The Baffler is Back!

Being as completely distracted and off the ball as I have been lately as regards politics & journalism & news & culture & whatever, it has only just now come to my attention through a couple of different sources that The Baffler is back!!!

If you've never heard of this kick-ass, unpretentious political/cultural journal thingie and want to know why its revival is a really great thing, read here and especially here. In The Baffler's glory days, during the Clinton era, its editor Thomas Frank and his coterie of South Side Chicago smart-asses provided a sustained critique of a Democratic Party that had transformed itself into a fanatically pro-laissez faire force, a party that turned its back on economic populism, but nevertheless continued -- pathetically -- to compensate for completely selling out its base by signaling its supposed 'leftism' by adopting ludicrously 'tough' postures, which naturally fed right into  the hysterical"Culture Wars"-style paranoia propagated by the A.M. radio demagogues and Think-Tank-Neo-McCarthyists of the Far Right. Furthermore, Frank and Company poked fun at the appropriation by multi-national marketeers of 'oppositional' pop culture tropes and 'attitudes', from the Nirvana-like guitar-crunch sounded by ads selling luxury cars, to Burger King's strategy of hawking burgers and fries with the apothegm: "Sometimes You've Gotta Break the Rules."

The list of contributors to the first issue of The Baffler's "Volume 2" appears to be a bit heavy on academicians. It was not uncommon for the 90s version of the journal to include the occasional professor or Ivory Tower-type -- after all, Frank himself earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago. But in those days, the the lion's share of spineless bimbos putatively positioned on the 'Left', inside and outside of academe, were united -- for either ideological or pragmatic reasons -- in their support for the new and improved neoliberal, "Third Way"-style Democratic Party. Some of the most forceful opposition to Frank's brand of left-populism -- and especially the way in which Frank framed the "Culture Wars" issue -- issued from politically engaged academic-types who really should have known better. Among them, and someone who in most respects I quite like, is the literature and cultural-studies professor Michael Bérubé.

But anyway, I gather that The Baffler has returned in part because the arguments to which it has given voice regarding market fundamentalism -- and the political toxicity of the Democratic Party's continuing institutional (read: $) and ideological allegiance with it -- are now impossible for an intellectually honest person to ignore. The impotence of the Democratic Party, despite enjoying an unprecedented congressional majority, the incoherence of the party's ideological stance as regards big business interests, health care, social justice, and any number of issues, and the Obama Administration's inability and unwillingness to pursue real reforms against an appallingly oligarchic financial sector are the inevitable consequences of thirty-or-more years of cynical market fundamentalism. A fundamentalism against which there is no bulwark in this country -- no checks, no balances. Pretty grim. But at least somebody's pointing it out now.

See also Thomas Frank's great new piece in The Wall Street Journal about the Right-wing Christian Fundamentalists who have hijacked -- with SERIOUSLY SHOCKING results (NY Times) -- the content of the social studies textbooks to be manufactured and distributed throughout Texas and probably throughout many other states.

The Populist Left / The Paranoid Right

In recent posts, I've discussed the idea of authoritarian populism, an idea popularized by the sociologist Stuart Hall to describe the rise of Margaret Thatcher in early 1980s England. I argued that the resentment-fueled rhetoric of the current Republican Party could be seen as an updated species of authoritarian populism.

But forget about all that.

I think that a recent op-ed by Thomas Frank nails it. What the GOP has been up to, he observes, is not really populism at all but paranoia. It's the John Birch Society gone mainstream....

Next month will mark the 45th anniversary of the publication by Harper's Magazine of Richard Hofstadter's famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," a work that seems to grow more relevant by the day.

I was not always a fan. [...] I thought, who really cared about the strange notions that occurred to members of marginal groups like the John Birch Society? Joe McCarthy's day was long over, and even in the age of high Reaganism, I thought, the type of person Hofstadter described was merely handing out flyers on street corners.

As the historian himself admitted, "in America it has been the preferred style only of minority movements." Why bother with it, then?

How times have changed! Hofstadter's beloved liberal consensus has been in the grave for decades now. Today it would appear that his mistake was underestimating the seductive power of the paranoid style.

The essential element of this mindset, Hofstadter explained, was its predilection for conspiracy theory—for understanding history as a theater in which sinister figures control the flow of events from behind the scenes, nudging us constantly and secretly in the direction of communism.

Back in Hofstadter's day this sort of thinking at least had something supremely rational going for it: The existence of the Soviet Union and its desire to bring the West to its knees.

But take that away and the theories become something far more remarkable. Consider, by contrast, the widespread belief that President Barack Obama's birth certificate was forged. What could have been his parents' motives for committing such a bizarre deed, or his home state's motive for colluding in it, or the courts' motives for overlooking it?

