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TRANSCRIPT OF PRESENTATION
BY WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS?AUTHOR
THOMAS FRANK
SATURDAY, JUNE 25, 2005
Hey. How you doin’? That’s what we say in Kansas. How you doin’?
Governor Lamm’s remarks about Norman Thomas when he opened up the proceedings this morning, instantly reminded me that there has been polarization in this country forever. And there has been this incredible divide in this country since time immemorial. In some ways, conflict in this country is as American as apple pie. Now he had the funny anecdote about Norman Thomas, the leader of the Socialist Party, which is a classic. But I was reminded of another story about Eugene Debs, who preceded Norman Thomas as the leader of the Socialist Party. When Debs came to Topeka, Kansas in 1905 to give one of his speeches, he would travel around the country in a train called the Red Special, preaching that there was no God. And he would draw these huge throngs of people, these adoring crowds, all over the country at the turn of the last century. What would happen to a guy like that today? Just ask yourself that. So he comes to Topeka in 1905, at a time when Kansas had a Republican governor and was dominated by Republicans as it is today, different Republicans. The Governor and his staff met Debs at the train station and accompanied him to the place where he spoke and sat on the platform with him, where they were joined by members of the Kansas Supreme Court, to sit with Eugene Debs!
Class conflict is All-American. We’ve had it in this country ever since Day One. Now, the thing is that we reached a certain consensus on class issues after World War II. And it was the kind of consensus that people like me really liked. We decided what kind of country we were going to be, and it was a unionized country, a high wage country with a regulated economy. But, beginning in the late 60s and in the early 70s, what Arthur Schlesinger used to call “the vital center,” that idea of centrism, the kind of centrism that people like me are very fond of, all that began to unravel and began to be reversed.
So what I want to talk about today, I want to start off by talking about class, because I think that the class divide is the key to the culture wars. I think it’s both the cause of the culture wars and also, ironically, an effect of the culture wars. To understand this though you have to go back a lot farther than we’ve been doing and go all the way back to the late 1960s when the “culture wars” got Richard Nixon elected. Now let’s start doing this by going over the very dry, I’m going to do stuff that’s even more boring than the charts Professor Fiorina showed us, which actually, his charts were very exciting by my standards. And my facts have to do with class in America, so don’t just go running out of the room.
We all know that we have profound class differences in this country and we have a uniquely American way of talking about them. The class divide has been getting worse and worse for decades. It gets worse in the good times and it gets worse in the hard times. Back in 1980, when the great Conservative revolution was just getting started, over 20% of the American private sector workforce was unionized and American CEOs were paid, on average, about 42 times what their blue collar workers received. And this is a figure that was pretty much comparable to the numbers that were then coming out of Western Europe and Japan. By the end of the 1990s, CEOs received 500 times as much as their average blue collar line worker, while unions have, by today, fallen to less than 8% of the private sector workforce and are still dropping.
Back in 1980, when all of this stuff started, you still used to hear comforting descriptions of America as an affluent society. Remember that phrase. I love that phrase! An “affluent society.” That’s who we were. A middle class country where you had this kind of rough equality of condition, in addition to all the other forms of equality that we’re so proud of in America. Around that time, I think it was around 1981 or 1982, the literary critic Paul Fussel wrote a book about class – a really mean and snarky book about class, but nonetheless, a very insightful one – in which one of his basic conceits was that you could have a blue collar person living next door to a white collar person, that they’d make virtually the same amount of money, and that all that would distinguish they would be their tastes and their consumer preferences.
It would be impossible to write a book like that today because the gulf between the classes in America today is just too huge. The very idea of workers living in the same neighborhood or next door to executives strikes us as something fundamentally foreign, you know, something they do in those Scandinavian countries or something like that. Today, nobody talks about “shared affluence” as being a basic American characteristic. Instead, they tell us that what distinguishes our country, what makes Americans who we are, is our tolerance for and our acceptance of great extremes of wealth and poverty. That’s what defines Americans. That’s what makes our country unique among the nations.
What’s true for American CEOs is also true for the social class to which they belong. Back in 1979, the richest stratum of American society owned about 20% of the nation’s wealth. Today, of course, its 40%. The economists have a way of measuring all this. They call it the, and I told you this was going to be boring, and they call it the GENIE index. Don’t ask me how it works, but if you chart the GENIE index over time, you’ll see that we have now achieved levels of wealth inequality that are unique among the industrialized nations – I mean, we are way out there – and that we haven’t seen here in the United States since the 1920s.
