Discussion Group Report

"The poorest county in America isn't in Appalachia or the Deep South. It is on the Great Plains, a region of struggling ranchers and dying farm towns, and in the election of 2000 the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush carried it by a majority of votes.

"That puzzled me when I first read about it, as it puzzles many of the people I know. For us it is the Democrats that are the party of workers, of the poor, of the weak and the victimized. Understanding this, we think, is basic; it is part of the ABCs of adulthood. When I told a friend of mine about that impoverished High Plains country so enamored of President Bush, she was perplexed. 'How can anyone who has ever worked for someone else vote Republican?' she asked…"

"Her question is apt; it is in many ways the preeminent question of our times. People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about. This species of derangement is the bedrock of our civic order; it is the foundation on which all else rests," says Thomas Frank in his recently published book, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Frank sees the conservative takeover of American politics as contrary to the economic interests of middle class and lower income people.

If you earn over $300,000 a year, he goes on, you owe a great deal to this derangement. It is thanks to their self-denying votes that you are no longer burdened by the estate tax, or troublesome labor unions, meddling bank regulators, and what your affluent forebears used to call "confiscatory" tax levels. Thanks to them you are able to buy two Rolexes this year instead of one and get that Segway with the special gold trim.

Yet millions of average Americans see nothing deranged about this at all. Frank tells of his friend's father, who was a teacher in the local public schools, a loyal member of the teacher's union, and a more dedicated liberal than most. But he eventually converted. These days he votes for the farthest right Republicans he can find on the ballot. The issue that brought him over was abortion. He was persuaded in the early nineties that the sanctity of the fetus outweighed all his other concerns, and then he accepted the whole pantheon of conservative devil-figures: the elite media; the American civil Liberties Union, contemptuous of our values; the la-di-da feminists; the idea that Christians are vilely persecuted--right here in the U.S.A. His new hero, Bill O'Reilly, blasts the teacher's union as a group that "does not love America." Or maybe he got sick of hearing rich kids bad-mouth the country back in 1968. Or maybe it was Richard Nixon when he talked about the "silent majority," whose hard work was rewarded with constant insults from network news, the Hollywood movies, and the know-it-all college professors, who had no interest in anything you had to say. Or maybe it was the liberal judges who got you mad as hell. Or maybe Ronald Reagan pulled you into the conservative swirl by talking about that sunshiny, Glenn Miller America you remembered before America went to Hell.

And Frank's friend's dad's superaverage Midwestern town has followed the same trajectory he has, even as Republican economic policy laid waste to the city's industries, unions and neighborhoods. The townsfolk responded by lashing out on cultural issues, eventually winding up with a hard-right congressman, a born-again Christian campaigning largely on an anti-abortion platform.

"Today," says Frank, "the city looks like a miniature Detroit. And with every bit of bad economic news it seems to get more bitter, more cynical, and more conservative still."

This derangement is an expression of the Great Backlash, a style of conservatism that first came snarling onto the national stage in response to the partying and protests of the late sixties. The backlash mobilizes voters with explosive issues--summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art--which it then marries to pro-business economic policies. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends. The backlash has made possible the recent international free-market consensus with all of its privatization, deregulation, and deunionization that are its components. It ensures that Republicans will continue to be returned to office even when their free-market miracles fail and their libertarian schemes don't deliver. The backlash imagines itself as the foe of the elite, as the voice of the unfairly persecuted and as a righteous protest of the people. The movement's basic premise is that values matter most, and on these grounds rallies citizens who once would have been reliable partisans of the New Deal to the standard of conservatism. But once conservatives are in office, the only old-fashioned situation they care to revive is an economic regimen of low wages and lax regulation. They talk Christ but walk corporate. They have smashed the welfare state, reduced the tax burden on corporations and the wealthy and generally facilitated the country's return to a nineteenth century pattern of wealth distribution. This is a working-class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working-class people.

"Values," points out Frank, "may 'matter most' to voters, but they always take a back seat to the needs of money once the elections are won… Abortion is never halted, affirmative action is never halted. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act…" The grandstanding leaders of the true believers never deliver, the fury of the believers mounts, and nevertheless they turn out every two years to return their right-wing heroes to office for a second, third and twentieth tries. "With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire 20th century."

"On closer inspection the country seems like a panorama of delusion and madness…of sturdy blue-collar patriots reciting the Pledge while they strangle their own life chances; of small farmers proudly voting themselves off the land; of devoted family men carefully seeing to it that their children will never be able to afford college or proper health care; of working-class guys in Midwestern cities cheering as they deliver up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life, will transform their region into a 'rust belt;' will strike people like them blows from which they will never recover."