"You are suffering economically because you didn't achieve high enough in life"

[AZ Progressive]

I bet that's what affluent Hillary supporters believe about the bottom 80%.

http://inthesetimes.com/features/listen-liberal-thomas-frank-democratic-party-elites-inequality.html

What’s the content of the ideology of the professional class and how does it hurt working people? What are their guiding principles?

The first commandment of the professional class is the idea of meritocracy, which allows people to think that those on top are there because they deserve to be. With the professional class, it’s always associated with education. They deserve to be there because they worked really hard and went to a good college and to a good graduate school. They’re high achievers. Democrats are really given to credentialism in a way that Republicans aren’t.

If you look at the last few Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Obama, and Hillary Clinton as well, their lives are a tale of educational achievement. This is what opened up the doors of the world to them. It’s a party of who people who have gotten where they are by dint of educational accomplishment.

This produces a set of related ideas. When the Democrats, the party of the professionals, look at the economic problems of working-class people, they always see an educational problem, because they look at working class people and say, “Those people didn’t do what I did”: go and get advanced degrees, go to the right college, get the high SAT scores and study STEM or whatever.

That was an essential point that I try to make in Listen Liberal: that there is no solidarity in a meritocracy. A meritocracy really is every man for himself.

Don’t get me wrong. People at the top of the meritocracy, professionals, obviously have enormous respect for one another. That is the nature of professional meritocracy. They have enormous respect for the people at the top, but they feel very little solidarity for people beneath them who don’t rise in the meritocracy.

Bonus quote:

One of the most shocking quotes in the book is from Alfred Kahn, an advisor to Jimmy Carter, who said, “I’d love the Teamsters to be worse off. I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off.” He then basically says that unionized workers are exploiting other workers.

Isn’t that amazing? He’s describing a situation in the 1970s. There was all this controversy in the 1970s about labor versus management—this was the last decade where those fights were front and center in our national politics. And he’s coming down squarely on the side of management in those fights.

And remember, Kahn was a very important figure in the Carter administration. The way that he describes unions is incorrect—he’s actually describing professionals. Professionals are a protected class that you can’t do anything about—they’re protected by the laws of every state that dictate who can practice in these fields. It’s funny that he projects that onto organized labor and holds them responsible for the sins of another group.

This is a Democrat in an administration that is actually not very liberal. This is the administration that carried out the first of the big deregulations. This is the administration that had the great big capital gains tax cuts, that carried out the austerity plan that saw the Federal Reserve jack its interest rates sky high. They clubbed the economy to the ground in order to stop “wage inflation,” in which workers, if they have enough power, can keep demanding higher wages. It was incredible.

The Democratic Party has been invaded by affluent moderate Republicans and they are the ones that need to leave the party, not the progressives. I am thus willing to say that professional Democrats that are Hillary supporters are accomplices of the 1%.

[missingthebigdog]

1. Attacking education is what the republicans do.

Higher education is a HUGE part of Bernie's platform- how does that emphasis gel with the assertion that those with educational achievements cannot be in solidarity with those who have not achieved academically?

[AZ Progressive]

2. We are talking about professionals here, people with Masters and PhD degrees

Second, everyone believes in education, but what's being said here is that professionals don't believe in more economic equality, they believe that you still must achieve higher educationally if you are suffering economically, rather than that people deserve to be able to live well even if they can't achieve a masters or PhD degree or have profitable talents. They are very much wedded to capitalist ideology and the puritan work ethic just like conservatives and thus frown at socialist ideas and don't really care about things that help the lower classes.

[missingthebigdog]

7. This is pitting "book learning" against "common sense"

And it is a GOP weapon.

Sure, it's dressed up for current times, but it is the same argument. It attempts to separate "professionals" from the "working class," when in reality, the real divide is between the investment class and the rest of us.

There was a time when it could be argued that a higher education wasn't necessary- factory workers were making as much as lawyers, and they didn't even need a diploma, let alone a college education. But when those jobs were shipped off to someone who would do them for much less, those workers had nowhere to turn.

A college education continues to be the best way to "move up" in economic status. Denigrating those who make that effort is carrying water for the GOP. As long as we are divided against one another, they are safe.

[DonCoquixote]

3. the meat of the matter

"Millenials’ take on the world is fascinating. Just a few years ago, people thought of them as very different. But now they’re coming out of college with enormous student debt, and they’re discovering that the job market is casualized and Uberized. The work that they do is completely casual. The idea of having a middle-class lifestyle in that situation is completely off the table for them.

Every time I think about these people, it burns me up. It makes me so angry what we’ve done to them as a society. It really gives the lie to Democratic Party platitudes about the world an education will open up for you. That path just doesn’t work anymore. Millenials can see that in their own lives very plainly."

To quote Bowie: "these children that you spit on, they're quoite aware of what they're going through."

[surrealAmerican]

4. The full quote:

...
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're going through
...

[AZ Progressive]

6. Paul Krugman is not that naive

Paul Krugman, one of the most famous Democratic economists, predicted this back in 1996 about the next 100 years looking to the year 2096:

The Devaluation of Higher Education

In the 1990's, everyone believed that education was the key to economic success. A college degree, even a postgraduate degree, was essential for anyone who wanted a good job as one of those ''symbolic analysts.''

Eventually, the eroding payoff of higher education created a crisis in education itself. Why should a student put herself through four years of college and several years of postgraduate work to acquire academic credentials with little monetary value? These days, jobs that require only 6 or 12 months of vocational training -- paranursing, carpentry, household maintenance and so on -- pay nearly as much as if not more than a job that requires a master's degree, and pay more than one requiring a Ph.D.

So enrollment in colleges and universities has dropped almost two-thirds since its peak at the turn of the century. The prestigious universities coped by reverting to an older role. Today a place like Harvard is, as it was in the 19th century, more of a social institution than a scholarly one -- a place for children of the wealthy to refine their social graces and befriend others of their class.

[Bernin4U]

5. Well, it's technically true

...if only in an entirely circular way: You're poor when you're not able to achieve enough wealth.

It's like Romney saying he wants everyone in America to be rich. Sure, let's all just have a bigger slice of the pie. (Don't worry that there's almost none left after my friends and I take our share first.)

[LiberalElite]

8. K&R nt

[Bernin4U]

9. The goal of corps is ZERO employment

A handful of execs, a few managers, and a pool of tens of thousands of contractors on call, from all around the world.

Min wage? FICA taxes? That's all in the past, because Non-exempt employees are a thing of the past. Who needs em, when all your work needs can be crowdsourced? Often for a fraction of the cost of an employee.

Yeah, millennials are pretty much fucked.