Daily Ramblings:
You Ain't Goin' Nowhere
...02/27/2005
04:32:27 pm
The book "What's the
Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won The Heart
Of America," by Thomas Frank, came out
before last November's election, but has been much
consulted in its aftermath by liberals seeking to
find an explanation for their overwhelming rejection
by the national electorate in 2004. Loosely speaking
(and based on my reading of reviews since I haven't
read the book) Frank seems to be positing that
Republicans have fooled the people of America's
heartland into voting against their real best
interests (in particular economic), by disingenuously
using issues once summed up by Howard Dean as
"guns, God and gays."
In this lengthy and
fascinating answer to that book in the magazine First
Things, James Nuechterlein
takes apart Frank's thesis and explains why liberals
embracing this theory of American politics will
simply be pushing the Democratic party further into
the downwardly spiralling whirlpool in which it is
currently floundering. The really rather steady
decline of the party of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Robert
Byrd is traced by Nuechterlein back to around the
time Dylan was recording Nashville Skyline.
Starting with Richard
Nixon’s narrow capture of the White House in
1968, Republicans have won seven of ten
presidential elections. (They had lost seven of
the previous nine.) More significantly in terms
of party standing, their marginal pickups in the
House and Senate that year presaged their
eventual emergence by the 1990s as the majority
party in Congress. For those of us who grew up in
a political America in which Democrats dominated
Congress as a matter of course, it is stunning to
note that Democrats are today numerically weaker
in the House than they have been since the days
of Harry Truman and in the Senate since before
the Great Depression.
To sum up (though the whole article
is worth reading) Democrats have been stuck in a
basically Depression era mindset that served them
well in the thirties, forties and fifties but is
simply out of date, and out of step with the way
ordinary Americans now view themselves.
Politics in America, in
Frank’s analysis, used to be—and still
ought to be—the way the Populists of the
1890s and progressive interests up into the 1960s
imagined it: the liberal masses—workers,
farmers, and all but the cream of the middle
class—arrayed against the conservative
economic elites.
The problem is that American
society and the American economy have long ago moved
on, and the old classes are either not recognizable,
or demographically completely altered -
notwithstanding how nostalgic the American left is
for the bad old times. To the extent the Democrats
have a message that appeals to the "poor,"
it actually is being heard and they are getting a
majority of those votes. Unfortunately for the Dems
however, the United States is not a poor country.
Democrats go wrong not because
they have forgotten the lessons of FDR and the
New Deal, but because they have not sufficiently
put those lessons behind them. Ours is the least
class-ridden society in the Western world. The
political economy of the 1930s is not
America’s historical paradigm; it is its
great exception. Democrats, of course, are not
entirely ignorant of that. They now address
themselves to middle-class interests, but their
middle class is still a working class that simply
has a few more dollars in its pocket. They have
not fully learned the lesson of exceptionalism:
that America is the quintessential bourgeois
society. We are, for better and worse, middle
class and middlebrow right down to our bones. And
their failure to see that is what’s the
matter with the Democrats.
And of-course this is not even to
touch on issues of foreign policy, and the deficit in
credibility on issues of national security that the
Democrats have possessed (and fairly steadily
reinforced) since the post-Vietnam era.
All in all, if I wasn't already a
conservative in today's America, I'd be mightily
confused and depressed by all this. Kind of like how
an anti-Israel Dylan fan must feel when they first
hear Neighborhood Bully.
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