July 19, 2011--What's the Matter with America?
I'm poaching the title of Thomas Frank's 2004 best seller, What's the Matter with Kansas?, in an attempt to better understand how corporate and Republican leaders have been so successful in getting middle-class, working people to support a political agenda that primarily does the bidding of the nation's most successful and wealthiest individuals. Even to get people who are struggling financially to risk seeing the U.S. tumble into default rather than agree to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires.
To Frank--and I agree--the sleight of hand conservative elites employ is to deflect class-based analyses of government-facilitated inequality in favor of pressing social issues such as abortion, prayer and creationism in schools, and the current galvanizing one--same-sex marriage.
One only needs to follow the career trajectory of Michele Bachmann to see this on full display since it was her and her husband's fierce attack on gayness that propelled her into Congress and her current front-runner status in the GOP presidential sweepstakes.
Many on the left felt that the Culture War was over. That they had won. They saw a tense but general consensus that these kinds of matters were settled both in law and public opinion. Not everyone agreed, of course, but those passionate about ending abortion, for example, were sufficiently marginalized that we could move on to more substantial issues such as growing the economy and securing our place in the world.
But then there is the Tea Party and concomitant Michele Bachmann phenomena. Whipped into a gossipy frenzy of frustration and anger by entertainment media masquerading as news and journalistic organizations--the collapsing Rupert Murdoch empire is the latest case in point--social issues are again front and center, serving as ideal distractions from the hard choices we would otherwise be forced to confront.
Bachmann was launched into prominence in Minnesota by her outspoken opposition to homosexuality itself, ignoring the science that it is a "condition" and asserting it is a "preference," a "choice of lifestyle." She called it a form of "enslavement," "bondage"; and claimed it could be cured by therapy that included counseling and especially prayer.
Not to be outdone by his wife, Michele's husband Marcus, who compares homosexuality to "barbarism," runs a number of for-profit Christian counseling businesses that specialize in this very thing. What he calls "reparative therapy," or gay-to-straight counseling. (See linked New York Times article.)
To understand how reparative therapy works ABC News had a reporter pretend to be a gay "patient" and filmed one of Dr. Bachmann's counselors tell him that "God designed men's eyes to be attracted to women's breasts." It sounds like Clockwork Orange time in Minnesota.
Back in the 19th century Kansas was a center of left-wing populist sentiment and political activity but less than 100 years later could be counted on as a bellwether of conservative social doctrine. In his book Frank traces this metamorphosis. How the consolidation of family farms into industrialized agribusinesses propelled new forces into prominence in the Farm Belt; and to protect and nurture those interests, with the connivance of local and national political leaders who were bankrolled by these companies, Kansans, among others, were weaned away from economic populist thought and action to embrace a new form of social and cultural populism. To get more riled up by concerns about same-sex marriage than tax breaks for oil companies.
By concentrating on social issues and not the widening gulf between the rich and working poor, Kansans by electing cultural conservatives who promised that they would outlaw abortion (which they have effectively managed to do in Kansas) and bring creationism to the public schools (not yet accomplished) wound up voting for economic policies that have proven to work to their own disadvantage.
We are now seeing this same sort of self-destructive behavior spreading beyond Kansas and affecting much of America. We need right now to take heed.
To Frank--and I agree--the sleight of hand conservative elites employ is to deflect class-based analyses of government-facilitated inequality in favor of pressing social issues such as abortion, prayer and creationism in schools, and the current galvanizing one--same-sex marriage.
One only needs to follow the career trajectory of Michele Bachmann to see this on full display since it was her and her husband's fierce attack on gayness that propelled her into Congress and her current front-runner status in the GOP presidential sweepstakes.
Many on the left felt that the Culture War was over. That they had won. They saw a tense but general consensus that these kinds of matters were settled both in law and public opinion. Not everyone agreed, of course, but those passionate about ending abortion, for example, were sufficiently marginalized that we could move on to more substantial issues such as growing the economy and securing our place in the world.
But then there is the Tea Party and concomitant Michele Bachmann phenomena. Whipped into a gossipy frenzy of frustration and anger by entertainment media masquerading as news and journalistic organizations--the collapsing Rupert Murdoch empire is the latest case in point--social issues are again front and center, serving as ideal distractions from the hard choices we would otherwise be forced to confront.
Bachmann was launched into prominence in Minnesota by her outspoken opposition to homosexuality itself, ignoring the science that it is a "condition" and asserting it is a "preference," a "choice of lifestyle." She called it a form of "enslavement," "bondage"; and claimed it could be cured by therapy that included counseling and especially prayer.
Not to be outdone by his wife, Michele's husband Marcus, who compares homosexuality to "barbarism," runs a number of for-profit Christian counseling businesses that specialize in this very thing. What he calls "reparative therapy," or gay-to-straight counseling. (See linked New York Times article.)
To understand how reparative therapy works ABC News had a reporter pretend to be a gay "patient" and filmed one of Dr. Bachmann's counselors tell him that "God designed men's eyes to be attracted to women's breasts." It sounds like Clockwork Orange time in Minnesota.
Back in the 19th century Kansas was a center of left-wing populist sentiment and political activity but less than 100 years later could be counted on as a bellwether of conservative social doctrine. In his book Frank traces this metamorphosis. How the consolidation of family farms into industrialized agribusinesses propelled new forces into prominence in the Farm Belt; and to protect and nurture those interests, with the connivance of local and national political leaders who were bankrolled by these companies, Kansans, among others, were weaned away from economic populist thought and action to embrace a new form of social and cultural populism. To get more riled up by concerns about same-sex marriage than tax breaks for oil companies.
By concentrating on social issues and not the widening gulf between the rich and working poor, Kansans by electing cultural conservatives who promised that they would outlaw abortion (which they have effectively managed to do in Kansas) and bring creationism to the public schools (not yet accomplished) wound up voting for economic policies that have proven to work to their own disadvantage.
We are now seeing this same sort of self-destructive behavior spreading beyond Kansas and affecting much of America. We need right now to take heed.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
4:42 AM
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