What's the Matter with Kansas? : How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

What's the Matter with Kansas? : How Conservatives Won the Heart of America Thomas Frank Date: 2005-07-21 08:27:52   —   $11.20   —   Book product page Rating:

This book should be called, "Thomas Frank Explains It All". It's the clearest explanation of backlash politics I've ever read, and judging by the conservatives I deal with every day, Frank hit the nail on the head with his tale of how conservatives won the heart of America.

While earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues - summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art - which it then marries to pro-business economic ends. ...The backlash is what has made possible the international free-market consensus of recent years, with all the privatization, deregulation, and deunionization that are its components.

I see this all the time. People who are concerned about unemployment, the drop in median income, rising poverty, skyrocketing healthcare costs, corporate monkey business wiping out their pension plans - all the issues Democrats are dedicated to solving - won't vote for a Democrat because some liberal artist dunked Jesus in piss or because they believe Democrats are snobby, latte sipping intellectual elitists.

The fact is, Frank points out, all the cultural issues that "value voters" so loudly denounce are the result of Republican Party free-market policies that they themselves are voting for.

The Supreme Court doesn't make American culture; neither does Planned Parenthood nor the ACLU. It is business that speaks to us over the TV set, always in the throbbing tones of cultural insurgency, forever shocking the squares, humiliating the pious, queering tradition, and crushing patriarchy. It is because of the market that our TV is such a sharp-tongued insulter of "family values" and such a zealous promoter of every species of social deviance.

We're seeing this play out right now in our summer movie choices. Because of slow box office sales, executives at the major studios are green-lighting more R-rated comedies like The Wedding Crasher, hoping to entice moviegoers by pushing the envelope on sex. Sure, the director is probably more liberal than... uh... somebody who's really liberal, but the driving motivation is profit, and the guys bankrolling these projects are the big-money GOP campaign donors in the boardroom.

And despite the fact that they never score a clear victory in the culture wars, too many working-class Americans keep sending Republicans back to Washington because, despite their failures and their anti-labor inclination, they're the only politicians speaking out strongly against moral decay - and in our media sound-bite society, it's more important to speak out than to actually succeed.

In fact, Frank contends that many Republican politicians are intentionally fanning the flames of backlash outrage in order to obscure the reality that unrestrained capitalism is the root cause of declining culture,

This is the basic lie of the backlash, the manipulative strategy that makes the whole senseless parade possible. In all of its rejecting and nay-saying, it absolutely refuses to consider that the assaults on its values, the insults, and the Hollywood sneers are all products of capitalism as surely as are McDonald's hamburgers and Boeing 737s.

...

Behold the political alignment that Kansas is pioneering for us all. The corporate world -- for reasons having a great deal to do with its corporateness -- blankets the nation with a cultural style designed to offend and to pretend-subvert: sassy teens in Skechers flout the Man; hipsters dressed in T-shirts reading "FCUK" snicker at the suits who just don't get it. It's meant to be offensive, and Kansas is duly offended. The state watches impotently as its culture, beamed in from the coasts, becomes coarser and more offensive by the year.

Kansas aches for revenge. Kansas gloats when celebrities say stupid things; it cheers when movie stars go to jail. And when two female rock stars exchange a lascivious kiss on national TV, Kansas goes haywire. Kansas screams for the heads of the liberal elite. Kansas comes running to the polling place. And Kansas cuts those rock stars' taxes.