Working-Class Republicans and 'False Consciousness"

...terrorism...

...Thomas Frank became the pundit of the hour for his answer to those questions...

...How did they get poor people to vote for tax cuts for the rich...

...He shows how the Republicans and their media voices—Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and so on—appeal to ordinary people with a class-conscious anger at "the elite...

...In fact it is the free market that is destroying "traditional values...

...In fact, there have been only a few decades in which any form of class conflict came to dominate the issues—the 1890s, the 1930s, with the latter being almost unique...

...The way to fight false consciousness is not to debate about Jesus, but rather to reassert the primacy of class in America...

...the Ten Commandments will not be inscribed in the courthouses...

...But the Democrats' problem, Mertes argues, is not simply stupidity...

...look at the people who are taking away your guns...

...That was certainly deceptive, but it was more than Kerry did...

...types who got rich by pushing sex and violence in the media...

...By calling the Democrats "criminally stupid," Frank implies that the solution is simply for them to get smart—to bring them to their senses, to recall their true mission: fight for equality, solidarity, and social progress...

...Democrats work on voter registration, Republicans work on vote suppression...

...Does it arise spontaneously from the experience of ordinary workers...

...Just when ordinary people most needed equality and economic security, the Democrats abandoned them...

...The party is controlled "largely by the super-rich," and in understanding and fighting for their own interests, they have been fairly smart...

...How did the Republicans do it...

...Today the Republicans control almost everything— the White House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, most of the governorships and state houses...

...Now we need him to go back and talk to them about terrorism and war, to understand the new forms of false consciousness that shaped the outcome of the 2004 election...

...Bush, meanwhile, had imposed tariffs on imported steel in 2001, which could be spun as taking a stand against the European competitors who were killing West Virginia's mines and mills...

...John Kerry went along with that project...

...It's when ordinary workers "insist on re-electing the very people who are screwing them" — that's Tom Frank's definition...

...Where does class consciousness come from...

...Mertes's response is a familiar one: from Wilson to Truman to Kennedy, and, yes, including Roosevelt, the Democrats practiced "the ferocious protection of capital at home and abroad...

...A more telling example of the political consciousness of declining workers, Davis argues, can be found in West Virginia, where deindustrialization has been catastrophic, and where the shift to the right has been more dramatic than any other state...

...And because the Democrats no longer speak the language of class, their former base is left open and vulnerable to false consciousness around abortion, school prayer, guns, and gays...

...The right has declared a war in which victory is impossible...

...It really is a trick, a kind of sleight of hand: don't look at people who are taking away your jobs...

...More of the super-rich favored the Democrats in 2004—the divide was 5941 among individuals with assets above $10 million...

...And while the critique is "robust enough," it fails to ask the obvious question: why does the Democratic Party act the way it does...

...So voting Republican isn't necessarily delusional or self-destructive...

...That challenge would lead to "class consciousness"—an awareness of social conflict and of the potential power of working people to transform the status quo...

...Frank offers the poorest county in the DISSENT / Spring 2005 57 FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS United States—McPherson County, Nebraska— as his prime example of false consciousness...

...But it's not hard to critique what is false...

...He holds the Democrats responsible for helping to create our "landscape of distortion, of paranoia, and of good people led astray...

...Davis argues that it is not: the Democrats who were elected in West Virginia made jobs the center of their campaigns, while Kerry offered only that pathetic proposal for tax breaks for corporations that didn't export jobs...

...Abortion is not going to be criminalized...

...False consciousness about "values" makes for political war that is permanent...

...The role of a political party is to explain these things, to define interests, and then to fight for them...

...The evidence lies in what Mertes terms "the blue plutocracy": virtually all of the wealthiest electoral districts in the country have become Democratic bastions...

...Frank says no—people do not necessarily understand their situation or know how to act to defend their interests...

...The question about this false consciousness, of course, is still, "What is to be done...

...But the deindustrialization of America, and the export of good industrial jobs to Mexico and now to China, was the policy of Bill Clinton, who introduced, fought for, and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement...

...Davis insists we need to question whether the various forms of ethno-religious politics in fact represented a consciousness that was genuinely "false...

...In his book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, Wallis points out that Jesus never said anything about tax cuts for the rich...

...Crudely put, the claim is that workingclass and poor people should vote for the party that is screwing them because that party is also protecting them from our enemies...

...And although many mine and mill workers voted against him, they voted for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, and Democrats held on to two of three congressional seats with an impressive two-thirds of the vote...

...We have two competing answers...

