So, I finished "What's the Matter with Kansas" another book by Thomas Frank. And I have to say, my knee jerk reaction? Between the republicans and the democrats, we are in hell. In Listen Liberal, frank talked mostly about the democratic party and the forces that made it as it is today, notably its rejection of the labor movement in favor of professional politics and centrism. What's the matter with Kansas looks at the GOP. And it's not a pretty picture.
According to Frank, the GOP IS essentially the party of the working class and of "normal people", but that in a sense, the whole concept of class is actually missing from the equation. In Frank's eyes, the right is waging a class war on the professional class, and it's mostly over culture. Conservatives see themselves as humble and authentic. They work hard, they go to church, they pay their taxes, and have to put up with dripping condescension from the liberal class on the coasts, who hate them for existing. Now, conservatives don't hate these guys because they're successful, but because they are cultured and snotty and look down their nose at the common man. They put their fork on the left and knife on the right. They think they're so superior, and that we're all living under the thumb of their arbitrary commands and edicts.
He sees the right as engaged in a culture war against this upper class left, and it's a culture war driven by backlash. Liberals say and do stupid things, or want to do things that threaten their way of life, and they react against it, in a perpetual state of outrage. I have to say, much like Listen Liberal, I think he's right about a lot of things, but I also think he's wrong.
Like one thing that stands out to me is that he doesn't think the right has a coherent ideology. Maybe history has proven him right with the acceptance of Donald Trump and withdrawing further into anti intellectualism (something Frank predicted all the way back in 2004), but as someone who had my political awakening during the 2004 election cycle as a teenager, I really feel like, as someone who was on the inside and a conservative at the time, he missed a lot.
I mean here's the thing, as an ex conservative, I can honestly say, yeah, he's right. There is a lot of conservative disdain of the left. The concept that the left thinks they're so much better. That conservatives are more humble, god fearing, and moral. But, I'm going to be honest, they DO have a consistent ideology. Something I learned fairly well early on, in my conservatism was actually the importance of ideology and worldviews. So allow me to do a brief taxonomy of my former conservative views here.
Ultimately, while conservatism has always been a coalition movement based on multiple factions, as I saw it, these factions came together and formed a coherent ideology, where people of these different ideologies all got something out of voting conservative.
For me at least, I think the big underlying principles are ones of "god" and "country". My own conservative worldview always had a religious overtone to it, in which the world was based on biblical principles (according to modern conservatism fundamentalism), and that god and christianity was the most important thing to me. God wanted the world to be a certain way, and it just so happened that society peaked in like, the 1950s. Women had their place in the home, we lived in a very evangelical culture, and our country had always been founded on God and Christianity. The founding fathers, as I understood them, were like prophets. They understood the sinful nature of man so made a conservative government based on democracy and separation of powers in order to control the sins and vices of man. And America was founded on those ideals. All men created equal, the constitution being morally correct. And society reaching its peak with the founding. over the years, any deviation from the founders intentions were bad, and America was built on God, conservatism, "freedom", and capitalism. And America is constantly under assault from the left. Starting in the 1960s those darned liberals went too far and started changing things, like taking God out of schools, and legalizing abortion, and stuff like that. This led to the moral decay of society and increased crime rates from the 60s onward, blah blah blah.
On economics, my views were always weird. While I would describe myself as a Reaganite and a believer in the free market, I was really only trained to hate America from the 1960s onward, meaning I actually did have a more nuanced view of FDR and realized he did "save" capitalism with the new deal and stuff. But I also understood that we werent in the 1930s any more and that government had gotten too big, especially with Johnson. I was especially raised to hate welfare. Welfare for me was something that deserving people couldnt get, and that lazy goodfornothings and immigrants always got. There was always a tinge to racism in how I viewed it, because let's face it, the boomer generation that taught me these thigns hated it for those reasons. it was part of the dog whistle politics of Nixon and Reagan. And while I was never explicitly racist, there were always latent racist undertones in my views that I didn't realize until decades later.
Still, there were a lot of elements Frank talked about in my views. I was always in an uproar over liberal wars against america, and blah blah blah. And as far as the more anti intellectual things go, here's how I saw it. Liberals were basically "playing God" in my view. While many of them were well intentioned, as I saw it, things like the markets and human nature, were literal forces of nature that are best left alone. Markets and human nature were unchangeable. Humans were evil, and greedy, and needed to be controlled, but mostly through religion. Government efforts to rein in these forces normally did more harm than good. Leftists were seen as "intellectuals" who thought themselves as intelligent, but arrogant. They wanted to make society better, but they did so in ways that didnt work and made things worse. Like, the government might make a program that helps the poor, but it does so in taking from productive people who work, and giving it to those who dont, making them lazy and dependent on government. The real solution was to show tough love, to MAKE them work, and MAKE them be productive, so that they can pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Stuff like that. Regulations just led to less efficiency. Shift burden to customers, etc. And of course, we were still enthralled in the boogeyman that was the USSR. The USSR was what peak liberalism was, a dystopia where people who tried to engineer a better society failed miserably, leading to a dystopia. Liberal efforts to control everything inevitably lead to that kind of society, and that's why we had to fight the liberals. We had to fight for the real america and "freedom".
