Thomas Frank flinches

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

New Left Review 30, November-December 2004

Why did cultural bogeys trump economic distress as working-class voters 
went to the polls in the US? Can the case of Kansas stand in for 
proletarian America at large, as Thomas Frank suggests? Billionaire 
Democrats and blue-collar Republicans in the twisting shapes of the 
21st-century political system.

TOM MERTES

A REPUBLICAN PROLETARIAT

Within two days of Bush?s 2004 election victory, Bill Clinton was making 
clear what direction the Democrats should now take. The party had to 
?engage the American heartland in a conversation about religion and 
values?. Too many voters thought that Democrats did not believe in faith or 
family. Kerry had failed to condemn gay marriage with the ardour 
required??He said it once or twice but not a thousand times, in small 
towns??or to point out that abortions had fallen by over 20 per cent under 
the Clinton Administration, and had risen under Bush. [1] Was the Kerry 
campaign too ?liberal? to win? ?Maybe this time the voters chose what they 
actually want?, exclaimed the Nation?s Katha Pollitt. ?Nationalism, 
pre-emptive war, order not justice, ?safety? through torture, backlash 
against women and gays, a gulf between haves and have-nots, government 
largesse for their churches . . .?

(clip)

At first glance, this looks like a robust enough critique of the Democrats. 
But there is an obvious question it fails to ask: why does the Democratic 
Party act the way it does? All Frank says is that the strategy that has 
dominated most of its thinking since the early seventies is ?criminally 
stupid?. But is ?stupidity? really an intelligent political category? Or is 
it a bit dumbed-down itself? Its effect is to suggest that the Democrats 
have simply made a mistake: if only they would come to their senses and 
remember their true interests, they would turn back to workers and the 
least well-off, and become once again the party of solidarity and social 
progress. Yet it should surely be plain enough that the Democratic Party is 
a vehicle of reaction, not out of error or lack of wit, but because it is a 
machine largely controlled by the super-rich, who are perfectly capable of 
understanding their own interests.

For all his spirited retorts to hucksters like David Brooks, Frank flinches 
from acknowledging the core of cold truth in their legends and demagogic 
stereotypes. In the recent Presidential election, the Democrats picked the 
wealthiest individual since George Washington ever to run for the White 
House as their candidate, outgunned the Republicans 59 to 41 per cent among 
donors with assets over $10 million, outspent Bush in every swing state of 
the Union, and hit an all-time financial record for a senatorial campaign: 
$17 million in a failed attempt to get Daschle back on the Hill. Moreover, 
there is little that is new in this: since the nineties virtually all of 
the richest electoral districts in the country have been Democratic 
bastions, Clinton?s cash-mountain easily topped Dole?s in 1996, and the 
Democrats have regularly received larger individual donations than 
Republicans, whose strength has been among smaller donors. In this 
situation, workers who vote Republican may be less deluded than Frank seems 
to believe. Putting it in sociological language, since there is so little 
to choose ?instrumentally? between the two parties, each of them dedicated 
to capital unbound, why not at least get the satisfaction of voting 
?expressively? for the one which seems to speak for their values, if not 
their interests?

If Frank sidesteps the political economy of the blue plutocracy, it is 
unlikely to be just out of tactical considerations. What?s the Matter with 
Kansas? is a completely honourable book, free of any hint of the electoral 
pandering that has marred contributions like Michael Moore?s Fahrenheit 
911. Rather, what seems to have happened is that as a former Republican 
youngster of the Reagan era, Frank has reacted by vaguely idealizing 
Democratic rulers of an earlier age. More than once he intimates that 
?forty years ago?, the party was still a beacon of enlightenment, and 
indeed even now he can write that ?it is the Democrats who are the party of 
the workers, the poor, of the weak and the victimized. Understanding this, 
we think, is part of the abcs of adulthood?. The weak link in his book, 
which runs through it like a wistful refrain, uniting past and present, is 
the broken-backed notion of American liberalism. Though he concedes that 
?liberalism deserves a large part of the blame for the backlash 
phenomenon?, he does not explain why this should be so, or whether it has 
anything to do with the nature of the phenomenon itself, rather than simply 
its decline. But it is enough to note that Frank can write of ?the things 
liberalism once stood for?equality and economic security? to realize that 
we are in the realm of historical mythology. Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, 
Kennedy, Johnson champions of equality! They would be turning in their 
graves. The Democratic Party and its ?liberalism?: the great tradition of 
the Palmer Raids, Nisei camps, Loyalty oaths, Agent Orange in Vietnam, 
assassinations in Africa and coups in Latin America, not to speak of the 
ferocious protection of capital at home and abroad.

full: http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR26402.shtml


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org