This piece has been adapt­ed from Thomas Frank’s new book Lis­ten, Lib­er­al, or What Ever Hap­pened to the Par­ty of the Peo­ple? (Met­ro­pol­i­tan Books) and first appeared at TomDis­patch.

The liberalism of professionals just does not extend to matters of inequality; this is the area where soft hearts abruptly turn hard.

When you press Democ­rats on their unin­spir­ing deeds — their lousy free trade deals, for exam­ple, or their flac­cid response to Wall Street mis­be­hav­ior — when you press them on any of these things, they auto­mat­i­cal­ly reply that this is the best any­one could have done. After all, they had to deal with those awful Repub­li­cans, and those awful Repub­li­cans wouldn’t let the real­ly good stuff get through. They fil­i­bus­tered in the Sen­ate. They ger­ry­man­dered the con­gres­sion­al dis­tricts. And besides, change takes a long time. Sure­ly you don’t think the tepid-to-luke­warm things Bill Clin­ton and Barack Oba­ma have done in Wash­ing­ton real­ly rep­re­sent the fiery Demo­c­ra­t­ic soul.

So let’s go to a place that does. Let’s choose a locale where Demo­c­ra­t­ic rule is vir­tu­al­ly unop­posed, a place where Repub­li­can obstruc­tion and sab­o­tage can’t taint the experiment.

Let’s go to Boston, Mass­a­chu­setts, the spir­i­tu­al home­land of the pro­fes­sion­al class and a place where the ide­ol­o­gy of mod­ern lib­er­al­ism has been per­mit­ted to grow and flour­ish with­out chal­lenge or restraint. As the seat of Amer­i­can high­er learn­ing, it seems unsur­pris­ing that Boston should anchor one of the most Demo­c­ra­t­ic of states, a place where elect­ed Repub­li­cans (like the new gov­er­nor) are high­ly unusu­al. This is the city that vir­tu­al­ly invent­ed the blue-state eco­nom­ic mod­el, in which pros­per­i­ty aris­es from high­er edu­ca­tion and the knowl­edge-based indus­tries that sur­round it.

The com­ing of post-indus­tri­al soci­ety has treat­ed this most ancient of Amer­i­can cities extreme­ly well. Mass­a­chu­setts rou­tine­ly occu­pies the num­ber one spot on the State New Econ­o­my Index, a mea­sure of how ​“knowl­edge-based, glob­al­ized, entre­pre­neur­ial, IT-dri­ven, and inno­va­tion-based” a place hap­pens to be. Boston ranks high on many of Richard Florida’s sta­tis­ti­cal indices of appro­ba­tion — in 2003, it was num­ber one on the ​“cre­ative class index,” num­ber three in inno­va­tion and in high tech — and his many books mar­vel at the city’s con­cen­tra­tion of ven­ture cap­i­tal, its allure to young peo­ple, or the time it enticed some firm away from some unen­light­ened locale in the hinterlands.

Boston’s knowl­edge econ­o­my is the best, and it is the old­est. Boston’s metro area encom­pass­es some 85 pri­vate col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties, the great­est con­cen­tra­tion of high­er-ed insti­tu­tions in the coun­try — prob­a­bly in the world. The region has all the ancil­lary advan­tages to show for this: a high­ly edu­cat­ed pop­u­la­tion, an unusu­al­ly large num­ber of patents, and more Nobel lau­re­ates than any oth­er city in the country.

The city’s Route 128 cor­ri­dor was the orig­i­nal mod­el for a sub­ur­ban tech dis­trict, lined ever since it was built with defense con­trac­tors and com­put­er man­u­fac­tur­ers. The sub­urbs sit­u­at­ed along this gold­en thor­ough­fare are among the wealth­i­est munic­i­pal­i­ties in the nation, pop­u­lat­ed by engi­neers, lawyers, and aero­space work­ers. Their pub­lic schools are excel­lent, their down­towns are cute, and back in the sev­en­ties their social­ly enlight­ened res­i­dents were the pro­to­type for the fig­ure of the ​“sub­ur­ban liberal.”

Anoth­er pro­to­type: the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, sit­u­at­ed in Cam­bridge, is where our mod­ern con­cep­tion of the uni­ver­si­ty as an incu­ba­tor for busi­ness enter­pris­es began. Accord­ing to a report on MIT’s achieve­ments in this cat­e­go­ry, the school’s alum­ni have start­ed near­ly 26,000 com­pa­nies over the years, includ­ing Intel, Hewlett Packard, and Qual­comm. If you were to take those 26,000 com­pa­nies as a sep­a­rate nation, the report tells us, its econ­o­my would be one of the most pro­duc­tive in the world.

