Red-State America Against Itself

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http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/07/07_204.html

 

Red-State America Against Itself

 

The rightward shift in American politics has largely

been driven by working-class voters -- the very people

whose lives have been materially worsened by

conservative policies.

 

By Thomas Frank

 

July 15, 2004

 

ted from the book, What's the Matter with Kansas? How

Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Thomas

Frank.

 

That our politics have been shifting rightward for

more than thirty years is a generally acknowledged

fact of American life. That this rightward movement

has largely been accomplished by working-class voters

whose lives have been materially worsened by the

conservative policies they have supported is a less

comfortable fact, one we have trouble talking about in

a straightforward manner.

 

And yet the backlash is there, whenever we care to

look, from the " hardhats " of the 1960s to the " Reagan

Democrats " of the 1980s to today's mad-as-hell " red

states. " You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly

any Main Street in middle America -- " going out of

business " signs side by side with placards supporting

George W. Bush.

 

I chose to observe the phenomenon by going back to my

home state of Kansas, a place that has been

particularly ill-served by the conservative policies

of privatization, deregulation, and de-unionization,

and that has reacted to its worsening situation by

becoming more conservative still. Indeed, Kansas is

today the site of a ferocious struggle within the

Republican Party, a fight pitting affluent moderate

Republicans against conservatives from the

working-class districts and the downmarket churches.

And it's hard not to feel some affection for the

conservative faction, even as you deplore their

political views. After all, these are the people that

liberalism is supposed to speak to: the hard-luck

farmers, the bitter factory workers, the outsiders,

the disenfranchised, the disreputable.

 

Democrats shed the language of class warfare

 

Who is to blame for this landscape of distortion, of

paranoia, and of good people led astray? Though Kansas

voters have chosen self-destructive policies, it is

just as clear to me that liberalism deserves a large

part of the blame for the backlash phenomenon.

Liberalism may not be the monstrous, all-powerful

conspiracy that conservatives make it out to be, but

its failings are clear nonetheless. Somewhere in the

last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to

huge portions of its traditional constituency, and we

can say that liberalism lost places like Wichita and

Shawnee, Kansas with as much accuracy as we can point

out that conservatism won them over.

 

This is due partially, I think, to the Democratic

Party's more-or-less official response to its waning

fortunes. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the

organization that produced such figures as Bill

Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe,

has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar

voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent,

white-collar professionals who are liberal on social

issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants

desperately to court are corporations, capable of

generating campaign contributions far outweighing

anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect

the votes and -- more important -- the money of these

coveted constituencies, " New Democrats " think, is to

stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position

while making endless concessions on economic issues,

on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law,

privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such

Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as

" class warfare " and take great pains to emphasize

their friendliness to business interests. Like the

conservatives, they take economic issues off the

table. As for the working-class voters who were until

recently the party's very backbone, the DLC figures

they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will

always be marginally better on economic issues than

Republicans. Besides, what politician in this

success-worshiping country really wants to be the

voice of poor people? Where's the soft money in that?

 

This is, in drastic miniature, the criminally stupid

strategy that has dominated Democratic thinking off

and on ever since the " New Politics " days of the early

seventies. Over the years it has enjoyed a few

successes, but, as political writer E. J. Dionne has

pointed out, the larger result was that both parties

have become " vehicles for upper-middle-class

interests " and the old class-based language of the

left quickly disappeared from the universe of the

respectable. The Republicans, meanwhile, were

industriously fabricating their own class-based

language of the right, and while they made their

populist appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats were

giving those same voters -- their traditional base --

the big brush-off, ousting their representatives from

positions within the party and consigning their

issues, with a laugh and a sneer, to the dustbin of

history. A more ruinous strategy for Democrats would

be difficult to invent. And the ruination just keeps

on coming. However desperately they triangulate and

accommodate, the losses keep mounting.

 

Curiously enough, though, Democrats of the DLC variety

aren't worried. They seem to look forward to a day

when their party really is what David Brooks and Ann

Coulter claim it to be now: a coming-together of the

rich and the self-righteous. While Republicans trick

out their poisonous stereotype of the liberal elite,

Democrats seem determined to live up to the libel.

 

Such Democrats look at a situation like present-day

Kansas where social conservatives war ferociously on

moderate Republicans and they rub their hands with

anticipation: Just look at how Ronald Reagan's " social

issues " have come back to bite his party in the ass!

