Creativity Ideology as Cover for Plutocratic Policy and the Decline of the Middle Class
Source: Thomas Frank. "The Creativity Con Ate the Middle Class." October 22, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
The author argues that America's love of 'creativity' is more than a feel-good idea. Politicians and business leaders used it again and again to justify tax cuts, deregulation, and letting industry decline. Those policies helped end the middle-class society that had embraced creativity in the first place and ushered in today's extreme inequality.
Conclusion
The postwar middle-class cult of creativity was not a harmless or healthy ideal. It became the ideological justification for the policies (tax cuts, deregulation, deindustrialization, the 'postindustrial' turn) that destroyed middle-class prosperity and produced today's plutocratic inequality.
Premises
- Creativity was promoted as a nearly universal, democratic faculty that would make people better workers and better people at once, which made it irresistibly appealing to the middle class, since it cast them in history's starring role.
- In practice the creativity literature and ideology focused on the highly educated upper strata (executives, officers, professionals) rather than line workers or enlisted personnel, so it was 'democratic yet elitist' and celebrated elite excellence.
- After Sputnik in 1957, creativity became a national project and grand theory of progress (the 'postindustrial society'), in which creativity and innovation at the top drove growth while blue-collar workers declined in importance.
- When economic and innovation anxieties struck in the 1970s, elites diagnosed 'Big Government' as the thing crushing creativity, and policymakers responded with measures such as the 1978 capital gains cut (the Steiger Amendment), justified explicitly as reinvigorating innovation.
- Reagan and his successors explicitly framed their market-oriented revolution as unleashing creativity and entrepreneurial innovation, redefining creativity around entrepreneurs and capital rather than artists or ordinary workers.
- Tax cuts, bank deregulation, favors to tech and pharma, and tolerance of deindustrialization were all justified in creativity's name, and they cost working people their claim on middle-class prosperity.
Assumptions
- The rhetorical invocation of creativity was a significant causal driver of, or necessary legitimation for, the policy changes, rather than a mere afterthought or decoration.
- The policies named (tax cuts, deregulation, deindustrialization) are the main causes of current plutocratic inequality and middle-class decline.
- Elites' stated creativity rationales reflected an ideology that served their interests rather than sincere, empirically grounded belief.
- The middle class's attachment to the creativity ideal made it more receptive to policies that harmed it.
- Because creativity talk accompanied these policies, it is fair to blame the ideology for their effects, rather than treating it as a symptom of deeper economic and political forces.