The Professions are Becoming Party-Aligned Guilds

Doctors are shifting left. Politico explained this last year with the blunt blue good / red bad stupidity that characterizes most media product: “The GOP Turned Its Back on Science. So Science Turned Its Backs on the GOP.” The subhed got to the actual point: “A political realignment around health care is reshaping state politics.”

Politico focused on Derry Township, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where a giant hospital is changing local demographics. “By the early 2010s, though, the med center was making Derry Township suburban and transient — and more Democratic…Today, the municipality (population 25,000) has never been bluer.” More health care workers, more Democrats.

A report at KFF Health News a few years ago used similar framing: “Events of 2020 Moved Medical Students to Political Activism.” Orange Man bad, so future doctors turned into leftists. Click the link if you want to see the too-perfect photo they used to illustrate this claim. Quote from a medical school administrator: “When it comes to public health issues, the covid crisis, racial issues, there is a role of the clinician to speak up. Our society wants to hear from us. Some people call this a political role.” Your cardiologist has your test results, but first he’d like to share a few thoughts on institutional racism. As an expert on medical care, you see. “Our society wants to hear from us.”

But then get some context for this shift by returning to the Politico story, which notes that pre-Obamacare doctors were more likely to be small business owners with their own medical practices, while doctors are now increasingly likely to be employees of a health care system. Let’s do this with a screenshot to soak up some context:

An independent profession of highly credentialed professionals is turning into…cogs in the machine. So it’s aligning more reliably with the Democratic Party, because cogs are Democrats. Starts to sound a bit less like the righteous political fervor of science-minded crusaders, yes? Structural change in the profession is realigning its politics.

Now consider the experience of Bill Brown, a conservative attorney and former Navy SEAL who worked in Newark for McCarter & English, a corporate law firm with offices in twelve cities. When I say that McCarter & English is a corporate law firm, I mean that they’re a corporate law firm. Look at the list of practice areas on their website: venture capital, tax law, corporate bankruptcy, commercial litigation, real estate and energy law, and so on. This is not a crusading civil rights firm in the Bronx; these are the people in gray suits who represent Fortune 1000 companies.

Remember that as you look at “A Message of Unity from McCarter’s Leadership Team,” which offers the thoughts of the firm about the “recent horrific manifestations of racism and violence” in America. Here’s a sample:

Saint George Floyd, a corporate DEI committee, the Southern Poverty Law Center. All boxes checked.

Doing commercial litigation in a corporate law firm, Bill Brown did things like this on the side:

He was also, as someone who had clashed publicly with Governor Chris Christie while attending law school, relentlessly outspoken. When he disagreed with something, he just said so. Attending a continuing legal education session taught by a judge, Brown expressed disagreement about the judge’s discussion regarding the way a lawyer should address a jury to avoid the use of gendered language: “People of the jury…”

Just say ladies and gentlemen, Brown argued. "I think reasonable people can disagree with gender fluidity. Because that's a political issue."

During his seven years at the firm, Brown began to notice a shift in the way he was treated. He asked to join the DEI committee, noting that no members were military veterans (correction: only one member was a veteran); the firm offered a cold and flat no. Then his work began to change: He was assigned to less and less corporate litigation, and assigned to represent child molesters in lawsuits against the Catholic church. Over time, he says, child molesters became most of his work. He was getting a message. As he puts it, using a military term, "They were trying to get me to drop out on request."

After the January 6 protest, Brown was uniquely situated as a lawyer and a military veteran — and so began to hear from other military veterans who had entered or been near the Capitol. A friend got in touch to say that the FBI had visited him to ask about his presence outside the Capitol, and he asked for advice about getting a lawyer. Brown emailed partners in the firm: a former federal prosecutor in Newark, and the head of the Washington, D.C. practice group. He asked if they could recommend a lawyer who they would trust to do criminal defense for a J6 defendant. The response, he says, was unusually hostile. They had no help to offer for a person like that — while the firm was assigning Brown to represent clients who were accused of child molestation. The legal profession will represent Gitmo detainees and sexual predators, but recoils in distaste from military veterans who walked outside the Capitol on January 6.

Brown’s experience calls to mind the anguished stories about law firms representing Donald Trump after the 2020 election. The Cleveland law firm Jones Day, the New York Times reported, had been comfortable representing giant tobacco companies and the bin Laden family, but was being torn apart by internal dissension over representing a client as horrible as the outgoing President of the United States. Similarly, a law firm in Pennsylvania, Porter Wright, withdrew as Trump’s lawyers there after associates staged an internal protest, with at least one threatening to leave the firm.

For a highly credentialed young corporate lawyer, the values are clear: You can represent Mohamed Atta, sure, but you can’t represent a real monster like some Republican.

Brown’s career at McCarter & English finally ended after he posted a discussion of Islamist violence on LinkedIn, having fought in Iraq. He was quickly called in by a partner and an HR manager and fired.

Looking back, Bill Brown thinks McCarter & English made a business decision. "They get a lot of work out of New York City, a lot of the big banks,” he says. And people who work in corporate offices in Manhattan sound a particular way, with particular values and a carefully shaped rhetorical style. "Every major industry in our nation has been saturated,” Brown argues, by the demand to signal progressive identity or get out.

Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: “Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.”

This cultural narrowing, the way that cogs in the machine learn to signal the correct opinions in the correct tone — you say “George Floyd” with the right doe eyes and tight mouth, displaying the correct mix of sadness and anger, which tells observers that you’re upper-middle-class and a professional — is becoming our politics by default. The restriction of acceptable opinion as social fashion becomes legal and medical policy by default, as we saw during the pandemic with Lysenkoist epidemiology and doctors who reliably performed “science,” purging wrongthinking colleagues. Are you a credentialed professional, or are you some right-winger? Whole avenues of choice are closed by assumption and habit, undiscussed. That’s just not the kind of thing that we say in this firm.

One of the implications of this behavior is that the professions are building blue islands in red seas. Montana has banned the child mutilation euphemistically known as “gender-affirming care,” but remember the recent story of the parents whose trans-declared child went to the hospital in Montana: Ignoring the wishes of the minor patient’s parents, the doctors and nurses addressed their daughter by “his” new name, and then arranged a medical transfer to a hospital in a trans-affirming state. The laws say X, but the medical profession says Not X, so Not X is what happens. This is just what we think in this hospital, so.

If you live in a deep-red place but go to the hospital, you’re climbing onto a blue island. If you live in a deep-red place but find yourself hiring BigLaw lawyers to deal with a legal problem, you’re climbing onto a blue island. A choice is being made for you, by cultural default.