If only the crazy Cons push a little bit more, these

Democrats think, the Republican Party will alienate

the wealthy suburban Mods for good, and we will be

able to step in and carry places like super-affluent

Mission Hills, Kansas, along with all the juicy boodle

that its inhabitants are capable of throwing our way.

 

While I enjoy watching Republicans fight one another

as much as the next guy, I don't think the Kansas

story really gives true liberals any cause to cheer.

Maybe someday the DLC dream will come to pass, with

the Democrats having moved so far to the right that

they are no different than old-fashioned moderate

Republicans, and maybe then the affluent will finally

come over to their side en masse. But along the way

the things that liberalism once stood for -- equality

and economic security -- will have been abandoned

completely. Abandoned, let us remember, at the

historical moment when we need them most.

 

Movement building on the right

 

The true lesson for liberals in the Kansas story is

the utter and final repudiation of their historical

decision to remake themselves as the other

pro-business party. By all rights the people of

Wichita and Shawnee should today be flocking to the

party of Roosevelt, not deserting it. Culturally

speaking, however, that option is simply not available

to them anymore. Democrats no longer speak to the

people on the losing end of a free-market system that

is becoming more brutal and more arrogant by the day.

 

The problem is not that Democrats are monolithically

pro-choice or anti-school-prayer; it's that by

dropping the class language that once distinguished

them sharply from Republicans they have left

themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like

guns and abortion and the sneers of Hollywood whose

hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far

overshadowed by material concerns. We are in an

environment where Republicans talk constantly about

class -- in a coded way, to be sure -- but where

Democrats are afraid to bring it up.

 

Democratic political strategy simply assumes that

people know where their economic interest lies and

that they will act on it by instinct. There is no need

for any business-bumming class-war rhetoric on the

part of candidates or party spokesmen, and there is

certainly no need for a liberal to actually get his

hands dirty fraternizing with the disgruntled. Let

them look at the record and see for themselves:

Democrats are slightly more generous with Social

Security benefits, slightly stricter on environmental

regulations, and do less union-busting than

Republicans.

 

The gigantic error in all this is that people don't

spontaneously understand their situation in the great

sweep of things. Liberalism isn't a force of karmic

nature that pushes back when the corporate world goes

too far; it is a man-made contrivance as subject to

setbacks and defeats as any other. Consider our social

welfare apparatus, the system of taxes, regulations,

and social insurance that is under sustained attack

these days. Social Security, the FDA, and all the rest

of it didn't just spring out of the ground fully

formed in response to the obvious excesses of a

laissez-faire system; they were the result of decades

of movement-building, of bloody fights between

strikers and state militias, of agitating, educating,

and thankless organizing. More than forty years passed

between the first glimmerings of a left-wing reform

movement in the 1890s and the actual enactment of its

reforms in the 1930s. In the meantime scores of the

most rapacious species of robber baron went to their

reward untaxed, unregulated, and unquestioned.

 

An even more telling demonstration of the importance

of movements in framing people's perspectives can be

found in the voting practices of union members. Take

your average white male voter: in the 2000 election

they chose George W. Bush by a considerable margin.

Find white males who were union members, however, and

they voted for Al Gore by a similar margin. The same

difference is repeated whatever the demographic

category: women, gun owners, retirees, and so on --

when they are union members, their politics shift to

the left. This is true even when the union members in

question had little contact with union leaders. Just

being in a union evidently changes the way a person

looks at politics, inoculates them against the

derangement of the backlash. Here, values matter

almost least of all, while the economy, health care,

and education are of paramount concern. Union voters

are, in other words, the reverse image of the

Brown-back conservative who cares nothing for

economics but torments himself night and day with

vague fears about " cultural decline. "

 

Labor unions are on the wane today, as everyone knows,

down to 9% of the private-sector workforce from a

high-water mark of 38% in the 1950s. Their decline

goes largely unchecked by a Democratic Party anxious

to demonstrate its fealty to corporate America, and

unmourned by a therapeutic left that never liked those

Archie Bunker types in the first place. Among the

broader population, accustomed to thinking of

organizations as though they were consumer products,

it is simply assumed that unions are declining because

nobody wants to join them anymore, the same way the

public has lost its taste for the music of the Bay

City Rollers. And in the offices of the union-busting

specialists and the Wall Street brokers and the retail

executives, the news is understood the same way

aristocrats across Europe greeted the defeat of

Napoleon in 1815: as a monumental victory in a war to

the death.

