Thinking like a Technocrat: On Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer’s “Mastery and Drift”
Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer (eds.) | Mastery and Drift: Professional-Class Liberals Since the 1960s | The University of Chicago Press | February 2025 | 416 Pages
During his campaign for the presidency in 1992, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton was fond of telling voters that he and his running mate Al Gore represented “a new generation of Democrats,” who “don’t think the way the old Democratic Party did.” Clinton’s numerous twenty-first-century critics on the resurgent American Left wholeheartedly agree. They charge him with repudiating traditional Democratic priorities, making the Right’s “free-market” Reagan Revolution a bipartisan consensus, and embracing “neoliberalism.”
Clinton’s election in 1992 was, indeed, a pivotal moment for his party and for modern American liberalism writ large. Yet the remaking of liberalism it represented was both subtler and more profound than Clinton’s slick campaign – soundtracked with Fleetwood Mac and enlivened by cynical displays of tough love for loyal Democratic constituencies – disclosed. The 1992 campaign crystallized a process that stretched beyond electoral campaigns, political rhetoric, and even specific policies, to incorporate a transformation of American liberalism’s mentalité. Rooted in the postwar generational experiences and class politics of Clinton and his contemporaries, this transformation enjoined American liberals to think, view the political landscape, and craft policies through the lens of technocracy. Ultimately, this remaking of liberalism helped create the deeply unsettled political world of 2025.
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Academic scholarship and popular books about the American Right abound. In the Trump era, numerous high-profile books have anatomized and historicized the right-wing populist animal. Even since before Donald Trump’s first election the United States’ recent history has seemed dominated by the Right; we have been living, historians conclude, in a decades-long “Age of Reagan.” These histories reduce modern liberalism and the Democratic Party to political afterthoughts. Recently, U.S. historians have started to reevaluate this narrow “rise of the Right” narrative by treating modern liberalism as an important subject in its own right. While the Right continues to receive more attention overall, new historical scholarship on modern liberalism has picked up steam in the last few years. Now, two of its leading historians, Lily Geismer and Brent Cebul, have coedited Mastery and Drift: Professional-Class Liberals Since the 1960s (2025). This wide-ranging collection of essays constitutes both a state-of-the-field on modern liberalism and a sort of scholarly roadmap for the future of a rich academic subgenre.
Liberalism’s transformations since the 1960s were generational, demographic, and intellectual. Beginning with the rise of “New Politics” activists in the 1960s, the Democratic Party reoriented around what Geismer and Cebul describe as the “professional class.” Broadly, the “professional class” is characterized by advanced education and training, by employment in the knowledge economy (think law and consulting, tech and finance, media and academia), and by social and cultural liberalism. It is predominantly metropolitan. The subtitle to Geismer and Cebul’s book plays on the term “professional-managerial class” (PMC), which was coined in 1977 by social critics Barbara and John Ehrenreich to describe a sociological and economic mezzanine between workers and corporate elites that developed in affluent society. More recently “PMC” became a popular political insult in the Online Left’s digital salons during the early Trump era.
Mastery and Drift’s contributors acknowledge the PMC term’s influence, but take their historical analysis of liberalism deeper than the self-absorbed online name-calling of 2017-2021. Taking the term “professional class” instead, they highlight how a postwar expansion of higher education helped fashion Americans with graduate and professional training (previously a tiny number of people) into a distinct demographic group. Mastery and Drift’s essays examine how a process of class formation rooted in the high-education knowledge economy intersected with electoral politics, liberal policy-making and governance, and nonprofit institutions from private philanthropy to public interest law. Molded by high-level graduate and professional training and inheriting (rather than creating) America’s “vast and necessarily complex bureaucratic state,” post-1960s liberals cultivated a managerial style of politics that dominated the Democratic Party for decades. “There are few things,” Marc Aidinoff writes in his Mastery and Drift essay, “[that] liberal politicians claim to hate as much as politics.”
The new professional-class formation displaced a form of liberalism that lasted roughly from the New Deal of the 1930s through the “postwar consensus” and well into the 1960s. In this era of less polarization, the liberal consensus included supporters from both political parties. (Personally, I feel a pronounced twinge of nostalgia thinking about America’s vanished liberal Republicans.) Within the Democratic Party of the midcentury U.S., liberalism was channeled into social-democratic class politics, a broad commitment to generous social spending, and a style of market-managing economic governance known as “developmental liberalism.” Liberalism’s professional-class turn to technocracy recast all of these defining characteristics.
