Thomas Frank on the 2004 election

Politics and religion
1

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17982

Depressing, accurate. Maybe we should just chuck the Democrats for a Green party.

George W. Bush was authentic; John Forbes Kerry, like all liberals, was an affected toff, a Boston Brahmin who knew nothing of the struggles of average folks. Again and again, in the course of the electoral battle, I heard striking tales of this tragically inverted form of class consciousness: of a cleaning lady who voted for Bush because she could never support a rich man for president. Of the numerous people who lost their cable TV because of nonpayment but who nevertheless sported Bush stickers on their cars.

The most poignant, though, was one I saw with my own eyes: the state of West Virginia, one of the poorest in the nation, in the process of transforming itself into a conservative redoubt. This is a place where the largest private-sector employer is Wal-Mart and where decades of bloody fights between workers and mine owners gave rise to a particularly stubborn form of class consciousness. It does not stand to gain much from Bush’s tax cuts and his crackdown on labor unions. But if class is a matter of cultural authenticity rather than material interests, John Kerry stood about as much of a chance there as the NRA’s poodle did of retrieving a downed duck. As I toured the state’s valleys and isolated mining towns, I spotted Bush posters adorning even the humblest of dwellings and mobile homes. Voters I spoke to told me they planned on voting Republican because of their beliefs regarding abortion or gun control.[11]

Every hamlet seemed to have a son or daughter on duty in Iraq, and wartime loyalty to the commander in chief was in the air. Running through each of these issues was the sense that Bush was somehow more authentic than his challenger. In the city of Charleston, West Virginia, I was told by a conservative activist that

when you see those photos of [Bush] on his ranch down in Texas, with jeans and a cowboy hat, that's genuine. I was in Beckley when he was there a couple weeks ago, and that crowd, four thousand people, they loved the man. They loved the man. Personally... You can't manufacture that; you can't fake it. They love him. They connect with him, they think he understands them, and I think he does, too.

West Virginia had been carried by Bill Clinton, Michael Dukakis, and almost every other Democratic candidate going back to Franklin Roosevelt, but this time it went Republican by a convincing thirteen percentage points.
2.

The illusion that George W. Bush “understands” the struggles of working-class people was only made possible by the unintentional assistance of the Democratic campaign. Once again, the “party of the people” chose to sacrifice the liberal economic policies that used to connect them to such voters on the altar of centrism. Advised by a legion of tired consultants, many of whom work as corporate lobbyists in off years, Kerry chose not to make much noise about corruption on Wall Street, or to expose the business practices of Wal-Mart, or to spend a lot of time talking about raising the minimum wage.[12]

Aaaand

In March the President and Republican congressional leaders chose to make much of the tragic Terri Schiavo affair, but the obvious futility of their legal demands and the patent self-interest of their godly grandstanding require little embellishment here.[18] Let us simply note how perfectly this incident, when paired with simultaneous GOP legislative action on big-business items, illustrates the timeless principles of the backlash. For its corporate backers, the GOP delivers the goods; for its rank-and-file “values” voters it chooses a sturdy wall against which they are invited to bang their heads.

2

It’s been said that George W. comes across as a guy you’d share a drink with at the local saloon. However, I prefer having a statesman in the White House.

3

I agree with that, except that I also wouldn’t want to have a drink with him. Personally, he comes off as an asshole. Politically, he’s just a disaster.

4

But this is a problem… i might say the problem, class identification, where for all intents and purposes the Democrats are dead as ducks, and with which i forsee no immediate reonciliation. Illustrating this was a silly questionaire someone posted months ago which would tell you which state you lived in by asking questions like “Do you like the play Annie Hall?” By this standard the only Democrats left in the country are Jewish New Yorkers living in Long Island. What do you believe in if your a liberal? Anti-republicanism? Intellectualism, Federalism, Free Trade, Nationalism, Internationalism, Environmentalism, Lesbianism? I can tell you with my eyes closed what issues motivate 75% of those whom vote Republican; today, the only motivating, unifying Liberal issue i can come up with is Abortion Rights.

I think ultimately it comes down to some simple truths - political correctness, post-modernism and consumerism caused organized liberalism, palatable to any but the radical fringe, like the “all hetero sex is rape” crowd, to fester and rot - with the next ‘liberal’ generation too rich and inebriated to care anymore. Conservativism has grown because the social kind is blind to any reality but its own, and so is impervious to criticism, whilst the ‘nobler’ economic conservativism has long ago been hijacked and made dependent upon the former, whilst gaining status as the underdog clawing a path through the oppresive and inefficient liberal establishment.

