Posted on 06/07/2005 7:13:08 PM PDT by Lorianne
If only working-class and poor people would register and vote, liberal Democrats would win every election-that's what we thought, until November 2, 2004. Democrats work on voter registration, Republicans work on vote suppression. So tens of millions were spent on Democratic voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts over the summer and fall. But on November 2 we discovered how wrong we were. Turnout in poor and working-class precincts was unprecedented, but many of those voters cast their ballots for George W. Bush-especially white people from non-union households, especially outside of cities. How did the Republicans do it? How did they get poor people to vote for tax cuts for the rich?
Thomas Frank became the pundit of the hour for his answer to those questions. In his best-selling book What's the Matter with Kansas?, published before the election, he argued that Republicans distracted and confused ordinary voters with a phony kind of class-war rhetoric and with the culture wars. In short, they fostered what we used to call "false consciousness." In Marxist theory, when workers accept the ruling ideology that justifies their exploitation, they have false consciousness. It's "a failure to recognize the instruments of one's oppression or exploitation as one's own creation, as when members of an oppressed class unwittingly adopt views of the oppressor class"-that's the dictionary definition. It's when ordinary workers "insist on re-electing the very people who are screwing them" - that's Tom Frank's definition.
The notion of "false consciousness" has always been appealing. But it's not hard to critique what is false; the problem is to know what is true. It's not just the postmodernists who object to the notion that we know the truth; almost all the people on the left who have lived through the political reversals of the last thirty years have developed a more humble sense of their analytical powers.
Although Frank uses the term "false consciousness" only a couple of times, his book provides the best example of both the strengths and the weaknesses of this kind of analysis. He brings to life the notion of false consciousness by focusing on the way the poorest counties on the Great Plains have turned Republican and "drifted into delusion" (Barbara Ehrenreich's phrase). He shows how the Republicans and their media voices-Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and so on-appeal to ordinary people with a class-conscious anger at "the elite." This elite is not the capitalist class; it is the liberals, who are held responsible for the "decline" in "values" that voters are called on to reverse. This ideology demonizes the New York and L.A. types who got rich by pushing sex and violence in the media; they are Volvo-driving, Brie-eating, latte-sipping snobs who have nothing in common with the problems or values of ordinary people.
In a wonderful phrase, Frank terms this argument "the latte libel." He paints an irresistible and hilarious picture of this "mutant strain of class war." And he has great fun pointing out its flaws: there is more sex and violence on the Murdoch-owned Fox networks than on the supposedly left-wing CBS-TV; "the mighty ACLU" does not control Hollywood; Desperate Housewives gets higher ratings in the heartland than it does in Manhattan or West L.A. In fact it is the free market that is destroying "traditional values." Because of the free market, all that is solid melts into air.
The culture wars foster false consciousness above all by focusing on abortion. Take away people's good industrial jobs, Frank writes, and the "next thing you know they're protesting in front of abortion clinics." How do you get poor people to vote for tax cuts for the rich? By convincing them that the issue is not tax cuts for the rich, it's stopping the slaughter of the unborn. And if you really believe the fetus is a person with a right to life, saving the lives of those helpless "babies" is a moral imperative that makes tax policy pretty insignificant. And if abortion is not your thing, there is school prayer, gun rights, and gay marriage-lots of issues to get angry about. This consciousness is false because it depends on "a systematic erasure of the economic." It really is a trick, a kind of sleight of hand: don't look at people who are taking away your jobs; look at the people who are taking away your guns!
Today the Republicans control almost everything-the White House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, most of the governorships and state houses. So how can they continue to demonize Democrats as the cause of the problems of ordinary people? Here Frank is at his most provocative: the "vague cultural grievances" fostered by the right are "incapable of ever being assuaged." Abortion is not going to be criminalized; the Ten Commandments will not be inscribed in the courthouses; school prayer is never going to become mandatory; sex and violence will not be eliminated from movies or television. The right has declared a war in which victory is impossible; in Frank's unforgettable phrase, "the backlash was born to lose." False consciousness about "values" makes for political war that is permanent.
