"What's the Matter With Kansas?"

[CTLawGuy]

http://www.henryholt.com/holt/whatsthematter.htm

This is a book by Thomas Frank, a native Kansan. In it, he talks about how the Republicans managed to ally wealthy business interests and the blue collar workers they were constantly screwing over.

He talks about how RW media creates a bogeyman, the "liberal". The "liberal" is a wealthy, overeducated, conceited Easterner who looks at "normal" everyday Heartland Americans with contempt. This "liberal" sits in his ivory towers and labors to dictate to the Heartland how to live their lives... (ie by forcing abortion rights, affirmative action, and welfare on them).

The RW tells the Heartland that capitalism is inviolate, they are helpless against it. Everything that is wrong with them is caused by the "liberal menace". This propaganda distracts blue-collar kansans away from economic issues and gets them concerned about their values being under attack.

What he writes at the end of the book is fantastic. He theorizes that the Democrats are partially to blame for this RW alliance between blue collar whites and the business class. This is because the Dems and Pugs basically agree on economic issues (at least the DLC controlled incarnation of the Dems). they are both pro-NAFTA, pro-tax cuts, anti-welfare, and they both pander to corporate interests.

This is an excellent book, which I just finished yesterday. Everyone should read it.

[REP]

1. The Weather, For One Thing

I read his essay in Harper's a few months ago.

[megaplayboy]

2. glad I'm not the only one who read it...

Every Democratic activist and politician should read this book, so they can begin to formulate a way to reach out to the working class folks who are falling for the "Values" con, and convince them they should be valuing better jobs, good health care, and good education for their kids above stuff the Cons aren't going to do anything about anyway.

[bossfish]

3. That's a good review...

I'll get it soon...

Just started "The Price of Loyalty" - Suskind's book about Paul O'Neill. Seems like an interesting guy, president of Alcoa, sec of Treasury and Yankee right fielder.

[AirAmFan]

4. A sample of Frank's analysis of the election this fall

I found this essay through Tom Frank's website at http://www.tcfrank.com :

From http://mondediplo.com/2004/02/04usa?var_recherche=thomas+frank

"February 2004

A WAR AGAINST ELITES: The America that will vote for Bush

by Tom Frank

... Thanks to the rightward political shift of the past 30 years, wealth is today concentrated in fewer hands than it has been since the 1920s; workers have less power over the conditions under which they toil than ever before in our lifetimes; and the corporation has become the most powerful actor in our world. Yet that rightward shift - still going strong to this day - sells itself as a war against elites, a righteous uprising of the little guy against an obnoxious upper class. At the top of it all sits President George Bush, a former Texas oilman, a Yale graduate, the son of a former president and a grandson of a US senator - the beneficiary of every advantage that upper America is capable of showering on its sons - and a man who also declares that he has a populist streak because of all the disdain showered upon him and his Texas cronies by the high-hats of the East. ... Bush shows every sign of being able to carry a substantial part of the white working-class vote this November, just as he did four years ago (although 90% of black Americans voted Democrat in 2000).

There was a time, of course, when populism was the native tongue of the American left (1), when working-class people could be counted on to vote in favour of stronger labour unions, a regulated economy and various schemes for universal economic security. Back then the Republicans, who opposed all these things, were clearly identified as the party of corporate management, the spokesmen for society ¡s elite. Republicans are still the party of corporate management, but they have also spent years honing their own populist approach, a melange of anti- intellectualism, promiscuous God-talk and sentimental evocations of middle America in all its humble averageness. Richard Nixon was the first Republican president to understand the power of this combination and every victorious Republican since his administration has also cast himself in a populist light. Bush is merely the latest and one of the most accomplished in a long line of pro-business politicians expressing themselves in the language of the downtrodden.

This right-wing populism works; it is today triumphant across the scene; politicians speak its language, as do newspaper columnists, television pundits and a cast of thousands of corporate spokesmen, Wall Street brokerages, advertising pitchmen, business journalists, and even the Hollywood stars that the right loves to hate. Rightwing populism takes two general forms. ..."

[BurtWorm]

5. I just ordered it today.

It was recommended to me yesterday. It's what Howard Dean was talking about last summer. It's what Kerry and Edwards should be talking about in Bush country now.

[CWebster]

8. Exactly what Dean was referring to with the confederate remark

which Edwards spun into, "We don't need you coming down here, during our church hour, telling us what to do".

