June 27, 2019--What's the Matter With "What's the Matter With Kansas"?

I read Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America when it was published in 2004 to great acclaim among progressives.

I found its central thesis to be persuasive. In a sentence Frank showed how over decades the conservative Kansas political establishment promised, if elected, to enact a long series of rightwing cultural policies (end abortion, bring prayer back to public schools, provide vouchers that would enable parents to offset the cost of private school tuition, ban same-sex marriage, eliminate the teaching of evolution, and so forth) while in return voters would not stand in the way of the conservatives' real agenda--essentially cutting government spending on all social programs such as Medicaid in order to pay for dramatic reductions in taxes for the wealthiest Kansans; and then, most important, once in office, they failed to deliver the social agenda but instead cynically enacted their self-serving regressive economic program.

Frank's central question was--Why are Kansas voters so seemingly willing to put aside their own self interest and go along with policies that will only make things worse for themselves?

In regard to this latter point, for years there has been something about it that did not sit right with me.

And then on Tuesday, during a long lunch with my politically-savvy cousin Harvey who lives in Maine, what has been troubling me for years became clear:

The Frank book is not about what's the matter with Kansas but rather what's the matter with the people of Kansas.

And for that reason it is incendiary because it ultimately blames the victims (the people) and not the perpetrators (the political leaders) for the voting patterns in Kansas and other Midwestern red states. 

Frank's point then turns out to be yet another version of the professional and academic class's saying to working people that we know better than you yourself what's good for you; and, further, we know even more clearly than you what needs to happen to serve your best interest is an expanded role for government.

Many, perhaps a majority of people who live and vote in the middle of the country for years have been saying that this is offensive and patronizing because it fails to recognize their ability to articulate what they value and the kind of role they on their own see it appropriate for government to play. 

More than anything they hate being taken for granted and feeling talked down to.

They have been saying this but not enough of us have not been listening. And thus for the most part Democrats running for national office have not figured out an effective way to communicate with voters they need to attract if they are to regain the White House and retain a majority in at least the House.

December 21, 2016--Obama's Political Legacy

There's lot of talk about Barack Obama's legacy. There's much that is positive to take note of and important things that will complicate the way he is remembered.

In regard to the latter there is the rupture in our relationship with Russia and chaos everywhere in the Middle East for which he is at least partially responsible.

The positive side of the ledger includes the impressive though imperfect Obamacare, the drawdown of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, the stimulus and economic recovery, and Wall Street reform.

Of a different sort is his political legacy. How many Democrats of high caliber did he inspire to seek high office and how did they in general fare?

By any measure, not very well--

Between 2009 and now there are 12 fewer Democratic governors, 900+ fewer Democratic state legislature seats, 69 fewer Democratic House members, and 13 fewer senators.

And, yes, one less Democratic president--Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton will be inaugurated next month.

This is not the meaning of life, but to progressives who care about the future of the Democratic Party the data require that we search for why this political tsunami swept so many away, wiping out a host of next-generation candidates.

The focus naturally has been on the results of the presidential election. If Democrats engaged in the forensics continue to cling to the notion that Clinton lost because of FBI director Jim Comey's letters and Putin's and Russian hacking, the numbers of elected officials will continue to slide further right.

For one, it's essential to acknowledge that Hillary was a terrible candidate who didn't have a convincing story about why she wanted to be president. Saying it was to make history by electing a woman or because it was her turn, ignored what elections are about--not the candidates, but the people they seek to represent.

For all his craziness, Trump did a much better job of presenting himself. How could a billionaire who lives in an actual gilded penthouse represent himself successfully as a friend of working people? How could someone with an orange face, three wives, and a lifetime of overt sexism gain the votes of 53 percent of white women?

We need to find answers to these questions. And very soon.

I've suggested here that a good analysis of the problems can be found in Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal.

The fact that Democratic Party leaders continue to be stuck on Comey and Putin prompts me to assign it as required reading.

November 29, 2016--This Is Depressing

In response to one of my blogs, Dr. S, a good friend who is also the best audiologist on the east coast, issued this warning. All in capital letters--

CAUTION:  THIS IS DEPRESSING. DO NOT READ ALONE OR WHILE STANDING ON A TALL BUILDING.