Then there are Boston’s many biotech and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal con­cerns, grouped togeth­er in what is known as the ​“life sci­ences super clus­ter,” which, prop­er­ly under­stood, is part of an ​“ecosys­tem” in which PhDs can ​“part­ner” with ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists and in which big phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal firms can acquire small ones. While oth­er indus­tries shriv­el, the Boston super clus­ter grows, with the life-sci­ences pro­fes­sion­als of the world light­ing out for the Athens of Amer­i­ca and the mas­sive new ​“inno­va­tion cen­ters” shoe­horn­ing them­selves one after the oth­er into the crowd­ed aca­d­e­m­ic sub­urb of Cambridge.

To think about it slight­ly more crit­i­cal­ly, Boston is the head­quar­ters for two indus­tries that are steadi­ly bank­rupt­ing mid­dle Amer­i­ca: big learn­ing and big med­i­cine, both of them impos­ing costs that every­one else is basi­cal­ly required to pay and which increase at a far more rapid pace than wages or infla­tion. A thou­sand dol­lars a pill, 30 grand a semes­ter: the debts that are grad­u­al­ly chok­ing the life out of peo­ple where you live are what has made this city so very rich.

Per­haps it makes sense, then, that anoth­er cat­e­go­ry in which Mass­a­chu­setts ranks high­ly is inequal­i­ty. Once the vis­i­tor leaves the brainy bus­tle of Boston, he dis­cov­ers that this state is filled with wreck­age — with for­mer man­u­fac­tur­ing towns in which work­ers watch their way of life drain­ing away, and with cities that are lit­tle more than ware­hous­es for peo­ple on Medicare. Accord­ing to one sur­vey, Mass­a­chu­setts has the eighth-worst rate of income inequal­i­ty among the states; by anoth­er met­ric it ranks fourth. How­ev­er you choose to mea­sure the diverg­ing for­tunes of the country’s top 10% and the rest, Mass­a­chu­setts always seems to fin­ish among the nation’s most unequal places.

Seething City on a Cliff

You can see what I mean when you vis­it Fall Riv­er, an old mill town 50 miles south of Boston. Medi­an house­hold income in that city is $33,000, among the low­est in the state; unem­ploy­ment is among the high­est, 15% in March 2014, near­ly five years after the reces­sion end­ed. Twen­ty-three per­cent of Fall River’s inhab­i­tants live in pover­ty. The city lost its many fab­ric-mak­ing con­cerns decades ago and with them it lost its rea­son for being. Peo­ple have been desert­ing the place for decades.

Many of the emp­ty fac­to­ries in which their ances­tors worked are still stand­ing, how­ev­er. Sol­id nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry struc­tures of gran­ite or brick, these huge box­es dom­i­nate the city visu­al­ly — there always seems to be one or two of them in the vista, con­trast­ing painful­ly with what­ev­er col­or­ful plas­tic fast-food joint has been slapped up next door.

Most of the old fac­to­ries are board­ed up, unmis­tak­able emblems of hope­less­ness right up to the roof. But the ones that have been suc­cess­ful­ly repur­posed are in some ways even worse, filled as they often are with enter­pris­es offer­ing cheap suits or help with drug addic­tion. A clin­ic in the hulk of one aban­doned mill has a sign on the win­dow read­ing sim­ply ​“Can­cer & Blood.”

The effect of all this is to remind you with every prospect that this is a place and a way of life from which the politi­cians have with­drawn their bless­ing. Like so many oth­er Amer­i­can scenes, this one is the prod­uct of decades of dein­dus­tri­al­iza­tion, engi­neered by Repub­li­cans and ratio­nal­ized by Democ­rats. This is a place where afflu­ence nev­er returns — not because afflu­ence for Fall Riv­er is impos­si­ble or unimag­in­able, but because our country’s lead­ers have bland­ly accept­ed a social order that con­stant­ly bids down the wages of peo­ple like these while bid­ding up the rewards for inno­va­tors, cre­atives, and professionals.

Even the city’s one real hope for new employ­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties — an Ama­zon ware­house that is now in the plan­ning stages — will serve to lock in this rela­tion­ship. If all goes accord­ing to plan, and if Ama­zon sticks to the prac­tices it has pio­neered else­where, peo­ple from Fall Riv­er will one day get to do exhaust­ing work with few ben­e­fits while being elec­tron­i­cal­ly mon­i­tored for effi­cien­cy, in order to save the afflu­ent cus­tomers of near­by Boston a few pen­nies when they buy books or electronics.

But that is all in the future. These days, the local news­pa­per pub­lish­es an end­less stream of sto­ries about drug arrests, shoot­ings, drunk-dri­ving crash­es, the stu­pid­i­ty of local politi­cians, and the lam­en­ta­ble sur­plus of ​“afford­able hous­ing.” The town is up to its eye­balls in wrath­ful bit­ter­ness against pub­lic work­ers. As in: Why do they deserve a decent life when the rest of us have no chance at all? It’s every man for him­self here in a ​“com­pe­ti­tion for crumbs,” as a Fall Riv­er friend puts it.