The question about this false consciousness, of course, is still, "What is to be done?" We have two competing answers. Conservative Democrats like Bill and Hillary Clinton say it is time to "engage the American heartland in a conversation about religion and values." Jim Wallis is the leading strategist on this front. In his book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, Wallis points out that Jesus never said anything about tax cuts for the rich. Thus Wallis would enlist Jesus on the side of class consciousness.
Tom Frank says this response to the Republicans is a betrayal. The way to fight false consciousness is not to debate about Jesus, but rather to reassert the primacy of class in America. Instead of fighting on the Republicans' terrain, Democrats should make class war the answer to the culture war, and restore economic issues to the center of the progressive political message: the primary cause of suffering in America is not the liberal elite, but rather the big corporations and their Republican friends.
Frank's case is a powerful and compelling one, but it has come in for some sharp and significant criticism from writers who know a lot about false consciousness. According to the theory, for consciousness to be false, a challenge to the ruling ideology must be available to ordinary people. That challenge would lead to "class consciousness"-an awareness of social conflict and of the potential power of working people to transform the status quo.
But if it's false consciousness for poor and working people to vote Republican, does a worker with class consciousness automatically vote Democratic? Here Frank's argument gets shaky. The "true" interests of the working class in America today start with jobs. But the de-industrialization of America, and the export of good industrial jobs to Mexico and now to China, was the policy of Bill Clinton, who introduced, fought for, and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. John Kerry went along with that project. His jobs program in 2004 was pathetic: tax cuts for the rich-in this case, for corporations that don't export jobs. But if unemployed industrial workers in Kansas wanted to vote their true interests in protecting decent jobs, why would they support the candidate and the party that established the policies that did away with those jobs?
Frank knows this history. He holds the Democrats responsible for helping to create our "landscape of distortion, of paranoia, and of good people led astray." The Democratic Party abandoned class issues; under the malevolent leadership of the Democratic Leadership Council, the party followed Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Joe Lieberman to "forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues." The real strategic turn came when the DLC began relying on contributions from the corporate world. The result is that the Democratic Party is now rock solid in its commitment to preserving choice, but happy to concede to the corporations on economic issues like the North American Free Trade Agreement, labor law, deregulation, and tax cuts. Just when ordinary people most needed equality and economic security, the Democrats abandoned them. And because the Democrats no longer speak the language of class, their former base is left open and vulnerable to false consciousness around abortion, school prayer, guns, and gays. Frank terms this strategy not only "ruinous" but "criminally stupid."
The opposite of false consciousness is class consciousness. Where does class consciousness come from? Does it arise spontaneously from the experience of ordinary workers? Frank says no-people do not necessarily understand their situation or know how to act to defend their interests. The role of a political party is to explain these things, to define interests, and then to fight for them. But the Democrats have little to say about the interests of ordinary people, while the Republicans are full of angry arguments that identify problems and propose solutions.
Here is where the objections arise. Tom Mertes, writing in the New Left Review (Nov-Dec 2004), notes that, in Frank's 250-page book, only 8 pages are devoted to criticizing the Democrats. And while the critique is "robust enough," it fails to ask the obvious question: why does the Democratic Party act the way it does? By calling the Democrats "criminally stupid," Frank implies that the solution is simply for them to get smart-to bring them to their senses, to recall their true mission: fight for equality, solidarity, and social progress.
But the Democrats' problem, Mertes argues, is not simply stupidity. The party is controlled "largely by the super-rich," and in understanding and fighting for their own interests, they have been fairly smart. The evidence lies in what Mertes terms "the blue plutocracy": virtually all of the wealthiest electoral districts in the country have become Democratic bastions. Bill Clinton may have been a poor boy from Hope, but the Democrats' candidate in 2004 was the richest man ever to run for the White House. More of the super-rich favored the Democrats in 2004-the divide was 59-41 among individuals with assets above $10 million. That's why working-class consciousness was not part of the Democratic Party message.
