Richard writes in with comments on my take on Digby's remarks about how the Republican media machine works:
That analysis of Rove by Digby is only half right, and the less interesting half at that. The only reason people like Atwater and Rove were/are able to make something of nothing using such tactics is because people like Dukakis and Kerry WILL NOT run campaigns on class issues. If those useless Dems, now completely in thrall to the monied interests that own them, were to speak plainly about the politics of rich and poor in terms remotely approaching those Kevin Phillips has used in his recent books, no one would give a damn about the Pledge of Allegiance or the twisted Vietnam version of the bloody shirt....(makes me wonder if any historian has taken a look at the extent to which the 'ol bloody shirt was still being waved in the election of 1896; after all, McKinley was a Major in the Union Army). For all his faults and weaknesses, I still think political scientist Thomas Ferguson was mostly on the money in his published analyses of changes in the Democratic Party during the 20th century. It's not a pretty story, but it seems to be where we are living.
Clinton's fortune was in being a person of humble origins and rising to power in a political backwater, which only helped fuel his ambition...he didn't know better. Of course, once he had the brass ring in hand, he readily capitulated on any policy issue that might have mattered to working people. As Bob Woodward documented in his book The Agenda, any progressive tendencies in policy matters Clinton might have had walking into the White House were quickly put in check. As it turned out, that (and having a mediocre opponent) didn't hurt him in '96; it just hurt most people.
This argument squares fairly well, I think, with Thomas Frank in What's The Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America and this article from Harper's Magazine in April 2004, "Lie Down for America" (available via Wilson Web):
Welcome to the Great Backlash, a style of conservatism that is anything but complacent. Whereas earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues--summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art--which it then marries to probusiness economic policies. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends. And it is these economic achievements--not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars--that are the movement's greatest monuments. The backlash is what has made possible the international free-market consensus of recent years, with all the privatization, deregulation, and deunionization that are its components. Backlash ensures that Republicans will continue to be returned to office even when their free-market miracles fail and their libertarian schemes don't deliver and their "New Economy" collapses. It makes possible the policy pushers' fantasies of "globalization" and a free-trade empire that are foisted upon the rest of the world with such self-assurance. Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, U.S.A.
The Great Backlash has made the laissez-faire revival possible, but this does not mean that it speaks to us in the manner of the capitalists of old, invoking the divine right of money or demanding that the lowly learn their place in the great chain of being. On the contrary: The backlash imagines itself as a foe of the elite, as the voice of the unfairly persecuted, as a righteous protest of the people on history's receiving end. That its champions today control all three branches of government matters not a whit. That its greatest beneficiaries are the wealthiest people on the planet does not give it pause.
In fact, backlash leaders systematically downplay the politics of economics. The movement's basic premise is that culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concern--that Values Matter Most, as one backlash book title has it. On those grounds it rallies citizens who would once have been reliable partisans of the New Deal to the standard of conservatism. Old-fashioned values may count when conservatives appear on the stump, but once conservatives are in office the only old-fashioned situation they care to revive is the regimen of low wages and lax regulations. Over the last three decades they have smashed the welfare state, reduced the tax burden on corporations and the wealthy, and generally facilitated the country's return to a nineteenth-century pattern of wealth distribution. Thus the primary contradiction of the backlash: It is a working-class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working-class people.
The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate. Values may "matter most" to voters, but they always take a back seat to the needs of money once the elections are won. This is a basic earmark of the phenomenon, absolutely consistent across its decades-long history. Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act. Even the greatest culture-warrior of them all, Ronald Reagan, was a notorious cop-out once it came time to deliver.
One might expect this reality to vex the movement's true believers. Their grandstanding leaders never produce, their fury mounts and mounts, and nevertheless they turn out every two years to return their right-wing heroes to office for a second, a third, a twentieth try. The trick never ages, the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital-gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization efforts. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.