Who do you suppose Edwards was echoing?

[BurtWorm]

14. By two Americas, you think Edwards means North and South?

;)

[HEyHEY]

6. An email from my buddy in Witchita...

I sent him an email after I saw F911 asking if he'd seen it. Here's his response


"Nah, haven't and won't see 9-11. I get lied to enough.
Why pay $7 to get lied to. Michael Moore is a tub of
shit, anyway.

Busy busy. But makin' it makin' it.

M"

He's a good guy and actually introduced me to MM with Roger and me, he loved him back then. I don't know what happened.

[JHB]

10. "he loved him back then. I don't know what happened."

Twelve years of corporate/Republican counterattacks in the corporate and wingnut media?

Just a guess.

[CWebster]

7. Thomas Frank has an op ed piece in the NYTimes today nt

[BurtWorm]

16. I read it. Every Democrat should read just that essay.

Every red state Republican should read it! Maybe they'll get pissed at being played for the suckers they are.

[JHB]

9. Old, old strategy...

Remember how one of the justifications for the Civil War was so that the South could live as it chose, but the southern states seceeded before Lincoln was inaugurated, before any actual action that might prove those fears right. Basically, they spent too much time listening to their own overblown rhetoric to the point where they reacted to their fantasy-version of Lincoln, not the real Lincoln nor his actions.

What's they saying about history? First as tragedy, again as farce?

[OneTwentyoNine]

11. A lot of dummies.......

I live in Wichita and see this first hand every day. Its really a great place to live but...it is fully overrun with Repukes. Most are just like you and me,middle or lower middle class and yet they vote time after time for the same sleaze ball politician that cost them their jobs and will constantly vote against minimum wage increases.

I had a guy that worked for me back in the eighties and was laid off at Lear Jet twice during Ronnie's Presidency,and he voted for Ronnie both times.

We can elect Dem Governor's,we have one in office now but thats where the picnic ends. IMO the Bible thumpers,abortion nut cases and gun nuts are who keep electing the Repukes. The guy next door told me that there is no way he would vote for Al Gore back in 2000 because Gore "hated internal combustion engines". Sigh...see what I'm talking about??

David

[suegeo]

12. Saw him on Now; I've got a bone to pick

He claimed that the culture today has gotten much much coarser than it was in the past.

Was our culture that much kinder in the past?

That's the bone I've got to pick with this guy.

The Wild West. World Wars. Vietnam war. Dropping the bomb. Developing god-only-knows what germ-wise.

Guys beat up their wives without any notice. etc. etc. Child labor. Sweat shops. The meat packing plants in Chicago. Indians on reservations.

I have not done a scietific survey, but I don't accept at face value that our culture is coarser today than it was in the past.

On Edit: Slavery! No Irish need apply!

[JHB]

13. Right! Pile it on!

Tar & feathering was more genteel?

Lynch mobs were more civil?

[CWebster]

15. True, but the corporate culture and the worship of greed

has somewhat made the world a crueler place as far as a sense of community and the feeling that we are all in this together to help one another. That is why they manufacture the feeling through nationalism so successfully--support our troops..

Who supports our senior citizens?

Look at our senior citizens and the way the corporate culture, health care, pharmeceuticals, nursing home care - leave them in the cold. When I was a child, medicine had noble ambitions to conquer the diseases that plague humanity, now it is only what inflates the bottom line--dick drugs over diseases that help relieve suffering on a grand scale.

[suegeo]

17. Upon reflection

I don't really have a bone to pick with the author. Upon reflection, I realize the bone I have to pick is with people who have been duped into thinking our culture today is much much coarser than it once was.

These are the same people, I deduce, that the author is describing in his book. What's wrong with these people, in part, might be that they have bought into the premise that our culture is much coarser now that it was in the past.

I agree that we should treat our elderly better, that medicine should not be entirely about the bottom line, and that corporate greed is out of hand. Most of all, I believe the amount of violence children and adults see on tv is inappropriate and not healthy. So I actually might find myself agreeing with the rubes in Kansas over these points, but probably would find myself in disagreement over the best steps to take to make things better, and over how today compares to the past.

And now I'm just rambling.

[QC]

18. The culture always becomes more coarse when the cons are in power.

The scapegoating. The worship of money. The exaltation of financial success over every other kind. Scorn for the poor. All those things were features of the Gilded Age, the Reagan Era, and our own time.

I think he's right about this one.