BY TOM MERTES
... For all his spirited retorts to hucksters like David Brooks, [Thomas] Frank flinches from acknowledging the core of cold truth in their legends and demagogic stereotypes. In the recent Presidential election, the Democrats picked the wealthiest individual since George Washington ever to run for the White House as their candidate, outgunned the Republicans 59 to 41 per cent among donors with assets over $10 million, outspent Bush in every swing state of the Union, and hit an all-time financial record for a senatorial campaign: $17 million in a failed attempt to get Daschle back on the Hill. Moreover, there is little that is new in this: since the nineties virtually all of the richest electoral districts in the country have been Democratic bastions, Clinton’s cash-mountain easily topped Dole’s in 1996, and the Democrats have regularly received larger individual donations than Republicans, whose strength has been among smaller donors. In this situation, workers who vote Republican may be less deluded than Frank seems to believe. Putting it in sociological language, since there is so little to choose ‘instrumentally’ between the two parties, each of them dedicated to capital unbound, why not at least get the satisfaction of voting ‘expressively’ for the one which seems to speak for their values, if not their interests?
If Frank sidesteps the political economy of the blue plutocracy, it is unlikely to be just out of tactical considerations. What’s the Matter with Kansas? is a completely honourable book, free of any hint of the electoral pandering that has marred contributions like Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911. Rather, what seems to have happened is that as a former Republican youngster of the Reagan era, Frank has reacted by vaguely idealizing Democratic rulers of an earlier age. More than once he intimates that ‘forty years ago’, the party was still a beacon of enlightenment, and indeed even now he can write that ‘it is the Democrats who are the party of the workers, the poor, of the weak and the victimized. Understanding this, we think, is part of the abcs of adulthood’. The weak link in his book, which runs through it like a wistful refrain, uniting past and present, is the broken-backed notion of American liberalism. Though he concedes that ‘liberalism deserves a large part of the blame for the backlash phenomenon’, he does not explain why this should be so, or whether it has anything to do with the nature of the phenomenon itself, rather than simply its decline. But it is enough to note that Frank can write of ‘the things liberalism once stood for—equality and economic security’ to realize that we are in the realm of historical mythology. Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson champions of equality! They would be turning in their graves. The Democratic Party and its ‘liberalism’: the great tradition of the Palmer Raids, Nisei camps, Loyalty oaths, Agent Orange in Vietnam, assassinations in Africa and coups in Latin America, not to speak of the ferocious protection of capital at home and abroad.
What has changed in recent years is not some falling away from earlier high ideals, but the social environment in which the Democratic elites were once able to dominate the political system by combining captive electorates of incompatible character in the South and North, as the very capitalism the party enthusiastically whipped forward eventually undermined its grip on white rural voters in a rapidly industrializing South, and atomized its black and worker constituencies in the North. The result today has been a fatal hollowing out of the party on the ground. Ward, precinct and county structures are shells—rotten ones, in much of the South. Blue-collar voters have learned that they have very little to gain from the party. Along with black church and community organizations, the unions still constitute the closest thing the Democrats have got to a local political machine, but they have been desperately weakened, not only numerically (down to 13 per cent of the workforce nationally, a mere 3 per cent in the South) and politically, but also as a space where working-class education and solidarity could unfold.
In Ohio, JoAnn Wypijewski has reported, the Democrats had serious organization in nine counties; the Republicans had it in all eighty-eight. Instead, Kerry’s ‘air war’ bombarded the electorate from 30,000 feet. America Coming Together, MoveOn.org and the other 527s bussed in white college kids and paid mercenaries to rust-belt towns with double-digit unemployment and high ex-convict levels, not to stay and help organize around community issues but to sign up votes for Kerry and get out. [14] By contrast, the gop has rebuilt itself nationally over the past decades and could mobilize nearly a million local party volunteers in 2004, with committees in over 3,000 us counties. Add to that the powerful conservative church organizations and it is easy to see why, with the electorate still more or less evenly divided, the Republicans can dominate all three branches of government.
Frank has offered some pungent advice to the Democrats in the wake of this debacle. Let us hope the next book this fine writer gives us will be as uncompromising a portrait of its massive edifice of sleaze and hypocrisy as he has provided for latter-day Republicans, without resort to the weasel L-word that is America’s tarnished substitute for a Left. The two-fisted spirit of his feisty journal out of Chicago, the Baffler, is what a radical politics in the us most needs today.
<http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR26402.shtml>
Carl