Here is an excerpt from an interview done recently by dissidentvoice with Thomas Frank:
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The same thing that’s been the matter with America for so many years: the culture wars. The cloud of inexhaustible right-wing outrage that hovers over so much of the country. Kansas, like many places in America, once had a tradition of progressivism and outright radicalism. Today, though, like many other places, the state’s political center just seems to move farther to the right in response to events. During the Nineties the state erupted in a sort of right-wing populist revolt, tossing out its old-school pragmatic leaders and replacing them with the most conservative Republicans available. It made national headlines when anti-abortion activists descended in massive numbers on Wichita in 1991, and it made world headlines when its State Board of Education took up the battle against evolution in 1999. Today Kansas is the sort of place where the angry, suspicious worldview typified by Fox News or the books of Ann Coulter is a common part of everyday life. So I went there to study the indignant conservative mindset up close.
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By “backlash” I mean populist conservatism of the kind pioneered in the Sixties by George Wallace and Richard Nixon, perfected by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and crafted into an entertainment form by Fox News. Instead of selling conservative politics on economic grounds, it imagines conservatism as a revolt of the little people against a high and mighty liberal elite. Its object is to fight back against artists who dip crosses in urine, Hollywood stars who wear outrageous clothes, Ivy League journalists who slant the news, and snob judges who remove Ten Commandments monuments from the parks, and so on. The “Great Backlash” refers to the long ascendancy of this style of conservatism, ever since 1968. The “backlash mentality” refers to the culture of the movement, to the way its members view the world we live in.
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There is no doubt that liberals bear a lot of the blame for the backlash. Back in the Sixties and Seventies, Democratic Party leaders decided to turn their backs on the working-class voters who until then had been the party’s central constituency, and to try to find a new constituency in groups like college students, environmentalists, and so on. They called this the “New Politics,” and it was a terrible mistake. Among other things, it is one of the sources of the “liberal elite” stereotype, in a historical sense.
And while there have been numerous Democrats who have tried to resurrect the alliance with the working class over the years, the dominant, Clinton wing of the party clings to this failed strategy. They essentially agree with the Republicans on economic issues, write off the working class, and try instead to win the votes (and the campaign contributions) of educated, professional people by taking liberal stands on social issues. Their idea of politics is a war of enlightened CEOs versus backwards CEOs. This strategy has been disastrous in the extreme. While stripping away any economic reason for working people to vote Democratic, it has simultaneously played into the “liberal elite” stereotype which is the Republicans’ strongest weapon. The result is what you see around you: Republicans talk constantly about class grievances, albeit in a coded and inverted way, while Democrats never bring it up at all, desperately trying to prove their “centrist” bona fides. What liberals must do to beat the backlash, it seems obvious to me, is to resurrect old-fashioned, upper-case-P populism, and to wage non-coded, non-inverted class war. They must at the very minimum counter Republican appeals to social class with their own appeals to social class.
All three books are about the colossal abuse of the language of democracy in the aftermath of the Sixties. And all three are about the many bizarre cultural inversions of the world we live in: Consumerism as nonconformity; Wall Street as an ally of the common man; the CEO as Deadhead—and now, the Republicans as the party of the working class.
In other words, they’re all about the sheer weirdness of our times. We inhabit a nation where the culture screams constantly about how rebellious and nonconformist and Xtreme we are, but where the politics constantly move to the right. My larger point is that these two aspects of our times are connected to each other; that our pseudo-revolutionary culture in some way helps to generate our reactionary politics, and vice-versa. We talk a lot about both parts of American life, but always separately—pondering one in the front pages and the other in the “Business” or “Style” section. My object is to consider both at the same time, to point out that these two aspects of America thrive symbiotically on one another’s excesses. The white-collar rebels shock and annoy the pious; the blue-collar Republicans are duly shocked and annoyed; and they vote to shower even more power, more tax cuts, more deregulation, on the white-collar rebels whom they despise so deeply. This topsy-turvy system works.
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more here:
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/June04/Frank0614.htm////////////////////////////////////////////////
Well, with regard to Frank's suggestion that Democrats "resurrect old-fashioned, upper-case-P populism, and to wage non-coded, non-inverted class war," this is certainly problematic: every time someone like Kucinich tries to do this, major conservative media outlets like the NY Times and the Wash Post savage and demonize him. Also, the Democrat elite have a lot more in common with the GOP elite than they do with the people. On one hand you have grasping greedy types like Clinton, who was actually a wet dream for the GOP elite when it came to economics. WHo needs enemies when you have "friends" like good old globalist Bill CLinton? It was like having a Republican in office.
THen you have true blue blood old money billionaires like Kerry. Oh, joy.....
I guess we are going to have to wait a long time till we get the Dems to take Frank's suggestion!
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