Backlash theorists imagine countless conspiracies in which the wealthy, powerful, and well-connected--the liberal media, the atheistic scientists, the obnoxious eastern elite--pull the strings and make the puppets dance. And yet the backlash itself has been a political trap so devastating to the interests of Middle America that even the most diabolical of string-pullers would have had trouble dreaming it up. Here, after all, is a rebellion against "the establishment" that has wound up abolishing the tax on inherited estates. Here is a movement whose response to the power structure is to make the rich even richer; whose answer to the undeniable degradation of working-class life is to lash out angrily at labor unions and liberal workplace-safety programs; whose solution to the rise of ignorance in America is to pull the rug out from under public education.
Like a French Revolution in reverse--one in which the sans-culottes pour down the streets demanding more power to the aristocracy--the backlash pushes the spectrum of the acceptable to the right, to the right, further to the right. It may never bring prayer back to the schools, but it has rescued all manner of right-wing economic nostrums from history's dustbin. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Wilson's estate tax, Theodore Roosevelt's antitrust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.
In the backlash imagination, America is in a state of quasi-civil war pitting the unpretentious millions of authentic Americans against the bookish, deracinated, all-powerful liberals who run the country but are contemptuous of the tastes and beliefs of the people who inhabit it. When the chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1992 announced to a national TV audience that "We are America" and "those other people are not," he was merely giving new and more blunt expression to a decades-old formula. Newt Gingrich's famous description of Democrats as "the enemy of normal Americans" was just one more winning iteration of this well-worn theme.
The current installment of this fantasy is the story of "the two Americas," the symbolic division of the country that, after the presidential election of 2000, captivated not only backlashers but a sizable chunk of the pundit class. The idea found its inspiration in the map of the electoral results that year: There were those vast stretches of inland "red" space (all the networks used red to designate Republican victories), where people voted for George W. Bush, and those tiny little "blue" coastal areas, where people lived in big cities and voted for Al Gore. On the face of it there was nothing really remarkable about these red and blue blocs, especially since in terms of the popular vote the contest was essentially a tie.
Still, many commentators divined in the 2000 map a baleful cultural cleavage, a looming crisis over identity and values. These pundits knew--before election night was over and just by looking at the map--what those two Americas represented. Indeed, the explanation was ready to go before the election even happened. The great dream of conservatives ever since the thirties has been a working-class movement that for once takes their side of the issues, that votes Republican and reverses the achievements of working-class movements of the past. In the starkly divided red/blue map of 2000 they thought they saw it being realized: The old Democratic regions of the South and the Great Plains were on their team now, stout blocs of uninterrupted red, while the Democrats were restricted to the old-line, blue-blood states of the Northeast, along with the hedonist left coast.(FN2)
I do not want to minimize the change that this represents. Certain parts of the Midwest were once so reliably leftist that the historian Walter Prescott Webb, in his 1931 history of the region, pointed to its persistent radicalism as one of the "Mysteries of the Great Plains." Today the mystery is only heightened: It seems inconceivable that the Midwest was ever thought of as a "radical" place, as anything but the land of the bland, the easy snoozing flyover. Readers in the thirties, on the other hand, would have known instantly what Webb was talking about, since so many of the great political upheavals of their part of the twentieth century were launched from the territory west of the Ohio River. The region as they knew it was what gave the country Socialists like Eugene Debs, fiery progressives like Robert La Follette, and practical unionists like Walter Reuther. They might even have known that there were once Socialist newspapers in Kansas and Socialist voters in Oklahoma and Socialist mayors in Milwaukee, and that there were radical farmers across the region forever enlisting in militant agrarian organizations like the Farmers' Alliance, or the Farmer-Labor Party, or the Non-Partisan League, or the Farm Holiday Association.
Almost all of these associations have evaporated today. That the region's character has been altered so thoroughly--that so much of the Midwest now regards the welfare state as an alien imposition; that we have trouble even believing there was a time when progressives were described with adjectives like "fiery," rather than "snooty" or "bossy" or "wimpy" --has to stand as one of the great reversals in American history.
So when the electoral map of 2000 is compared with that of 1896--the year of the showdown that pitted the "great commoner," William Jennings Bryan, against the voice of business, William McKinley--a remarkable inversion is indeed evident. Bryan was a Nebraskan, a leftist, and a fundamentalist Christian, an almost unimaginable combination today, and in 1896 he swept most of the country outside the elite Northeast, which stood rock-solid for industrial capitalism. George W. Bush's advisers love to compare their man to McKinley, and armed with the map of 2000 the President's fans are able to envisage the great contest of 1896 refought with optimal results: the politics of McKinley chosen by the Middle American voters for Bryan.
