Re: Nick Cohen on Thomas Frank

[andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen@xxxxxxxxx>]

I am not sure I read Frank as saying that liberals and
Democrat should not be bothered to defend their
favored social issues, like women's equality, abortion
rights, gay liberation. That's not how I read the book
at all.

Rather, I say Frank's point as being that the Dems
should _also_ get back to their New Deal-Great Society
roots on economic issues, and play this up. Don't
Marxists agree with this idea?

 Mind you, the prescription for action in the book is
rather thin, basically a few pages at the end. Most of
the book is analysis and reportage about how the GOP
has won over working class people and farmers using
religion and social issues to redefine the class
struggle as one aginst "the liberal elite," which is
Godless, homosexual, pro-abortion, anti-family, etc.,
while the economy is hustled off the scenes
altogether.

Do you disagree with that analysis?

You might say that Frank downplays race as dividing
issue, but he discusses that, and does at least say
that in Kansas, it doesn't really seem to be as big a
deal as it might be in, say, Chicago or Georgia. I
certainly do not think you would find Frank saying
that liberals and Democrats should not be actively
anti-racist.

Frank does not carry the kind of hatchet for Marxist
or class analysis that Rorty does, perhaps because of
his background -- his dad, James Rorty, was a former
communist poet who drifted way right and ended up
denouncing the Red Menace for Reader's Digest. But I
speculate about Rorty. Frank is a good solid leftist
-- he has never made it his business to attack the
left from the center (or the right). His magazine, The
Baffler, is one of the best venues for good,
no-nonsense, lucid writing on left themes in America,
along with Against the Current and Monthly Review.

jks


--- Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> A while back I said that Thomas Frank's "What's the
> Matter with Kansas"
> reminded me of the sort of stuff that Richard Rorty
> was saying back in
> 1998. If only the Democrats could downplay all that
> divisive stuff about
> homosexuality, etc. and return to its
> bread-and-butter, trade union
> past, it would begin winning elections. Frank
> concentrates on the social
> issues, but Rorty is just as miffed with people who
> harp on
> "imperialism". Moving further to the right, you get
> Todd Gitlin's "The
> Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by
> Culture Wars" and
> bringing up the rear is the atrocious Jim Sleeper, a
> self-described
> "liberal" who spent most of the 1980s railing
> against Al Sharpton and
> affirmative action.
>
> In yesterday's London Observer, Nick Cohen hailed
> Frank as "the true
> voice of the liberal left". Why? Because:
>
> "Frank is in a different league from Michael Moore.
> He is a smarter and
> better writer, and a proper hack who has been to ask
> the supporters of
> the backlash why they vote against their fundamental
> interests.
>
> "The answers, says Frank, lie first in the
> disastrous consequences of
> the liberal reliance on the judiciary and bills of
> rights to bring
> social change rather than votes in legislatures.
> Unelected judges
> legalised abortion in America and conservatives are
> able to claim that
> the common people have had their views disregarded
> by the elite. Indeed,
> they have convinced millions that this 'elite' is
> not made up of the
> actual holders of power, nearly all of them
> Republicans, but rich
> Hollywood stars who lecture the poor on how to
> behave, and TV executives
> and academics who pump out propaganda for
> homosexuality, pornography,
> divorce and promiscuity, and denigrate patriotism,
> sexual fidelity and
> godliness. Dismissing working-class concerns as the
> idiocies of stupid
> white men explains the failure of the US left."
>
> It is no big surprise that Cohen urges the left to
> pander to the worst
> prejudices of the white working class. For the
> longest time, he has been
> one of the biggest supporters of Tony Blair's
> participation in the war
> on Iraq. I seem to remember somebody saying that
> Cohen, like his
> cothinker Christopher Hitchens, was a radical in a
> previous lifetime.
> Couldn't find anything on the Internet, however.
>
>
> --
>
> The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
>





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