Frank's second great failing, according to Mertes, is his romantic idealization of the Democratic Party of yesteryear. Is this Frank's own false consciousness? Forty years ago, he suggests, the Democrats were "the party of the workers, the poor, the weak and the victimized." Mertes's response is a familiar one: from Wilson to Truman to Kennedy, and, yes, including Roosevelt, the Democrats practiced "the ferocious protection of capital at home and abroad." It's true, of course, as Marxists have often argued, that FDR saved capitalism. But it can hardly have been false consciousness for workers in 1936 to support the party and the president that had just passed the Wagner Act, which put the power of the federal government behind the creation of the CIO.
Mike Davis (in an unpublished conference paper) has a different critique. He points out that culture war is hardly an invention of the last two decades-on the contrary, it is "the default condition of American politics." Religion, race, and ethnicity have "structured the field" of party politics for the last two centuries. The Protestants versus the Papists, the Nativists versus the immigrants, and of course the whites versus the blacks-that's been the story in American political life. In fact, there have been only a few decades in which any form of class conflict came to dominate the issues-the 1890s, the 1930s, with the latter being almost unique.
Davis insists we need to question whether the various forms of ethno-religious politics in fact represented a consciousness that was genuinely "false." Often they were part of a "defense of perceived systems of privilege and entitlement." False consciousness in the classic sense, he argues, "embracing purely imaginary solidarities with one's exploiter," is "not common." Culture war "rages most fiercely when it is able to mobilize material self-interest, however ignorant or short-sighted."
Frank offers the poorest county in the United States-McPherson County, Nebraska-as his prime example of false consciousness. It voted 80 percent Republican in 2000. But the people who vote there, Davis points out, are mostly small cattle ranchers. Their incomes put them among the nation's poor, but their assets give them the interests of property owners. So voting Republican isn't necessarily delusional or self-destructive. And their assets make them the wrong people to serve as examples of voters who are poor or working class.
A more telling example of the political consciousness of declining workers, Davis argues, can be found in West Virginia, where deindustrialization has been catastrophic, and where the shift to the right has been more dramatic than any other state. It was once a Democratic stronghold, but Kerry lost West Virginia by 13 percent. And although many mine and mill workers voted against him, they voted for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, and Democrats held on to two of three congressional seats with an impressive two-thirds of the vote. Is this schizophrenic divide an example of false consciousness? Davis argues that it is not: the Democrats who were elected in West Virginia made jobs the center of their campaigns, while Kerry offered only that pathetic proposal for tax breaks for corporations that didn't export jobs. Bush, meanwhile, had imposed tariffs on imported steel in 2001, which could be spun as taking a stand against the European competitors who were killing West Virginia's mines and mills. That was certainly deceptive, but it was more than Kerry did.
There is one more problem that critics have found with Frank's argument for "false consciousness." Although the evidence is overwhelming that Republican media pounded away to foment culture war, it's not at all clear that cultural issues provided the basis of working-class votes for Bush. Despite the conventional wisdom the day after the election that "values" had been the Republicans' trump card, opinion polls showed that the number of voters who said they voted primarily on the basis of "values" in fact declined: in 1996 (Clinton-Dole) it was 40 percent; in 2000 (Bush-Gore) it was 35 percent; and in 2004 it fell to 22 percent. If these polls are accurate, we have to conclude that the culture war as a basis for voting has steadily lost ground over the last decade.
Why, then, did so many working-class and poor voters support George Bush? The evidence is that abortion, gun rights, school prayer, and gay marriage were not the decisive issues. The key issues, as Mark Danner argued in the New York Review of Books of January, 13, 2005, were the attacks of September 11, 2001; terrorism; and war. You can call it "false consciousness" for workers to support war, and that of course is the classic Marxist position going back to the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. But that's not Frank's argument. Although his book was published in 2004, the September 11 attacks get two pages, "Iraq" doesn't appear in the index, and the only terrorists he mentions are the homegrown ones who struck in Oklahoma City.
