I was mostly annoyed by What’s the Matter with Kansas, even though I do think that Thomas Frank has some valid points. Unfortunately, I have done just enough reading of social science to find the use of individual history backed up by a handful or even a hundred interviews incredibly sloppy as a data source for Telling Us What To Do. I don’t have any reason to believe that Mr. Frank’s observations are wrong—they seem right—but I can’t bring myself to trust them. So his interpretation of what he observes grates on me.
I’m glad the book exists, and I’m glad I read it, and I think his basic point is largely accurate, at least as I understand it. I’ll give the point in brief like this: The Democratic Party, having abandoned working-class rhetoric in favor of pro-business moderation, won a few presidential elections at the cost of allowing Republicans to push business and class out of the political realm, creating a vacuum that they filled with religion as a blind. The working class, then, largely votes for an anti-worker party because at least that party is on their side on religious matters, and they neither see a pro-worker party nor expect a political party to be pro-worker. I’ll just underline that, of course, large chunks of the working class do vote Democratic, so the Mr. Frank is describing the relative, rather than absolute, success of three or four strands of political rhetoric. And, of course, Mr. Frank appears to assume that either the Democrats could have won some elections with working-class rhetoric or that it wouldn’t have mattered much if we had lost them. I can’t agree with either. Try to imagine if Bill Clinton had lost in 1992, and what the world would look like now. Or try to imagine my man Tom Harkin winning in 1992. No, everything comes at a cost, and even now I don’t know that the cost of going pro-business was too high.
I mean, I would prefer if the Democrats had successfully been a pro-worker party all along, if Mr. Gore and Mr. Lieberman hadn’t succeeded in pushing the Party’s agenda to support corporate capitalism and we had won a bunch of elections that way. And maybe we would have. Maybe Mario Cuomo would have won in 1988, or in 1992. But I doubt it. And democracy, fundamentally, involves accepting that I don’t to determine what will be popular.
Which does connect to one of the things that annoyed me in Mr. Frank’s book. He points out, as lots of observers do, that union members vote for Democrats, even in demographic groups that vote for Republicans. He takes that correlation as causative in one direction, and suggests that we should put more effort into union organizing, in order to get more votes (while also claiming that the faintness of the Party’s support for labor meant fewer union workers and fewer Democratic voters). I would like to see more organizing, as I think unions are good for workers (and for honest management), and I certainly think that union members get some social support for voting Democratic that has got to help. But I think it’s hard to say that the causation is one way, or that it exists at all. More likely there are social factors in groups that both make it difficult to unionize and lead them to vote for Republicans. Certainly, in a workplace where Republican rhetoric dominates, a union drive will struggle. In a workplace where people are resistant to unions, largely because (I imagine) they believe that unions are corrupt and counterproductive, Republican rhetoric should find fertile soil.
Which goes back to a point I’ve been making for a while now. If we want Democrats to win elections, or Republicans to lose them, or if we want the kinds of policies Democrats support to be implemented, or if we want to keep Republican policies from being implemented, then we have to sell our world-view along with our candidates. Or, rather, the Party has to sell candidates at elections, and the rest of the year the people in the Party and out of it too have to sell the world-view. We have to explain how our economic life need not be about the struggle of behemoths. We have to explain how workers need protection, and how they can find and provide that protection. We have to explain how, yes, some of us are different one to another, and that really does make life interesting and fun.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.