Now, for some extremely boring statistics, I read recently that median family income stayed roughly the same over the period from 1989 to 1999, over that decade of great, unimaginable prosperity. Remember, the “New Economy”? Median family income first dropped and finally made it back to where it was in 1999, but at the end of that period, the median family, to earn that income, had to work six weeks longer a year, in order to earn that money. These are some statistics I got from Kevin Phillips’ recent book Wealth and Democracy. Back in 1999, at the very height of the boom, the average real, after-tax income for the middle 60% of the population, this is in 1999, was lower than it had been in 1977. Back in the 1950s and the 1960s, American workers used to put in shorter hours than workers elsewhere, in Europe and in Japan. By 1999, Americans worked the longest hours in the industrialized world. Ask yourself, “Is that because of choice or because of something else?” We have less pension and health coverage in this country, the least amount of vacation time, we have the shortest maternity leaves of any western country, the shortest notice of termination of any industrialized country. Our disposable income, basically if you look at a chart of disposable income in this country, it rose steadily from 1948 up until 1972, the period of the Great Consensus that I was talking about earlier, from 1948 to 1972, it was on a straight path upwards. But since 1972, it has basically been deteriorating slowly. This is all, again, from Kevin Phillips’ recent book… a Republican, by the way.
Another statistic, 49% of employees in the lowest 10% of the population had health coverage as recently as 1982. That’s almost 50% of the workers in the lowest part of the workforce had health care coverage in 1982. By 1996, of course, it was only 26%. And, lastly, a statistic I gleaned from The New York Times the other day, the CEO of Wal-Mart today makes as much in two weeks as his average employee does in their entire working lifetime. That’s the country we’re living in.
Now, accompanying all of this, as you know, has been the intrusion of corporate power into more and more aspects of everyday life. Your average American works harder and for more hours than in previous decades. They see more ads on more surfaces than ever before in history. They take more personality tests and drug tests at work. They’ve run up huge household debts. They have less power than at any time over the past 50 years over the conditions in which they live and work. The world of business, it sometimes seems, is becoming the world period. You all remember Fast Company magazine, they were sort of the flower of New Economy thought just a few years ago. They had a way of describing all of this, they put it like this, they said, “Corporations have become the dominant institution of our time, occupying the position of the church of the Middle Ages and the Nation State of the last two centuries.”
That’s the story of social class in America. But to hear our media talk about the subject, you get a very different impression. Oh, we’re a nation divided, all right. We’re at each other’s throats here in America. But the “real” divide, they tell us, is between those Republican “red states,” where dwell the humble, patriotic, God-fearing common people. And, then, of course, on the other hand, the “blue states” like the one I live in, where reside the wicked know-it-alls of the two coasts, who affect their “French” manners as they steer their Volvos around their degraded, boutique, latte towns. Right? That’s social class in America.
As for the politics that goes along with social class, we all know how it goes. The elite, blue state snobs are said to be the kind of people who put their trust in government, while the common folk of the Great Plains – you know, the prairie populists that burn with such a righteous fire – are said to trust the people. And what does that mean? Well, in the parlance of our day, it means that they trust the market. And the man that they elected, George W. Bush, heard the vox populi, saw that it was good, and moved swiftly and surely to shower his corporate donors with favors of every kind. To roll back workplace safety requirements, to deregulate in every way, to privatize Social Security and crack down on those interfering labor unions.
Because in America, when we talk about social class, that’s just how it is. That’s just how we understand the terms. What the common people want is more power to General Electric, right? More power to Citibank. They want to see that Dow Jones average hit 36,000. They want another crack at that dot.com bubble. They want to pile up their money at the feet of Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or Sam Walton or whoever the hero CEO happens to be this year. And, should it turn out that they don’t want to do those things, if they go out there and protest or strike or vote for the wrong fella, then our op-ed pages stand ready to call them “elitists.” You’ve heard this word, right? Elitists. Despicable, self-absorbed snobs, who by their failure to believe in the goodness of free market forces are helping to trample down the unfortunates of the Third World. And a thousand corporate PR departments stand ready to chime in, to insist that business is just an altruistic operation dedicated to raising up the little people of the world. Every time they bust a union in America, a worker somewhere cries out for joy. All right. So that’s social class in America.
Now, this word “elitist,” I want you to think about that, because I think that the way that we are encouraged to think about elites and elitism are the key to What’s the Matter With Kansas? and to what’s the matter with America. And there is something the matter with us, don’t be mistaken. There’s something wrong when the areas that are hardest hit by conservative economic policy are also the areas that are most enthusiastic for conservative politicians or capital gains tax cuts or laws cracking down on bankruptcy. Now when the poorest state in America, which, these days is by per capita income West Virginia – now I should point out that West Virginia is home to a particularly ferocious species of class consciousness – but when this state goes for the Republican by 13 points, there’s something wrong. And this is a state, by the way, that went for every Democrat to come down the pike. Even Michael Dukakis! With the exceptions of McGovern and Gore, every single one since Roosevelt. But when this state changes sides, there’s something going on. When the poorest county in America, which in 2004 was in North Dakota, when this county goes for Bush by 78%, there is something amiss. By the way, the second poorest county is in Nebraska. It went for Bush by 81%.