The Great Entre­pre­neur­ial Awakening

If Fall Riv­er is pocked with emp­ty mills, the streets of Boston are dot­ted with facil­i­ties intend­ed to make inno­va­tion and entre­pre­neur­ship easy and con­ve­nient. I was sur­prised to dis­cov­er, dur­ing the time I spent explor­ing the city’s polit­i­cal land­scape, that Boston boasts a full-blown Inno­va­tion Dis­trict, a dis­used indus­tri­al neigh­bor­hood that has actu­al­ly been zoned cre­ative — a pro­jec­tion of the post-indus­tri­al blue-state ide­al onto the urban grid itself. The heart of the neigh­bor­hood is a build­ing called ​“Dis­trict Hall” — ​“Boston’s New Home for Inno­va­tion” — which appeared to me to be a glo­ri­fied mul­ti­pur­pose room, enclosed in a sharply angu­lar façade, and shar­ing a roof with a restau­rant that offers ​“inven­tive cui­sine for inno­v­a­tive peo­ple.” The Wi-Fi was free, the screens on the walls dis­played famous quo­ta­tions about cre­ativ­i­ty, and the walls them­selves were cov­ered with a high-gloss fin­ish meant to be writ­ten on with dry-erase mark­ers; but oth­er­wise it was not much dif­fer­ent from an ordi­nary pub­lic library. Aside from not hav­ing any­thing to read, that is.

This was my intro­duc­tion to the inno­va­tion infra­struc­ture of the city, much of it built up by entre­pre­neurs shrewd­ly angling to grab a piece of the entre­pre­neur craze. There are ​“co-work­ing” spaces, shared offices for star­tups that can’t afford the real thing. There are start­up ​“incu­ba­tors” and start­up ​“accel­er­a­tors,” which aim to ease the innovator’s eter­nal strug­gle with an uncar­ing pub­lic: the Start­up Insti­tute, for exam­ple, and the famous Mass­Chal­lenge, the ​“World’s Largest Start­up Accel­er­a­tor,” which runs an annu­al com­pe­ti­tion for new com­pa­nies and hands out prizes at the end.

And then there are the inno­va­tion Democ­rats, led by for­mer Gov­er­nor Deval Patrick, who presided over the Mass­a­chu­setts gov­ern­ment from 2007 to 2015. He is typ­i­cal of lib­er­al-class lead­ers; you might even say he is their most suc­cess­ful exem­plar. Every­one seems to like him, even his oppo­nents. He is a wit­ty and affa­ble pub­lic speak­er as well as a man of com­pe­tence, a high­ly edu­cat­ed tech­no­crat who is com­fort­able in cor­po­rate sur­round­ings. Thanks to his upbring­ing in a Chica­go hous­ing project, he also under­stands the plight of the poor, and (per­haps best of all) he is an hon­est politi­cian in a state accus­tomed to wide-open cor­rup­tion. Patrick was also the first black gov­er­nor of Mass­a­chu­setts and, in some ways, an ide­al Demo­c­rat for the era of Barack Oba­ma — who, as it hap­pens, is one of his clos­est polit­i­cal allies.

As gov­er­nor, Patrick became a kind of mis­sion­ary for the inno­va­tion cult. ​“The Mass­a­chu­setts econ­o­my is an inno­va­tion econ­o­my,” he liked to declare, and he made sim­i­lar com­ments count­less times, slight­ly vary­ing the order of the opti­mistic key­words: ​“Inno­va­tion is a cen­ter­piece of the Mass­a­chu­setts econ­o­my,” et cetera. The gov­er­nor opened ​“inno­va­tion schools,” a species of ramped-up char­ter school. He signed the ​“Social Inno­va­tion Com­pact,” which had some­thing to do with meet­ing ​“the pri­vate sector’s need for skilled entry-lev­el pro­fes­sion­al tal­ent.” In a 2009 speech called ​“The Inno­va­tion Econ­o­my,” Patrick elab­o­rat­ed the polit­i­cal the­o­ry of inno­va­tion in greater detail, telling an audi­ence of cor­po­rate types in Sil­i­con Val­ley about Massachusetts’s ​“high con­cen­tra­tion of brain­pow­er” and ​“world-class” uni­ver­si­ties, and how ​“we in gov­ern­ment are active­ly part­ner­ing with the pri­vate sec­tor and the uni­ver­si­ties, to strength­en our inno­va­tion industries.”

