Red-State America Against Itself (more from Thomas Frank)

[dumpster_baby]

Thomas Frank is a GOD of political analysis, as far as I am concerned.

Here are 4 paragraphs selected from another op-ed piece by Frank published in Common Dreams today.

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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.

....


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.


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?

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more here:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0716-08.htm

[ThomWV]

1. I Agree

You are not Frank's only fan.

[Hoping4Change]

2. I too bow down to Frank. Do you read his magazine The

Baffler, at thebaffler.com?

[welshTerrier2]

3. great article ...

thanks for the post !!

[lapfog_1]

4. The funny thing is

that Kansas wants to watch the rock stars make out as much as
anybody (perhaps a *lot* more than the coasties, to whom this isn't
really outrageous behavior anymore). It's like a car accident that
they have to slow down and rubberneck. THEY are the audience that
Jerry Springer and reality TeeVee is all about... and one of the
drivers is that they KNOW they aren't as well off as the left
coasties, I mean, they watched BevHill 90210 and saw OJ and house he lived in or they watched Friends or even the Cosby show, and they KNOW
that we are all gay and rich beyond belief (at least to them). So
they watch the female rock stars make out on TeeVee and pretend
outrage so they can feel morally superior in every way and talk about
how they are the real America, the heartland and all that. If they
weren't watching what they roundly condemn as morally corrupting
Hollyweird products, it wouldn't be produced.

If what they wanted was to watch Leave It to Beaver and Father
Knows Best, then Hollywood would cater to their desires. And Pax
TeeVee would be a ratings smash (imagine if ONE cable channel could
capture 40 million TeeVee sets every night!). So they rant and
rave about the left coast and the moral decline, but they can't stop
tuning in every night.

As for politics, they see the Dems as supporting (actually promoting)
the gay "agenda" and womens lib and minorities and unions, and while
they are working class, most are not members of a union nor do they
see unions as being a "good thing". So that leaves them open for
the Repugs, and they can vote for "family values" and "strong
America" and "morals"... but they still watch "Average Joe" and
"The Bachelor" and such (see, FOX really understands this, FOX
panders envelop pushing semi-smut and morally corrupt shows every
night for entertainment, while at the SAME TIME, railing against
those very shows (what Hollywood is pushing on America) on it's
own "news" channel.

BTW, I was born in Kansas, left at the age of 28, moved to California
where I've lived the last 14 years. But I still have lots of family
there (and DESPITE having been married once for 8 years, and having
taken long term girlfriends back home for holidays or
vacation, there are apparently rumors that I'm gay, simply because
I'm over 40, live in San Fran (actually in San Jose, but let's
not confuse anyone) and I'm not currently married!

That's how Jayhawks think. It's weird.

[lottie244]

5. Why should the red states get more of Fed coffer than they put in?

That has always been my question. The folks from the red states bitch about taxes yet all the evidence in research shows that the red states reap more than they put into the Fed coffers. Yet all the conservatives continue to complain about taxes and social spending.

[OneBlueSky]

6. the August issue of Harper's (not online yet) . . .

has a Forum section entitled "Liberalism Regained: Building the Next Progressive Majority . . . participants in the forum, which took place at the New School University in NYC, include:

- Ron D. Daniels, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights;
- Eric Foner, author and teacher at Columbia University;
- Ralph Nader, independent candidate for President;
- Kevin Phillips, noted political author;
- Frances Fox Piven, author and teacher at CUNY; and
- Lewis H. Lapham, editor of Harper's.

just came today, so I haven't had a chance to read it yet . . . it should be posted online at some point but, until then, here's the opening salvo:

I. The Opportunity

KEVIN PHILLIPS: I don't know if the Democrats fully understand what a defining moment in American political history a Bush presidency is. The job approval of the first President Bush climbed as high as 89 percent right after the Gulf War but fell to 29 percent in the summer of 1992; he wound up losing in 1992 with 37% of the vote, the worst showing for an incumbent president since William Howard Taft in 1912. Our current President is the second generation of this esteemed line. His own approval rating got up to 90 percent right after the September 11 attacks and is now, according to the most recent poll, at 46 percent. Like his father, he's proved that it's possible to drop more than 40 percentage points within one administration.

ERIC FONER: Support for the war in Iraq has unraveled incredibly fast. And that would not have happened if there hadn't been so much opposition to the war to begin with, no matter how much Bush thumbed his nose at it. Also, we've finally seen the media turn on him. The media march along in lockstep in whatever direction they think things are heading: when they had the idea that Bush was riding high, you couldn't find an anti-Bush view. But now you turn on the evening news and all you get is how everything is going wrong. This is not because the media are controlled by liberals, any more than they were controlled by conservatives a year ago when they were sprouting the administration line over and over again.

RALPH NADER: It's because they were lied to, and they don't like that.

FONER: We're also starting to see a backlash against the religious right. On libertarian grounds, on privacy grounds. Americans don't want to see the government in league with religious people telling them how to conduct their lives.



p.s. same issue includes a poignant photo essay of American and Iraqi families burying sons killed in the war . . .

[lanparty]

7. Oh the irony ... snicker ...

Many conservative voters who can't BEAR to vote for a "liberal Democratic" but can no longer abide Bush will vote for NADER!!!!!!!!

Oh the IRONY!!!!

[bvar22]

8. Nails the DLC

"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;


ABB anyone?