I don't think it is false consciousness to fear another terrorist attack; I think it's rational. And it's not a class issue. Of course, the president has manipulated that fear, used that fear as the basis of an ideology, in the classic sense of that term. Crudely put, the claim is that working- class and poor people should vote for the party that is screwing them because that party is also protecting them from our enemies. That's a different kind of "false consciousness," one that is harder to fight because it invokes real problems and real dangers.
The most vivid and indeed unforgettable parts of Tom Frank's book are his detailed portraits of ordinary people in his home state of Kansas trying to make sense of their situations and not succeeding. Now we need him to go back and talk to them about terrorism and war, to understand the new forms of false consciousness that shaped the outcome of the 2004 election.
Jon Wiener (Wiener@uci.edu) is the author of Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower (The New Press, 2005). He is a contributing editor of the Nation and teaches history at UC Irvine.
I don't think it is false consciousness to fear another terrorist attack; I think it's rational. And it's not a class issue. Of course, the president has manipulated that fear, used that fear as the basis of an ideology, in the classic sense of that term. Crudely put, the claim is that working- class and poor people should vote for the party that is screwing them because that party is also protecting them from our enemies. That's a different kind of "false consciousness," one that is harder to fight because it invokes real problems and real dangers.Well, DUH. And there is nothing "false" about it. The first priority of any political entity is to protect its members. If it fails that, it fails entirely.
More of the same "people are too stupid to vote" ... but highly entertaining nonetheless.
****How did they get poor people to vote for tax cuts for the rich? ****8
This story is long and full of crap. How come Democrats voted for tax cuts for the rich? They didnt. We had Momma T who paid 15% taxes last year we had George Soros, we Had Kerry a rich kid himself, we had Ted Kennedy rich man,we had Edwards anothe rich lawyer, we had all these rich Dems telling Dems to vote against Bush because of tax cuts. Even Dems arent stupid enough to listen to rich people calling Republicans rich and saying vote against them because they are rich. Their whole program was a lie ,only the most stupid Dems couldnt see it.Tie that in with John F'in Kerrys Viet nams lies and we have a winner in George Bush.
Well at least they have given up calling the red staters stupid. They merely suffer from false consciousness.
"He is a contributing editor of the Nation and teaches history at UC Irvine."
Perhaps Governor Schwarzenegger should be notified that there is an identifyable Communist on his payroll.
A couple of months ago, I was in Luang Prabong, Laos. There is a large prison on the outskirts of town that was dedicated to "reeducating the local rice farmers as to what their "real interests and beliefs" were. The government is building a new prison some 3 Km out of town. I suspect that it will serve the same purpose. Doubtless many of the Mao (Hmong) who are surrendering will be beneficiaries of a first rate education. After all, as Frank would doubtless tell you, many in the working class are too stupid to understand what is in their own interest.
If you can't even ask basic, honest questions, then you'll never get at the truth.
LOL! A limousine liberal university professor lecturing about class-warfare! And he still has no idea what the problem is! Unbelievable.
"How did they get poor people to vote for tax cuts for the rich?"
"If you can't even ask basic, honest questions, then you'll never get at the truth."
Very well put. He's not willing to put the situation in honest terms, and then he is surprised when he can't figure out what's wrong with the situation. That seems to be what's going on all over the Democratic Party. I don't see the slightest introspection going on, just patting themselves on the back and claiming that everybody that doesn't vote for them is stupid.
Imagine what it's like to love your "poor" lifestyle, and NOT want to race the rats, dine with celebrities, or shop Manhattan.
Those poor, stupid cattle ranchers don't know what they're missing.
"Thomas Frank became the pundit of the hour for his answer to those questions."
No... Thomas Frank is advocating more of the same. The only Democrat who correctly identified the problems with the Democratic party among working class voters was Zell Miller, and he was pretty much exiled for it.
And...? You say that like it's a bad thing ;)
Here's my idea - when guys like Frank and Wiener (did I just say that?) start expounding on how the basic problem is that the mouth-breathers are too dumb to vote their own best interests, let's all just shut up and let them ramble on. They're their own worst enemies, and why interfere when your opponent has thrown a rope over a nearby tree branch and is just about to kick the stool out from under himself?
