Thomas Frank on FMA: Another tour-de-force dissection of American politics

[dumpster_baby]

Thomas Frank (author of _What's Wrong With Kanasas_)in has an editorial in the NYT: "Federal Marriage Amendment was a masterpiece of strategy"

some excerpts:

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Failure Is Not an Option, It's Mandatory
By THOMAS FRANK

For three days this week the nation was transfixed by the spectacle of the United States Senate, in all its august majesty, doing precisely the opposite of statesmanlike deliberation. Instead, it was debating the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would not only have discriminated against a large group of citizens, but also was doomed to defeat from the get-go. Everyone knew this harebrained notion would never draw the two-thirds majority required for a constitutional amendment, and yet here were all these conservatives lining up to speak for it, wasting day after day with their meandering remarks about culture while more important business went unattended. What explains this folly?

Not simple bigotry, as some pundits declared, or even simple politics. While it is true that the amendment was a classic election-year ploy, it owes its power as much to a peculiar narrative of class hostility as it does to homophobia or ideology. And in this narrative, success comes by losing.

For more than three decades, the Republican Party has relied on the "culture war" to rescue their chances every four years, from Richard Nixon's campaign against the liberal news media to George H. W. Bush's campaign against the liberal flag-burners. In this culture war, the real divide is between "regular people" and an endlessly scheming "liberal elite." This strategy allows them to depict themselves as friends of the common people even as they gut workplace safety rules and lay plans to turn Social Security over to Wall Street. Most important, it has allowed Republicans to speak the language of populism.

The amendment may have failed as law, but as pseudopopulist theater it was a masterpiece. Each important element of the culture-war narrative was there. Consider first its choice of targets: while the Senate's culture warriors denied feeling any hostility to gay people, they made no secret of their disgust with liberal judges, a tiny, arrogant group that believes it knows best in all things and harbors an unfathomable determination to run down American culture and thus made this measure necessary.

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more here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/16/opinion/16FRAN.html





This guy will have the American leftist movement in the palm of his hand if he keeps this up....

[AirAmFan]

1. 'Who on earth would fall for THAT?!"

Do you think the MoveOn.org TV ad with that tagline has been effective this week, in exposing the GOP's transparently phoney right-wing populism?

[dumpster_baby]

2. I have not seen it? Is it actually running on TV?

maybe I ought download it?

[AirAmFan]

3. I don't believe MoveOn puts currently-running ads on their open public websites

I've seen "Who on earth would fall for THAT" a lot on CNBC and CNN during the past week, and every time I appreciate its low-key brilliance even more. I think it's the best thing MoveOn has done, by far. Talk about your kitchen table issues! And it ties in precisely with Frank's analysis.

A middle-aged couple is sitting at their proletarian kitchen table having coffee. They mention Bush's phony "tax cuts", skyrocketing health care costs, overseas job outsourcing. no WMD, the cost of the "war" in Iraq,

Husband "He says he's against gay marriage. Oooooo!"

Wife: "Who on earth would fall for that!"

Then there's a message from MoveOn, something like: "Tell Bush to focus on the real issues people care about"

[markses]

4. I'm reading WTMWK right now

Pretty good stuff, if fairly predictable for Frank.

[dumpster_baby]

5. fairly predictable?

What other writings of his had you read? I was only aware of the consumerist-oriented and the market-oriented books he has written. This one seems to be in a new area.

[Waverley_Hills_Hiker]

6. Franks' written some left populist stuff before

He published a pretty good pamphlet on the various strikes that where racking Decateur, Illinois. Solidarity in the Heartland. Part of the "Open Magazine Pamphlet Series".

And, yeah, Frank is one of my favorites. This guy rocks.

[dumpster_baby]

7. here is another recent essay op-ed from Frank

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0716-08.htm

[markses]

9. Both "The Conquest of Cool" and "One Market Under God"

make basically the same point as is made in "What's the Matter with Kansas," to wit: that the current political situation is primarily based in economics, and that cultural issues are secondary and a kind of epiphenomenon that runs certain operations, but remains more or less superstructural. In other words, there's a vestigial "vulgar" Marxism involved. That was his beef with cultural studies in "One Market," and you can see the same thing playing out again here. Since one of the pressing questions in a variety of areas (political theory, political economy, cultural studies and theory, history, etc.) is whether or not one can even distinguish the economic from the cultural anymore, the issue is nowhere near as easy to parse out as Frank at times makes it seem. That's not a bad thing. He has a position in the debate. But given his position, and seeing how it played out in Conquest and One Market, his reading of the Conservative "revolution" is fairly predicable.

[dumpster_baby]

10. hmm

Yeah, basically the American "system" is one driven by thousands of force vectors, some large, some small. The net effect is that we are being driven to the right, even while other western industrialized countries have seemed to be able to take the best of the right and the left. But in order to do something we have to be able to differentiate at least some of these forces, and neutralize/counteract them, crude as that may be when you consider the multitude of vectors. But it is better than nothing.

