[Mb-hair] NYTimes.com Article: Op-Ed Contributor: Why They Won

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Op-Ed Contributor: Why They Won

November 5, 2004
 By THOMAS FRANK 



 

Washington 

The first thing Democrats must try to grasp as they cast
their eyes over the smoking ruins of the election is the
continuing power of the culture wars. Thirty-six years ago,
President Richard Nixon championed a noble "silent
majority" while his vice president, Spiro Agnew, accused
liberals of twisting the news. In nearly every election
since, liberalism has been vilified as a flag-burning,
treason-coddling, upper-class affectation. This year voters
claimed to rank "values" as a more important issue than the
economy and even the war in Iraq. 

And yet, Democrats still have no coherent framework for
confronting this chronic complaint, much less understanding
it. Instead, they "triangulate," they accommodate, they
declare themselves converts to the Republican religion of
the market, they sign off on Nafta and welfare reform, they
try to be more hawkish than the Republican militarists. And
they lose. And they lose again. Meanwhile, out in Red
America, the right-wing populist revolt continues apace,
its fury at the "liberal elite" undiminished by the
Democrats' conciliatory gestures or the passage of time. 

Like many such movements, this long-running conservative
revolt is rife with contradictions. It is an uprising of
the common people whose long-term economic effect has been
to shower riches upon the already wealthy and degrade the
lives of the very people who are rising up. It is a
reaction against mass culture that refuses to call into
question the basic institutions of corporate America that
make mass culture what it is. It is a revolution that plans
to overthrow the aristocrats by cutting their taxes. 

Still, the power of the conservative rebellion is
undeniable. It presents a way of talking about life in
which we are all victims of a haughty overclass -
"liberals" - that makes our movies, publishes our
newspapers, teaches our children, and hands down judgments
from the bench. These liberals generally tell us how to go
about our lives, without any consideration for our values
or traditions. 

The culture wars, in other words, are a way of framing the
ever-powerful subject of social class. They are a way for
Republicans to speak on behalf of the forgotten man without
causing any problems for their core big-business
constituency. 

Against this militant, aggrieved, full-throated philosophy
the Democrats chose to go with ... what? Their usual soft
centrism, creating space for this constituency and that,
taking care to antagonize no one, declining even to
criticize the president, really, at their convention. And
despite huge get-out-the-vote efforts and an enormous
treasury, Democrats lost the battle of voter motivation
before it started. 

Worse: While conservatives were sharpening their sense of
class victimization, Democrats had all but abandoned the
field. For some time, the centrist Democratic establishment
in Washington has been enamored of the notion that, since
the industrial age is ending, the party must forget about
blue-collar workers and their issues and embrace the
"professional" class. During the 2004 campaign these new,
business-friendly Democrats received high-profile
assistance from idealistic tycoons and openly embraced
trendy management theory. They imagined themselves the
"metro" party of cool billionaires engaged in some kind of
cosmic combat with the square billionaires of the "retro"
Republican Party. 

Yet this would have been a perfect year to give the
Republicans a Trumanesque spanking for the many corporate
scandals that they have countenanced and, in some ways,
enabled. Taking such a stand would also have provided
Democrats with a way to address and maybe even defeat the
angry populism that informs the "values" issues while
simultaneously mobilizing their base. 

To short-circuit the Republican appeals to blue-collar
constituents, Democrats must confront the cultural populism
of the wedge issues with genuine economic populism. They
must dust off their own majoritarian militancy instead of
suppressing it; sharpen the distinctions between the
parties instead of minimizing them; emphasize the
contradictions of culture-war populism instead of ignoring
them; and speak forthrightly about who gains and who loses
from conservative economic policy. 

What is more likely, of course, is that Democratic
officialdom will simply see this week's disaster as a
reason to redouble their efforts to move to the right. They
will give in on, say, Social Security privatization or
income tax "reform" and will continue to dream their happy
dreams about becoming the party of the enlightened
corporate class. And they will be surprised all over again
two or four years from now when the conservative populists
of the Red America, poorer and angrier than ever, deal the
"party of the people" yet another stunning blow. 

Thomas Frank is the author, most recently, of "What's the
Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of
America." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/05/opinion/05frank.html?ex=1100684026&ei=1&en=77b1e73f97d2bcfa


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