Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?
Gessen, Keith
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? HOW CONSERVATIVES WON THE HEART OF AMERICA by Thomas Frank Metropolitan Books, 2004 288 pp $24 FOR WHAT IT' S WORTH, Commodity Your Dissent, the 1997 anthology...
...Almost no one was spared, and almost no one listened...
...I became a leftist...
...It is business that speaks to us over the TV set, always in the throbbing tones of cultural insurgency, forever shocking the squares...
...The Baffler had never had time or inclination to formulate an actual aesthetic philosophy, so aside from its allegiance to eighties indie rock and the typeface and design lifted from H.L...
...The answer to this mystery is also the answer to why Frank, his generation's preeminent cultural critic, has become, in effect, a political reporter...
...He also makes a compelling case for the left to decouple in its thinking the unholy right-wing coalition forged by the backlash...
...One is that, at least in the Midwest, the backlash is not racist...
...Strip today's Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans," Frank wonders...
...And then, in the nineties, something dangerous happened to the Baffler: the dot-com bubble came along, with its casual Fridays, Ping-Pong tables, and office bunk-beds for software engineers to sleep in...
...On the sixties: "It has become difficult to understand the countercultural idea as anything more than the self-justifying ideology of the new bourgeoisie...
...Because one of the curious aspects of this book is that, reading it, one finds oneself rooting for the Mods...
...If, as centrist Democrats hope, the Mods do eventually get pushed into the Democratic Party, and that party opens up to greet them, it will no longer be a party worth our tears...
...On the invention of "alternative" music: "There are few spectacles corporate America enjoys more than a good counterculture, complete with hairdos of defiance, dark complaints about the stifling 'mainstream,' and expensive accessories 104 n DISSENT / Fall 2004 of all kinds...
...More recently, the Baffler has done serious work on the history of the "backlash," examining the trajectories of different cultural and political figures as they moved rightward since the 1960s...
...It was the knowledge that the music—and, by extension, the literature, the thoughts—that spoke most earnestly and honestly to our lives were virtually forbidden, barred from the record labels and airwaves choked with sixties-style liberationist pap...
...As the culture industry grew more powerful and more pervasive, there remained fewer and fewer things in the world that had not been compromised by corporate greed...
...But Frank traveled back to Kansas to learn more...
...This line appears almost verbatim in What's the Matter with Kansas, which is the broad terminus of the trajectory along which the Baffler has been moving...
...It's a class war the left is losing, having found itself, in effect, on the wrong side...
...A few years before, during an extended junior year abroad, I had seen in Russia, in primitive, transparent condition, the workings of a modern capitalism based on violence, a free press paid for by large moneyed concerns, and a political system run by cronyism, the brazen theft and resale of natural resources, and the naked manipulation of public opinion...
...The premise of the first Baffler collection was that, in much the same way as Western liberalism had reinvented itself in the face of the communist challenge, so business had changed in reaction to the sixties: all stances of rebellion were now highly profitable poses...
...It needs a critic of culture to describe it properly...
...Their contempt for their now-triumphant enemies only increased: these people were fools who cultivated bad music, sold bad literature, applauded bad art...
...Franks sees them being driven, gradually, into the Democratic Party...
...anti-abortion crusaders frequently cite the abolitionist Kansan John Brown...
...As for Frank the writer, Washington, D.C., is a good place for him to have landed after years in wintry Chicago...
...Republicans have forged their impossible coalition of the richest and the poorest by recognizing the potency of culture in a time of diminished economic hope...
...The Rules Have Changed— Dodge...
...The more fashionable among them extended this idea to television commercials...
...An awesome rhetorician, Frank begins with a simple statement of fact: the poorest place in the United States, McPherson County in Nebraska, voted for Bush in 2000 by an 80 percent margin...
...But we are all electoral strategists now, amateur Karl Roves...
...And on the entire older generation that had created the world I now inhabited: "For each of us there came at some point a revelation, a sudden, astonishing realization of the way your world worked, of the purposes of your media, your politics, your academy...
...He just blames different people...
...The Supreme Court doesn't make American culture," he argues, "neither does Planned Parenthood or the ACLU...
...For ten years, the Baffler hammered away at this theme...
...One was an examination of market fundamentalism—what Frank, in homage to Richard Grossman, termed "The God That Sucked...
...The father, reading his newspaper, looks ashamed...
...How could this be...
...and Frank, for his part, believes that if the Democrats would only start talking about class again, it would become clear to the Cons that their cultural enemy is rapacious capitalism, not traitorous liberalism...
...The New York Times, in a surprisingly ignorant review, claimed that Frank refused to acknowledge the very idea of a cultural grievance...
...Yet how does it work...
...Frank goes to Wichita: "There were so many closed shops in Wichita when I visited in 2003 that you could drive for blocks without ever leaving their empty parking lots, running parallel to the city streets past the shut-down sporting goods stores and toy stores and farm implement stores...
...We need him there, too...
...If You Don't Like The Rules, Change ThemWXRT-FM...
...It is the good old-fashioned class rage of the citizens of these places that animates the Cons, making the backlash, in Frank's fine phrase, "a mutant strain of class war...
...KEITH GESSEN is co-editor of n+1 (www.nplusonemag.com ). He last wrote for Dissent about Victor Serge...
