Within two days of Bush’s 2004 election victory, Bill Clinton was making clear what direction the Democrats should now take. The party had to ‘engage the American heartland in a conversation about religion and values’. Too many voters thought that Democrats did not believe in faith or family. Kerry had failed to condemn gay marriage with the ardour required—‘He said it once or twice but not a thousand times, in small towns’—or to point out that abortions had fallen by over 20 per cent under the Clinton Administration, and had risen under Bush.footnote1 Was the Kerry campaign too ‘liberal’ to win? ‘Maybe this time the voters chose what they actually want’, exclaimed the Nation’s Katha Pollitt. ‘Nationalism, pre-emptive war, order not justice, “safety” through torture, backlash against women and gays, a gulf between haves and have-nots, government largesse for their churches . . .’footnote2
At stake is not just the small but unmistakeable rightward shift in voters’ self-descriptions, with ‘conservatives’ up to 34 per cent from 29 per cent in 2000, and ‘moderates’ down from 50 to 45 per cent; nor that ‘moral values’ trumped the economy, the occupation of Iraq and terrorism as the top issue of the election campaign. It is the fact that so many of the voters that turned out to swell Bush’s 3.5 million lead are blue-collar workers, those bearing the brunt of Republican policies. Only 61 per cent of trade unionists voted for Kerry; among white union members, the figure was lower still. The former mine-and-steelworkers stronghold of West Virginia went for Bush by 13 per cent. There were significant swings to the Republicans among middle-income women and latino voters, traditionally pro-Democrat groups.
In post-mortems of an election that seemed to many to defy political logic—a clear swing towards an Administration that has brought rising unemployment, tax cuts for the super-rich and the murderous quagmire of occupied Iraq, among precisely those most likely to lose their jobs, their homes, their relatives in the military—Thomas Frank’s lively study of the ‘great backlash’ sweeping the country’s heartland has become a central reference point. American liberals have had trouble believing that the blue-collar/corporate-capital alliance is really happening, Frank argues: ‘For the Republican Party to present itself as the champion of working-class America strikes liberals as such an egregious denial of political reality that they dismiss the whole phenomenon’. The blue-collar Republican vote is explained away as ‘crypto-racism, or a disease of the elderly, or the random griping of religious rednecks, or the protests of “angry white men”’.
Frank knows, of course, that the Reagan-era backlash attracted a mountain of liberal comment, and cites Christopher Lasch and others to good effect. It was during the Clinton years that the phenomenon was wished away by the well-intentioned—and at the same time, as Frank shows, deepened and reinforced. What’s the Matter with Kansas? is a vivid and moving update, a depiction of the political mind and cultural yearnings of right-wing populism in a Great Plains state over the last fifteen years.footnote3 More generally, it offers a case-study in the flourishing of a party that talks about morality and religion in order to enact legislation that benefits big capital, at the expense of most of those who vote for it. Unlike more traditional forms of conservatism, characterized by deferential respect for the rich and powerful, this is a movement that:
imagines itself as a foe of the elite, as the voice of the unfairly persecuted, as a righteous protest of the people on history’s receiving end. That its champions today control all three branches of government matters not a whit. That its greatest beneficiaries are the wealthiest people on the planet does not give it pause.footnote4
For Frank, this is the central contradiction of the backlash: ‘it is a working-class movement that has done incalculable harm to working-class people’. For though ‘values may “matter most” to the voters, they always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won’. For decades, this has been right-wing populism’s most consistent feature: ‘Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished.’ Instead, the politicians swept into office by this grassroots rebellion have ‘smashed the welfare state, reduced taxes for corporations and the wealthy, and generally facilitated the country’s return to a nineteenth-century pattern of wealth distribution.’footnote5
With the aim of examining the backlash from top to bottom—its theorists, its elected officials, its footsoldiers—Frank returns to his native Kansas, the geographical navel of the country. It is here, he argues, in the place where Superman grew up, where Dorothy was whirled away by the tornado, that we can best understand the forces that have pulled the us so far to the right. His book provides a striking socio-economic portrait of the ‘reddest of the red states’ at the turn of the 21st century (in fact, with a 62 per cent vote for Bush in 2004, Kansas ranks only eighth in redness; Utah, at 71 per cent, comes top). Its 2.7 million people, the vast majority of them white, closely parallel the demographics of the Republicans’ electoral bastions.