Political Correctness was a many edged sword for liberalism, because while under its tenets political minorities made headway, it only repressed and submerged discrimination instead of weeding it out and resolving it; only to have discrimination resurface more organized and entrenched than ever. It also meant that equality was allotted to even extremist and unpalatable sects of minority groups, like extremist environmentalism or LGBT groups, that were obviously deviant. It’s one thing to support GLB rights, its another to embrace a gay philosophy that says its inherant and necessary for gay men to have multiple anonymous sex partners ever week in holes cut between bathroom stalls. Political Correctness sort of devolved into Political Toleration-ness (/cough) later on, which let extremist conservative ideologies regroup, defended in their early years by the very toleration they hated.

Post-Modernism … arg, it’s really beyond me to critique what is called Postmodern in literary or philosophical circles, at least at what would pass at an academic level. But what strikes me most about the Postmodern worldview is its own philosophic self-annihilation; or at least, crippling indecision. To quote a random website i googled, which helps clarify my point,

Postmodernism, in rejecting grand narratives, favors “mini-narratives,” stories that explain small practices, local events, rather than large-scale universal or global concepts. Postmodern “mini-narratives” are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability.

Postmodern art (and thought) favors reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, and an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject.

Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn’t lament the idea of fragmentation, provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The world is meaningless? Let’s not pretend that art can make meaning then, let’s just play with nonsense.

What all this says to me is that, at least in practice, Postmodernism is a philosophy of a tired, decaying civilization almost too smart for its own good. Instead of right and wrong there are a thousand shades of gray. Instead of rape and love there is a spectrum of sexual interactions. Instead of civil society vs barbaric society there are many competing viewpoints and life experiences, all of which have some validity. It’s like having to study art for a decade to understand why that painting which consists of three uniform lines is ‘high art’; it takes a lot of study before you can understand the sublime journey to the literary “i dunno, wanna fuck?”. Postmodernism has crippled Liberalism intellectually.

Consumerism - well, its self explanatory, but also in one way explains why the “have-nots” are increasingly voting Republican. There are so many problems in the world… but those can wait until i get my new Aimee Mann CD and pricecheck that new LCD monitor. And i’m going to a concert this weekend, cancer can wait. And TiVo, well, you know, HBO rocks. The enthusiasm and social awareness of the demographic which animated the Vietnam generation has been dulled, commotitized (Woodstock 2!), and sold at the supermart for a new low price. The peace-and-love culture has mutated a culture of hedonism, excess and the Right to Party.

All these factors have just gutted Liberalism in America, and i see nothing other than revulsion at the Republican agenda energizing enough to bring together enough people to really challenge the cultural anti-revolution we’re about to undergo. And as the 2004 election showed, revulsion is not enough.

5

I think ultimately it comes down to some simple truths - political correctness, post-modernism and consumerism caused organized liberalism, palatable to any but the radical fringe, like the “all hetero sex is rape” crowd, to fester and rot - with the next ‘liberal’ generation too rich and inebriated to care anymore.

The irony of all this is liberals do not believe this shit, but even you think we’re all a bunch of post-modern college professors who hate Christmas. For chrissakes, Republicans somehow to manage not to have a public image of James Dobson, and it’s more accurate for them than “liberals are best represented by the view of a bunch of goofy college professors no one has heard of.” It’s even less accurate than that for Democrats at large. Really, “the necessities of modern life available to all for a reasonable amount of work” + “gays don’t get shot at or fired from work” is about it for 90% of us.

The concept of political correctness as a liberal movement was made up by conservatives looking for a fundraising angle. There is no liberal agenda to outlaw everything that doesn’t agree with a parody of a liberal college professor. The entire thing is the result of professional conservative organizations like Brent Bozell’s “Media Research Center” scouring the news every day for stuff they can misrepresent to make liberals look bad and gin up the plentiplaint outrage of the week.

Pretty much the same thing for post-modernism. Consumerism? The term “consumer” was a conscious invention of advertising & industry to come up with a way to keep the proles in line. I’m not kidding about this - see Stuart Ewen’s books. No longer do you work for a wage - you work so you can consume! Bottomless appetites, all of us.

Seriously, read David Brock’s noise machine book. Covers all this.

As illustrated here, the GOP has gotten so good at selling lies I honestly have no idea what to do about it. Is it pointless, barring some Great Depression to snap everyone out of it?

6

Some don’t. Some do.

Republicans somehow to manage not to have a public image of James Dobson, and it’s more accurate for them than “liberals are best represented by the view of a bunch of goofy college professors no one has heard of.”

How do you know this to be true?

The concept of political correctness as a liberal movement was made up by conservatives looking for a fundraising angle. There is no liberal agenda to outlaw everything that doesn’t agree with a parody of a liberal college professor.