...Though not a natural journalist, he does sustain short narratives, makes acute temperamental observations, and, refreshingly, actually feels a sympathy toward the more outrageous right-wing characters in the book...
...The revolutionary new Supra was made possible by workers' being brought to heel...
...Frank understands this far better than most of the left because he shares so much of the far right's anger...
...In the 1995 essay, "Why Johnny Can't Dissent," Frank compiled a remarkable list of ad slogans from major commercial brands: "Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules—Burger King...
...Republican tax breaks are in their interest—but because they are relatively liberal on social issues such as abortion and evolution, the fierceness of the Cons has them spooked...
...Another interesting movement tracked by Frank occurs within the Republican Party...
...I discovered Frank and the Baffler just after my graduation...
...for Frank, the cooptation by intelligent ad writers of the centuriesold language of resistance represented a hollowing out of the American heart...
...This is disturbing less for itself than for what it says about the thoroughgoing nature of the backlash worldview...
...Push them off their land, and next thing you know they're protesting in front of abortion clinics...
...The magazine had a house ad in which a little boy stopped playing with his toys to look up at his father and ask, imploringly, "Daddy, what did you do during the culture war...
...What all this talk of revolution signaled was that actual revolution, or resistance, or BOOKS even basic friction—by which the Baffler, which occasionally reprinted poems from the New Masses, meant the old-style 1930s class antagonism wherein workers formed unions to defend their rights—was becoming impossible, squeezed out of existence by its own advertised simulacra...
...If the business of America has become culture, and culture in the old Marxian scheme has therefore migrated from the superstructure into the base, then politics becomes the last fake thing that remains...
...The backlash is, however, intermittently anti-Semitic...
...HOW CONSERVATIVES WON THE HEART OF AMERICA by Thomas Frank Metropolitan Books, 2004 288 pp $24 FOR WHAT IT' S WORTH, Commodity Your Dissent, the 1997 anthology of essays from the first years of Thomas Frank's magazine, the Baffler, changed my life...
...But anti-Semitism has always been about more than actual Jews...
...Yup...
...The Baffler would not be caught so off guard...
...This much we knew about the backlash, if we were paying attention...
...Some time later, David Brooks would make an eerily similar argument in a semi-satirical celebratory vein...
...Whatever this might mean electorally, though, Frank does not find it heartening...
...But I returned to a campus where student activism was still dominated by identity politics and to classrooms in which my literature professors, arguing in the wake of the canon wars for their very lives, suggested that the classic texts were subversive because they had sent coded sexual messages to . . . my literature professors...
...He also draws some interesting conclusions...
...They were serious about popular culture in a way my professors were not, and they were furious...
...The consumers of this rubbish suffered from false consciousness...
...But it is happening, of course, and it's the reason W. was able to win almost as many votes as Al Gore in 2000, and it will, again, be his only hope...
...While I enjoy watching Kansas Republicans fight one another as much as the next guy," he writes in his conclusion, "I don't think the Kansas story really gives true liberals any cause to cheer...
...It is about cosmopolitanism and book-learning, and, as we can deduce from the behavior of our president, anti-intellectualism is, in Frank's words, a "grand unifying theme of the backlash...
...But Frank is, if anything, a DISSENT / Fall 2004 NIO 5 BOOKS bundle of cultural grievances...
...Everything the Baffler writers had been saying was proved spectacularly true, and they kept saying it...
...Mencken's American Mercury, there didn't seem to be anything the Baffler actually admired...
...The Cons, the backlashers, are the people hardest hit by the economic turbulence of the last twenty years, perpetrated largely by the Mods...
...And: "The Line Has Been Crossed: The Revolutionary New Supra— Toyota...
...The critique of contemporary culture was solid and true, but it had come to seem, perhaps, too solid, and too true...
...They were based in Chicago, with connections to midwestern indie rock and the university in Hyde Park...
...The book is a sustained meditation and examination of the backlash phenomenon as it has transformed the political landscape of Frank's home state of Kansas...
...In Kansas, where the radical right has made abortion and evolution its twin crusades, the backlash has split the Republicans into moderate and conservative factions (the Mods and Cons, respectively...
...106 n DISSENT / Fall 2004...
...j UST AROUND THEN, though, and just in time, the Baffler and Frank launched themselves on two new paths...
...On my professors: "For [them], there is no contradiction between replaying the standard critique of capitalist conformity and repressiveness and then endorsing its rebel products . . . as the obvious solution...
...It separates you from the crowd—Vision Cologne...
...Greedy capitalism is still our bona fide enemy...
...He recently moved to Washington, D.C., to become the Harper's correspondent there...
...but the foot soldiers of the religious right are what used to be called the working class...
...Time was," Frank wrote in issue 14, "the only place a guy could expound the mumbo jumbo of the free market was in the country club locker room or the pages of Reader's Digest . . . . But thirtyodd years of culture war have changed all that...
...Frank chalks it up to culture war: as the Democrats have by and large abandoned their traditional talk of class, the most powerless individuals have found in hot-button cultural issues a coherent worldview, He writes, "As a formula for holding together a dominant political coalition, the backlash seems so improbable and so self-contradictory that liberal observers often have trouble believing it is actually happening...
...As my grandmother likes to say about postwar Poland: "Incredible that there can be so much antiSemitism when there are so few Jews...
Vol. 51 • September 2004 • No. 4
