In 1999, I lived in a modest, rented townhouse in Redmond, Washington with my wife and a year-old baby. I had just quit my academic R&D position in a fit of pique over issues of contracts and conscience, and had uprooted our lives to go to Microsoft to be a program manager while still harboring an academic’s independent streak. I had hair down to nearly my waist that I tied back in a ponytail after it dried a bit on my way to work. I had a coordinating goatee, too. On dark, overcast days I would sometimes reach back to reposition my hair tie and the cinched area would still be mildly damp into the afternoon.
In Seattle that year, the World Trade Organization came to meet and with it violent protests over, well, what was it over? Some of it had to do with the notion of globalization of the economy. Some of it had to do with a hope for labor empowerment. Some of the participants were just anarchists, it seemed. I had a run-in one morning with a door guard-type who thought I had tailgated her through a security door at Microsoft. We had been warned in a corporate-wide email about security concerns were the protests to come out to the suburbs. I dutifully backed out, pulled the door shut, and ran my access card to open the door. Curiously, even after that, she decided not to ride the elevator up with me, a look of uncertainty and fear in her eyes.
And then there were the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 that felt similar to those Seattle actions of more than a decade before.
Kurt Andersen, author of the memorable Fantasyland, has a new book and a new Atlantic essay, College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots, that continues his theme of capturing intellectual history as a series of consistent trends that are easily observable and digested. I enjoy these kinds of eloquently crafted—but inherently flawed—exercises for thinking about society. In Andersen’s telling, the labor movement was undermined by Yuppies, democratization of the primary system of the Democratic Party, neoliberalism, and rapacious corporations.
Seattle comes up, too, and Andersen admits he was bewildered a bit by it at the time, just like I was, riding my bike back and forth in the gloom of the Pacific Northwest. For me, it seemed like a romantic movement based on a hope that everyone involved would get a better life, but the actors seemed uncertain about what the pressure points were in order to reify the change. There were some labor movements active in the area at the time: strikes at SeaTac and at Boeing. But was the problem, then, that the labor movement hadn’t been successful for those who were not represented by them, or was it that they were anxious about not having opportunities like, well, the techies across the lake who were cashing out and starting foundations? Microsoft’s mega-wealth was an unusual new event in inequality that had not been seen at such a scale in history. It would go on to be replicated again and again as the internet economy exploded, imploded, and then exploded once again. Stories of cooks and assistants becoming paper millionaires overnight based on options were commonplace by the time I moved to Silicon Valley.
Andersen sees broader trends, including the reduction in coverage of the labor movement by a press that thought themselves above the laborers who printed their papers. This lack of solidarity fed into a national distaste for Big Labor that culminated in the neoliberal Democratic presidency of Clinton who was moderate enough that normalizing foreign trade via NAFTA and reforming welfare made sense to him. Meanwhile, there was a machine of dirty tricks and disinformation and moneyed interests that sought to downplay climate change or remove restrictions on financial institutions that then wreaked havoc on America.
Given the initial touchstones of the Washington Post strikes of 1974 in Andersen’s essay, the dirty tricks campaigns of the Republicans around that same time serve to inform us about how certain corporate and political interests saw themselves as having an opportunity to shape public opinion. This continues to this day, with the former communications director for Cigna lamenting his anti-Canada campaign in a recent WaPo opinion piece.
But are these trends coordinated as Andersen paints them? Were Yuppies useful idiots in thinking that the continuous “creative destruction” (as Andersen quotes Joseph Schumpeter) of capitalism was intellectually tolerable, that outsourcing was inevitable, that the labor movement had become a bit fat and flawed in its successes and inevitable excesses? I don’t harbor any antagonism towards them—and not just because I might be identified with them—because their education was a mixed bag of rational perspectives on economies, on history, and on practical matters in business, science, and the arts. They were acting in a combination of self-interest, which involved becoming better educated, and then trying to use educated methods to enhance various levers in corporations and organizations. A useful idiot is some kind of actor propagandizing for a grander cause or conspiracy, but the educated elites weren’t doing that for the most part, but were instead actors working to better their own lives and skeptical of the value of some of the tenets of the Left. The idea of preventing automation from disrupting jobs in industry just isn’t workable; if I don’t automate my factory those in other cities, other states, or other countries will, and my factory and business will wither. That inevitability demonstrates the problem with totalism in intellectual history. There are pushes and pulls. Sometimes there are moneyed interests trying to protect something at the expense of others. Sometimes there are just people trying to survive and any harm is sadly inevitable. Closing off international trade via protectionism is another example that was an unworkable goal of the labor movement.
Now, one can argue that the more standard critique of dynamism in American capitalism is also captured in Andersen’s analysis. When there is disruption in the economy, the government has a viable role in helping and protecting those affected by the disruption. And when Republicans block or try to eliminate workplace protections, insurance, regulation, medicare, unemployment, that serve to help cushion those changes there is a cruel indifference to the people affected. Traditionally, that has been driven by a desire to minimize the effectiveness of government institutions or out of fiscal conservatism where law, order, and the military take precedence over social programs. And there, agreed, Andersen’s points are well understood as a staple of the basic interplay between Democrats and Republicans, between the left and the right.
So what are we left with? Certainly not as derogatory a phrase as “useful idiots,” the phrase itself of unknown origin, but perhaps more innocent actors suffused in the zeitgeist of their era, when inner cities were war zones, when the antiwar movement had changed timbre, when labor was in an early senescence, and when corporations did what they always had and worked to make money. Along the way there was the invention of the EPA, the collapse of the Soviet empire, a radical reduction in crime through the 90s, the evolution of whole new ways of communications and information dissemination, continued rising GDP, and, yes, increased inequality. Maybe there will be a reshaping of American life post-pandemic with work-from-home, gig economies, and so forth. Maybe the labor movement will find new traction as well. But there are many actors in this drama, and few of them are useful idiots to my reckoning.
Small edits, corrected Joseph