Now, it’s not that people in these places have suddenly become complacent and satisfied, you know, like the Republicans of old. That’s not what’s going on. On the contrary, they’re mad as hell, as we all know. They’re “red with rage.” They’re participating in what I call in the book, a “Great Backlash.” But who are they angry at? You know who it is. Liberals. It’s people like me. And it’s people like you. That’s who they’re angry at. The people David Brooks talked about yesterday in such a lively manner. The people in the affluent suburbs like Bethesda. I think that this is the great historical fact of our time. Millions of angry, average people, who vote for politicians who only make their situation worse. I sometimes think that it’s like a French Revolution in reverse. In which the workers come pouring down the street, screaming “More power to the aristocracy!”
How are we supposed to explain all this? How do we make sense of this paradox? How is it that conservatives in these places can profess to hate “elites,” which they do, but at the same time, to excuse from their fury the corporate world, even when it has so manifestly screwed them over? How do they sign up for an uprising of the common people that only winds up making the upper crust even crustier? How did they decide that one man is a frenchified snob for being rich and, here, of course, I’m referring to “John Kerry, yachtsman,” right? But that another man, George Bush, humble man of prayer, that his riches show him to be a regular fellow. How do they make that distinction?
Now, at the center of it all, I want to suggest, and this is the key, it’s a way of thinking about class that both encourages class hostility and, at the same time, it denies the economic basis of the grievance. So class, conservatives will tell you, isn’t really about money or birth or occupation. It is primarily a matter of authenticity, that most valuable cultural commodity. Class is about what kind of car you drive and where you shop and how you pray and only secondarily, about the job that you do or the income that you make. So what makes you a member of the proletariat, according to this view, is not work per se but unpretentiousness, humility, and all of the rest of the sort of moral qualities that our pundit core never tires of celebrating. They’re sort of “red state” qualities. So according to this view, the producer class doesn’t care about unemployment, or a dead-end life, or a boss that makes 500 times as much as they do. No. Out in places like my home state of Kansas, both workers and their bosses are supposed to be united in righteous disgust at those affected college boys over at the next table, prattling on about French cheese and villas in Tuscany and the big ideas for running things that they read about in books. So these are the real parasites – not Enron, not Halliburton, not Merrill Lynch – it’s people like me. That’s who it is.
The key element in this repackaging of class is the notion of a “liberal elite.” Now, you’ve heard this term before. The idea has taken many different forms over the years, but in its basic outlines it’s always remained pretty much the same and it goes like this: our culture and our schools and our government, conservatives will tell you, are controlled by an over-educated ruling class that is contemptuous of the beliefs and the folkways of average people. So those who run our country are despicable, self-important, show-offs. They are effete, to use a favorite conservative phrase. They are arrogant. They are snobs. They are, in a word, liberals.
Now, conservatism, on the other hand, is supposed to be the doctrine of the oppressed majority. Unlike your kind of classical conservatism, the backlash that I’m describing doesn’t defend some established order of things. What it does is it accuses. It rants. It points out hypocrisies and gleefully pounces on contradictions. And while liberals are always supposed to be using their control of the airwaves, and the newspapers, and the schools to persecute average people, the Republicans tell us that they are the real Party of the disrespected, the downtrodden, the forgotten men. They are the Party of dissent, always in rebellion against a haughty establishment, always rising up from below. So all claims on the right, in other words, advance today from victimhood. It’s an important point to remember when you’re watching O’Reilly or something and he’s complaining about liberals and their culture of victimization. They revel in fantasies of their own marginality and persecution. In fact, I use that word persecution on purpose because Rush Limbaugh’s brother, David Limbaugh, has actually written a book – I believe it was a best-seller – with one of those one word titles that people love these days and the one word title, of course, was “Persecution.” You get one guess as to who was persecuting whom in that book.
