Speaker 1: . Today, I'm going to be speaking with Professor Katherine Liu, who teaches
at University of California, Irvine, and is also author of the new book Virtue Hoarder's
The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. It's so great to have you on today.
Speaker 4: Thank you. Speaker 1: So there's there's certainly a
narrative I think much of my audience will be familiar with that is often used in some
populist circles about elites and non elites or an overclass and an underclass. And one
of the things your book does that's interesting is you're sort of focusing in on a specific
slice that's smaller than such a simple division, the managerial class, professional managerial
jewel. Let's start there. What is that? Who's included in it, et cetera.
Speaker 4: So the professional managerial class is an intermediary class. A lot of classic
Marxists call it the petty bourgeois because it's located between the working class, which
is the mass of people without college degrees now and late capitalism in America and the
capitalists. So this class, uniquely, though, in the United States, has become really, really
important. Exports, one of the most important American creations of the postwar period,
the meritocracy. And it basically does the bidding of capitalism and the capitalist by
producing now we think of as content and ideological content to justify the really staggering levels
of inequality and exploitation that keep capitalism going. So discuss our college educated white
collar workers who I like to say do jobs that don't entail physical damage to their bodies,
that they could actually damage themselves psychologically and intellectually, which
I think is actually the case. But what they do is reproduce the ideology of the class
system to make it seem like it's justified that rich people are rich and it's justified
that the masses are poor and that there are no universal programs that would actually
create a more equitable society. Now, this is to say, though, in nineteen seventy seven,
when John and Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about this class, this class has taken over the
left and progressive liberal organizing spaces. So it thinks of itself as being on the side
of progress, bright and virtuous and good. But actually its actions serve only to reproduce
the interests of capitalism. Speaker 1: Yeah, this is it. So I think many
in the audience may realize that, that when you tell me is it correct to call this a Marxist
perspective? Yes. Yeah. As a non Marxist myself, I still think that the analysis has a lot
of very interesting things that that are that are accurate. And one of the things I was
thinking of during the 20, the rise of the Tea Party in 2010 was that a lot of the people
that were supporting the Tea Party, they were definitely never going to benefit from much
of what the Tea Party was advocating for. Like it wasn't even there was a chance they
would benefit statistically. They just weren't going to benefit. What I think is interesting
about the managerial class that you're talking about is that they actually, to some degree,
could benefit from the propping up of the actual overclass that you describe. And so
there's there actually seems to be if you want to talk about rationality, it actually
seems more rational to me that they would prop that system up, whereas it made less
sense with the Tea Party people. Speaker 4: But I think the Tea Party people
and populists about which I've written in the past, are animated by a a rage against
the economic system that's left them marginalized. But what they are but what they support were
free markets, but also the values, traditional values. And they hated the liberal elites,
the liberal elites who created the crisis in which they find themselves. And they're
not wrong right now. A lot of them were not college educated people. They were small business
people would say like crap craftsmen or, you know, there was like the classic Joe the Plumber
who turned out to be fake. But there were these this population in America, which I
would say are non college educated people after World War Two were really hopelessly
rewarded by the redistribution of wealth that was put into place by both Republican and
Democratic administrations after nineteen forty five. But since nineteen seventy two,
as you know, the middle and the working classes have seen their wages stagnate actually go
down. We've seen the social safety net be destroyed. And so a lot of the actual economic
damage that people. Suffered from in the Tea Party's setting, and I would say several Trump
supporters had to do with the imposition of this kind of neoliberal austerity politics
and actually free markets that were engineered by economists, academics and elites after
nineteen seventy two of both parties. Right. So what they wanted in the Tea Party was less
government because they thought the government had created the financial crisis and the government
didn't did. Participate in creating the financial crisis, but it was Wall Street and financiers
who really produced this crisis and capital that destroyed a trillion dollars in American
assets like overnight. And there was this fantasy that that the Tea Party had, that
it was people borrowing and that with bad credit and and who they were to blame. And
somehow the government and some banks participated in that. I heard this line repeated to me
by a very wealthy liberal who said, you know, what caused this crisis? All those people
couldn't afford the houses and everyone wants a flat screen TV. So, in fact, she's actually
being more rational, although wrong, because it was actually Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley
and AIG that created the crisis, the credit default swap created with the crisis. But
there's this idea that these poor people overconsuming who had bad credit and they brought the world
economy to its knees. And so the Tea Party had that idea and they were all mad at Fox
News, but also MSNBC, CNN watching liberals had that same idea. So there's actually this
consensus about how poor people caused the financial crisis that Tea Partiers and liberal
elites shared. PMC liberally shared. Speaker 1: And yeah, I don't I don't know
if this is I don't know if this this is analogous or part of or parallel to your analysis. But
to some degree, what I'm hearing you say about the Tea Party and then also some on the left
is similar to I use the term bamboozling, but there's probably a different term that
could be used that the populist rhetoric has succeeded with over the last many years, where
it pulls in people from both left and right with what are typically different voting patterns
and stated values that that would differ. But the rhetoric starts to sound similar on
the left and right. But then the solutions don't match up when you actually ask people,
will, how would you solve this problem? Speaker 4: But there's a similar level of
irrationality. And what I think is really insane is that the professional managerial
classes have always prided themselves on being rational. Right. They're located in the university.