He went on to tell me about his ongoing frustrations with the outcome of the election. How we should not spend too much time beating ourselves up about not doing enough to forestall the outcome or struggle too hard to "understand" Trump voters. We have fallen into times where things are seen in extremes of black and white and right and wrong. He advocated calling Trump supporters out for being racist, sexist, and even worse.

I responded--

We do live on the 14th floor and have a terrace with a low railing so, heeding your warning (thank you) I read this in a room without a window or exterior door. The same place we go to when there's a tornado warning.    

I do get your point.  

It likely is a dangerous time even if Trump is a closet moderate and will find ways to wiggle out of some of his most outrageous positions. Dangerous in my mind since he is wicking out the worst in some people. 

I leave his "some people" for him to deal with. (Speak about reaping the whirlwind.) But I also have been trying to urge the rest of us to recognize that even people who voted for Trump also represent just "some people." 

I can't think of what to say to those who are as you describe them. They are out there and probably not up for grabs. I mean politically. 

So I've chosen to try to find a few ways to be optimistic and to spend most of my time trying not to get crazy while chiding the people with whom I affiliate--mainly progressives--to get up off the mat (or pot), stop feeling powerless and defeated, and get back in the game. But this time being sure to keep it up, not just do some marching for a few days and some annual check writing and then revert to the too frequent--talking, writing, fulminating.  

There's a war going on for the soul of America and too many on our side are not, I feel, behaving accordingly. Including, in my view, taking the full measure of who's on the other side. I see them as a bit more diverse than I am hearing many of my friends describe.  

To me what makes them dangerous is not that they are identifiable alt-right people (many obviously are) but people with genuine frustrations that deserve attention. People who, for example, have been lied to and manipulated by both parties, are working 2-3 jobs and still falling behind, whose kids have $50K or more in college loan debt, and who fear their children will not have good lives or a chance to live the American Dream. 

So I've been reading Kevin Phillips again (mainly American Theocracy) and the new Thomas Frank book (Listen, Liberal). For me they've figured out a lot of what's been gathering the past 30-40 years. And can serve to help explain what we might do to take back our America. 

I'm getting beat up by some friends for my efforts to urge them and myself to get more sustainably activated, but activated with as deep and nuanced an understanding about what happened as possible, to take note of the antecedents in recent and earlier American history, and also to take a hard, critical look at ourselves since I feel it essential right now not just to understand the Trump people. We need to look within. No more jerking ourselves around thinking that because we have the right views that that's enough.  

Clearly it isn't.  

We lost in very disturbing ways (look at all the swing states Trump won--Pennsylvania to me is most disturbing), look at how shallow the Dem's political bench is, look at the PC responses (see what's going on with the American flag at highly-selective Hampshire college as just one recent example), try to hear the pleas behind some of the right-wing bombast.  

Most important, I have been trying to say, it's essential to be honest about what one believes and how, among other things, one may have been a passive beneficiary of some of the right's regressive policies. How, I confess, I have benefited by the Bush tax cuts and am thereby contributing to the inequality I say I abhor. 

I've been trying to do that and am not entirely happy with what I have been discovering about myself. Another example--I find myself more Islamophobic than I'm comfortable admitting. Sadly, I could go on.

But now I'm ranting when I should be thinking about what to do with still-left-over turkey. 

Hang in there. It could get worse. Likely will. So we need to do some struggling. Including among ourselves. Maybe, starting there. 

Cozy up with a six-pack and watch some football. 

Beyond that, keep off rooftop balconies.

His response--

On occasion, especially during moments of weakness, I have found it easier to see things in black and white.  Two beers, a good night sleep, and I am again seeing the gray.   

I was really feeling like it was the end of the world, between the anti-Semitic picks and now the Secretary of Education . . .  

I realize now it’s going to be OK, eventually.  The New Yorker article, “Obama Reckons With a Trump Presidency” by David Remnick also helped.  Liked, “I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.”  

I’ll keep talking and sending checks to the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center.

At Hampshire College

November 28, 2016--Listen Liberals

Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal is a must read for progressives who are confused, frustrated, or just plain furious about why our preferred candidate is not the president-elect, ensconced up in Chappaqua, assembling her cabinet.

He is the author, recall, of What's the Matter With Kansas? which exposed the truth about how the conservative establishment backed by big-buck contributors such as the Koch Brothers figured out how to hoodwink Kansans among others by promising to make their lives great again--they would deliver on all the social issues that at the time were tormenting traditional-minded voters, from abortion and gay rights to prayer in school but not evolution in school.

