For all the attention paid to partisan polarization over the last decade or more, the Right and a resurgent political Left largely agreed on a common adversary: professionally trained, elite, technocratic liberals. Democrats including Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, Rahm Emanuel, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, and Elizabeth Warren embody many of the momentous transformations that have remade political liberalism since the 1960s. From one perspective, they symbolize liberalism’s championing of equality of opportunity and diversity— a happily married gay man; the son of a single mother and Kenyan father; icons of second-wave feminism’s successes; the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants. But they also manifest the momentous professional-class transformations that have more subtly redefined liberal orientations to governance and popular politics. They were equally a former McKinsey and Company consultant; an attorney and long-standing member of Walmart’s board; an investment banker; a tough-on-crime prosecutor; and law professors.

To many on the right, these figures were high-flying examples of the “liberal elite”: cosmopolitan, coastal, and contemptuous of the “Heartland” and its working-class (white) people— the so-called deplorables in Hillary Clinton’s self-defeating formulation. On the left, when Clinton vanquished the social democrat Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primary, many Sanders supporters dusted off an old concept to make sense of what had happened. By the 1970s, the “professional-managerial class,” in Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich’s analysis, formed a novel managerial, bureaucratic, legal, and professional stratum that operated between working people and the highest echelons of corporate and finance capitalism. With its ranks exploding in the 1970s, “the PMC” absorbed and moderated the era’s radical politics, deflecting serious critiques of capitalist democracy. After Clinton and the liberal establishment rallied to defeat Sanders, “PMC” quickly became an epithet for a privileged political class’s credulous commitments to capitalism and centrist moderation in the face of unfolding global economic, political, and ecological catastrophes.

Rather than relitigate the PMC debates of the last decade, we conceived of this volume to better understand the significant transformations that remade liberalism and the Democratic Party after the 1960s, and which, we maintain, propels much of the recent frustration with liberal governance and electoral politics. Coming of age politically amidst these developments led us to wonder less about how momentary, strategic miscalculations by Democratic administrations or the cunning maneuverings of Republicans dashed potential moments of progressive opportunity. These episodes instead caused us to turn our attention to the limitations internal to liberalism, to examine its fraught relationship with the Left, and to clarify its relationship to neoliberalism.

The essays that follow examine what we term “professional-class liberalism” and explore important conjunctures between professional-class formation, electoral politics, and liberal ideologies of governance. We employ the terms “professional class” and “liberal” to explain how emergent class formations and governing ideologies relate to a set of broader historical political, economic, and demographic transformations as well as to the deeper liberal political tradition.

Their attitudes about governance were shaped not only by their professional training but also by their particular generational relationship to capitalism and the vast and necessarily complex bureaucratic state.

This focus shifts attention to different sorts of developments that are the focus of most traditional histories of twentieth-century American politics. In particular, we emphasize the political effects of the expansion of graduate and professional training in the United States beginning in the 1960s and accelerating in the decades that followed. Some figures illustrate these remarkable demographic, educational, and professional developments. Between 1963 and 1979, the annual number of first-year law students doubled to more than forty thousand. Other professional schools and MA programs saw similarly explosive growth: between 1959 and 1980, the figure more than quadrupled to nearly three hundred thousand new students annually. During the 1970s and 1980s, formal training in public policy also grew substantially. By the mid-1970s, more than one hundred universities offered advanced degrees in public policy, and by 1990, these schools together graduated around a thousand new masters students annually. The growth and diversification of professional and graduate training was particularly striking among women, whose enrollment in law school, for instance—which had accounted for just 9 percent of the total students in 1970—reached parity with that of men circa 2000 and eclipsed it two decades later. The combination of civil rights legislation and the wide implementation of affirmative-action programs also expanded professional training opportunities for African Americans. In 1970, there were around four thousand African American lawyers in the United States; by 2005 there were more than forty thousand.

As the essays suggest, from within the broader ranks of these professionally trained managers, lawyers, and expert bureaucrats of the 1960s and 1970s, there emerged a rising and increasingly diverse generation of political liberals. Their attitudes about governance were shaped not only by their professional training but also by their particular generational relationship to capitalism and the vast and necessarily complex bureaucratic state. These increasingly career-oriented political and policy-development professionals came to exert profound influence over the Democratic Party and the democratic process—as arbiters of political narratives, moderators of party politics, and essential actors in policy development and implementation.

Rather than mark a decisive break with New Deal and mid-century liberalism, however, professional-class liberals’ ideas about capitalism and democracy were in many ways adapted from mid-century and Cold War liberals, even as these younger liberals strove to define themselves as against their forebears’ methods of state and market making. This volume, then, charts the causes and components of professional-class liberalisms’ distinctive governing logics, which emerged in the economically and politically tumultuous 1970s and were theorized and formalized in the 1980s during liberalism’s sojourn in the Reagan-era wilderness.