In his best-selling book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives won the Heart of America, author Thomas Frank – editor of the sharp-witted Baffler, a small-press magazine based in Chicago – argues the working class used to vote Democratic but started crossing over with the rise of Christian fundamentalism and its “inverted class war.”
Frank examines this change through the politics in his home state and, by extension, America. What’s upside down, he says, is that by insisting it’s liberals, not the rich, who pull their strings, the far rights votes against abortion, intellectualism – and its own economic class.
Cydney Gillis with the Street Newspaper Real Change New in Seattle recently interviewed Frank.
Real Change: How did working-class Republicans come to see themselves as victims of their own economic system?
Thomas Frank: The victimhood thing is one of the most fascinating aspects of the right. It’s the idea that average people are actually persecuted by liberals. An argument you hear often from right-wing Christian conservatives is that to criticize them or to make fun of them is to persecute them – it’s religious persecution. And that’s just ridiculous. They take offense all the time and they even look for things to offend them.
In a lot of ways, they are victims where you’re talking about distribution of wealth and lack of healthcare. The victimhood that the movement embraces is different, though. It embraces the sense that the real victims of society are conservatives and regular Americans, in particular evangelical Christian who are looked down upon by liberal elite intellectuals.
RC: Can you give me an example of this?
Frank: Well, one of the easiest examples is the way my book is being received. What I was aiming to do in my book is to try to understand the conservative movement. It’s not entirely sympathetic, but I’m trying to understand the people involved in it rather than simply make fun of them. I’d say 90 percent of the reviews of the book are written by conservatives who manifest exactly the same attitudes I describe in the book. It’s highly ironic. They say, “Well, this is just a liberal looking down on regular people and making fun of people in Kansas. And we are the victims of this high-brow author who thinks he’s smarter than everybody else.”
RC: Isn’t there some truth to the idea that liberals are snooty? Why should they tell a farmer or a worker how to go about leading her life?
Frank: Yes, there is definitely that edge to liberalism. It’s very annoying and there is a grain of truth to it. The backlash uses the agreed-up language of social class, cut the people that it’s really against are the intellectuals. It substitutes “intellectual” into the usual targeted class in class antagonism.
RC: It’s as if liberalism is viewed as the new communism.
Frank: The backlash against liberalism shares a lot of the same characteristics as the more embarrassing parts of the anti-communist movement – the tendency towards conspiratorial thinking, anti-intellectualism. Even when they’re not elected, [the idea is liberals] still manage to control everything from their strategic positions – the judiciary and the media – and they’re supposed to constitute this gigantic threat to America. For the real hard-liner anti-communist types, such as McCarthy, the threat wasn’t really the Soviet Union – rather, it was domestic, it was here at home around the corner.
RC: One point you make in the book is working-class Republicans vote based on cultural issues that keep them angry, such as abortion, but what they get are economic policies that don’t benefit them, such as unregulated trade. But aren’t they voting for both?
Frank: Sometimes, but not usually. It would be very hard to find a working-class worker in Ohio wo would be in favor of the bankruptcy bill. It’s written by the lobbyists for the credit card companies and make it harder to declare bankruptcy, which has always been one of the saving graces of American capitalism. Nobody like these companies and yet they get their way because that’s who funded the Bush campaign.
RC: You have written that the far right never achieves anything on the cultural front, such as outlawing abortion or getting school vouchers. But does that matter when the culture wars pushed Democrats farther to the right and keeps them off their own agenda?
Frank: They have achieved something on values issues here and there. But they’re very minor with what they’ve done on the business front. It’s huge! And it totally remade the world that we live in, economically speaking.
RC: At one point in the book, you indicate that outlawing abortion is beyond achieving. But it’s one of the main issues moving working-class voters farther to the right.
Frank: I don’t want people to be complacent about that – it could well happen. But historically speaking, they have often had this opportunity; instead, they focused on different issues. In the Reagan Administration, for example, they never even tried to do it, although Reagan was an avid pro-life supporter. The country remains pro-choice, by and large, but [the pro-choice] people aren’t as motivated because, obviously, their position is the law of the land.
In Kansas, the abortion issue has turned the state on its head politically. When I was a kid, there was no abortion issue. We only saw protesters in the south. Kansas became an example of how this issue completely altered states’ politics. But whether or not they’re going to get their way is a different question. The Republican party has completely changed and become this culture war party, but it sure looks like business still comes first to these guys. And business-minded Republicans are actually moderates, because business demands it.
RC: Part of the backlash is about liberals tinkering with the “God-given” order of things, such as unregulated capitalism. But even liberals might agree social programs do little to change the economic reality that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Frank: The period between the ‘30s and the ‘70s, the high mark of American liberalism, was nothing like you describe. Even Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower were liberal. In that period, the gap between the rich and poor narrowed. America was not a country that had a gigantic disparity in wealth. The country was becoming more equal, until we drastically made a change in the ‘70s to the point that today CEOs are making 500 times as much as their blue-collar line workers do.
RC: But how can anyone ever convince farmers or workers that Democrats represent their interests?
Frank: You probably won’t be able to persuade your hardline conservatives. But when I talk to farmers, it’s different. The family farmers are disappearing in this country – nobody cares about their problems anymore. And their problems are huge, dealing with industrializing agriculture. It takes a little more education with working-class people who have never thought critically about the economy, but most people understand the basic relationships. The problem is making people understand that these are political questions. And Democrats aren’t doing it because, if they did, they would lose all their [corporate] funding.
What can we do about it? Organized labor is what will beat it, but it has to be revived. Democrats have to change the law. And how are they going to do that if they can’t win an election? You see, it’s impossible. I think some people in the Democratic party get it. I think Howard Dean gets it. I think John Edwards gets it. Maybe Hillary Clinton. Kerry didn’t.
