News » January 12, 2005 » Web Only

Recapturing Kansas

By Emily Udell

Shannon Marylin wears a band-aid displaying a heart shape in the color purple, meant to make light of John Kerry allegedly earning purple hearts in Vietnam for superficial wounds.

How did conservatives win the heart of America?

That is the question Tom Frank explores in his bestselling book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, an incisive analysis of the Republican transformation of traditional economic populism into the Great Backlash. Frank’s book, which has become a post-election touchstone for progressive pundits, looks beyond the red state/blue state paradigm to explain how the mirage of “moral values” issues (“God, guns and gays”) has subverted public dialogue about economic issues and convinced working class Americans to vote against their economic self-interest.

Frank—who is also the author of The Conquest of Cool and One Market Under God, founder and editor of the Chicago-based magazine The Baffler, and a contributing editor for Harper’s—recently spoke with In These Times and its affiliated radio show “Fire on the Prairie,” from his home in Washington, D.C.

Can you give some historical background for what you call the “Great Backlash”?

What I mean by that term is populist conservatism. It’s this angry right-wing sensibility that speaks in—or pretends to speak in—the voice of the working class. It got its start, more or less, in 1968, with the candidacy of George Wallace. The issues that the Backlash has embraced have changed a lot over the years. In the early days it was pretty much racist. Today, you have the same angry, hard-done-by sensibility, but it’s attached to different issues – the most famous being abortion, and, in this latest election, gay marriage.

The Great Backlash has a way of thinking about the people vs. the elite, which is one of the classic hallmarks of populists. According to your standard populism—your left-wing variety—it’s working people against owners, or blue collar against white collar. It’s about social class. According to the Backlash, it’s basically everybody against what they call the “liberal elite,” who they generally identify by their tastes and fancy college educations. But it’s an amorphous term, they’ll apply it to anybody they feel like. It’s not a solid sociological category. Nonetheless, it’s extremely powerful. And conservatives throw this idea around all the time, basically unchallenged by liberals or by the left.

Do you think the traditional values of the left have as much appeal as the cultural values of the right? And is there a motivation besides just winning for Democrats to adopt a real values stance? As you wrote in your book, where is the soft money in that?

I think they definitely have as much appeal as the right-wing values. One of the most interesting things about the right-wing movement that’s so powerful today is that is borrows—or steals, if you will —so much of its language and its blueprint from the old left. The stereotype of liberals as these high-hat blue bloods, these effete, devitalized weaklings is straight out of your proletarian literature of the ’30s. Only back then it was a description of rich people.

I think the values of the left still have power. But something has become apparent to me since I moved to Washington, D.C. [from Chicago]. There is this aversion, bordering on hatred, for the left, especially among Democrats. People who dominate discussions in Democratic circles despise the left, and there is no way in hell they are going to embrace the values of the left. You can try to explain to them how they need to do it for strategic purposes or in order to win elections, [but] it doesn’t matter. The Democratic centrists got their way [in the 2004 presidential election], they got their candidate, they got their way on everything, and they still lost. And who gets the blame? It’s going to be the left.

Is there a danger that Democrats could manipulate the language of economic populism (like the conservatives manipulate the language of culture) but still pander to big business?

You mean could they do this in a disingenuous fashion? Of course they could. But I don’t think it would play very well. When you’re talking about economic populism, you’re talking about bread and butter issues. The Republicans have the advantage in that their populism is a matter of fantasy. And so their voters don’t really care that they never gain any ground on their populist issues. Because they don’t really expect to.

If the labor movement had more traction in this country, then would the Democrats be more inclined to embrace traditional populist values?

There’s no question about that. The problem is that unions have been beaten pretty badly. There’s always hope. Back in the ’30s, the labor movement just came out of nowhere, and had its great organizing drives. And it did it more or less by itself, not with a lot of help from the Democratic Party. The funny thing was that when that happened, it was in the middle of a depression. … ordinarily that’s a very difficult time to be organizing people and they really captured this cultural position where it was very attractive to join a union.

In your book you examine the debate over “authenticity”—do you propose to abolish this pursuit to identify the needs and values of the “real” American or to redefine what a “real” American is?