They all went to fancy universities and have credentials, but they are utterly irrational
right now. And I think that the Russia gate thing is a really good example of their rationale
that what happened to that. But nobody's supposed to not trust MSNBC after they made that whole
kerfuffle about something that didn't really they had no proof for. So that's something
that's in the book, too, is how I show the PMC. Elites now do not abide by the high liberal
values of either due process or reason and rational argument in the public sphere and
certainly on the right, people do not believe in reasoned and rational argument in the public
sphere either. So our the state of our politics today has a finds ourselves in this position
where nobody wants to defend argument, argument, reasonable people debating each other, not
agreeing with each other. And the PMC liberals like to blame this on Fox News and blame this
on extreme right forces. But they are policing their own boundaries in the same exact way,
and they're demonizing their antagonists to make them seem like they really don't deserve
to even exist or vote when they and then they say the Republicans want to suppress the vote.
But I think that there's a lot of contempt for non college educated Americans, that working
class Americans that's actually in the PMC itself.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm the part that is less clear to me is the rush to get peace, because
it seems to me that certainly there were some people who very early on were setting expectations
that were unreasonable, like Trump's going to be caught on video planning something with
Putin that was never going to happen. Trump's going to end up in prison. That was never
going to happen. You know, you go back to my videos from April of twenty seventeen,
and that's what I said all along. But in great part, I don't see maybe MSNBC was doing different
things than I, so I don't really watch any of any MSNBC or that type of stuff. But from
the perspective of this led to not only more than a dozen indictments, but it actually
found enough wrongdoing to recover more money than the investigation cost. It is very clear
that Donald Trump was a useful idiot in a number of different ways. And part of it did
overlap with I don't know that I see that as the same thing that you see it as necessarily.
Speaker 4: OK, well, I you know, that is a very reasonable take and I totally appreciate
that. What I think was what I was talking about more, I guess, is the energy of condemnation
that they were sure was going to lead to an impeachment. I see. And it works only partially,
but it's so different. I was alive during. You're probably too young to remember Watergate
when there was bipartisan condemnation of Nixon, when the work was done to bring in
the Republicans and say something so bad has happened. Yeah, no illegal has happened that
we have to condemn this person. And the prosecuting did find wrongdoing, but it didn't actually
create because our politics are so polarized now, a national consensus.
Speaker 1: But I think that's an indictment of the Republican Party. I think because when
I see there was a point in Watergate where the reason there was not impeachment was because
it became clear that Nixon was going down, if it went that far, because Republicans I
think that the reason it went the way it did is an indictment on Republicans.
Speaker 4: Now, I absolutely agree. But I also think there's the core and more, if you
like, of Republicans support popular support for Trump or right wing popular support for
Trump that is animated by hatred of the professional managerial class. And the more you have these
liberal talking heads pumping people up about cultural issues, ignoring actual bread and
butter, economic issues are suffering the majority of Americans, the more you will have
this label of hypocrisy being thrown at liberal elites and this idea also that there are worthy
people to help and unworthy people to help. That is usually a Republican and right wing
talking point. But the liberal elite PMC has actually done this completely, like there
are good poor people and there are bad working class people and working to give all of the
moral iniquity to the other side. Well, and not and they do not see their complicity and
actually bring us to a state where the country is so polarized and so divided and animated
by these class antagonisms and hatreds that should be talked about rationally. They can't
do that, though, because that would mean that they will not saintly in some way. I think
it is like tried to cloak itself in a kind of saintly identity that always has to put
itself on the right side of things. Let's look at the state of California. We have an
incredible homeless problem that is generated by regulations on housing and land use in
the state, the PMC here in the state, they rule the democratic elites have supermajorities
in everything and every legislative branch in this state, and yet they can only put up
Black Lives Matter sign in. Their yards, and they refused to have lower income housing
built in their neighborhoods or homeless shelters built in their neighborhoods or even create
higher density housing so that we're not living in suburban enclave suburban hell. Right.
