Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece

["Max B. Sawicky" <sawicky@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

That's only half of Frank's argument.
I've been blazing through the book this
week.  It's a lot of fun to read.  Frank
also says Clintonesque center-hugging on
economics -- free trade, labor rights,
privatization, etc. -- causes the culturally-
conservative worker's decision to hinge solely
on God, guns, and gays.

I haven't finished the book yet.  So far Frank's
argument begs the question of why we don't see a
politics that is culturally conservative and
economically progressive, like the old populists
100 years ago.

mbs


(Thomas Frank's new book "What's Wrong With Kansas" argues implicitly that
the Democrats lose elections because they are identified with the wrong side
of the "culture wars". This is the same sort of position that Michael Moore
argued in the Nation Magazine in 1997 and that Richard Rorty put forward in
"Achieving Our Country". You get a more strident version of this in Todd
Gitlin's "The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture
Wars". Moving directly into the enemy's camp, you get  Arthur Schlesinger
Jr.'s "The Disuniting of America:
Reflections on a Multicultural Society" and Jim Sleeper's "Liberal
Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream". Somehow, this
kind of economism that panders to white workers has been associated with
Marxism in some circles. Frank himself would probably describe himself as a
Marxist, but not on the Charlie Rose show--I don't imagine. In any case,
this has little to do with the outlook of Lenin who urged that socialists
act as a "tribune of the people".)

NY Times, July 16, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Failure Is Not an Option, It's Mandatory By THOMAS FRANK