The essays in Mastery and Drift travel from the twilight of the New Deal order to the presidency of Barack Obama. But the critical decades of influence are the 1960s and 1970s. During this period, an ideological reaction against midcentury liberalism emerged from within the center-left itself. This reaction focused on democratic transparency, “good government,” and taming the imperial excesses of the American state. No political impulse captured this critique more thoroughly than Ralph Nader’s public-interest law, the subject of Sarah Milov and Reuel Schiller’s essay. Nader, Milov and Schiller explain, forewent “mass politics…in favor of technocratic reform.” For “the young and educated,” Nader’s “vision was generative.” But his style of technocratic, reformist liberalism lacked a durable political base. As historian Paul Sabin outlined in greater detail in his brilliant book Public Citizens (2021), Nader’s movement helped to delegitimize “big government” from the left. In our era of manic, even violent, polarization, this reconfiguration of liberalism has ultimately created a new Democratic coalition that is capacious yet precarious. A core base of highly-educated metropolitan professionals bridges the party’s disparate constituencies among affluent suburbanites and multiracial, primarily nonindustrial working-class urbanites.
Trying to explain this dizzyingly complex political reality can lead to simplistic histories. Call these, collectively, the “liberal betrayal narrative”: liberals reacted defensively to Reagan, shifted hard to the Right, and left the New Deal behind. Mastery and Drift’s importance lies in how it crafts a subtler, deeper, and thus more persuasive narrative. First, professional-class liberals “adapted” ideas about “capitalism and democracy” and approaches to government from midcentury liberalism. They did not, as many critics on the Left claim, mainly borrow or adapt their ideas from the “free-market” Right. Second, post-1960s liberalism is a distinctive phenomenon worthy of taking seriously and studying on its own terms, not a footnote to a grand narrative of neoliberalism. Indeed, after briskly unpicking it in the introduction, Mastery and Drift’s contributors largely evade the linguistic octopus of “neoliberalism.” This is welcome: by trying to explain everything, the concept of neoliberalism has rapidly lost utility. It’s best used to describe political and economic conditions rather than a unitary ideological system.
There were, Geismer and Cebul write in their introduction, “distinctively liberal paths toward neoliberal governance.” Neoliberal governance incorporates finance-friendly deregulation, the federal government’s retreat from large-scale developmental projects, and, ultimately, widening economic inequality. But Mastery and Drift’s contributors repeatedly illustrate how liberals were not part of a monolithic, ideological project toward neoliberalism. Rather, their own “distinctively liberal” political ethos – emerging from midcentury liberalism while also reconfiguring it – helped shape, sometimes deliberately although often inadvertently, the conditions of our time.
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Continuities have persisted between New Deal-style liberalism and the post-1960s variety. The most significant is a longstanding liberal commitment to implementing public policy (especially to do with economic development) via philanthropic and for-profit partners. Contemporary American government’s public-private partnerships, in other words, long predate the Reagan era. In Mastery and Drift’s first two essays, Lila Corwin Berman and Stephen Macekura explore, respectively, the longer history of “philanthropic governance” and the origins of a “contract state.” Berman takes a bird’s eye view of the involvement of private foundations and charities (august names like Ford and Rockefeller most prominent among them) in researching, devising, and implementing liberal policies since the New Deal. Macekura, meanwhile, limns the “contract state’s” emergence in microcosm via onetime New Deal bureaucrat Robert Nathan’s lucrative postwar career as an economic consultant on foreign aid. By drawing attention to such continuities, Berman and Macekura flesh out a foundational theme that’s concordant with coeditor Lily Geismer’s own pathbreaking scholarship: modern, “professional-class” liberalism drew on, adapted, and rearranged a midcentury legacy of public-private partnerships.
However, liberal interest in public-private “market-based” policy solutions dramatically scaled up and expanded after the 1960s. Danielle Wiggins takes up this theme in her exceptional essay on “black liberalism” after the Civil Rights Movement. Wiggins argues that “post-civil rights” figures, like public intellectual Roger Wilkins or politicians Michael Lomax and Andrew Young, “focus[ed] on self-help, corporate partnerships, and voluntarism” as managerial, market-based ways to tackle poverty in black communities. Challenges arising from the 1970s onwards, such as fiscal crises or the rise of the Right, hastened this configuration. Crucially, however, these “post-civil rights” figures also embraced “the funds and tools of the private sector” due to their own intellectual preferences: professional-class liberals were, in Wiggins’s words, “in alignment…[over] more decentralized, flexible, and cost-effective governing solutions.” The specter of “cost-effective” governance haunts Mastery and Drift, coming to the fore in David Stein’s rebarbative essay on Democratic “deficit hawks” who favored fiscal restraint over more expansive industrial policy.