...Instead of fighting on the Republicans' terrain, Democrats should make class war the answer to the culture war, and restore economic issues to the center of the progressive political message: the primary cause of suffering in America is not the liberal elite, but rather the big corporations and their Republican friends...

...And their assets make them the wrong people to serve as examples of voters who are poor or working class...

...How do you get poor people to vote for tax cuts for the rich...

...It's true, of course, as Marxists have often argued, that FDR saved capitalism...

...WHY, THEN, DID so many working-class and poor voters support George Bush...

...and war...

...sex and violence will not be eliminated from movies or television...

...the problem is to know what is true...

...IMIKE DAVIS (in an unpublished conference paper) has a different critique...

...Here Frank's argument gets shaky...

...The key issues, as Mark Danner argued in the New York Review of Books of January, 13, 2005, were the attacks of September 11, 2001...

...The opposite of false consciousness is class consciousness...

...rRANK'S CASE is a powerful and compelling one, but it has come in for some sharp and significant criticism from writers who know a lot about false consciousness...

...Although the evidence is overwhelming that Republican media pounded away to foment culture war, it's not at all clear that cultural issues provided the basis of workingclass votes for Bush...

...In Marxist theory, when workers accept the ruling ideology that justifies their exploitation, they have false consciousness...

...in Frank's unforgettable phrase, "the backlash was born to lose...

...According to the theory, for consciousness to be false, a challenge to the ruling ideology must be available to ordinary people...

...58 DISSENT / Spring 2005...

...they are Volvo-driving, Brie-eating, latte-sipping snobs who have nothing in common with the problems or values of ordinary people...

...And he has great fun pointing out its flaws: there is more sex and violence on the Murdoch-owned Fox networks than on the supposedly left-wing CBS-TV...

...I don't think it is false consciousness to fear another terrorist attack...

...Jim Wallis is the leading strategist on this front...

...Turnout in poor and working-class precincts was unprecedented, but many of those voters cast their ballots for George W. Bush—especially white people from non-union households, especially outside of cities...

...He paints an irresistible and hilarious picture of this "mutant strain of class war...

...He is a contributing editor of the Nation and teaches history at UC Irvine...

...Bill Clinton may have been a poor boy from Hope, but the Democrats' candidate in 2004 was the richest man ever to run for the White House...

...The most vivid and indeed unforgettable parts of Tom Frank's book are his detailed portraits of ordinary people in his home state of Kansas trying to make sense of their situations and not succeeding...

...Their incomes put them among the nation's poor, but their assets give them the interests of property owners...

...Although Frank uses the term "false consciousness" only a couple of times, his book provides the best example of both the strengths and the weaknesses of this kind of analysis...

...So tens of millions were spent on Democratic voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts over the summer and fall...

...Frank's second great failing, according to Mertes, is his romantic idealization of the Democratic Party of yesteryear...

...It voted 80 percent Republican in 2000...

...And if abortion is not your thing, there is school prayer, gun rights, and gay marriage—lots of issues to get angry about...

...He points out that culture war is hardly an invention of the last two decades— on the contrary, it is "the default condition of American politics...

...The Protestants versus the Papists, the Nativists versus the immigrants, and of course the whites versus the blacks—that's been the story in American political life...

...This consciousness is false because it depends on "a systematic erasure of the economic...

...The result is that the Democratic Party is now rock solid in its commitment to preserving choice, but happy to concede to the corporations on economic issues like the North American Free Trade Agreement, labor law, deregulation, and tax cuts...

...Tom Frank says this response to the Republicans is a betrayal...

...But if unemployed industrial workers in Kansas wanted to vote their true interests in protecting decent jobs, why would they support the candidate and the party that established the policies that did away with those jobs...

...school prayer is never going to become mandatory...

...Religion, race, and ethnicity have "structured the field" of party politics for the last two centuries...

...Take away people's good industrial jobs, Frank writes, and DISSENT / Spring 2005 55 FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS the "next thing you know they're protesting in front of abortion clinics...

...Conservative Democrats like Bill and Hillary Clinton say it is time to "engage the American heartland in a conversation about religion and values...

...Of course, the president has manipulated that fear, used that fear as the basis of an ideology, in the classic sense of that term...

...Tom Mertes, writing in the New Left Review (Nov— Dec 2004), notes that, in Frank's 250-page book, only 8 pages are devoted to criticizing the Democrats...

...under the malevolent leadership of the Democratic Leadership Council, the party followed Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Joe Lieberman to "forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, whitecollar professionals who are liberal on social issues...

...So how can they continue to demonize Democrats as the cause of the problems of ordinary people...

