Thomas Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805073396
This is the definitive book on post-60s politics in the United States, detailing the roots, strategies, and history of the working class cultural backlash.
It’s an amazing, funny, breezy read. But as you flip through the pages, seeing the bricks of his argument thud into the dirt, you come to realize what the future has in store. If the Democrats continue their policy of “hey, at least we’re not the GOP!” giveaways to the rich, acceptance of union-busting, well-meaning but badly-framed givewaways to the non-working poor, and totally unrestrained cultural liberalism framed in aggrieved-minority spoils terms, they will lose elections for the indefinite future. They will see the destruction of everything they care about. They will see the United States of America turn into “Brazil with a big military” - an insanely rich plutocracy ruling sway over a seething, manipulated underclass. Frank doesn’t go into it in too much detail on solutions - he mostly diagnoses - but I think this book points the way towards a policy of value-framed, working-class centered money policies - smart trade, regulation of the heavy hand of big business, helping those who actually work, who don’t live on inherited money. More on solutions below the review.
In the 2000 presidential election, the poorest county in the entire United States - McPherson County, Nebraska - voted for George Bush over Al Gore by a margin of 60 points.
Read that again, and reflect on the cosmic insanity of that sentence. All liberals know that the Republicans are the party that screws workers and crushes the poor. What’s happening here?
Thomas Frank knows. The modern narrative of politics in the United States is this:
My friend’s dad was a teacher in the local public schools, a loyal member of the teachers’ union, and a more dedicated liberal than most; not only had he been a staunch supporter of Geroge McGovern, but in the 1980 Democratic primary he had voted for Barbara Jordan, the black U.S. Representative from Texas. My friend, meanwhile, was in those days a high school Republican, a Reagan youth who fancied Adam Smith ties and savored the writing of William F. Buckley. The dad would listen to the son spout off about Milton Friedman and the godliness of free-market capitalism, and he would just shake his head. Someday, kid, you’ll know what a jerk you are.
It was the dad, though, that eventually converted. These days he votes for the farthest right Republicans he can find on the ballot. The particular issue that brought him over was abortion. A devout Catholic, my friend’s dad was persuaded in the early inineties that the sanctity of the fetus outweighed all of his other concerns, and from there he gradually accepted the whole pantheon of conservative devil-figures; the elite media and the American Civil Liberties Union, contemptuous of our values; the la-di-da feminists; the idea that Christians are vilely persecuted - right here in the U.S. of A. It doesn’t even bother him, really, when his new hero Bill O’ Reilly blasts the teachers’ union as a group “that does not love America.”
His superaverage midwestern town, meanwhile has followed the same trajectory. Even as Republican economic policy has laid waste to the city’s industries, unions, and neighborhoods, the townsfolk responded by lashing out on cultural issues, eventually winding up with a hard-right Republican congressman, a born-again Christian who campaigned largely on an anti-abortion platform. Today the city looks like a minature Detroit. And with every bit of economic bad news it seems to get more bitter, more cynical, and more conservative still.
This sentence is probably the best summary of the last 40 years in politics:
Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the enter planet must remake itself along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, U.S.A.
This would be strange enough, but it becomes downright loony when you reflect that the exact same people using the exact same rhetoric gave us all of the liberal reforms of the late 19th and early 20th century. Unions, the minimum wage, a shorter workweek, bringing corporations to heel - railroads in those days - worker safety, social security, the progressive income tax - all of it. Remember that line about “raise less corn, and more hell?” From a Kansas mass meeting. The midwest had socialist newspapers, socialist mayors, Eugene Debs won counties there, it was convulsed with bloody working class strikes. Now, they’re willing to give it all away, if that’s the price they have to pay to get rid of those damned treasonous liberals at the colleges, get the girls kissing each other off tv, stop your kids from getting pregnant and cursing at you - the Republicans promise to fix it, and Kansas votes for it knowing exactly the cost. That the Republicans never deliver, instead turning the country into an economic Brazil isn’t that big of a deal; everyone knows the death of christian culture is insolvable - after all, we’re probably in the end of days. What’s important is we fight, and stick it to those damned Hollywood liberals with their save the whales and hatred of God.
