengthy investment in “standing with Bernie” on Medicare-For-All. But this was not Warren’s only misstep on prime time TV, and Warren’s advisors are not her only weakness as a Presidential candidate. Most recently, the ability of Pete (‘Presidential candidacy will raise my profile’) Buttigieg to fight Warren to a draw, on the debate topic of big donors, says more about Warren’s debating weaknesses than about any strengths of Buttigieg. In contrast, Buttigieg was helpless against Sanders’ effectively humorous jab at Buttigieg’s “energetic and competitive” pursuit of billionaire donors. This is the difference between Sanders, as a lifelong veteran of anti-machine electoral politics and Warren, as a lifelong legal scholar whose knowledge and instincts, which are deep and strong in her specialty, are shallower and weaker in many of the policies, tactics and mass psychologies underlying electoral politics.

By Warren’s own account, she became attentive to politics very late in life (after long sharing her earlier peers’ vague “market-friendly” Republicanism), roughly around the time she made it into the Ivy League. But learning voter-mobilization while teaching at Harvard Law School is like trying to learn how speed boats affect the bottom of the food chain on the ocean floor-- while water skiing.

Warren’s next role, which was to serve as a U.S. Senator, actually reduces most Senators’ ability to communicate with people at the bottom of the political food chain-- as documented by the examples of John Kerry and Joe Biden, whose originally attractive qualities were grossly degraded by their long tenures as U.S. Senators. A more positive example for Warren can be found in Ted Kennedy, who proved that there is no shame in losing a Presidential race, if the loser learns from the experience that his or her skill set is better suited to another influential role.

Perhaps the second hardest thing to learn is that people brilliant in one realm can be clumsy in another. Certainly the hardest thing to learn is how to recognize your own limitations and mistaken path early enough to cut your losses.

Is now the time for Professor Warren to take her own advice?

“But if we academics take ourselves seriously, we should put single-issue theories into a somewhat less exalted position in order to minimize the harm we can do.”

This advice fits today’s moment neatly (changed words in bold):

But if we Progressive candidates take ourselves seriously, we should put into a somewhat less exalted position single-issue theories-- such as: “greater electability of a female Sanders-lite will pressure the unelectable Sanders to withdraw in order to avoid splitting the Progressive vote.”

Nearly every day, when Warren was polling higher than Sanders, despite polls’ documented under-representation of the younger and poorer (and more diverse) eligible voters who make up Sanders’ actual and potential base, there was an elite commentator highlighting Sanders’ duty to withdraw and endorse Warren. How many months of Warren polling and primary results, lower than Sanders will be needed for Warren to recognize her duty to withdraw in order to minimize the harm she can do?