Thomas Frank is at it again. Thomas Frank is the author of the book What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. While perusing Salon.com I came across this article by who other than Thomas Frank. I found it quite revealing. He titled it The matter with Kansas now: The Tea Party, the 1 percent and delusional Democrats. His byline was even better; Democrats believe demographics alone will defeat the Tea Party. It’s a smug fantasy: Economic populism’s the answer.
Thomas Frank wrote the following.
Here was a faction that had made the folkways of ordinary Americans into a kind of a cult — and yet its signature economic policies had brought catastrophic harm down on those same ordinary Americans. Here was a ruling philosophy that, thanks to its sacrosanct conception of itself as the foe of the state, could never acknowledge that it actually ruled. Here was a form of common-man-hailing populism that had raised up an economic elite the likes of which we hadn’t seen since the nineteenth century. What a spectacle it was! What a circus of delusion, deceit, devotion and disaster! Best of all, it was a movement in whose ranks I had once marched myself, which meant I had a certain innate understanding of it.
How could Americans support the new Conservative elite that are actually hurting their economic well-being? They did it because the Conservative elite did not fly above them. They made themselves a part of them. While the Conservative elite knew they were not pushing equality, their rhetoric was.
Liberals and Democrats on the other had seemed only concerned on the academic level. Thomas Frank wrote.
For the ruling faction of the Democratic party, meanwhile, I felt like the Kansas story triggered a bout of guilty conscience. To begin with, there was something true at the core of all the conservative bullshit: we really are ruled by a meritocratic, professional elite — just look at the members of the president’s cabinet, or who gets interviewed on NPR — and a great number of meritocratic believers really are found in the ranks of the Democrats. As a party, they are openly in love with expertise; it is who they are; it means more to them than any ideology. It’s the awful story of “The Best and the Brightest” repeating itself over and over and over again.
Yes, Liberal policies which can be documented throughout the history of America have opened doors of access and equality. It has fomented tolerance. Yet those that foment these policies to many, come across as elitist. There is no personalization of concepts with the American subjects, the people.
This statement is telling and very important.
Even more alarming for Democrats were the stark implications of “Kansas” for their grand strategy of “centrism.” As I tried to make plain back in 2004, the big political change of the last 40 years didn’t happen solely because conservatives invented catchy conspiracy theories, but also because Democrats let it happen.Democrats essentially did nothing while their pals in organized labor were clubbed to the ground; they leaped enthusiastically into action, however, when it was time to pass NAFTA and repeal Glass-Steagall. Working-class voters had nowhere else to go, they seem to have calculated, and — whoops! — they were wrong. The Kansas story represented all their decades of moderating and capitulating and triangulating coming back to haunt them.
There were many laws passed under Republicans and Centrist Democrats that have been clobbering the middle class for the last thirty plus years. One cannot solely blame Republicans for these.
Thomas Frank illustrated the callous disregard on the false success through a demographic fallacy.
At any rate, it’s all moot now. These days, the big thinkers of the Democratic Party have concluded that they can safely ignore the things I described. They’ve got a new bunch of voters these days — the famous “coalition of the ascendant,”made up of professionals, minorities and “millennials” — and it pleases them to imagine that with this unstoppable army at their back they will win elections from here to eternity. There is no need to resolve the dilemmas I outlined in “Kansas,” no need to win back working-class voters or solve wrenching economic problems. In fact, there is no need to lift a finger to do much of anything, since vast, impersonal demographic forces are what rescued them from the trap I identified. They now have the luxury of saying, as Paul Krugman did on the day after the 2012 election, “Who cares what’s the matter with Kansas?”
Hillary Clinton seems to be anointed as the next presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. Some pundits believe she is the only Democrat that can outright win. She has all the money, Wall Street, the wealthy, and others locked up. In fact the big Liberal Super PAC Priorities USA is sitting out 2014. One can be sure the Republican presidential nominee will be just as flush in money as Hillary Clinton.
I wrote the following in my piece Is Hillary Clinton The President We Need At This Time?
A populist Republican with limited Wall Street ties, with a fairly liberal social stance on marijuana, marriage equality, immigration reform, incarceration (mandatory minimums), and women’s rights is out there waiting. Anyone following the news can see that Republican in the making.
Thomas Frank is correct about demographics and elections.
Thomas Frank is absolutely right. Republicans have been a sufficiently populist party to win with policies they should not win with. Democrats have been a sufficiently populist party to not lose. Demographics will not win you an election. Real populism will.
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