Tell this to sort of thing to your average upper-middle class liberal today - Atlantic Monthly reader, New Yorker lover - and he’ll tell you these voters are one of three things:
“They’re uneducated hicks.” Ok, but what about the rural roots of the progressive movement?
“Well then, they’re racists.” What about white-bread Kansas, with its history of bloody fighting against the forces of slavery? Kansas was the site of open warfare in the mid-19th century and they’re damned proud of fighting against slavery then.
“Ah, they’re crazy religious nuts!” Ok, what about the history of the evangelical movement, especially in the midwest, on progressive economic reforms and fighting slavery?
In short, those stock answers are a dodge that comes from the growing separation between the rich and poor in our country, especially in culture, especially in the war around our modern consumer culture’s desire for authenticity. They say we don’t understand them, and they’re goddamn right. So they sneer at our pretensions, write hundred page fantasy screeds about the coming war against urban intellectuals, and always with the hatred of our precious, precious lattes. You see, the one thing they have over their new overlords - us, the upper classes, whether it’s the charlatan Republicans promising to fix their problems or the clueless liberals - is their cultural authenticity. Man of the people, clarity, appeals to common sense - those are what everyone in modern consumer culture is fighting for to define their jobs and their lives. The upper class movement for “simplicity” has the same damned roots as the lower middle class buying cowboy hats, after all.
Abortion is the issue in this story. As Frank details, there was an evangelical uprising during the 1990s in Kansas over abortion which threw out the Democratic governor, control of both houses, and knocked off half the Republican moderates. Just like the previous populist movements, there were mass meetings, spontaneous mass demonstration, reinforcing disapproval from the establishment - all the ingredients of a political firestorm to blow through the state, cleansing everything more complicated than earthy bedrock, leaving a flat divide over abortion as the single decision you must make, that is unavoidable, that is the new dividing line between Us and Them. The Republican establishment of old there is barely hanging on; a few have started defecting to the Democrats out of absolute terror that their upper middle-class cultural niceties will be threatened . Which only reinforces the stereotype, of course.
Those in the GOP who’ve decided to ride the wave of rage have done far better - take Senator Brownback. He’s famous for wanting to hold congressional investigations into “cultural decline”, insisting cultural coarseness can be measured objectively, and once washed the feet of a former aid leaving his service. Funny - he was actually a boring Republican pro-choice moderate before abortion got big. He’s just found a new gig, being careful to focus on issues that are extremely remote and almost by definition cannot be solved - international human trafficking, cultural decline, abortion. That it’s all a possibly-not-conscious sham can be seen in his opposition to loosening media concentration rules in the late 1990s; he favored getting rid of the rules because hey, that’s what companies do! How dare you try to get in their way! He’s the absolute toast of the local Koch rich people money, of course, with all the trappings of power that go along with it.
That’s the current situtation. Now how the hell did something this batshit crazy come to pass? Frank’s theory is that the business world has slowly faded out of the worldview of the working class, both due to organized propaganda campaigns from the right and massive mistakes on the left; and once that’s gone, well the backlash is an appealling theory. On the right: there was an actual organized campaign by the advertising industry to get people to identify themselves as “consumers” instead of workers. I’m serious. Ever notice how strange that word is, or wonder where the hell it came from? There you go. Then there’s the story of a tiny set of very rich conservatives - British-style aristocrat conservative, that is - buying themselves the trappings of a social movement. Olin, Scaife, Koch, and so on, as detailed by David Brock and Sidney Bluementhal. On the left: reacting to the racial convlusions that killed the FDR coalition by intentionally turning into the party of the social mores of the upper middle-class, jettisoning ever more of the working class, culminating in the collective decision to become the party of socially liberal bond traders in the 1990s.