LOL
"why interfere when your opponent has thrown a rope over a nearby tree branch and is just about to kick the stool out from under himself?"
Because there's absolutely no risk that they will listen and change their ways. They are total fanatics incapable of objective thought.
In "A National Party No More", Zell Miller listed and explained the reasons the Democrats have totally lost Rural, Southern, and Working Class voters. Not only was he right about those reasons, but he also told the reader exactly what was going to happen in 2004 if the party didn't change strategy. And you know what... he was 100% right. Yet he is immediately dismissed if I mention him to one of my Democratic friends. The fact is Democrats don't want honest answers and solutions, they just want to pat themselves on the back and call others stupid.
Is there a way to send this thread to the author? Maybe he'd be interested what we think of his analysis. It's actually quite good - much of it - with the obvious flaw that he assumes we all care about money and social climbing.
WE DON'T. Never have, never will.
Why does he assume that we're impressed or jealous if someone earns more than us? A: Because he, himself, is like that.
Attention, want, and selfishness are all he understands.
i stopped reading at the line "conservative democrats Bill and Hillary Clinton
I think the author has discovered a formula for utterly worthless non-fiction writing.
Write an illogical absurd counter factual counter intuitive ESSAY comparing several illogical absurd counter factual counter intuitive BOOKS.
You should email the link of this thread to his email address given in the article.
Summary-
We're stupid. The Republicans took advantage of our stupidity. Democrats must save us from our stupidity since it led us to vote for Republicans.
Yeah. This is the way to bring back voters. Say we're stupid because we saw through the liberal failures of the past sixty years. Say we've never known an honest days work. And attack Christians and their faith. Woohoo. brilliant strategy!
No, no, no. We're not stoopid ... we're victims of false consiousness. We're suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome. We need help a.s.a.p.
We should be glad they care about our well-being.
I think it is simpler than the rather overlong convuluted analysis presented in the article. The blue collar white voters in less urbanized areas don't see much of a difference between the parties on economic issues that they care about, and thus feel free to vote on cultural matters and personal appeal. The parties have lost their image as class based, both of them, which also shows up in the decline in GOP votes in chic precincts. In part this is due I think to the increasing sophistication of the voters that, despite the rhetoric, the economic options of both parties in reality are rather tightly constrained, by the global market and budgetary concerns and the horrific cost of entitlements.
"attack Christians and their faith. Woohoo. brilliant strategy!"
That's really the core of their problem. An arrogant, dismissive, and at times hostile attitude toward religious values and rural necessities.
That includes issues ranging from Gay Marriage to the Estate Tax... and sums up the Democrats problem.
However, this phrase alone shows him to be a real nimrod:
Conservative Democrats like Bill and Hillary Clinton say it is time to "engage the American heartland in a conversation about religion and values."
If the Clintons are Conservative Democrats, then I'm the world's most successful gigolo.
Democrats are no longer the part of the working man. Us working class stiffs know that, and the dems don't like it. They are now the party of rich leftists, pro-aborts, gun grabbers, union bosses, the gay lobby, academia, and race pimps. Now these arrogant idiots are saying that us working class people are "voting against our best interests". That's a pile of horse manure. These people aren't intelligent enough to know what my interests are.
Fox News, and so on-appeal to ordinary people with a class-conscious anger at "the elite." This elite is not the capitalist class; it is the liberals, who are held responsible for the "decline" in "values" that voters are called on to reverse. This ideology demonizes the New York and L.A. types who got rich by pushing sex and violence in the media; they are Volvo-driving, Brie-eating, latte-sipping snobs who have nothing in common with the problems or values of ordinary people.
It's true. Look at where the leftists get all their money. Hollywood, foundations(Pew, Joyce Foundation, MacArthur Fund, Robert Woods Johnson, Goldman Fund, Trauma Fund, Tides Foundation), George Soros, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates. They also have free advertisement in the media.
don't look at people who are taking away your jobs; look at the people who are taking away your guns!