 

While leftists sit around congratulating themselves on

their personal virtue, the right understands the

central significance of movement-building, and they

have taken to the task with admirable diligence. Cast

your eyes over the vast and complex structure of

conservative " movement culture, " a phenomenon that has

little left-wing counterpart anymore. There are

foundations like the one operated by the Kochs in

Wichita, channeling their millions into the political

battle at the highest levels, subsidizing free-market

economics departments and magazines and thinkers. Then

there are the think tanks, the Institutes Hoover and

American Enterprise, that send the money sluicing on

into the pockets of the right-wing pundit corps, Ann

Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, and the rest, furnishing them

with what they need to keep their books coming and

their minds in fighting trim between media bouts. A

brigade of lobbyists. A flock of magazines and

newspapers. A publishing house or two. And, at the

bottom, the committed grassroots organizers going

door-to-door, organizing their neighbors, mortgaging

their houses even, to push the gospel of the backlash.

 

And this movement speaks to those at society's bottom,

addresses them on a daily basis. From the left they

hear nothing, but from the Cons they get an

explanation for it all. Even better, they get a plan

for action, a scheme for world conquest with a wedge

issue. And why shouldn't they get to dream their lurid

dreams of politics-as-manipulation? They've had it

done to them enough in reality.

 

Kansas in the vanguard?

 

American conservatism depends for its continued

dominance and even for its very existence on people

never making certain mental connections about the

world, connections that until recently were treated as

obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet. For

example, the connection between mass culture, most of

which conservatives hate, and laissez-faire

capitalism, which they adore without reservation. Or

between the small towns they profess to love and the

market forces that are slowly grinding those small

towns back into the red-state dust -- which forces

they praise in the most exalted terms.

 

In this onrushing parade of anti-knowledge my home

state has proudly taken a place at the front. It is

true that Kansas is an extreme case, and that there

are still working-class areas here that are yet to be

converted to the Con gospel. But it is also true that

things that begin in Kansas --the Civil War,

Prohibition, Populism, Pizza Hut -- have a historical

tendency to go national.

 

Maybe Kansas, instead of being a laughingstock, is

actually in the vanguard. Maybe what has happened

there points the way in which all our public policy

debates are heading. Maybe someday soon the political

choices of Americans everywhere will be whittled down

to the two factions of the Republican Party. Whether

the Mods still call themselves " Republicans " then or

have switched to being Democrats won't really matter:

both groups will be what Kansans call " fiscal

conservatives, " which is to say " friends of business, "

and the issues that motivated our parents' Democratic

Party will be permanently off the table.

 

Sociologists often warn against letting the nation's

distribution of wealth become too polarized, as it

clearly has in the last few decades. Societies that

turn their backs on equality, the professors insist,

inevitably meet with a terrible comeuppance. But those

sociologists were thinking of an old world in which

class anger was a phenomenon of the left. They weren't

reckoning with Kansas, with the world we are becoming.

 

Behold the political alignment that Kansas is

pioneering for us all. The corporate world -- for

reasons having a great deal to do with its

corporateness -- blankets the nation with a cultural

style designed to offend and to pretend-subvert: sassy

teens in Skechers flout the Man; hipsters dressed in

T-shirts reading " FCUK " snicker at the suits who just

don't get it. It's meant to be offensive, and Kansas

is duly offended. The state watches impotently as its

culture, beamed in from the coasts, becomes coarser

and more offensive by the year. Kansas aches for

revenge. Kansas gloats when celebrities say stupid

things; it cheers when movie stars go to jail. And

when two female rock stars exchange a lascivious kiss

on national TV, Kansas goes haywire. Kansas screams

for the heads of the liberal elite. Kansas comes

running to the polling place. And Kansas cuts those

rock stars' taxes.

 

As a social system, the backlash works. The two

adversaries feed off of each other in a kind of

inverted symbiosis: one mocks the other, and the other

heaps even more power on the one. This arrangement

should be the envy of every ruling class in the world.

Not only can it be pushed much, much farther, but it

is fairly certain that it will be so pushed. All the

incentives point that way, as do the never-examined

cultural requirements of modern capitalism. Why

shouldn't our culture just get worse and worse, if

making it worse will only cause the people who worsen

it to grow wealthier and wealthier?

.. What do you think?

 

Copyright © 2004 by Thomas Frank. Reprinted by

arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of

Henry Holt and Company, LLC

 

Thomas Frank was born and raised in the suburbs of

Kansas City. He is editor of The Baffler magazine and

the author of One Market Under God, a study of “New

Economy” thinking, and The Conquest of Cool, an

examination of the roots of corporate hipsterism.

 

This piece first appeared at Tomdispatch.com.