[markses]

11. I'm not sure how that basic point is a response

to what I said. I stand by the claim that Frank's newest work is in the same vein as his previous work: he continues to distinguish economic from cultural effects and forces, and he continues to value the economic over the cultural. That was my point. It was predictable, given Frank's previous work. Does that mean some of the analyses aren't spot-on and damn insightful? No. They are. But if you'd read Frank before, you kinda knew what you were gonna get, that's all.

[dumpster_baby]

12. I was speaking to one particular sentence you wrote in that comment

You wrote:
"Since one of the pressing questions in a variety of areas (political theory, political economy, cultural studies and theory, history, etc.) is whether or not one can even distinguish the economic from the cultural anymore, the issue is nowhere near as easy to parse out as Frank at times makes it seem."

I agree. Frank has simply chosen a couple of the force vectors, and although there are undoubtedly many others, and the issue is indeed not that easy to parse, what Frank has done is given us something tangible to see, and to use.

[dumpster_baby]

13. And BTW, the News Media IS starting to use Frank's analysis

Since one of the pressing questions in a variety of areas (political theory, political economy, cultural studies and theory, history, etc.) is whether or not one can even distinguish the economic from the cultural anymore, the issue is nowhere near as easy to parse out as Frank at times makes it seem.

[dumpster_baby]

15. I heard Gwen Ifill on PBS mention "cultural wars" in reference to FMA

When she was talking about the Federal marriage act (the GOP gay marriage Senate shenanigans), she referred to "the cultural wars." This is pure Thomas Frank.

I think Frank has given the liberal activists and liberal members of the media a handle on a new paradigm, a new perspective, a clarfication of the dynamics of the Rightist/neoliberal takeover.

Just having a better and clearer way of describing this phenomenon is a big help. Once you can label something and describe it, you can use that to get across a message. You have defined in a way that seems logical and consistent. Frank has isolated some of the dynamics and has given some members of the media an "A ha" or "Eureka" moment.

I hope the rest of the liberal media will seize upon this paradigm and ride it for all it is worth.

[markses]

14. Oh, I agree

Since the point you were originally disputing is whether Frank's particular version of those forces was predictable, your point here is neither here nor there. It was predictable, given his previous work. That it may be useful is another question altogether.

[AirAmFan]

8. Frank's script for exposing Dubya as not what he appears to be

Dubya poses as a God-fearing good 'ol boy from Texas, helping defend the ordinary working-class GOP dupe from the depredations of Liberal Eastern Elitists.

A Tom Frank essay has a few sentences that could serve as the gist of another great negative ad for MoveOn or some other progressive media effort. How many of the faithful know that Dubya followed 2 years behind Kerry at Yale? But later, while JFK was sailing into machinegun fire in Vietnam, Dubya was drinking, snorting, slurring his words, and evading military service

I found this essay through Tom Frank's website at http://www.tcfrank.com :

From http://mondediplo.com/2004/02/04usa?var_recherche=thomas+frank

"February 2004

A WAR AGAINST ELITES: The America that will vote for Bush

by Tom Frank

... Thanks to the rightward political shift of the past 30 years, wealth is today concentrated in fewer hands than it has been since the 1920s; workers have less power over the conditions under which they toil than ever before in our lifetimes; and the corporation has become the most powerful actor in our world. Yet that rightward shift - still going strong to this day - sells itself as a war against elites, a righteous uprising of the little guy against an obnoxious upper class. At the top of it all sits President George Bush, a former Texas oilman, a Yale graduate, the son of a former president and a grandson of a US senator - the beneficiary of every advantage that upper America is capable of showering on its sons - and a man who also declares that he has a populist streak because of all the disdain showered upon him and his Texas cronies by the high-hats of the East. ... Bush shows every sign of being able to carry a substantial part of the white working-class vote this November, just as he did four years ago....

There was a time, of course, when populism was the native tongue of the American left (1), when working-class people could be counted on to vote in favour of stronger labour unions, a regulated economy and various schemes for universal economic security. Back then the Republicans, who opposed all these things, were clearly identified as the party of corporate management, the spokesmen for society ¡s elite. Republicans are still the party of corporate management, but they have also spent years honing their own populist approach, a melange of anti- intellectualism, promiscuous God-talk and sentimental evocations of middle America in all its humble averageness. Richard Nixon was the first Republican president to understand the power of this combination and every victorious Republican since his administration has also cast himself in a populist light. Bush is merely the latest and one of the most accomplished in a long line of pro-business politicians expressing themselves in the language of the downtrodden.

This right-wing populism works; it is today triumphant across the scene; politicians speak its language, as do newspaper columnists, television pundits and a cast of thousands of corporate spokesmen, Wall Street brokerages, advertising pitchmen, business journalists, and even the Hollywood stars that the right loves to hate. ..."