If elected, the Republican Party promised it would end affirmative action and the voters would in return agree to tax cuts to benefit only the top five percent.

What of course happened was that the wealthy got their loopholes but average Americans did not have their social issues addressed.

Gays now can marry in all 50 states, evolution is still being taught in most schools, women still have the right to seek an abortion (often sadly having to run the gauntlet to secure one), and prayer in schools continues to be unconstitutional.

So now Frank turns his attention to the collapsed liberal majority. His subtitle says it well--What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

If you haven't done so, read it and weep.

With a wealth of data and other forms of evidence, sardonically, he lays out how the old Democratic coalition of constituents has slipped further and further behind while progressive leaders offer lip service explanations and support policies that do not even chip away at inequality. In fact, they have voted for policies like the Bush tax cuts that have made things worse while at the same time for the liberal professional elites things have actually gone quite well.

Among liberals, Frank demonstrates, a kind of political ju jitsu is taking place that is spookingly similar to that practiced by Republican conservatives in the heartland of Kansas and the rest of red-county America.

In his words, "A form of corporate and cultural elitism has largely eclipsed the party's old middle-class commitment. For certain favored groups in a handful of cities, this has meant prosperity. But for the nation as a whole, it is a one-way ticket into the abyss of inequality."

And Frank does a good job of vividly describing that abyss--

There was a time when average Americans knew whether we were going up or going down--because when the country prospered, the people prospered, too. But these days things are different. From the middle of the Great Depression [of the 1930s] up to 1980, the lower 90 percent of the population, a group we might call the "American people," took home some 70 percent of the growth in the country's income. 

Look at the same numbers beginning in 1997--from the beginning of the New Economy boom to the present--and you find that this same group, the American people, pocketed none of America's income growth. Their share of the good times was zero. The gains they harvested after all their hard work were nil. The upper 10 percent of the population--the country's financiers, managers, and professionals--ate the whole thing. The privileged are doing better than at any time since economic records began.

The last chapter of Listen, Liberal, rather than the current, "Liberal Gilt," could easily have been, "Why Donald Trump Won the Election." And the chapter after that should be, "It's Time, Liberals, to Fess Up, Organize, and Fight Back."

May 2, 2016--Limousine Liberals

Back in 2004, liberals like me loved Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? We chortled as he exposed how Republicans there and elsewhere duped white working people by promising and then failing to focus on social issues such as abortion and anything having to do with gay rights while in fact delivering tax cuts for themselves and their wealthy patrons.

On the other hand, I am not so sure we will like Frank's latest--Listen, Liberal: Or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? As Beverly Gage quipped in her front-page review in yesterday's New York Times Book Review, it could just as easily have been titled, What's the Matter With Massachusetts?

As I haven't yet read Listen, Liberal, here are highlights from Gage's review--

Liberals in general--and the Democratic Party in particular--should look inward to understand the sorry state of American politics. Too busy attending TED talks and vacationing in Martha's Vineyard, Frank argues, the Democratic elite has abandoned the party's traditional commitments to the working class. In the process, they have helped create the political despair and anger at the heart of today's right-wing insurgencies. . . . 

In Franks's view, liberal policy wonks are part of the problem, members of a well-educated elite that massages its own technocratic vanities while utterly missing the big question of the day. . . .  It is the eternal conflict of management and labor, owner and worker, rich and poor. . . . 

Frank notes that today some people are living much better than others--and many of those people are not Republicans. . . . He argues that the Democratic Party--once the "Party of the People"--now caters to the interests of the "professional-managerial class" consisting of lawyers, doctors, professors, scientists, programmers, even investment bankers. These affluent city dwellers and suburbanites believe firmly in meritocracy and individual opportunity, but often shun the kind of social policies that once gave a real leg up to the working class.

I have offered similar thoughts here for at least the past two years, confessing in one posting that though I am an advocate for tax reform that would be democratically redistributive, I have benefited from and enjoyed the bounty of the Bush tax cuts.

From that position it is hard not to sound hypocritical when calling for structural changes that would truly help the hardening underclass. Listen. Liberal sounds like something I need to read. And in a hurry. It sounds as if my progressive friends need to do likewise.

We have a lot to answer for. Liberals too have been duping the people who trusted us and been the core of our constituency. Partly on our watch inequality has widened and many of us in the professional class have benefitted mightily.