Some of the SAME people who are taking away my guns are taking away my jobs. John Kerry and Bill Klinton are leaders in outsourcing.
Conservative Democrats like Bill and Hillary Clinton say it is time to "engage the American heartland in a conversation about religion and values."
First of all, Bill and Hill are not conservatives. Secondly, I know they are full of crap and their actions speak louder than any words. It's like John Kerry and his "I'm a hunter" line while voting to ban the .30-30. Where's that poodle again?
Wallis points out that Jesus never said anything about tax cuts for the rich. Thus Wallis would enlist Jesus on the side of class consciousness.
Oh and as for this "Tax cuts for the rich" stuff. Many of us didn't know we were rich until Klinton raised taxes on us. Where do the jobs come from? Upper middle class and the "lower rich"(as opposed to the Sorosites). These are also those who were more apt to work for a living with their businesses. I see many of these people who work 16 hour days as well.
Tom Frank says this response to the Republicans is a betrayal. The way to fight false consciousness is not to debate about Jesus, but rather to reassert the primacy of class in America.
And here's your problem Tommy boy. In fact there is two. One is that THE DEMOCRATS ARE NO LONGER THE PARTY OF WORKING FAMILIES!!!!! The other one is that class is not caste. People move up in class. rather the big corporations and their Republican friends.
The Big Corporations are just as often DEMOCRAT. COSTCO? Tyson(switch hitter). Hollywood is corporate.
But the de-industrialization of America, and the export of good industrial jobs to Mexico and now to China, was the policy of Bill Clinton, who introduced, fought for, and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. John Kerry went along with that project.
BOOM!
the Democratic Leadership Council, the party followed Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Joe Lieberman to "forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues."
And these are my ideological enemy 100%. Gun grabbing pro-abort rich leftists.
concede to the corporations on economic issues like the North American Free Trade Agreement, labor law, deregulation, and tax cuts.
The Klintonites still love taxes and high regulations. Franks is FOS there, but they love globalism and global treaties that threaten soverignty like NAFTA, GATT, and CAFTA.
their former base is left open and vulnerable to false consciousness around abortion, school prayer, guns, and gays. Frank terms this strategy not only "ruinous" but "criminally stupid."
Here's another problem Tommy. It's not FALSE. The Democrats who were for the working man in the old days were more apt to be conservative and pro-American. Many of us were suspicious of big government. That's why were are no longer democrats. Democrats are raising taxes invading my wallet. They are social engineering our kids in schools. They are after our guns in their war against the constitution. Gays aren't my big issue, but they are forcing gay marriage on us with activist judges.
Frank says no-people do not necessarily understand their situation or know how to act to defend their interests. The role of a political party is to explain these things, to define interests, and then to fight for them.
How unbelievably arrogant. I know my interests and always made my own decisions.
But the Democrats' problem, Mertes argues, is not simply stupidity. The party is controlled "largely by the super-rich,"
BOOM! Soros. Kerry. Kennedy. Corzine. The Clintons. Gates. Buffett. Hollywood. The creators of MoveOn.org (off the Computer game You Don't know Jack). Peter Lewis(Regressive Insurance).
The evidence lies in what Mertes terms "the blue plutocracy": virtually all of the wealthiest electoral districts in the country have become Democratic bastions.
California's Coast(Outside San Diego), Manhattan, Martha Vineyard, Seattle, Portland, to a lesser extent Greenwich Connecticutt, Montgomery County MD, Chicago's Lakeshore(Rostenkowski's area), Florida's Gold Coast. Fairfax County VA and Oakland County MI are treading dem now too.
More of the super-rich favored the Democrats in 2004-the divide was 59-41 among individuals with assets above $10 million. That's why working-class consciousness was not part of the Democratic Party message.
Forty years ago, he suggests, the Democrats were "the party of the workers, the poor, the weak and the victimized."
Not only that, many of the republicans of the past were also liberals. The Rockefeller Republicans. I side more with the old rural yooper style democrats 40 years ago than I do with a Bill Milliken(who backed John Kerry since he's a gun grabber).
