In What’s the Matter with Kansas?
Good question. A damned good question. You know you can write a best selling book based on a good question and never really answer it? Yes, it’s true. Because I just read all 250 pages of Frank’s book looking for the snappy question. Found it. And then the answer. Boom…. Didn’t find it. Even better would have been three factors neatly dovetailed to answer the question. Boom. Boom. Boom…. Didn’t find it.
Frank answers the question in different ways in the book, which was obviously one of those projects that went on for a long time and was just pasted together without the benefit of an editor with cojones to make him stay on point.
Because Frank didn’t have the editor with cojones, I have to be the one to tease out Frank’s answer. How annoying.
The first reason that Frank offers for why the working class votes for Republicans is because the Republican leadership has fooled them with the abortion and cultural issues. The Republican leadership is really moderate on cultural issues and is closely aligned with corporate interests. They offer up an old fashioned bait and switch. Anti-abortion before the election. Repeal the estate tax after the election.
You would think that this bait and switch would only work once. People would get wise to these crass manupulations by party elites. Frank also points out that the pro-lifers have no chance in hell of repealing abortion, so why do they continually vote against their class interest and go Republican?
Well, Frank says that people aren’t all that bright. O’Connor seems peculiarly given to dizzy ideas such this one. Like many of the Cons, she gives the impression of intelligence, choosing and enunciating each word carefully, but she also seems oddly naive, like a person who has sat down and worked out the world’s problems all on her own. (p.171)
Another reason is that the Republicans have found a whole pile of dumb grassroots activists, like O’Connor, who tirelessly knock on doors pushing the cultural agenda. In one of his more interesting chapters, Frank profiles a few of these activists, who all come from very modest means. Tim Golba, a line worker at a soda pop bottling company, spends every free minute putting Republicans in office. Golba is a misguided martyr. He denies himself so that others might luxuriate in fine mansions; he labors night and day so that others might enjoy their capital gains and never have to work at all.
Yet another reason is that Republican propagandists like Coulter, Hannity, and Limbaugh have generated a powerful backlash message that resonates with people from Kansas. They talk about the individual fighting against the establishment, the elite, the moneyed class out in the East. The poor guy in the soda factory buys into it and blames the wrong guy for his rundown community. Frank can’t help himself and points out that the pro-slavery faction in Kansas used the same rhetoric back in the day. So, even if the Republicans aren’t racists, there is that connection. Wink. Wink.
One short paragraph on page 176 and then again way, way at the end, Frank offers one last point. Maybe the fault could lay somewhat on the Democratic leadership. Bill Clinton and others went too far to the right on economics, so the people no longer have a clear choice on those issues. All there is left to fight about is cultural matters. Democrats have also done a lousy job of reaching out to the working class and putting their people in the trenches. Ya think?
Other little bits of half-baked ideas are offered here and there. People just like being part of the winning team. Unions, which do help keep people on focus, are on decline. But he doesn’t go into those ideas enough to give them much weight.
As much as I’m annoyed by Frank’s lack of ability to provide me with the Boom Boom Boom answer to his question, I didn’t hate the book. Yeah, his belief that the working class is dumb really sets me off, too, but Frank’s book has its merits.
Frank talks about class. He talks about the growing gap between rich and the struggling in America. He does offer some, though not enough for me, criticisms of the Democratic leadership for falling down on the job. He puts the issue of economics back on the table. For this, along with his snappy question, Frank deserves praise.
Apt. 11d 
cajones are box drums. cojones is what you are after here.
LikeLike
Does he talk about the role of the media at all? I don’t think that’s something you can ignore. Not just blatant pro-conservatism by some outlets, but sheer lack of reporting on what’s really happening, even in people’s own backyards. People don’t often know how badly they’re being exploited until too late (if at all) if their local media sits on the story and talks about J-Lo instead. It doesn’t help that most towns now have just one major paper, which is usually owned by a conglomerate or local wealthy family with lots of business ties.
LikeLike
I believe one of the left’s current reigning ideas is that increased wealth, beyond the level of poverty, will not significantly increase happiness. (Ergo, accelerating economic growth should not be an overriding goal.) The corollary of this argument is that Frank’s idea that advancing the economic interests of the “working classes” is not all that important to these same working classes. Cultural issues come to the fore when a reasonable amount of prosperity has been attained.
Another potential problem is that these same “working classes” in fact don’t agree that the left wing’s methods (emphasis: methods) will not advance their economic interests.
LikeLike
Nice review Laura; I agree that Frank deserves a lot of praising for writing a book which pushed the debate over the future of the Democratic party in the right (economic-populist) direction. I just think, as I said before, that he has a profoundly limited understanding of what it means to have an “interest” in a way of life. Of course what we are capable of in a market economy is significantly a matter of class, and shame on all politicians who have made the (reasonable, but still wrong) decision to ignore the broader economic public good in favor of appealing the more reliable voters of the middle and upper-classes. But class is more than income–it’s about the kind of community you have capability of putting yourself into, the kind of neighborhood and environment available to you. Just because certain rural voters may not see how to put all that together into a comprehensive platform doesn’t mean that they’re stupid suckers falling for the same showy hysterics over and over again. There’s a class-aspect to the voting habits Frank documents; he’d have written a better book if he could have connected with that, rather that assuming that it’s all “obviously” irrelevant to the “real” needs of the rural poor.