Democratic champions of fiscal discipline like Clinton-era treasury secretary Robert Rubin embodied this professional-class turn in liberalism. Rubin, a Goldman Sachs executive who specialized in the cutting-edge field of arbitrage, crafted the party’s new accord with Wall Street in the 1980s, building Democratic inroads into what had once been a sleepy, genteel, and overwhelmingly Republican sector of the economy. In the 1990s, he successfully urged Clinton to adopt finance-friendly fiscal policies rather than undertaking large-scale developmental investment. This uncorked the liquid prosperity of the post-Cold War “fabulous decade.” But it built neither long-term middle-class economic stability nor a durable Democratic electoral majority. High finance’s growth, specialization, and technologization made it a bigger, more important professional-class constituency, similarly to the emergent field of political consulting—which Timothy Shenk explores in his entertaining essay—and to the postindustrial tech sector.
Neither finance, consulting, nor academia so perfectly encapsulated professional-class liberalism’s evolution as tech. From the late-1970s to the mid-1990s, the “new generation” of Democrats sought to “reindustrialize” America in alliance with high-tech manufacturers. Yet by the turn of the century, professional-class Democrats focused on tech’s services sector (think retail or social media) rather than on the productive high-tech economy. Obama-era Democrats’ cozy relationship with Silicon Valley, moreover, proved to be professional-class liberalism’s high-water mark. Aidinoff’s aforementioned essay on the 1970s-1990s computerization of welfare administration insightfully connects professional-class liberals’ enchantment with technology to their class formation and their governing approaches. Dylan Gottlieb’s beautifully written essay on the rise of the “liberal media” highlights how the internet birthed new forms and audiences for political media such as Slate.
But tech as an economic sector itself warrants much more focused attention in Mastery and Drift than it receives. “New” Democrats’ shift from high-tech manufacturing to voguish high-tech services arguably mirrored the American economy’s retreat from chipmaking into apps, gimmicks, and 280 characters. A discrete exploration of the politics of tech could have illuminated how Democrats’ professional-class sensibility initially coexisted with an agenda to revive, reinvent, and technologically upgrade liberalism’s market-shaping midcentury state.
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Liberalism’s technocratic, “professional-class” outlook fostered the spread of market-oriented policy solutions. It also cultivated a complementary instinct: “de-politicization.” Julilly Kohler-Hausmann explores this dynamic through the post-1965 politics of voting rights, which she provocatively claims that modern liberals misrepresent as being “bureaucratic, procedural, and apolitical.” This focus on their procedural aspects obscured real political debate about voting rights for several decades—until “democracy” became a focal point of resistance liberalism during the first Trump Presidency. Meanwhile, as Aidinoff explains, liberal politicians and policymakers pushed for computerizing the administration and case management of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) as a way to neutralize misleading right-wing attacks about its inefficiency. (AFDC was usually called “welfare,” and it was the target of Reagan’s racialized rhetoric about “welfare queens.”)
Computerization, Aidinoff explains, was closely bound up with professional-class identity: the adoption of cutting-edge technologies symbolized liberals’ expertise and modern sensibility while also advancing “good government.” For example, computerized case management enabled state-level civil servants to automatically deduct child-support payments from noncustodial fathers’ bank accounts or identify absent parents quickly and efficiently. Welfare computerization was popular with Baby Boomer Republicans as well (George W. Bush’s future health secretary Tommy Thompson pioneered it as governor of Wisconsin), but it became a cause célèbre among professional-class liberals of the new generation, such as Mississippi governor Ray Mabus, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, and Clinton himself. The agenda of computerizing welfare grew from professional-class liberals’ conception of technological advancement as a virtue in itself, and then converted this conception into a governing method.
Computerization also helped liberals to “de-politicize” controversial issues. AFDC, like many social programs from food stamps to Medicaid, was constantly under attack by Republicans. Rather than winning a difficult political debate, liberals increasingly believed that they could de-fang the anti-government GOP by emphasizing how social programs weren’t objects of political debate–rather, they were subjects of sensible, managerial, and apolitical “good government” reform. (In 1996, Clinton took the draconian step of replacing AFDC with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.) The de-politicizing instinct that Aidinoff traces through welfare computerization reached new heights with the Obama administration’s embrace of “smart” governance. Nicole Hemmer’s essay on Barack Obama’s presidency retells the now-famous story of how the administration, inspired by behavioral-economics theories of “choice architecture” and “nudges,” chose to provide working- class Americans with a stimulus payment via payroll-tax cuts rather than checks.
