Once in a while, completely at random in this internet world of angry invective, you stumble onto a really interesting and valuable online exchange. I'd like to point out that there's one going on at Josh Marshall's
TPMCafe
between Ed Kilgore and Thomas Frank.
To me people like Josh Marshall and Ed Kilgore represent the "good" centrists. The ones that may support the DLC, but are able and willing to call it out when it's clearly crossed the line. And of course, Thomas Frank is one of the most important Democratic thinkers in recent memory and a man who, with forward-thinking innovators like David Sirota and Howard Dean, has the potential to finally put us on a strong footing again.
In the debate between Frank and Kilgore I see two very interesting and almost diametrically opposed models of human behavior that I feel have been instrumental in the many rivalries driving the party apart. I want to draw particular attention to the two following quotes.
KILGORE:
In other words, it's pretty clear to me that Populism always encompassed right-wing as well as left-wing hostility to capitalism, and always was more closely associated with cultural conservatism rather than cultural progressivism, especially at the grass-roots level. So I have to wonder: is the association of the Right with the Populist temperament in Kansas--and just as conspicuously, in the South--in recent years really a displacement of "progressive," class-based economic discontents by "reactionary" cultural concerns--or simply a continuation of the same tradition in a different context? I would be interested in your reaction to this question.
More broadly, I wonder if your book's general distinction between legitimate economic motivations for partisan identification and illegitimate cultural motivations is based on the same oversimplification of political history.
My own reading of political history is that non-class, and non-economic factors have perpetually been important in partisan identification among Americans. Economics cannot explain why Appalachian southerners, the poorest category of voters, went heavily Republican for more than a century after the Civil War; why midwestern German Protestants and Catholics diverged politically for most of their history; why farm-state voters gyrated from party to party throughout most of the twentieth century, often based on foreign policy issues; why Jewish-Americans have been so heavily Democratic; and why union voters went Republican prior to the Great Depression, and at key points during the Cold War.
FRANK:
At the grass-roots level, on the other hand, the populist emotions are genuine. I say this as a former populist conservative myself: I know lots of liberals who think eating meat is wrong, and some of them can be awfully shrill and righteous about it. And it is, of course, true that some TV shows are offensive, and that some Hollywood movies mock middle America, and that some college professors say wacky things, and that some artists ache to do something that will move Jesse Helms to denounce them. Furthermore, people know that in everyday life they are being screwed in a hundred ways, and that the people who benefit from this screwing are the ones they see driving Volvos and drinking lattes and enjoying life in Bethesda or Georgetown or wherever. In the topsy-turvy post-Sixties world we live in, this kind of populism makes a certain amount of sense.
How do you change that? How do you make it so right wing populism doesn't make sense anymore, so that it would be impossible for voters in West Virginia to say of Dubya, "He's one of us." Well, you have to bring economics back into the conversation, make it unambiguously clear what the conservatives have done to people economically, and thus neutralize their class-based appeals.
Answering the cultural side of the right-wing populist message is slightly tougher. I have a lot of recommendations for liberals, if they care to hear them, but I will just share one of them here. We need to point out the massive contradiction between the cons' populist, "family values" rhetoric and their free-market practice. When conservatives talk about how Xtreme and revolutionary the laissez-faire system is, we should agree with them--and then point out what exactly this means: the destruction of the world you grew up in. If left to itself, free-market capitalism would empty our towns and bid our wages down to nothing and drill for oil in the Grand Canyon and hook us all up to non-stop virtual-reality advertising goggles for the rest of our days. It doesn't give a damn about families or values or very much else. This is why you once had so many liberals in this country: liberals protected people from these forces. That's what we were about.
To me it boils down this way. Kilgore posits that non-economic, culturally based identities always (or usually) take precedence over class consciousness. This idea suggests that Southern populists who are now Republicans are voting more on their Southern identity than on any economic vision, and that trying to appeal to an economic vision will be necessarily doomed to failure. Kilgore's statement also illuminates some of the disdain that's often evident in the DLC's discussion of populism and grassroots democracy-- if you see a movement as the continuation of regressive anti-civil rights attitude then clearly you're not going love it.
I really do agree with Frank's statements, however. I've long argued for a model that recognizes the cultural conservatism of most of America and tries to appeal to the economic attitudes instead. However, I think this particular debate is VERY valuable.
One other question. Why is it so hard to imagine a merger of these two ideologies? Why can't we have a party that's fairly moderate on cultural issues but also explicitly left-wing on economics? Today we seem to have a party that's paralyzed and unwilling to take any clear stands on either plank.