When business & economics is something that just happens, that might as well be on the astral plane for all you think about it, the backlash makes sense. All the things the working class doesn’t like about where our culture is going - saucy stick-it-to-the-man rebellion by teenagers, sex on television, the dissolution of the nuclear family into teenage pregnancy and living together outside of marriage, casual sex, gangster rap - it’s all because of those damned hollywood & college liberals poisoning their minds through flee-floating insiduous ideas. That this theory is manifestly at odds with the real world - is there a more powerless political group than college english professors or Hollywood stars? - doesn’t matter; you can’t beat a bad theory with no theory. That all the things in crass popular culture are there because corporations get very, very rich putting them there is so off the wall and against the conventional wisdom people literally don’t understand what you’re talking about. Here’s Frank discussing the obsession with Hollywood:
But the backlash offers more than this ready-made class identity. It also gives people a general way of understanding the buzzing mass-cultural world we inhabit. Consider, for example, the stereotype of liberals that comes up so often in the backlash oeuvre: arrogant, rich, tasteful, fashionable, and all-powerful. In my real-world experience liberals are nothing of the kind. They are an assortment of complainers - for the most part impoverished complainers - who wield about as much influence over American politics as the cashier at Home Depot does over the business strategy. This is not a secret, either; read any issue of The Nation or In These Times or the magazine sent to members of the United Steelworkers, and you figure out pretty quickly that liberals don’t speak for the powerful or wealthy.
But when you flip through People magazine, you come away with a very different impression of what liberals are like. Here you read about movie stars who go to charity balls for causes like charity rights and the “underpriviledged.” Singers who were big in the seventies express their concern with neatly folded ribbons for this set of victims of that. Minor TV personalities instruct the world to stop saying mean things about the overweight or the handicapped. And beautiful people of every description don expensive transgressive fashions, buy expensive transgressive art, eat at expensive transgressive restaurants, and get edgy with an expensive punk sensibility or an expensive earth-friendly look.
Here liberalism is a matter of shallow appearances, of fatuous self-righteousness; it is arrogant and condescending, a politics in which the beautiful and wellborn tell the unwashed and the beaten-down and the funny-looking how they ought to behave, how they should stop being a racist or homophobic, how they should be better people. In America, where the chief sources of one’s ideas about life’s possibilities are TV and the movies, it’s not hard to be convinced that we inhabit a liberal-dominated world: feminist cartoons for ten-year-olds are followed by commercials for nonconformist deodorants; entire families of movies are organized around some transcendent dick joke; even shows for toddlers have theme songs about keeping it real.
Frank talks to the workers responsible for organizing and running the 1990s Kansas revolution. They’re line workers at the bottling plant, they live in the tract homes that the local upper middle class establishment sneers at, they dress unpretentiously like their parents used to, they shop at the very Wal-Mart that picks their pockets. But - this is an important but - they use the revolutionary rhetoric and plans of action developed in the 1960s by the New Left. Kids wear anti-evolution t-shirts, imploring us to “Subvert the Dominant Paradigm.” The commodification of dissent, as Frank has discused in his previous books, is here in full force - express your disapproval of popular culture by buying Christian music and clothing! When Frank tries to ask them what they think of the idea that big business is the root of all their problems, they basically give him blank stares. The capitalists have won. The question of their power is way off the map, an unthought.
I’m leaving out a lot - how the very American focus on the power of positive thinking leads to the creation of a certain type of guy who is incredibly bitter aggrieved and bitter, in spite of having it all; the hilarious bits of doublethink David Brooks and his ilk go through to explain the backlash without using any economics; the many ways in which the Red State/Blue State divide is wrong; the almost-governor of Kansas in the 1920s who promised to restore male virility through goat testicle transplants; the dead-serious perfectly nice guy who declared himself Pope a few years back and is a perfect example of the backlash mindset. Not to mention Frank’s truly amazing grasp of rhetorical power. Watch the master at work:
Let us pause for a moment to ponder this all-American dysfunction. A state is spectacularly ill served by the Reagan-Bush stampede of deregulation, privatization, and laissez-faire. It sees its countryside depopulated, its towns disintegrate, its cities stagnate - and its wealthy enclaves sparkle, behind their remote-controlled security gates. The state erupts in revolt, making headlines around the world with its bold defiance of convention. But what do its rebels demand? More of the very measure that have brought ruination on them and their
neighbors in the first place.This is not just the mystery of Kansas; this is the mystery of America, the historical shift that has made it all possible.
In Kansas the shift is more staggering than elsewhere, simply because it has been so decisive, so extreme. The people who were once radical are now reactionary. Though they speak today in the same aggrieved language of victimization, and though they face the same array of economics forces as their hard-bitten ancestors, today’s populists make demands that are precisely the opposite. Tear down the federal farm programs, they cry. Privatize the utilities. Repeal the progressive taxes. All that Kansas asks today is a little help nailing itself to that cross of gold.
