[Mb-civic] How The Left Lost its Heart LATimes

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-frank18jul18.story

How the Left Lost Its Heart

Now, the working class has no true champion
 By Thomas Frank
 Thomas Frank is editor of the Baffler magazine and author of "What's the
Matter With Kansas?" This article was adapted from that book by arrangement
with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt a

 July 18, 2004

 WASHINGTON ‹ That our politics have been shifting rightward for more than
30 years is a generally acknowledged fact of American life. That this
movement has largely been brought about by working-class voters whose lives
have been materially worsened by the conservative policies they have
supported is less commented upon.

 And yet the trend is apparent, from the "hard hats" of the 1960s to the
"Reagan Democrats" of the 1980s to today's mad-as-hell "red states." You can
see the paradox firsthand on nearly any Main Street in Middle America, where
"going out of business" signs stand side by side with placards supporting
George W. Bush. 

 I chose to observe the phenomenon by going back to my home state of Kansas,
a place that has been particularly ill served by the conservative policies
of privatization, deregulation and deunionization ‹ and that has reacted to
its worsening situation by becoming more conservative still. Indeed, Kansas
is today the site of a ferocious struggle within the Republican Party, a
fight pitting affluent moderate Republicans against conservatives from
working-class districts and down-market churches. And it's hard not to feel
some affection for the conservative faction, even as I deplore its political
views. After all, these are the people that liberalism is supposed to speak
to: the hard-luck farmers, the bitter factory workers, the outsiders, the
disenfranchised, the disreputable.

 Although Kansas voters have chosen self-destructive policies, it is clear
that liberalism deserves a large part of the blame for the backlash
phenomenon. Liberalism may not be the monstrous, all-powerful conspiracy
that conservatives make it out to be, but its failings are clear
nonetheless. Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be
relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and liberalism
just as surely lost places like Wichita and Shawnee as much as conservatism
won them over. 

 This is due partly, I think, to the Democratic Party's more-or-less
official response to its waning fortunes. The Democratic Leadership Council,
the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe
Lieberman and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget
blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent,
white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger
interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable
of generating campaign contributions far outweighing anything raised by
organized labor. The way to collect the votes and ‹ more important ‹ the
money of these coveted constituencies, "New Democrats" think, is to stand
rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions
on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law,
privatization, deregulation and the rest of it.

 Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as "class warfare" and
take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like
the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for the
working-class voters who were until recently the party's very backbone, the
DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be
marginally better on bread-and-butter economic issues than Republicans.
Besides, what politician in this success-worshiping country really wants to
be the voice of poor people? Where's the soft money in that?

 This is, in drastic miniature, the criminally stupid strategy that has
dominated Democratic thinking off and on ever since the "New Politics" days
of the early '70s. Over the years it has enjoyed a few successes, but, as
political writer E.J. Dionne has pointed out, the larger result was that
both parties have become "vehicles for upper-middle-class interests" and the
old class-based language of the left quickly disappeared from the universe
of the respectable. The Republicans, meanwhile, were industriously
fabricating their own class-based language of the right, and while they made
their populist appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats were giving those
same voters ‹ their traditional base ‹ the big brushoff, ousting their
representatives from positions within the party and consigning their issues,
with a laugh and a sneer, to the dustbin of history. A more ruinous strategy
for Democrats would be difficult to invent. And the ruination just keeps on
coming. 

 Curiously, though, Democrats of the DLC variety aren't worried. They seem
to look forward to a day when their party really is what David Brooks and
Ann Coulter claim it to be now: a coming-together of the rich and the
self-righteous. While Republicans trick out their poisonous stereotype of
the liberal elite, Democrats seem determined to live up to the libel.

 Such Democrats look at a situation like present-day Kansas, where social
conservatives war ferociously on moderate Republicans, and they rub their
hands with anticipation: Just look at how Ronald Reagan's "social issues"
have come back to bite his party! If only the crazy Cons push a little bit
more, these Democrats think, the Republican Party will alienate the wealthy
suburban Mods for good, and we will be able to step in and carry places like
superaffluent Mission Hills, along with all the juicy boodle that its
inhabitants are capable of throwing our way.