From this one piece of evidence, the electoral map, the pundits simply veered off into authoritative-sounding cultural proclamation. Just by looking at the map, they reasoned, we could easily tell that George W. Bush was the choice of the plain people, the grassroots Americans who inhabited the place we know as the "heartland," a region of humility, guilelessness, and, above all, stout yeoman righteousness. The Democrats, on the other hand, were the party of the elite. Just by looking at the map we could see that liberals were sophisticated, wealthy, and materialistic. While the big cities blued themselves shamelessly, the land knew what it was about and went Republican, by a margin in square miles of four to one.
The attraction of such a scheme for conservatives was powerful and obvious. The Red-state narrative brought majoritarian legitimacy to a President who had actually lost the popular vote. It also allowed conservatives to present their views as the philosophy of a region that Americans--even sophisticated urban ones--traditionally venerate as the repository of national virtue, a place of plain speaking and straight shooting. But then the idea coasted on, becoming a standard element of the media's pop-sociology repertoire. The "two Americas" idea became a hook for all manner of local think pieces (Blue Minnesota is separated by only one thin street from Red Minnesota, but my, how different those two Minnesotas are); it provided an easy tool for contextualizing the small stories (Red Americans love a certain stage show in Vegas, but Blue Americans don't) or for spinning the big stories (John Walker Lindh, the American who fought for the Taliban, was from California and therefore a reflection of Blue-state values); and it justified countless USA Today-style contemplations of who we Americans really are, meaning mainly investigations of the usual--what we Americans like to drive, to watch, to eat, and so forth.
Red America, these stories typically imply, is a mysterious place whose thoughts and values are essentially foreign to society's masters. Like the "Other America" of the sixties or the "Forgotten Men" of the thirties, its vast stretches are tragically ignored by the dominant class--that is, the people who write the sitcoms and screenplays and the stories in glossy magazines, all of whom, according to the conservative commentator Michael Barone, simply "can't imagine living in such places." Which is particularly unfair of them, impudent even, because Red America is in fact the real America, the part of the country where reside, as a story in the Canadian National Post put it, "the original values of America's founding."
The Gore-voting people of the Blue states, meanwhile, were dismissed with what we will call the latte libel: the suggestion that liberals are identifiable by their tastes and consumer preferences and that these tastes and preferences reveal the essential arrogance and foreignness of liberalism. And since many of the pundits who were hailing the virtues of the Red states--pundits, remember, who were conservatives and who supported George W. Bush--actually, physically lived in Blue states that went for Gore, the rules of this idiotic game allowed them to present the latte libel in the elevated language of the confession. David Brooks, who has since made a career out of projecting the liberal stereotype onto the map, took of the pages of The Atlantic to, admit on behalf of everyone who lives in a Blue zone that they are all snobs, toffs, wusses, ignoramuses, and utterly out of touch with the authentic life of the people:
We in the coastal metro Blue areas read more books and attend more plays than the people in the Red heartland. We're more sophisticated and cosmopolitan--just ask us about our alumni trips to China or Provence, or our interest in Buddhism. But don't ask us, please, what life in Red America is like. We don't know. We don't know who Tim La-Haye and Jerry B. Jenkins are.... We don't know what James Dobson says on his radio program, which is listened to by millions. We don't know about Reba and Travis.... Very few of us know what goes on in Branson, Missouri, even though it has seven million visitors a year, or could name even five NASCAR drivers.... We don't know how to shoot or clean a rifle. We can't tell a military officer's rank by looking at his insignia. We don't know what soy beans look like when they're growing in a field.
One is tempted to dismiss Brooks's grand generalizations by rattling off the many ways in which they're wrong: by pointing out that the top three soybean producers--Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota--were in fact Blue states; or by listing the many military bases located on the coasts; or by noting that when it came time to build a NASCAR track in Kansas, the county that won the honor was one of only two in the state that went for Gore. Average per capita income in that same lonely Blue county, I might as well add, is $16,000, which places it well below Kansas and national averages, and far below what would be required for the putting on of elitist or cosmopolitan airs of any kind.