This is just not true. It may not be an overt goal that is held by the vast majority of those describing themselves as “liberal”, but PC is far more than conservative spin.

There are things I cannot say in public. I know what they are. You know what they are. We both know they are not inherently harmful or even particularly derogatory in all possible contexts, or even most

One example: back when Hu Jintao became president of China, and I was working for the VA division of a company headquartered in CA, someone sent me one of those things that gets forwarded around the net; this was a takeoff on “Who’s On First”, with Bush and Condi Rice doing the talking, and Hu (who) the subject of the discussion. It was hilarious. At one point, Bush, trying to clarify who exactly he’s talking about, exclaims: “The Chinaman!”

Everybody in the VA division thought the whole thing was hilarious. The Californians who saw it, however, raised a stink about how I was being racially derogatory and in need of sensitivity training and so on and so forth and HR made me send out an apology, so as to be sure that the work environment wasn’t hostile to people who might get offended by such a horrible derogatory word. Never mind that we had Asians in the VA division who read the joke and laughed - it was only when the Californians saw it that I got hauled in to be yelled at.

I don’t know what to call that other than PC, and you will never convince me that that is reasonable behavior.

Just last night on Comedy Central they had this Mexican guy on one of their standup comedy shows. He was really funny, and I don’t normally go for shows like that. Then he starts talking about how all the white people at home are laughing, yeah, but if they went to a live show with all the “brothers” they wouldn’t be laughing at the nigga jokes, no, they’d be all straitlaced and saying “that ain’t right!”, and so on - and this had the audience laughing as hard as before, because of how he was describing it; but he was absolutely right. There are things you cannot say in public, and not because they are inherently evil or untrue things, but just because some goddamned idiot will make a big deal over how their precious little feelings have been hurt, and we as a society aren’t willing to tell them to grow up.

This leads directly into why I don’t like affirmative action, but that’s getting off on a tangent.

7

Really, “the necessities of modern life available to all for a reasonable amount of work” + “gays don’t get shot at or fired from work” is about it for 90% of us.

I’d be more inclined to agree with that idea except that I see a lot of left inspired PC’ism that is very very radical and hardly about equality and they seem to control the left. There is no place for moderates to go anymore. The right are going for the religious vote (while denying it) and left go for the nutso secularist “liberals” or whatever term you want to use.

8

I don’t know what to call that other than PC, and you will never convince me that that is reasonable behavior.

There you go; a perfect anecdote. Things missing from this:

  • That the people complaining were big liberals, rather than just touchy people in general.
  • That the people complaining had anything to do with the Democratic party.
  • That anyone at all agreed with them.

And you missed my point: yes, things like that do happen. However, they’re just random anecdotes out there from touchy people. This is no unified liberal or Democratic opinion on this kind of thing, much less a plan to actually get these rules written into any sort of law or administrative practice.

I like how the fact that I have yet to meet a liberal anywhere who believes the stuff you think they do, online or in real life, can’t defeat the anecdote army.

9

I like how I don’t know any conservatives who fit into the Dobsonite model you try to portray as the image of modern conservatism either.

So apparently both sides want to demonize the other. Wow, that’s a shocker.

10

Describes the liberal platform to a tee. :roll:

11

Nick, I actually don’t think modern conservativism is defined by James Dobson. My point was that if you were going to use the extremists to represent the parties, he’d be the guy, and it’d probably be more accurate than identifying the Democrats with that Ward Churchill guy. Doesn’t happen, though, does it?

12

What the hell? EVERY liberal I know – and that’s a good 30+ people – are almost uniformly are strong civil libertarians that would like to see a better social support infrastructure, sponsored by heavier taxation of corporations and wealthy private citizens. That’s IT. The tenets are simple: get the government the fuck out of everyone’s personal lives and make sure the rich pay their fair share so that we can have programs to support the poor/disabled/sick/veterans/environment.

Not a single one cares about the PC crowd or the academically self-absorbed, since they’re such a minority within the shared political spectrum as to be utterly irrelevant – hell, the only reason they garner media attention is due to the histrionics of the Right. In fact, most liberals find them as offensive as any self-righteous fundamentalist, especially given that its an attack on free speech. I can’t think of a single liberal I know, even those in local politics, who has even entertained the tenets of PC dogma. Folks that DO tout PC or environmental radicalism come from a few notable hotspots on the map: Kent State, Berkeley, and a few other notorious “left coast” colleges. Real-world liberals – y’know, the ones that make more money and are better educated on average than most Republicans – shy away from them as quickly as any real Mencken-type conservative might from the Religious Right.

Like Jason said, though, the Religious Far Right currently dictates the Republican Party platform. I don’t see any stipulations to the Cult of PC in the Democratic agenda.