 Though I enjoy watching Republicans fight one another as much as the next
guy, I don't think the Kansas story really gives true liberals any cause to
cheer. Maybe someday the DLC dream will come to pass, with the Democrats
having moved so far to the right that they are no different from
old-fashioned moderate Republicans, and maybe then the affluent will finally
come over to their side en masse. But along the way the things that
liberalism once stood for ‹ equality and economic security ‹ will have been
abandoned completely. Consequently, at precisely the historical moment when
we need them most, Democrats no longer speak to the people on the losing end
of a free-market system that is becoming more brutal and more arrogant by
the day.

 The problem is not that Democrats are monolithically pro-choice or
anti-school-prayer; it's that, by dropping the class language that once
distinguished them sharply from Republicans, they have left themselves
vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion. We are in an
environment where Republicans talk constantly about class ‹ in a coded way,
to be sure ‹ but where Democrats are afraid to bring it up.

 Democratic political strategy simply assumes that people know where their
economic interest lies and that they will act on it by instinct. The glaring
flaw in this thinking is that people don't spontaneously understand their
situation in the great sweep of things. Liberalism isn't a force of karmic
nature that pushes back when the corporate world goes too far; it is a
man-made contrivance as subject to setbacks and defeats as any other.

 Consider our social welfare apparatus, the system of taxes, regulations and
social insurance that is under attack these days. Social Security, the Food
and Drug Administration and all the rest of it didn't just spring out of the
ground fully formed in response to the obvious excesses of a laissez-faire
system; they were the result of decades of movement-building, of bloody
fights between strikers and state militias, of agitating, educating and
thankless organizing.

 More than 40 years passed between the first glimmerings of a left-wing
reform movement in the 1890s and the actual enactment of its reforms in the
1930s. In the meantime, scores of the most rapacious species of robber baron
went to their reward untaxed, unregulated and unquestioned.

 Today, while liberals sit around congratulating themselves on their
personal virtue, the right has embraced the task of building a movement that
speaks to those at society's bottom, that addresses them on a daily basis.
>From liberals, the nation's working class hears little, but from the
conservatives it gets an explanation for everything. Even better, it gets a
plan for action, a scheme for world conquest with a wedge issue.

 My home state has proudly taken a place at the front of the pack in the
common man's rush to conservatism. It is true that Kansas is an extreme
case, and that there are still working-class areas there that are yet to be
converted to conservatism. But it is also true that things that begin in
Kansas ‹ the Civil War, Prohibition, Populism, Pizza Hut ‹ have a historical
tendency to go national.

 So maybe Kansas, instead of being a laughingstock, is in the vanguard.
Maybe what has happened there points the way in which all our public policy
debates are heading. Maybe someday soon the political choices of Americans
everywhere will be whittled down to the two factions of the Republican
Party. 

 Sociologists often warn against letting the nation's distribution of wealth
become too polarized, as it clearly has in the last few decades. A society
that turns its back on equality, the professors insist, inevitably meets
with a terrible comeuppance. But those sociologists are thinking of an old
world in which class anger was a phenomenon of the left. They weren't
reckoning with Kansas, with the world we are becoming.

 Behold the political alignment that Kansas is pioneering for us all. 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 pop stars exchange a lascivious kiss on national
TV, Kansas goes haywire. Kansas screams for the heads of the liberal elite.
Kansas runs to the polling place. And Kansas cuts those pop stars' taxes.

 As a social system, the backlash works. The two adversaries feed off each
other in a kind of inverted symbiosis: One mocks the other, and the other
heaps even more power on the mocker. This arrangement should be the envy of
every ruling class in the world. Not only can it be pushed much, much
further, but it is fairly certain that it will be so pushed. All the
incentives point that way, as do the never-examined cultural requirements of
modern capitalism.

 Why shouldn't our culture just get worse and worse, if making it worse will
only cause the people who worsen it to grow wealthier and wealthier?


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