In its implacable bitterness Kansas holds up a mirror to the rest of us. If this is the place where America goes looking for its national soul, then this is where American finds that its soul, after stewing in the primal resentment of the backlash, has gone all sour and wrong. If Kansas is the concentrated essence of normality, then here is where we can see the deranged gradaully become normal, where we look into that handsome, confident, reassuring, all-American face - class president, quarterback, Rhodes scholar, bond trader, builder of industry - and realize that we are staring into the eyes of a lunatic.
From the air-conditioned heights of a suburban office complex this may look like a new age of reason, with the Web sites singing each to each, with a mall down the way that every week has miraculously anticipated our subtly shifting tastes, with a global economy whose rich rewards just keep flowing, and with a long parade of rust-free Infinitis purring down the streets of beautifully manicured planned communities. But on closer inspection the country seems more like a panorama of madness and delusion worthy of Hieronymous Bosch: of sturdy blue-collar patriots reciting the Pledge while they strangle their own life chances; of small farmers proudly voting themselves off the land; of devoted family men carefully seeing to it that their children will never be able to afford college or proper health care; of working-class guys in midwestern cities cheering as they deliver up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life, will transform their region into a “rust belt,” will strike people like them blows from which they will never recover.
It’s all enough to make you go soak in the tub holding your head.
This is the question for 2005: where is liberalism? Where is a real, honest-to-god left that focuses on the value of work, not the value of money? Don’t believe me on “economic populism is the solution?” Read this: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=8956
In Vermont, Representative Bernie Sanders, the House’s only independent and a self-described socialist, racks up big wins in the “Northeast Kingdom,” the rock-ribbed Republican region along the New Hampshire border. Far from the Birkenstock-wearing, liberal caricature of Vermont, the Kingdom is one of the most culturally conservative hotbeds in New England, the place that helped fuel the “Take Back Vermont” movement against gay civil unions.
Yet the pro-choice, pro–gay-rights Sanders’ economic stances help him bridge the cultural divide. In the 1990s, he was one of the most energetic opponents of the trade deals with China and Mexico that destroyed the local economy. In the Bush era, he highlighted the inequity of the White House’s soak-the-rich tax-cut plan by proposing to instead provide $300 tax-rebate checks to every man, woman, and child regardless of income (a version of Sanders’ rebate eventually became law). For his efforts, Sanders has been rewarded in GOP strongholds like Newport Town. While voters there backed George W. Bush and Republican Governor Jim Douglas in 2004, they also gave Sanders 68 percent of the vote.
Sanders’ strength among rural conservatives is not just a cult of personality; it is economic populism’s broader triumph over divisive social issues. In culturally conservative Derby, for instance, a first-time third-party candidate used a populist message to defeat a longtime Republican state representative who had become an icon of Vermont’s anti-gay movement.
There’s more examples in there of Democrats standing up on economics and beating the shit of the GOP in places where they “shouldn’t” be doing so - Montana, North Dakota, North Carolina. Unlike the unrestricted free-trade, moderate upper-class Democrats who normally run against culture backlash Republicans - kind of the average swing election nowdays - they win.
The interesting thing about the left-aligned people on this forum seems to be that we’re all upper-middle class, at the very least in outlook if not income. As such, there’s kind of this economic sorta-libertarian plus culturally liberal thing, which is the accurate stereotype of why we lose. It’s hilarious. Myself, only recently have I done the reading and found out the econ 101 nostrums about “free trade” are ridiculous; before that I was a trade absolutist, like a large part of the educated professional left. Little thing called reality doesn’t match up, apparently - only a handful of first-world countries have industrialized through neoliberal trade policies, and they’re not very good models for anyone else - Singapore. By contrast, the United States, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea all had amazingly sheltered domestic industries until after they got rich, and things have been liberalized since then less than you realize.
So I’ve got to ask: would you vote for FDR’s policies? This is not an rhetorical question anymore. They’re all on the chopping block: social security, the income tax, probably the minimum wage at some point (who would have thought of a 2005 push for social security’s elimination in 1980?) - if there is not a serious return to the progressive tradition in the Democratic party, we will lose them all.
A closing thought: do you know what they called the socially liberal upper middle class of the 1920s?
Republicans.