LikeLike
Right-wing nativist Steve Sailer says (at http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050508_family.htm) “In parts of the country where it is economical to buy a house with a yard in a neighborhood with a decent public school, you’ll generally find more Republicans”
First off, I haven’t read Franks. But I think Sailer is suggesting an economic climate which allows family formation is of value to many working-class people, and that that’s not present in the blue states. Does this make it causal? Are the Reeps who run Kansas (Sebelius is actually a Dem, but let’s go with red states in general here) doing something which lets a couple of 22-year-old kids with 2-year Associate in Arts degrees in dental hygiene and police science set up a family, which is utterly out of reach for 30-year-old teachers with masters degrees in my area of $600,000 houses (greater suburban DC)? And if so, is it really right to claim that the Reeps are against the economic interests of these people?
So I’m with Russel Arben Fox here – I think Frank, from what I have read about him, misses a lot of what people think is in their interest, and he disdains their beliefs about their interests.
As well, if you believe that abortion is murder, it’s very hard to see any other issue in American public life (except maybe defense against terrorism) as even approaching abortion in importance. Certainly not fifteen-years-out changes in the national pension system, or whether Tom DeLay is, or is not, worse than Jim Wright.
LikeLike
yeah, guys, I totally agree. Frank just doesn’t get the working-class Republicans. I spent too much talking about Frank’s disorganization and not enough on his assessment of the working class.
He writes off pro-lifers too quickly. He doesn’t understand why they put abortion above economic issues. That’s why he has to write them off as stupid and easily manipulated.
Dave S, really liked your comment that the lower cost of living in red states is actually more hospitable to families than blue states. Thinking about it more….
Is there anything that Democrats can do to win back this constituency or are they lost for good?
LikeLike
I have to disagree, somewhat, with the assessment that Frank doesn’t get working class Republicans. I don’t think he misses that for many working class Republicans, social and cultural issues trump economic issues. I think that comes through when he writes about O’Connor and Golba. What Frank finds odd, as I do, is that working class Republicans keep voting for politicians who never come through for them. It isn’t that the Republicans never repeal abortion, for instance, but rather that they don’t even try that hard. They just make a few half-hearted gestures every couple of years and then go pass some more laws that screw the very people who put them into power.
LikeLike
Pro-lifers keep voting Republican for the same reason that inner-city blacks keep voting Democrat. The conditions of the inner city don’t improve when Democrats are in power. But they have to keep voting for that party, because where else do they go.
And Frank does say later on that the social conservatives have been able to force moderate conservatives to compromise with them. I think that he says that later in the book (it’s not on my desk at the moment) in a chapter entitled “inherit the storm” or something like that.
LikeLike
A Damned Good Question
Is the quote machine broken:…
LikeLike
more on the red state blue state economics of families: Carolyn Hax is the WaPo agony aunt for under-30s, here is a letter she got:
“Dear Carolyn:
I just found out I’m pregnant. I am psyched for all the obvious reasons, but also dismayed with myself. I’d planned to do so much more before becoming a mom. I had always promised myself that I’d make a lot of money so I could give a child everything; that I’d be living in a nice house in a nice suburb, etc. Well, I work at a nonprofit, as does my husband, and we live in a rented condo, not a house, and I’m just so worried that we won’t be able to provide for our baby the way I always fantasized we could. I also feel thoroughly guilty for thinking this way. Help? Advice?
Massachusetts
_____Carolyn Hax_____
•
“Everything” to a baby is love, food, warm clothing, dry pants and, in a few months, some measuring cups to play with. Stability’s nice, too, but not if it’s at the expense of love, food, warm clothing and dry pants…”
So, again – 2 parents, both employed, live in a rented condo, she doesn’t feel ready. And, irresistably, signed “Massachusetts” If the diaphragm hadn’t slipped, she would have gone til she was 40 waiting for the time to be right for a family, and then failed to get pregnant and been childless.
Laura, you asked what the Dems can do to get young family formers back. I don’t have any good ideas – lessening the barriers to building cheap housing, sure, but how do you do that in Braintree or Waltham? But I do know that people who live in a situation which they don’t feel permits families won’t form them, and they will be wistful the rest of their lives.
LikeLike
As a former Republican who has lived largely in red-state America — and worked as a reporter in Kansas during some of the events Frank describes — I think he gets it exactly right. Drive through the Great Plains sometime and flip the radio dial, and you will hear:
1.) Country music, which, when it is political, tends to be pro-Republican.
2.) Fundamentalism, which is pro-Republican.
3.) Secular talk radio, which is absolutely Republican.
Any other mention of politics generally involves trash entertainment — Jerry Springer or Howard Stern — or sarcastic comedians who mock Republicans and rural Americans — Al Franken, Jon Stewart and such. When your culture is saturated by Republican ideas, and Democrats look down on you or don’t seem very different, you will be Republican.
I have been active mainly within the Green Party, and have had little political experience with Democrats. However, the Democrats I talk to seem to believe that “liberals” are half of America, and “conservatives” the other half. Based on my experience, I estimate about 20 percent of Americans are politically active, about 15 percent of which Republican and about five percent are “liberal,” Green, Libertarian and so on.
On the other hand, 80 percent of Americans want single-payer health care and 77 percent believe corporations have too much power. But who represents those views in the heartland?
These numbers presumably include a majority of Republicans and fundamentalists — which fits my experience. But who talks about these issues to the 80 percent of politically uninvolved Americans? If no one is exposed to these issues, but only gay marriage and abortion, then a large percentage of Americans and a majority of politically active people will be Republican, especially in the South and Midwest.
We have heard much from “liberals” who want to find ways to beat “the Right.” I don’t think things will change until we 1.) get more Americans to meet and talk politics, and 2.) abandon a spectrum that categorizes people into Democrats and Republicans, with Stalin and Earth First at one extreme and Hitler and the Amish on the other.
Thanks for the opportunity to rant,
Brian Kaller
Editor, Pulse of the Twin Cities
http://www.pulsetc.com
LikeLike