Michael Berube on Thomas Frank

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Berube is a cruise-missile leftist who can be quite interesting 
when he stays off topics like Yugoslavia, how to protest the war in Iraq, 
etc. His take on Thomas Frank is an example of him at his best:

http://www.michaelberube.com/EE/index.php

He makes a very interesting point that Frank's thesis grows out of his 
early preoccupations in Baffler Magazine, namely that big business 
encourages faux rebelliousness in order to sell commodities. Basically, he 
explains the rightward shift in Kansas and elsewhere as a reaction to MTV 
et al. Here's something from a Salon interview with Frank that Berube uses 
to illustrate his point:

---
Salon: You have a whole critique of pop culture that is difficult to 
summarize, but let?s talk more about your sympathy with the right-wing 
activists. When they bemoan how coarse and cheap pop culture has become, 
you almost seem to agree, or at least to feel that they have a certain kind 
of point.

Frank: Well, look. I should say this: I started out as a punk rocker, and 
we try to deal with cultural dissent, genuinely shocking things, at the 
Baffler. But as I have written about many, many times, so much of the 
shockery that surrounds us is not genuine. There?s no avant-garde about it. 
It?s not the real thing, it?s a watered-down capitalist projection. You?ve 
seen this argument before, ?the commodification of dissent.?

The argument I?m making is not that they?re absolutely right to be 
disgusted by our culture?although when I?m away from the country and I come 
back and turn on MTV, I?m always like, ?Holy shit!? I?m just trying to play 
up the flagrant contradiction. If you hate this stuff, talk about 
capitalism! Talk about the forces that do it! I?m focusing on the 
contradiction there, rather than accepting their argument about obscenity 
or whatever.

Salon: Right, so your real problem is with the kind of cultural-studies 
intellectual who believes that pop culture really is subversive.

Frank: Yes, exactly. The cultural studies people read these products of 
capitalism as face value. They see fake rebellion as the real thing. To put 
it in very vulgar terms, that?s the argument.
---

Since Berube is exactly one of those "cultural-studies intellectual" 
derided by Frank, you can imagine that he is not pleased with this 
analysis. Indeed, he promises to answer Frank in a subsequent blog entry.

This business about corporations pissing off voters in Kansas by televising 
shows like "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" or ads for Caribbean cruises 
with an Iggy Pop soundtrack is something that I sympathized with when I 
first became a Baffler reader. Upon further reflection, however, I think 
that Frank is missing something. Although corporations will co-opt nearly 
anything, there is a *real* impetus behind the "transgressive" behavior 
that they exploit in ads and TV shows, etc. For example, gays have a 
burning desire to be treated in the same fashion as anybody else. They 
don't want cops busting down their doors and hauling them off to jail when 
they are in bed with somebody from their same sex.

If after years of immense gay pride demonstrations some TV executive 
decides that it makes sense to include some gay programming, then it is 
really too bad that somebody in East Jesus, Nebraska decides to vote 
Republican even though they work at Walmart for shitty wages.

What's missing from the political equation in the USA is a VANGUARD that 
can explain to workers why it is in their interest to support gay rights. 
In Lenin's "What is to be Done", the most fully evolved explanation of what 
a vanguard is, he argues that the German social democracy is a model for 
socialist parties everywhere. As a tribune of the people, the German social 
democrats. Lenin writes:

"Why is there not a single political event in Germany that does not add to 
the authority and prestige of the Social-Democracy? Because 
Social-Democracy is always found to be in advance of all the others in 
furnishing the most revolutionary appraisal of every given event and in 
championing every protest against tyranny...It intervenes in every sphere 
and in every question of social and political life; in the matter of 
Wilhelm's refusal to endorse a bourgeois progressive as city mayor (our 
Economists have not managed to educate the Germans to the understanding 
that such an act is, in fact, a compromise with liberalism!); in the matter 
of the law against 'obscene' publications and pictures; in the matter of 
governmental influence on the election of professors, etc., etc."

What Lenin did not mention was that the German party was also in the 
forefront of defending gay rights. In an article by Peter Drucker in 
"Against the Current," we learn:

"For  example:  the German  Social Democratic Party was in the forefront 
of  the fight  to  repeal Germany's anti-gay Paragraph  175  in  the years 
before the First World War.  Eduard Bernstein defended Oscar Wilde (himself 
an iconoclastic socialist) in the pages of  the  SPD's  theoretical 
journal, "Die Neue  Zeit."   The Bolsheviks  repealed anti-gay laws when 
they took  power  in Russia,  and supported the pro-gay World 
League  for  Sexual Reform  throughout the 1920s.  The German 
Social  Democratic and Communist parties were the gay movement's best 
allies in the 1920s.  These basic facts are worth reiterating, if only 
because  some  recent  scholarship has managed  to  overlook them."

While it is far too soon to project our own vanguard in the USA, let's just 
say that the Nader-Camejo campaign is the best expression of how to combine 
bread-and-butter, economic demands with cutting edge social policies such 
as the need to allow gays to get married. It is really too bad that folks 
like Michael Berube cannot perceive this, blinded as they are by hatred for 
anything to the left of the Democratic Party.