Blue People

A Lack of Passion

Once again Harper's has published an article that has a beneficial clarifying effect, this time on the "stab in the back" myth and the seeming failure of today's Right to deploy it successfully. In the final paragraphs the author gets very close to the central point, which is the detachment of the American public from the policies that should, in theory, concern them the most. Why, he asks, are there no important anti- or pro- war demonstrations, as there were during the Vietnam era?

This question has been addressed before, mainly by pointing out that during this war there is no draft, no matter how much the manpower might be needed. The lack of a draft means that a relatively small share of the population has a direct stake in the war, in the sense that they have a family member or friend on active duty, in harm's way. While this may be true, it doesn't go quite far enough, and the author manages to take that extra step, or at least part of it.

The fact is that Americans for the most part don't provide for their own way of life anymore. Almost all of the manufactured goods that we use (such as the computer that this is being typed on) are made overseas, typically in Asia. True, we still do some engineering, and of course we do the marketing and distribution, but that's not enough to support the deep connection that people need to feel between what they make and what they use. Americans are now mostly consumers, not producers, and it's becoming clear that consumption is not a platform robust enough to support a personal - or national - identity.

It is this psychic disinvestment that leads to apathy about the Iraq venture (I can't bring myself to call it a "war"), even though the soldiers killed there are just as dead as those who died in previous wars. It was, ironically, a proud WWII veteran, Bob Dole, who introduced into the vernacular the slang expression that has become the symbol of this apathy, this anomie: "whatever".

What's the Matter with Thomas Frank?

Without a doubt one of the best-known books to come in the wake of John Kerry's loss in the 2004 presidential election was Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?", an examination of how working-class voters have for some time now voted for conservative Republicans whose economic policies are, for the most part, seriously damaging to the interests of those working-class voters. Frank's brilliant rhetoric has been cited often enough that I need not do so here.

Not long in coming were papers and books by other analysts, claiming to prove Frank wrong in some respect. Some argued that Frank was mistaken to claim that working-class voters have in fact been abandoning the Democratic party, citing numbers which seemed to show that support for Democrats was as strong as ever among the working class. Others have argued that Frank was right, but also irrelevant, in that the group of working-class voters discussed by Frank is a shrinking portion of the electorate.

I would echo the analysis I've seen elsewhere, not necessarily in response to Frank, that argues that the increasing economic marginality (and desperation) of the white working class goes hand in hand with its increasing resentment and religiosity. What's happening is that the rising tendency to vote Republican among the working class is a second-order - maybe third-order - phenomenon. The root of it all is the increasing economic pressure that this group has been experiencing. This pressure results in an anxiety that then undergoes displacement in two directions: cultural conservatism for those whose anxiety is expressed mostly as anger; religious conservatism for those whose anxiety is transformed into defeatism and quietism.

Note that in neither case is anxiety expressed as an impulse to directly confront those who imposed this fate upon them, which is clearly what Thomas Frank would wish. This is at least partly due to a factor that has been noted both by me and by others, namely the tendency in our current culture to privatize everything, to scorn the idea that widespread problems may have solutions that can be promoted through collective public action.