Thomas Frank on the failure of liberalism
Oh Kansas fools! Poor Kansas fools!The banker makes of you a tool.
These lines from a populist song of 1892 are the epigraph for Thomas Frank's new book, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. They are a small reminder that Kansas, Frank's "homeland," the state where he grew up, was once part of the great progressive heart of this country. Going home again, he observes a simple fact of the voting map: "The more working-class an area is, the more likely it is to be conservative." His observation: "This situation is the opposite of what it was thirty years ago. And it is the complete negation of the Kansas of one hundred years ago, when those in the hardest-hit areas were the most desperate -- and the most radical."
How, Frank asks, could this have happened? His book is an exploration of just how hard hit Kansas has been in an era of ever more right-wing Republican administrations and ever-rightward drifting Democratic ones; of how a right-wing war against a fantasy "liberal power elite" was successfully waged, and why it is that people seem to vote against what once would have been considered their interests. It's really a must-read. (By the way, for interesting poll results on America as a nation "desperate for change," see Michael Scherer's The Unhappy Majority at Mother Jones magazine on-line.)
Below in a piece adapted by Frank for Tomdispatch from part of his book's conclusion, he considers the fall of liberalism in America. A final note: Frank's book has been causing a little storm of media controversy. Recently, for instance, Barbara Ehrenreich ("The notion of a sinister, pseudocompassionate liberal elite has been rebutted, most recently in Thomas Frank's brilliant new book…") and Nicholas Kristof both praised his book in columns in the New York Times, while George Will took out after it full frontally in a recent column of his own ("Frank is a formidable controversialist… He says, delusionally, that conservatives have 'smashed the welfare state'… etc."). Don't miss it yourself. Tom
Red-State America Against Itself
By Thomas Frank
That our politics have been shifting rightward for more than thirty years is a generally acknowledged fact of American life. That this rightward movement has largely been accomplished by working-class voters whose lives have been materially worsened by the conservative policies they have supported is a less comfortable fact, one we have trouble talking about in a straightforward manner.
And yet the backlash is there, whenever we care to look, from the "hardhats" of the 1960s to the "Reagan Democrats" of the 1980s to today's mad-as-hell "red states." You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America -- "going out of business" signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush. (Read More)
Oh Kansas fools! Poor Kansas fools!The banker makes of you a tool.
These lines from a populist song of 1892 are the epigraph for Thomas Frank's new book, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. They are a small reminder that Kansas, Frank's "homeland," the state where he grew up, was once part of the great progressive heart of this country. Going home again, he observes a simple fact of the voting map: "The more working-class an area is, the more likely it is to be conservative." His observation: "This situation is the opposite of what it was thirty years ago. And it is the complete negation of the Kansas of one hundred years ago, when those in the hardest-hit areas were the most desperate -- and the most radical."
How, Frank asks, could this have happened? His book is an exploration of just how hard hit Kansas has been in an era of ever more right-wing Republican administrations and ever-rightward drifting Democratic ones; of how a right-wing war against a fantasy "liberal power elite" was successfully waged, and why it is that people seem to vote against what once would have been considered their interests. It's really a must-read. (By the way, for interesting poll results on America as a nation "desperate for change," see Michael Scherer's The Unhappy Majority at Mother Jones magazine on-line.)
Below in a piece adapted by Frank for Tomdispatch from part of his book's conclusion, he considers the fall of liberalism in America. A final note: Frank's book has been causing a little storm of media controversy. Recently, for instance, Barbara Ehrenreich ("The notion of a sinister, pseudocompassionate liberal elite has been rebutted, most recently in Thomas Frank's brilliant new book…") and Nicholas Kristof both praised his book in columns in the New York Times, while George Will took out after it full frontally in a recent column of his own ("Frank is a formidable controversialist… He says, delusionally, that conservatives have 'smashed the welfare state'… etc."). Don't miss it yourself. Tom
Red-State America Against Itself
By Thomas Frank
That our politics have been shifting rightward for more than thirty years is a generally acknowledged fact of American life. That this rightward movement has largely been accomplished by working-class voters whose lives have been materially worsened by the conservative policies they have supported is a less comfortable fact, one we have trouble talking about in a straightforward manner.
And yet the backlash is there, whenever we care to look, from the "hardhats" of the 1960s to the "Reagan Democrats" of the 1980s to today's mad-as-hell "red states." You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America -- "going out of business" signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush. (Read More)
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