WOW! I'm buying Kansas, right NOW!

[Union Thug]

Oh my gawd... I've heard some rumblings about the book, "What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America" by Thomas Frank, but up until this morning, I hadn't really paid much attention.

Then I read the article "Red State America Against itself" on tomdispatch: sort of a distallation of key points in "Kansas". I'm purchasing the book as I write this, one for myself and sending one to my father.

Frank says what we relatively aware blue collar guys have known all along - the the Democratic party's catering to pro-business interests and its abandonment of pro-labor employment and economic policies, as well as energizing class war rhetoric have led to the decline in FDR styled liberalism and, indeed, the Democratic Party as a whole(as contrasted to the republican lite 'new' democrats).

From Red State America Against itself" http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1551 :

Democrats shed the language of class warfare

Who is to blame for this landscape of distortion, of paranoia, and of good people led astray? Though Kansas voters have chosen self-destructive policies, it is just as clear to me that liberalism deserves a large part of the blame for the backlash phenomenon. Liberalism may not be the monstrous, all-powerful conspiracy that conservatives make it out to be, but its failings are clear nonetheless. Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and we can say that liberalism lost places like Wichita and Shawnee, Kansas with as much accuracy as we can point out that conservatism won them over.

This is due partially, I think, to the Democratic Party's more-or-less official response to its waning fortunes. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far outweighing anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and -- more important -- the money of these coveted constituencies, "New Democrats" think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as "class warfare" and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for the working-class voters who were until recently the party's very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what politician in this success-worshiping country really wants to be the voice of poor people? Where's the soft money in that?

This is, in drastic miniature, the criminally stupid strategy that has dominated Democratic thinking off and on ever since the "New Politics" days of the early seventies...."

BULLSEYE. CHECKMATE. TOUCHE'.

[rooboy]

1. There was a big extract from it in Harper's a couple of months back...

a very enlightening read.

[WMliberal]

3. i read that one too

I think it was the April issue. The article title was something like "laying down for kansas."
I'm going to wait for the paperback edition.

[Cassandra]

2. The book is fabulous!

I'm almost finished. It's just one of the best, most cogent books I've read in years.
I'd like to point out that Howard Dean has shown the way for Democrats to return (if we can) to our real base and still raise enough money to be competitive.

[Warpy]

4. This is one book I just might have to spring for

I've been saying for ages that the reason Democrats are losing so many elections is because they haven't offered working people a damned thing but a continuation of the policies that are driving them all farther into the hole. At least the GOP offered them tax cuts, not to mention a return to a Utopian past that never really existed.

I also criticised Gore (lambasted, really) for playing the GOP game of squabbling over a few yuppies while failing to address the disaster that has befallen working people over the past 30 years, but most heavily since 1983.

So far that book sounds like he's been reading my email. I'll just have to get it to see if that's true.

[AP]

5. This is why Edwards is a breath of fresh air for the Dem party and why

he did as well as he did in the primaries.

It's probably no surprise as well that he takes no PAC money, has a career that he can fall back on if politics don't work out (that is more lucrative), and that he hasn't been in politics for a long time.

[Beloved Citizen]

6. I'm probably the only person here who thinks Thomas Frank

...is full of malarkey.

Having been a long time reader of The Baffler, I must admit it is refreshing to see that Frank has finally moved on from offering scathing critiques on the lack of authenticity in punk rock and other assorted counter-cultural products to this slightly larger arena. And while I don't necessarily disagree with the basic tenet of his lifelong bugaboo regarding the core inauthenticity of our consumerist society, that most people behave irrationally and act in ways that are contrary to their real interests, this little old doggy can only roam so far.

C'mon guys, people in Kansas vote for Republicans because the Democrats have become too much like Republicans? You'd have to drink a case of Ralph Nader Kool-Aid to believe logic this strangled.

Alf Landon carried Kansas in 1936. Was it because FDR had become too much like a Republican? Or was it because Roosevelt abandoned the language of class warfare?

To say that Frank's analysis is superficial is to belabor the obvious. Kansas has been Republican since Reb hating Jayhawkers began raiding the farms of slave holders in Missouri.

Look, there was a moment in my life when I subscribed to the theories of Marcuse as well. It was really exciting at the time to find someone with so towering an intellectual reputation agreeing with my basic instinctual adolescent belief that most people are full of shit and spend their lives fruitlessly chasing their tails in the mistaken belief that they can somehow consume their way to happiness. And that people can be waylayed in their innately human search for truth by such things as saturation marketing and the mistaken belief that they really must possess and consume shiny products in order to have worth.

But later on I came to understand just how wrong it is to assign blanket assumptions to human beings assembled into fictional neo-sociological groupings such as "red state" or "Kansas."

Mr. Frank is going to have to dig a whole lot deeper than he has so far for me to join his fan club.