13

The biggest difference between Liberals and Conservatives:

Liberals ignore the crazy people in their ranks, Conservatives do not.

I would like to say that liberals in general have a higher ethic. That is, they don’t do everything they can to get the vote. Some view this as incompetence, but I don’t know. Perhaps partly so, but perhaps it is also that many liberals simply can’t stomach the thought of pandering to the extremist fruitbags. But, in this race, the extremist right wind fruitbags are what got Bush and Co in. The entire Republican party is now sitting on a platform of careful lies and misdirection.

I mean, the opening post says it clearly:

George W. Bush was authentic; John Forbes Kerry, like all liberals, was an affected toff, a Boston Brahmin who knew nothing of the struggles of average folks.

Bush and Kerry graduated from the same school. The Bush family is generally northeastern to begin with. Bush ran off to play cowboy, never bothering to leave the silver spoon behind. He was a drunkard and a party boy, and was bailed out by his far richer and better connected family time and time and time and time again, and practically handed the Governership of Texas.

The Republicans have managed to hide this or make it not matter for the conservative masses. They are simultaneously able to believe that Kerry is an elitist snob while Bush is not. They are distracted by their shiny rebate checks, and forget to take into account the fact that the super duper wealthy are benefiting from Bush policies in hilariously larger ways than they are. If they do realize this, they rack up some serious cognitive dissonance by simply ignoring it. It doesn’t matter because for some, it’s no longer about who is the better person for the job, it’s about which side has maligned the other enough to make them seem like the devil incarnate.

Ramble ramble ramble. We’ve heard it all before, I’m sure. I don’t buy Republican lies and never will.

14

Yeah, the fake populism is a whole other discussion. Bush didn’t buy that ranch of his until a couple years before he ran for President, for example.

15

You can brush it off, but Rollory would have been fired if he hadn’t publicly apologized. That’s not a couple of loud whiners that no one cares about, that’s your livelihood being on the line over a joke that, after working hard at it, some people were able to find offensive. ‘Niggardly’ lost the DC city manager his job, people were on TV arguing that linguists don’t actually know it’s a Scandanavian word, it’s probably actually racist. The machinery of government is behind the PC movement, and that makes it silly to argue that the people promoting it have no influence.

16

Yes, but it doesn’t have a damned thing to do with liberals. Christ, why not blame the GOP for the self-help movement? Just randomally pick a party a and a social annoyance, match them up, and go!

17

Man, there are times I’m really bummed we don’t have a parlimentary system, becuase there really are more than 2 kinds of people in the world.

18

Oh please. Liberals may ignore many of their extremists in the ranks but they’re in love/lust/league with NOW (gee, VAWA isn’t extremist or sexist now is it?), certain environmentalist groups have major sway, and other lobbyists as well. Both parties are corrupt in this way. A lot of people these days just love to point it out with Repubs and the religious right while ignoring it on the left as well.

19

There’s no comparison in terms of money, power, and influence.

Also, and you may have to crack a history book to find this out, religious fundamentalism has been responsible for a great deal more slaughter than philosophical fundamentalism.

20

I also find PC to be incredibly annoying and stupid, but I’m honestly not sure as to its impact. Part of me wants to lump the whining about PC into Thomas Frank’s category of issues that are unimportant but are used to inflame passions. On the other hand, it IS true that in certain parts of the country (CA) and in certain fields (academia) PC can actually have a far greater impact on our lives on a day to day in your face basis than the macro-level abstract policy stuff in DC. I think part of Frank’s thesis is very true: the current Demo party doesn’t actually offer the working class and middle class much to hang their hat on, but it does have allies who annoy the freaking hell out of the working and middle classes. Franks tends to minimize this annoyance factor and focus on the lack of leftist goodies in the Demo platform but in terms of voting, daily annoyance may be a much stronger impetus than high-value but abstract concerns. Look at the furor that erupts over gas hikes: often a gas hike that may only impact your lifestyle by a few bucks a week will create much greater controversy than a big policy issue which will have much greater impact. Gas hikes are in your face and thus in your attention. So is PC.

It may not be great from a utopian political theory standpoint but its human nature. The Demos need to do a better job of controlling, phasing out or getting rid of their annoying allies. I mean, PC is just SO annoying. Have you guys heard about the LA County deal from last year? Some employees got offended that the county computer gear had “master” and “slave” on their labels (I think it was hard drives) so the county had to spend like $25,000 to relabel all of their computer gear (true story!). As a practical matter its a teeny tiny expense, less than 1 cent per LA county resident, but it sure is annoying. Even I was grumbling about it. Stupid PC buttheads :0.