I think we have to play the game of authenticity. The first step is recognizing that the conservatives have been doing it for a long time, and they’ve been doing it without any effective answer from our side. Authenticity is an incredibly powerful commodity in our day and age. There is this sort of culture of soft suburban liberals who are very into authenticity. But in their minds, authenticity is the stuff you read about in travel magazines, whereas Middle America is this horrible, plastic monstrosity that you’re supposed to flee from. The Republicans have just reversed that. The Middle American in his Chevy going to McDonald’s – that’s authentic. They’ve captured this idea of all-American authenticity, and it has to be challenged. But you can’t challenge it by saying American culture is hollow and conformist and stupid. That’s not going to work.

So you’d rather say something like the real American has two jobs and no healthcare?

The Republicans are incredibly vulnerable in many ways. Both in terms of culture and their brand positioning, and in terms of the contradictions between what they say and what they do. Between this world of all-American, regular people that they imagine and the world that they give us, like you just said, where people have to work two jobs to stay afloat, [is a wide gap]. Hammer that contradiction.

Unrestrained free-market capitalism is not the friend of average Americans. It’s not the friend of tradition and of small town values. It’s quite the opposite. It’s the great destroyer. But where are you going to find somebody in American politics to make an argument like that?

One of the things that you document in your book is how anti-abortion activists identify themselves with figures in the anti-slavery movement. And I read in another interview that you attended a party during Republican convention where people were putting Purple Heart band-aids on their clothes. You talk about how it would be really easy to poke holes in these various assertions that are made by conservatives. But if we can’t even address these obvious contradictions….

The Purple Heart band-aids—those were given out at a party sponsored by Grover Norquist’s group Americans for Tax Reform. The idea being that if a liberal gets one, than a Purple Heart is a joke. Everybody at the party had these on, and they thought it was so funny. And the party was being held at the New York Yacht Club. You couldn’t ask for a more perfect set piece for what Republicans are about—they were toasting tax cuts, making fun of Purple Heart winners, at the New York Yacht Club!

In your epilogue you wrote, “Encouraging demographic self-recognition and self-expression through products is, similarly, the bread and butter not of leftist ideology but of consumerism.” What kind of arguments specifically do Democrats and leftists have to make to distinguish their ideology from a consumer ideology so as not to be blamed for the crap that’s out there in the media?

That’s a very hard question to answer. The problem comes when [populist conservatives] pin people’s disgust with the culture around them on free-floating liberalism. And it just ain’t so. Just before I got on the phone with you, I was reading that Clear Channel is in trouble with the FCC for some indecency infringement. Now Clear Channel is not a bunch of liberals! Fox is another [example]—run by conservative Rupert Murdoch, the same man that brings you Fox News. Fox is consistently the most offensive TV network, the one that’s willing to stoop the lowest in search of the most outrageous program. Market values go hand in hand with that sort of thing.

This argument is something that instinctively makes sense, and if you just made it you’d find it would resonate with people. But Democrats are very afraid to make arguments like that about the free market. They don’t want people thinking that they’re some kind of radicals. And also they don’t want to lose the funding from the business community. And this year that was so critical to them, they almost raised as much as W.

So how do Democrats make the argument?

They just have to bite the bullet and try it. We’ve got to do something new. But they’re not going to do anything unless they’re pushed, unless there are forces on the ground making them do something. And it’s our job to stir up those forces.

Have you heard any stories from people who’ve said that they’ve given your book to conservative relatives or friends?

I have gotten some amazing letters—especially from people in Kansas. I got one the other day from someone that I met when I was out there, and she said that her dad and her brother totally fit the description of backlash personality type. She said that they will, when they’re sitting around the dinner table, say things like, “Someday liberal blood is going to have to be shed. That’s the only way this is going to end.”

What’s your next project?

I think I’m going to write about what the Democrats have to do. Don’t you think that’s the thing?

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• Reader Comments

  “The idea being that if a liberal gets one, than a Purple Heart is a joke. “

  Typical. The joke was that *Kerry* got them. Not because he is liberal. He “earned” three and got a get out of Vietnam free card. And then came back and in many minds betrayed his fellow soldiers still in Vietnam.

  Who here can testify as to how serious his “injuries?” actually were? And did it really make sense to attempt to run as a “war hero” when he was only in Vietnam for 4 months? His real “legacy” from that conflict was his anti-war stance, which was controversial to say the least!

  One can imagine that Kerry would have run as an anti-war candidate. But he did not. He could have run on his “record of achievements” as a Senator. Nope. He was an amazingly weak candidate and could not beat a very vulnerable president. Sad.

  And yet, most liberals still don’t get it. Even sadder. . .