...But the Democrats have little to say about the interests of ordinary people, while the Republicans are full of angry arguments that identify problems and propose solutions...

...Despite the conventional wisdom the day after the election that "values" had been the Republicans' trump card, opinion polls showed that the number of voters who said they voted primarily on the basis of "values" in fact declined: in 1996 (Clinton-Dole) it was 40 percent...

...Forty years ago, he suggests, the Democrats were "the party of the workers, the poor, the weak and the victimized...

...Here Frank is at his most provocative: the "vague cultural grievances" fostered by the right are "incapable of ever being assuaged...

...False consciousness in the classic sense, he argues, "embracing purely imaginary solidarities with one's exploiter," is "not common...

...But on November 2 we discovered how wrong we were...

...The evidence is that abortion, gun rights, school prayer, and gay marriage were not the decisive issues...

...But it can hardly have been false consciousness for workers in 1936 to support the party and the president that had just passed the Wagner Act, which put the power of the federal government behind the creation of the CIO...

...Here is where the objections arise...

...And it's not a class issue...

...Although his book was published in 2004, the September 11 attacks get two pages, "Iraq" doesn't appear in the index, and the only terrorists he mentions are the homegrown ones who struck in Oklahoma City...

...This elite is not the capitalist class...

...in 2000 (Bush-Gore) it was 35 percent...

...That's why working-class consciousness was not part of the Democratic Party message...

...I think it's rational...

...it is the liberals, who are held responsible for the "decline" in "values" that voters are called on to reverse...

...Often they were part of a "defense of perceived systems of privilege and entitlement...

...Thus Wallis would enlist Jesus on the side of class consciousness...

...The notion of "false consciousness" has always been appealing...

...In a wonderful phrase, Frank terms this argument "the latte libel...

...the mighty ACLU" does not control Hollywood...

...Is this schizophrenic divide an example of false consciousness...

...But the people who vote there, Davis points out, are mostly small cattle ranchers...

...It's not just the postmodernists who object to the notion that we know the truth...

...You can call it "false consciousness" for workers to support war, and that of course is the classic Marxist position going back to the Franco- Prussian War and World War I. But that's not Frank's argument...

...and in 2004 it fell to 22 percent...

...JON WIENER (Wiener@uci.edu ) is the author of Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower (The New Press, 2005...

...The culture wars foster false consciousness above all by focusing on abortion...

...Frank terms this strategy not only "ruinous" but "criminally stupid...

...He brings to life the notion of false consciousness by focusing on the way the poorest counties on the Great Plains have turned Republican and "drifted into delusion" (Barbara Ehrenreich's phrase...

...This ideology demonizes the New York and L.A...

...There is one more problem that critics have found with Frank's argument for "false consciousness...

...almost all the people on the left who have lived through the political reversals of the last thirty years have developed a more humble sense of their analytical powers...

...By convincing them that the issue is not tax cuts for the rich, it's stopping the slaughter of the unborn...

...It's "a failure to recognize the instruments of one's oppression or exploitation as one's own creation, as when members of an oppressed class unwittingly adopt views of the oppressor class"—that's the dictionary definition...

...His jobs program in 2004 was pathetic: tax cuts for the rich—in this case, for corporations that don't export jobs...

...And if you really believe the fetus is a person with a right to life, saving the lives of those helpless "babies" is a moral imperative that makes tax policy pretty insignificant...

...The "true" interests of the working class in America today start with jobs...

...That's a different kind of "false consciousness," one that is harder to fight because it invokes real problems and real dangers...

...In short, they fostered what we used to call "false consciousness...

...Is this Frank's own false consciousness...

...If these polls are accurate, we have to conclude that the culture war as a basis for voting has steadily lost ground over the last decade...

...Desperate Housewives gets higher ratings in the heartland than it does in Manhattan or West L.A...

...Frank knows this history...

...Culture war "rages most fiercely when it is able to mobilize material self-interest, however ignorant or short-sighted...

...It was once a Democratic stronghold, but Kerry lost West Virginia by 13 percent...

...The real strategic turn came when the 56 DISSENT / Spring 2005 FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS DLC began relying on contributions from the corporate world...

...Because of the free market, all that is solid melts into air...

...The Democratic Party abandoned class issues...

...But if it's false consciousness for poor and working people to vote Republican, does a worker with class consciousness automatically vote Democratic...

...In his best-selling book What's the Matter with Kansas?, published before the election, he argued that Republicans distracted and confused ordinary voters with a phony kind of class-war rhetoric and with the culture wars...