The policy worked: Americans spent money (much needed at the nadir of the financial crisis) rather than stashing it in savings. Viewed another way, though, the policy’s success seems less clear. Americans were apparently unaware that they had received a tangible stimulus from the new administration. Overall economic recovery was sluggish (even self-professed moderates now acknowledge that Obama’s stimulus was far too small). In the 2010 midterms, voters gave Democrats a “shellacking” from which the party has never fully recovered. Hemmer mocks the “nudge” moment as proof of professional-class liberals’ “we-know-better-than-you attitude.” Yet, the truth of this episode seems more complicated. As policymakers and managers of the bureaucracy, liberal technocrats have been masterful. But their proclivity for de-politicizing governance has politically weakened them and proved to be an electoral stumbling-block.
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Alternatives on the left to this new liberal paradigm often arise from organizations engaged in what Geismer and Cebul describe as “collective-oriented politics.” For example, Marisa Chappell’s essay recounts the response to the 1980s Savings & Loan (S&L) Crisis by ACORN, a prominent federation of local community-organizing groups. ACORN’s leaders lobbied Congressional Democrats to strengthen progressive measures such as anti-redlining provisions and legal enforcement—some of which had been created in the first place due to ACORN advocacy—in response to the S&L Crisis. ACORN’s “version of liberalism,” Chappell writes, “diverged dramatically” from the modern Democratic Party’s “values.” ACORN, which was eventually brought down by a combination of internal mismanagement and external right-wing harassment, relied on working-class Americans organizing in their own communities. Grassroots “outside pressure” from the left on Democratic politicians also emerged in the arena of refugee policy. Adam Goodman’s essay on the installment of Temporary Protected Status for refugees points out that Congressional Democrats’ passage of this measure and extension of it to Central American countries required significant campaigning by community groups.
However, as the essays in Mastery and Drift continue to reveal, liberalism’s professional-class makeover has colored not only mainstream Democratic politics but the full spectrum of left-liberal causes. B. Alex Beasley narrates how more radical visions of queer rights in the 1970s – which, in particular, critiqued “the family” – dwindled as professional-class liberals adopted an allegedly narrow vision of equality focused on incorporation into existing social and economic life. Beasley writes, elegantly, that “it is not sufficient to ask why queer rights have become a core component of American liberalism…we need to identify what we even mean when we say ‘queer rights.’” Karen Tani argues along similar lines that professional-class liberalism’s devotion to “efficiency” resulted in the evaluation of disability rights in restrictive “cost-benefit” terms. Finally, in a closing essay that alchemizes insular academic debates between social and “institutional” history into a fascinating, occasionally caustic intellectual history of liberalism, Gabriel Winant contends that the rise of technocratic professional-class liberalism has even recast the historical profession itself. (With its artful synopsizing of three decades of scholarship and its not-so-veiled jabs at eminent historians, Winant’s essay is the perfect digestif for a graduate-school seminar on modern U.S. history.)
Yet Mastery and Drift’s robust elaboration of how professional-class liberalism has extended beyond high politics reaches a conclusion that might make some of the book’s contributors uneasy. Geismer and Cebul passingly comment, early in their introduction, that the Democratic Party’s “liberal establishment rallied to defeat [Vermont senator Bernie] Sanders” in the 2016 presidential primaries. In one sense, this is obviously true: most party elites supported Hillary Clinton. Of course, in 2016, most GOP elites opposed Trump (a happier time). Sanders’s second defeat in 2020, after the primaries narrowed to a head-to-head contest, is still occasionally treated by the Left as evidence of some nefarious elite conspiracy.
But the reality is far less dramatic. One party establishment’s preferences mattered and the other’s did not because liberalism’s high-political professional-class turn also transformed the Democratic electorate. Historians ought to acknowledge that the electoral core of the Democratic Party mostly supports and votes for figures of the sort critiqued in Mastery and Drift. Arguably, the most lasting political mobilization of the past decade—beyond Trump’s personal vote—has been of diverse, middle- and upper-middle-class suburbanites who power both down-ballot Democratic victories and referendum wins on issues such as minimum-wage increases, Medicaid expansion, and reproductive freedom.
Last year’s election, though, starkly illustrates that professional-class liberals have failed to build a political majority, despite reshaping their party’s electorate. Indeed, neither party since the New Deal coalition’s fragmentation has actually built a durable “realigning” majority. One reason that Democrats have failed to forge their new majority is the party’s overreliance on professional-class liberals. The contributors to Mastery and Drift would clearly concur with this point — but the twenty-first-century politicians they implicitly favor have, likewise, struggled to conjure a cross-class Left majority. Democrats have, overall, been more competitive than many European parties of the liberal-left across the last two decades; but this is not enough. Liberalism’s great challenge now, at a moment of terrifying social, political, and economic chaos, is not to reject its electorate in favor of a mythical populist majority, but to work out how to build up from its real, imperfect political foundations.