If you spend a lot of time on right-wing listservs, you will find conservatives greeting fellow conservatives with phrases like “fellow rubes of the flyover.” They love to speculate about the many, many ways in which liberals are supposed to look down on them. There’s an ad for one of Laura Ingram’s recent books and the headline for the ad – and remember, this is an ad trying to get you to buy the book, to be interested in the book, to make you think you want to read it – and the headline says “Are you stupid?” Then the phrase underneath says, “The elites think so.” There’s an article that ran in the American Enterprise Institute’s magazine and the first sentence of this article about the virtues of the red states was, “I’m stupid, and if you’re reading this, you probably are too.” (By the way, they’re meeting right over here at Beaver Creek, reveling in their marginality and persecution!) Another thing that this variety of conservative loves to do is boast of their own subversiveness. They’re always drawn to this phrase “politically incorrect,” you know it’s even the title of a book by Ralph Reed. John Leo, who’s a columnist for U.S. News and World Report, wrote a book in 1994 that he called “Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police.” You get it, right? The liberal Gestapo is hunting him down and he’s just barely staying out of their grasp. And then, in 2001, he wrote another one that he called “Incorrect Thoughts,” which, as it happens, very ironically, is also the title of a 1991 album by the hard-core punk band, The Subhumans. I am the only man in America that owns both the book and the record.
Now, the object of all this breast-beating under-doggery on the right is not to un-victimize the average Americans for whom conservatism claims to speak. That is always ruled out almost right from the get-go. While most of us think of politics as a kind of Machiavellian drama in which actors make alliances, then take practical steps to advance their own material interests, the Backlash is something very different. It is a crusade in which your material interests are suspended in favor of vague cultural grievances that are both supposed to be all-important, and yet incapable of ever being assuaged. OK, and I’m not exaggerating. Let’s think about it. When the movement’s leaders pick their cultural battles and, remember, their leaders are very canny people, intelligent players. I think I read somewhere that Karl Rove reads Machiavelli. He gets it off the shelf and reads it once a week to stay in touch with that spirit. But when these guys choose their cultural battles, they almost always choose ones where victory is impossible, where their followers’ feelings of powerlessness will simply be dramatized and their alienation aggravated. For example, the Backlash fury object de jour while I was writing a big part of the book, which was the Alabama Ten Commandments monument, you all remember that, put up by the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. He did it deliberately to draw a lawsuit from the ACLU. And everyone knew at the time how that lawsuit was going to end, what was going to happen to that monument. It was going to be pried loose and carted away. But that didn’t stop thousands of articles from being written about it.
The same thing is true of the great crusade against Darwin that’s going on right now in my home state of Kansas. I mean how many paleontologists are they going to win over with that one? Right? Think about that.
Look, as culture war, the Backlash was born to lose. There’s something insubstantial and meaningless about so many of these issues. It’s almost designed to lose. Its goal is not to win cultural battles, but to take offense, conspicuously, vocally, flamboyantly. Getting mad. This is where the Backlash spends its energy. Indignation is the great aesthetic principle of conservative movement culture, and I mean everything pisses these people off. And the way they react is not by getting un-pissed off, but by documenting and cataloguing their disgust, generating these endless piles of petty, unrelated beefs with the world, amassing thousands upon thousands of stories of the many, many tiny ways the world that surrounds around us assaults family values, uses obscenities, disrespects parents, foments revolution and on and on and on.
The implication of all this conservative culture of offense-taking is that liberalism can be held responsible for the world around us. That each of these objections to the way people drive, the way people cut in line, the way people talk with their mouths full, that each of these is somehow an indictment of the left. Now, it doesn’t matter that liberals have basically lost their power over government and, by the way, there hasn’t been a real honest-to-God liberal President elected in this country since 1964, the year before I was born, but it doesn’t matter that there hasn’t been a proper liberal in all those years. In the Backlash mind, liberalism is still what changes our mores, what determines what’s on TV and in the magazines, and what makes, or I should say, interprets the laws. There is nothing – not the Constitution, not guns, not even sweeping electoral victories – there is nothing that can protect us from liberalism or even slow it down. It is an alien, conspiratorial force, that can’t be held accountable and doesn’t care when its project go awry.
Let me remind you that all of this stuff is a class-based complaint. It’s always the honest, hard working people of middle America against a tiny, self-righteous band of snobs, lording it over the rest of us with their fancy college degrees. Culture war is a form of class war and, insofar as they can claim to be taking on the liberal elite, the Republicans do represent themselves as the true leaders of the working class. And I’m not making this up. You all remember Gary Bauer, who ran for president in 2000. He was for a while there running something called the “Campaign for Working Families” and expressly identifies himself as a leader of the working class and when the New York Times asked him last year to explain the continuing power of the culture wars, here’s what he said: “Joe Six-Pack doesn’t understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn’t have a say in it.” When I read that, it struck me, because that really is it, in a nutshell. That kind of language is what liberal used to say. That’s what people like me used to say. We were the ones who stood up for the little guy, against a world that really, truly doesn’t give a damn about him or his views. We were the ones that railed against the high and the mighty and who fought to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But today, it’s conservatives that use this language. And that is the power of the culture wars.
Thank you very much.
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