  Posted by thinkHarder on Jan 12, 2005 at 9:26 PM

  the question is how can you consider his anti-war actvities a betrayal of his fellow troops? It seems that someone who actually cares about his fellow troops would try his best to get them unnecessarily out of harm’s way. running into a shit storm for no good reason makes about as much sense as a suicide bomber blowing his ass to high heaven thinking he’s doing something great. What will it take to get some of you people to admit to your mistakes? That would be much more honorable. Maybe I’m just a ‘fancy-pants’ who bothered to go to college on my own damn dime of my own hard work.

  Posted by Ryan Conover on Jan 12, 2005 at 10:17 PM

  I didn’t realize the military gave purple hearts out as a ‘get out of Vietnam free card,’ but even if this were true, the fact is Mr. Kerry was actually there. Even if he did it solely to improve his resume, the Vietcong didn’t know this, and when he saved a fellow soldier under heavy fire, it was luck—not some pre-determined career path—that allowed him to survive.

  The joke is how so many current conservative patriot types used the system to not get purple hearts or serve a quick tour of duty, but to avoid serving in Vietnam at all. They padded their resumes without the risk of being killed and forgotten. 

  That’s not a liberal or conservative view point, and there is nothing to ‘get.’ Removed from this continual churning of the soundbite argument that defines modern debating, deriding individuals who achieved their goals through great personal risk and civic duty ought to be called “shameless” and “despicable.”

  I think the larger point that Mr. Frank was trying to make about wealthy citizens (whose offspring largely avoided the Vietnam war) mocking a symbol of patriotism w/the purple heart band aids, and cheering a tax cut that mainly benefited themselves, was that their beliefs dispute the supposed populism of the republican party.

  Would it seem as cute if cheerful democrats mocked their rivals with mini-bottles of booze containing little plastic George W. Bush’s inside?

  Posted by ken on Jan 12, 2005 at 10:40 PM

  “Who here can testify as to how serious his “injuries?” actually were?”
  They were “serious” enough to qualify for the Purple Heart based on the military requirements of the day.  Who are you to question that?  Are you equally curious about the quality of injuries of the (multiple) thousands of other purple hearts given out during Vietnam?  How about the ones being handed out now?  To laugh at anyone’s medals honorably earned in any conflict is indefensible.  These same idiots who wore these bandages mocking Kerry’s service are driving through drive-throughs with Support our Troups magnetic “ribbons” on their SUVs, ordering “Freedom Fries” with their super-sized burgers, accusing anyone who questions the policies of this administration of not supporting our troops.  Well, how is mocking a medal winner “supporting” our troops?

  Posted by Steven Bean on Jan 12, 2005 at 11:17 PM

  I agree that Kerry was an amazingly weak, even amateurish, candidate. Even so, it took voting machine malfunction, hours long lines at polling places, throwing out of 90,000 “spolied” (that means minority) ballots in Ohio alone, and loads of other tricks to beat him. I guess Bush’s faith still wasn’t strong enough to just trust that enough people would vote for him on their own.
    I enjoyed Frank’s book very much and have pushed my friends to read it, but I disagree that anyone should do anything with regard to the democrats short of disbanding them. They have proven over the last 12 years to be utterly useless at defending their core values, or their core constituents. To be sure there are individual members who still fight the good fight, but usually have to first fight the leadership of their own party to take a stand.
    How in the name of all that’s holy can Alberto Gonzales be seriously considered for anything besides a subpoena to appear before a committee investigating the widespread torture and several murders of prisoners in US military custody?
    How can the proposed use of the “salvador” option (paramiltary death squads of the type we trained for action in central america in the 80,s)in Iraq fail to cause massive civil disobedience in this country?
    How can anyone take seriously the chicken little-like rhetoric around social security designed to benefit wallstreet brokerage houses and further undermine and impoverish the american family?
    How can a CIA operative be allowed to be exposed, and their most experienced hands be driven out for the crimes of having pointed out the lies told by this administration to manipulate a nation into a war of choice.
    How can medals be hung around the necks of the very people who conned our nation to war after having failed to heed the numerous alarms sounding before 9/11.
    With the full help and co-operation of the democrats, that’s how. They are to the republicans what the concentration camp capos were to the nazis. The good cop to the republican’s bad cop. No progress will be made against the right wing and their authoritarian agenda until clear thinking people build a new party that actually does fight for the rights granted us in the bill of rights, and not one that votes for pre-emptive wars, patriot acts, and torture memo writing attourney generals.

  Posted by Kenneth D. Brown on Jan 13, 2005 at 5:49 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 85 posts.

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