What did all of this inno-talk mean? Much of the time, it was pure apple­sauce — stan­dard-issue plat­i­tudes to be rolled out every time some phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny opened an office build­ing some­where in the state.

On some occa­sions, Patrick’s favorite buzz­word came with a gigan­tic price tag, like the bil­lion dol­lars in sub­si­dies and tax breaks that the gov­er­nor autho­rized in 2008 to encour­age phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and biotech com­pa­nies to do busi­ness in Mass­a­chu­setts. On still oth­er occa­sions, favor­ing inno has meant bull­doz­ing the peo­ple in its path — for instance, the taxi dri­vers whose liveli­hoods are being usurped by rideshar­ing apps like Uber. When these work­ers staged a vari­ety of protests in the Boston area, Patrick inter­vened deci­sive­ly on the side of the dis­tant soft­ware com­pa­ny. Appar­ent­ly con­ve­nience for the peo­ple who ride in taxis was more impor­tant than good pay for peo­ple who dri­ve those taxis. It prob­a­bly didn’t hurt that Uber had hired a for­mer Patrick aide as a lob­by­ist, but the real point was, of course, inno­va­tion: Uber was the future, the taxi dri­vers were the past, and the path for Mass­a­chu­setts was obvious.

A short while lat­er, Patrick became some­thing of an inno­va­tor him­self. After his time as gov­er­nor came to an end last year, he won a job as a man­ag­ing direc­tor of Bain Cap­i­tal, the pri­vate equi­ty firm that was found­ed by his pre­de­ces­sor Mitt Rom­ney — and that had been so pow­er­ful­ly denounced by Democ­rats dur­ing the 2012 elec­tion. Patrick spoke about the job like it was just anoth­er start­up: ​“It was a hap­py and time­ly coin­ci­dence I was inter­est­ed in build­ing a busi­ness that Bain was also inter­est­ed in build­ing,” he told the Wall Street Jour­nal. Rom­ney report­ed­ly phoned him with congratulations.

Entre­pre­neurs First

At a 2014 cel­e­bra­tion of Gov­er­nor Patrick’s inno­va­tion lead­er­ship, Google’s Eric Schmidt announced that ​“if you want to solve the eco­nom­ic prob­lems of the U.S., cre­ate more entre­pre­neurs.” That sort of sums up the ide­ol­o­gy in this cor­po­rate com­mon­wealth: Entre­pre­neurs first. But how has such a doc­trine become holy writ in a par­ty ded­i­cat­ed to the wel­fare of the com­mon man? And how has all this come to pass in the lib­er­al state of Massachusetts?

The answer is that I’ve got the wrong lib­er­al­ism. The kind of lib­er­al­ism that has dom­i­nat­ed Mass­a­chu­setts for the last few decades isn’t the stuff of Franklin Roo­sevelt or the Unit­ed Auto Work­ers; it’s the Route 128/­sub­ur­ban-pro­fes­sion­als vari­ety. (Sen­a­tor Eliz­a­beth War­ren is the great excep­tion to this rule.) Pro­fes­sion­al-class lib­er­als aren’t real­ly alarmed by over­sized rewards for society’s win­ners. On the con­trary, this seems nat­ur­al to them — because they are society’s win­ners. The lib­er­al­ism of pro­fes­sion­als just does not extend to mat­ters of inequal­i­ty; this is the area where soft hearts abrupt­ly turn hard.

Inno­va­tion lib­er­al­ism is ​“a lib­er­al­ism of the rich,” to use the straight­for­ward phrase of local labor leader Har­ris Gru­man. This doc­trine has no patience with the idea that every­one should share in society’s wealth. What Mass­a­chu­setts lib­er­als pine for, by and large, is a more per­fect mer­i­toc­ra­cy — a sys­tem where the essen­tial thing is to ensure that the tru­ly tal­ent­ed get into the right schools and then get to rise through the ranks of soci­ety. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, how­ev­er, as the blue-state mod­el makes painful­ly clear, there is no sol­i­dar­i­ty in a mer­i­toc­ra­cy. The ide­ol­o­gy of edu­ca­tion­al achieve­ment con­ve­nient­ly negates any esteem we might feel for the poor­ly graduated.

This is a curi­ous phe­nom­e­non, is it not? A blue state where the Democ­rats main­tain trans­par­ent con­nec­tions to high finance and big phar­ma; where they have delib­er­ate­ly cho­sen dis­tant soft­ware barons over work­ing-class mem­bers of their own soci­ety; and where their chief eco­nom­ic pro­pos­als have to do with pro­mot­ing ​“inno­va­tion,” a grand and promis­ing idea that remains sus­pi­cious­ly vague. Nor can these inno­va­tion Democ­rats claim that their hands were forced by Repub­li­cans. They came up with this pro­gram all on their own.