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At the helm of the Democratic coalition, professional-class liberals can be counted on to design programs that bury popular benefits in a web of complex tax credits and public-private partnerships, awash in abstruse policy concepts that few voters — even reliable party supporters — can recognize. But these critiques of technocratic thinking could just as easily be applied to the consultant class of the Clinton and Obama administrations as they could to the more patrician architects of the New Deal. The difference of course is that professional-class liberals have — whether knowingly or not — shed even the pretense of reforming capitalism that their ancestors maintained.