It's pretty much a waste of time, however, to catalogue the contradictions(FN3) and tautologies(FN4) and huge, honking errors(FN5) blowing round in a media flurry like this. The tools being used are the blunt instruments of propaganda, not the precise metrics of sociology. The "two Americas" commentators showed no interest in examining the mysterious inversion of the nation's politics in any systematic way. Their aim was simply to bolster the stereotypes using whatever tools were at hand: to cast the Democrats as the party of a wealthy, pampered, arrogant elite that lives as far as it can from real Americans; and to represent Republicanism as the faith of the hard-working common people of the heartland, an expression of their unpretentious, all-American ways, just like country music and NASCAR. At this pursuit they largely succeeded.
Frank then goes on to detail the devastating economic consequences of this diversion of class politics into cultural politics, concluding:
Let us pause for a moment and gaze across this landscape of dysfunction. A state is spectacularly ill served by the Reagan-Bush stampede of deregulation, privatization, and laissez-faire. It sees its countryside depopulated, its towns disintegrate, its cities stagnate--and its wealthy enclaves sparkle, behind their remote-controlled security gates. The state erupts in revolt, making headlines around the world with its bold defiance of convention. But what do its revolutionaries demand? More of the very measures that have brought ruination on them and their neighbors in the first place.
This is not just the mystery of Kansas; this is the mystery of America, the historical shift that has made it all possible.
In Kansas the shift is more staggering than elsewhere, simply because it has been so decisive, so extreme. The people who were once radical are now reactionary. Although they speak today in the same aggrieved language of victimization, and although they face the same array of economic forces as their hard-bitten ancestors, today's rebels make demands that are precisely the opposite. Tear down the federal farm programs, they cry. Privatize the utilities. Repeal the progressive taxes. All that Kansas asks today is a little help nailing itself to that cross of gold.
This past summer, in response to the trumped up furor over the gay marriage amendment, Frank wrote an insightful op-ed in the New York Times (available via Nexis) on July 16, 2004, adding another angle to the ways in which public opinion is manipulated:
Of course, as everyone pointed out, the whole enterprise was doomed to failure from the start. It didn't have to be that way; conservatives could have chosen any number of more promising avenues to challenge or limit the Massachusetts ruling. Instead they went with a constitutional amendment, the one method where failure was absolutely guaranteed -- along with front-page coverage
Then again, what culture war offensive isn't doomed to failure from the start? Indeed, the inevitability of defeat seems to be a critical element of the melodrama, on issues from school prayer to evolution and even abortion.
Failure on the cultural front serves to magnify the outrage felt by conservative true believers; it mobilizes the base. Failure sharpens the distinctions between conservatives and liberals. Failure allows for endless grandstanding without any real-world consequences that might upset more moderate Republicans or the party's all-important corporate wing. You might even say that grand and garish defeat -- especially if accompanied by the ridicule of the sophisticated -- is the culture warrior's very object.
The issue is all-important; the issue is incapable of being won. Only when the battle is defined this way can it achieve the desired results, have its magical polarizing effect. Only with a proposed constitutional amendment could the legalistic, cavilling Democrats be counted on to vote ''no,'' and only with an offensive so blunt and so sweeping could the universal hostility of the press be secured.
Losing is prima facie evidence that the basic conservative claim is true: that the country is run by liberals; that the world is unfair; that the majority is persecuted by a sinister elite. And that therefore you, my red-state friend, had better get out there and vote as if your civilization depended on it.
Most ironic is the fact that the Republicans now control all three branches of government and still proclaim themselves victims. That is the key to motivating their base. They decry the "culture of victimhood" of minorities etc., but that is where they eat their bread and butter. See, for example, two articles in today's New York Times Arts section. In one article, the head of a movie distribution studio rejects a documentary about the Iraq War because he is afraid that he will be accused of liberal bias; in the other, conservative writers complain that they can't get their books published even though the lie-filled Unfit for Command tops the best-seller lists in the wake of its multimillion dollars of free publicity provided by our network and cable news outfits.
Rich white men make the best victims.
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