This this this state, with its veneer of liberalism and its preachiness about tolerance, has actually
created this kind of dystopia of inequality. But they don't really actually want to solve
the look at the San Francisco school board. They stop this now. But rather than asking
for funding to get schools open in the correct way, supporting teachers and students, they
wanted to rename San Francisco public schools. Forty four of them, one of them named after
Abraham Lincoln because of the racism of the past me just infuriates me so much because,
first of all, I. I don't like Dianne Feinstein. I don't think she should have a school named
after her. But if you just go after these cosmetic things and then you say like people
who are from the past, like Lincoln, were racist, what the PMC there is saying is everyone
who came before us are racist. We're enlightened, and we're going to create a cosmetic, superficial
veneer of tolerance and anti-racism, ignoring all of the structural economic inequalities
that has made the San Francisco school system majority minority African-American, Latinos
and Asian American working class people use that public school system, the wealthy elites
of all the mostly white, but some of them Asians, some of them African American, some
of them are Latino. They send their kids to private schools. And this is what has happened
in every city in the country, is this kind of lip service to public education and this
undermining of public goods so that the upper tier of the PMC can enjoy privatized education
and everyone else is left with poor quality mass education that nevertheless has a veneer
of tolerance. And that's a great strategy for virtue, holding and reproducing economic
inequality. Speaker 1: So in the very limited time we
have left, I want to get your thoughts on how we've talked about this issue of the cultural
fights that, you know, particularly in the Trump era. The right is not they're not even
pretending to be about policy anymore. It's it's Dr. Seuss, it's council culture, etc.,
etc.. As a strategic calculation, should the left fight these cultural issues or should
they just ignore them and focus on policy or something else?
Speaker 4: Well, the left doesn't have it doesn't have much of a commitment to freedom
of speech right now. So I think if the left fights these issues, I'm not sure what they're
going to actually be standing on because they actually don't want Dr. Seuss books to be
reproduced. Those books are really problematic in many ways, but also a lot of people enjoyed
those books. I enjoyed those books for my kids and my kid. And so I. I feel like the
culture war aspect of American politics serves elites on both sides of the party. So it doesn't
I guess Speaker 1: the reason I think it serves the
right more is that the left has a package right now when it comes to infrastructure,
foreign policy, taxation pandemic that's absent from a lot of the the new right. So it strikes
me that it would be better for the left to focus on that.
Speaker 4: The policies I always someone who's for focusing on economic material issues.
OK, that is the bottom line. What is who benefits, who doesn't benefit, remain focused on the
economics that's, I think, always going to work much better and actually deliver for
people, not just focus on economic policies that will create more redistributive redistribution
of wealth, but really deliver. I think the vaccine is a sign that there can be publicly
funded health initiatives. And you should focus on that. We should focus on creating
strong infrastructure within public health, universal health care, universal quality child
care, all of these bread and butter issues that people need in their lives desperately
right now. And if you can produce that, then you can produce a sense of the collective.
You can produce a sense of progressive liberal policies that work for people. Yes. And so
in that sense, they should not take the bait left to not take the bait on the cultural
issues. They should absolutely deflect. And I and I've had my I've been an agnostic on
Biden, but I do feel like he's much more progressive than Obama and that his stimulus package is
be something that is executed with the greatest fervor and authority. And here's one thing
I'm going to end with is that I'm not playing the PM the blame game where I say, OK, the
PMC, they're all bad. No, we need good professionals, can't have infrastructural reconstruction
of this country without return to the professional standards of both like stockbroking or researching
universities or policy making and think tanks. That is shielded from the market right now.
All of these knowledge workers are so driven by profit and we need to go back to nonmarket
professional standards of being. And that's, I think, something we often lose track of
in the left. And we think like anybody who is a bureaucrat is bad. How are you going
to spend one point nine trillion dollars correctly or. Well, without a good functioning bureaucracy,
good functioning government? That's why I have no patience for the anarcho leftists.
Speaker 1: Yes, you and me both. You and me both. The book is Virtue Hoarder's The Case
Against the Professional Managerial Class. We've been speaking, of course, with the book's
author, Professor Katherine Lou. So great to have you on today.
Speaker 4: Thank you, David. Thank you so much.