Now, much like Frank described in his book, I had a falling out with conservatism. His falling out came in college with him not getting the same opportunities as his richer classmates who were being groomed for republican party positions while his social class ensured he never got anywhere. And as such, he eventually became a democrat and left.
With me, my shift to the left was a bit more gradual and slow. While I was one of these conservative culture warriors around the time he wrote this book, in the later 2000s I went to college and moderated a bit, taking up political science as my major because I thought that that's what "God" wanted. And while I tried to resist changing in college, it was impossible. Because education teaching you things. And challenges your views. So over time my conservative worldview ended up becoming more and more fragmented as more and more holes developed in my worldview. While backlash culture did temporarily shift me back in 2008 to be anti Obama, intellectually I largely compensated by shifting from a religious form of conservatism to a more Ron paul style libertarianism. And after 2010, the tea party horrified me so much that I ended up leaving for good, causing me to become one of those snooty, secular liberals who wanted to give everyone free money (literally).
I kind of find it interesting how Frank seemed to predict this shift would happen. Frank seemed to have a lot of mention of infighting between moderate establishment republicans and conservative masses. And while the moderates remained in control of the party for a while, eventually the inmates took over the asylum and post 2008 they were purged from the party. This drove more intellectual conservatives out of the party and toward liberalism. And then Trump did the same thing. And of course, even back then, Frank was criticizing the democratic party for playing up stereotypes the right had of the left, being fixated on winning over those moderate conservatives leaving rather than winning the working class back. So he called that one.
Honestly, reading this in 2022, it seems clear that despite my criticism of Frank on conservatives not having an ideology, his model is proving to be correct. The cons HAVE taken over. The party IS anti intellectual. It IS powered by backlash politics. And the democrats ARE more interested in simply winning over moderate professional class voters than actually taking the dialogue back.
Honestly, 2016 was the perfect time to bring back working class politics, but the dems have stacked the deck so far against that that their coalition of professional class moderates and minorities is unstoppable at the time, with progressives and people like me (yang gangers) having little chance to make it in a democratic party primary.
Honestly, we are in hell. The democrats have zero interest in a working class movement to improve peoples' lives, having sold their souls decades ago, and the republicans are basically entralled in this "schwarzen mann" mentality akin to the Angst music video I discussed, with anti intellectual nutjobs leading movements and driving the country off of the cliff.
While this arrangement is great for the rich (until it tears the fabric of society) apart, it's terrible for anyone who actually wants to improve things for the better. Whether it be Frank's politics or my own. So yeah, I have to recommend this book regardless of my differences with Frank's view and his politics.
On a side note, to discuss my post 2012 politics a bit, it does make sense, given both of Frank's books, why I never got into the democratic party's politics. I am, demographically, one of those working class white guys who was conservative and was at one time, religious and humble and caught up in culture war BS too. And I always had these stereotypes of the left that were broken when I came over in 2012. In 2012, the GOP became rabidly crazy post tea party, while liberals seemed more moderate, cordial, and nothing like what I was raised to believe. yes, they were snarky, and reality did have a liberal bias, but at the same time, I still had that deep seated disdain for elitism. While I would occasionally be elitist, it's ebcause as a political science major i understood experts actually knew what they were talking about, and how they werent all dumb. But, I quickly tried to engineer a new type of liberalism in a few short years to counter the right's perceptions and break the working class free of their perceptions. UBI was based on old school conservative/libertarian principles from the new deal era, when conservatism was moderate. It was an approach to welfare that rebuffed most of my criticisms of it when I was a conservative. It was simple, you couldn't mess it up, and the science showed IT WORKED. Instead, dems seemed to go for these weird fragmented technocratic solutions that didnt work, and just fueled the conservative mentality of government nto working. I also tried to avoid most culture war battles. Id take on the anti intellectualism and the religious crazies on the right, promoting a form of secular intellectualism intended to engineer our societies to be better, but again, I always advocated for what i believed worked. But then in 2016, the dems ruined it with their professional class bend. They instead ignored economic issues, leaned into culture war BS, and alienated the masses. And as such, we are still in hell. With one side actually LIKING trump, and the other being clueless and stuck in their upper class social justice warrior mentalities that just end up inflaming people and driving them to the right.
Say it with me guys, WE ARE IN HELL. Politically? This is hell. We've been here for a while. I'm just realizing the full implications of this in the past few years, and yeah, we're screwed. We literally need a full on party realignment to get out of this mess. As long as we keep feeding the technocratic democratic party and the anti intellectual GOP and fight mostly culture war nonsense, we are SCREWED. And yeah, that's my take on things.
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