Frank offers the poorest county in the United States-McPherson County, Nebraska-as his prime example of false consciousness. It voted 80 percent Republican in 2000.
Wonder Why?
But the people who vote there, Davis points out, are mostly small cattle ranchers. Their incomes put them among the nation's poor, but their assets give them the interests of property owners.
And which party has been protecting the wolves EVEN IF they are harassing ranchers? The DEMOCRATS. That's economic interest there if there ever was any.
It was once a Democratic stronghold, but Kerry lost West Virginia by 13 percent. And although many mine and mill workers voted against him, they voted for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, and Democrats held on to two of three congressional seats with an impressive two-thirds of the vote.
Many areas split and vote for local dems(or GOP) while backing the opposite federal candidate. The UP re-elected Bart Stupak, took out a moderate GOP'er based on one gun vote(and lax campaign), re-elected another GOP'er, and two other moderate democrats. They also voted for Bush.
You said in six words what Jon failed to make clear in 2692 words. I guess that’s "nuance".
I started to reply to all the falsehoods in this scribbling, but realized that was a bigger job than I want.
How did Bush win? By pressing the hot button issues of the Red States
1.Abortion and the potential new appointees to the courts.
2.Gun Rights advocates and the threat Soros and his cronies pose.
3.Terrorism and the threat of the wilting left to blame America 1st.
4.His average Joe demeanor and sense of being an honest character.
P.S. Some of us Red Stater’s will vote our core beliefs before our pocket book. We know that we have been hosed on the exporting of the industrial and the jobs that go with it, but our eternal sole’s are worth it! No, we are not stupid and yes we understand. Jeeze, you elites are really dumber than you think we are.
My favorite part is when he criticizes the DLC for gaining support from Upper middle class and wealthy suburbanites who are socially liberal. If you look at demographic voting data... Democrats absolutely NEED that group today. If that support fell through they would be crushed. They can't shift their appeal to the working class because that would mean alienating socially liberal suburbanites, yet they can't stay where they are now because they're losing elections.
It's a complete checkmate! Beautiful!
I have not read the Frank book, but it appears that the message is: the lower classes in flyover country are too stupid to realize that economic issues are the ones that count, and that social issues are irrelevant, so We the Enlightened need to convince them of their true interests. Of course, if the Dem elites really believed what Frank is peddling, that social issues were irrelevant, then they could simply surrender their views on social issues, focus exclusively on economic issues, and perhaps win over the red-state voters that Frank wants to reach. But they won't -- not now, not ever -- because abortion, gay marriage, freedom from religion and the rest is what they really care about. So, the Frank plan: let's use issues that we don't really care about to win over voters who bitterly oppose us on the issues that we and they both care about a great deal. Am I missing something?
And where is it written in stone that Democrats naturally are the party of economic growth? Huge sections of the Democrat Party coalition destroy the chances for economic growth: trial lawyers, environmentalists, unions, government employee and regulators.
Take the case of Kansas de-industrialization. Wichita was the small plane capital of the world, until the lawyers (Democrats) got involved. Their lawsuits killed off General Aviation in Kansas. Clinton's Luxury Tax killed the yacht building business in the US, especially New Jersey and put thousands of working class Americans out of work.
In my life, economic growth has come from Reagan and Bush II policies and no one else. As a rational person, who values economic growth, why would I ever vote for a Democrat? Is my Class Consciousness true or false?
Liberal elites run the party - the only real understanding Kerry had of working class people came from talking to his butler. Liberal elites pay off the lower classes and pit them against the middle class. That gives them power. It's no wonder people vote against the dems.
What a Weiner..
bump
Old leftists can prattle to their hearts' content about "the rich," but the fact remains that leftist policies aren't helping most of us who don't have big trust funds. I don't really trust upper management at most companies or those who are considered "the rich." I agree with some limits that would keep "the rich" from simply running the system through legalized bribes. However, most left/liberal policies are bad for the average guy out there trying to make a living. The failure of the Democrats isn't a result of people not voting their wallets. It's a direct result of people voting their wallets.
Bill
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