IX: Obama’s Triumph of the Will: The 2008 Primaries 345
OBAMA’S CHIMERA OF THE “CREATIVE CLASS”
Bowers writes that
...unless Obama somewhat surprisingly does not become the next President of the United
States, the Democratic Party will experience its first changing of the guard since the late 1980’s.
What differences will be in store? Here are the three major changes I expect:
- Cultural Shift: Out with Bubbas, up with Creatives: There should be a major cultural shift in
the party, where the southern Dems and Liebercrat elite will be largely replaced by rising
creative class types. Obama has all the markers of a creative class background, from his
community organizing, to his Unitarianism, to being an academic, to living in Hyde Park to
shopping at Whole Foods and drinking PBR. These will be the type of people running the
Democratic Party now, and it will be a big cultural shift from the white working class focus of
earlier decades. Given the demographics of the blogosphere, in all likelihood, this is a
socioeconomic and cultural demographic into which you fit. Culturally, the Democratic Party
will feel pretty normal to netroots types. It will consistently send out cultural signals designed to
appeal primarily to the creative class instead of rich donors and the white working class.
- Policy Shift: Out with the DLC, up with technocratic wonks. My sense of Obama and his
policy team is overwhelmingly one of technocratic, generally less overtly ideological
professional policy types. We should see a shift from the more corporate and triangulating
policy focus of the Democratic Party in the 1990’s, and see it replaced by whatever centrist,
technocratic policies are the wonkish flavor of the month. It will all be very oriented toward
think-tank and academic types, and be reminiscent of policy making in the 1950s, 1960s and
1970s. A sort of “technocratic liberalism” that will be less infuriating than DLC style
governance, but still not overtly leftist.
- Coalition reorganization: Out with party silos, in with squishy goo-goos. In addition to a
shift in culture and policy focus, I also expect a different approach to coalition building. A long-
standing Democrats approach of transactional politics with different issue and demographic
silos in the party shift toward an emphasis on good government (goo goo) approaches. We will
see lots of emphasis on non-partisanship, ethics reform, election reform instead of on, say,
placating labor unions, environment groups, and the LGBT community by throwing each of
these groups a policy bone or two. Now, the focus will be on broad, squishy fixes that are
designed to appeal to several groups at once.’ (Chris Bowers, Changing of the Guard, open left,
May 8, 2008)
This is the eternal delirium of the crisis-crazed petit bourgeois, who imagines himself or herself
to represent pure and undifferentiated humanity free from all parochial interests, and cannot
imagine that there are billions of people in the world who do not see things in the same way. The
source for this idiocy is a successful and trendy academic huckster by the name of Richard Florida,
the author of Cities and the Creative Class and The Rise of the Creative Class. Here is how Florida
advertises himself on his own website: ‘Just as William Whyte’s 1956 classic The Organization
Man showed how the organizational ethos of that age permeated every aspect of life, Florida
describes a society in which the creative ethos is increasingly dominant. Millions of us are
beginning to work and live much as creative types like artists and scientists always have. Our values
and tastes, our personal relationships, our choices of where to live, and even our sense and use of
time are changing. Leading this transformation are the 40 million Americans – over a third of our
national workforce – who create for a living. This “creative class” is found in a variety of fields,