Or consider the widespread conservative conviction that we are being marched secretly into communism or fascism. Why would someone bother? It seems equally likely, given today's circumstances, that conspirators would trick us into becoming a colony of Belgium or the imperial seat of the Bonaparte family.

The paranoid pattern persists regardless. It is impervious to world events; a blurting of the American subconscious that has not changed since Hofstadter analyzed it 45 years ago. Consider the recent wave of fear that the hypnotic Mr. Obama was planning to indoctrinate schoolchildren. In "The Paranoid Style," Hofstadter wrote, "Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; . . . he has a new secret for influencing the mind; . . . he is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system."

Conspiracy-mindedness isn't just for fringe political groups anymore; it makes for riveting entertainment. And it is all around us today, a disorder with an entire industry to act as its enabler. [...]

Frank goes on to cite recent examples of this phenomenon, from Glenn Beck's fake news show to a truly bizarre essay penned by Michelle Malkin. These examples always include (1) alarmingly hysterical conspiracy theories and (2) a self-persecution complex, accompanied by massive amounts of self-pity.

What the hell's going on, anyway?

Although Frank's piece isn't about progressive political strategy, I believe that Frank's formulation (or, rather, his appropriation of Hofstadter) might provide a rhetorical framework with which to strengthen the project of Left-populism.

The conundrum that I had been perceiving in all of the Angry Right-Teabagger stuff had not been limited to the damage that violent, racist innuendo and intellectual dishonesty threatens to inflict upon civil discourse. What had been worrying me most of all had been the fact that it appeared that the Deranged Right was -- albeit disingenuously -- threatening to dominate populist-inflected discourse in this country.

But why cede that ground to a bunch of hacks, liars and -- as Frank notes -- producers of mass entertainment?

Glenn Beck doesn't represent a twisted, authoritarian version of populism: He represents many vile, stupid and wrongheaded things. Not one of them has anything to do with populism.

Politics & ideas? Economic self-interest & authoritarian populism.

The relation of politics to ideas has always been complicated. But the conceit of this post will be that there's something to be learned by exploring it.

Politics and ideas: the Right
For example: Ideas are, in an important sense, anathema to the climate within which the current American conservatism prevails. Nevertheless, it's important to remember that during the decades prior to the election of Barack Obama, ideas had a twofold significance in em the Republicans to seize/maintain and use political power.

To be sure, at least half of this significance was ancillary to how, why and for whom the so-called 'conservative movement' of the 1980s, 90s and 00s was built. The GOP seized/maintained power through the application of brainpower to such tactical/operational processes as propaganda, demographic analysis and the procurement and allocation of material resources. Simultaneously, the ideas developed by various big brains/think tank types connected to the 'movement' as to how best to use this power were every bit as oriented toward strategic considerations -- how to maintain power -- as toward articulating philosophical/political 'principles'.

For the most part, this coterie of ideologically warped eggheads agreed that this political power could best be put to use by dismantling government itself (see: Messrs. Gingrich, Norquist, Rove, Ambramoff, et al.).

This GOP ambition to dismantle government did not extend, naturellement, to such elements of the public-sector as military and "intelligence" infrastructure. Although, of course, 'outsourcing' these functions -- to mercenaries to fight our wars and to 'specialists' to torture our 'enemy combatants' -- is by now established practice, thanks to Messrs. Rumsfeld & Cheney, et al.

Politics and ideas: the Left
By contrast, no left/progressive politics can exist or have any hope of success without ideas.

To be sure, ideas don't do the trick in and of themselves, and the Right knows this. That's why it has tried, and not without success, to milk every last drop of potential from the 'left-leaning, soulless egghead/expert' cliché. (Although, for some time now, its effectiveness is showing definite signs of strain.)

Allow me to illustrate. One of the biggest and looniest lies that extreme-neoconservative shills like the neo-McCarthyite former/longtime Communist and Black Panther David Horowitz have tried to propagate is that notion that the American professoriat -- as with, of course, 'the mainstream media, the arts, and the employees of public libraries(!) -- is overwhelmingly left-wing in its orientation and that its aim is to indoctrinate defenseless undergraduates, the progeny of unsuspecting, good, decent, law-abiding American families.

Would that that were the case!

For one thing, it's self-evident that this notion is a big, stinking lie (and a febrile one, at that), so ludicrous that it doesn't even merit refutation. However, setting aside the fact that it is categorically untrue -- self-evidently, and empirically -- I believe that there is a more important point to be made as regards the internal logic of what the lie intends to imply. Namely, we might ask: Could the professoriat -- irrespective of the direction in which its politics trend -- really wield the kind of seismic influence over the nation's populace that Horowitz wants to believe it does?

The answer: To the extent to which the academy (and the same applies to the arts, or the press, or what have you) has provided a safe refuge to progressive/left -- even 'liberal' -- ideas over the past decades, then surely this fact has diminished the capacity of these ideas to engage people rather than the other way around. Academia is not called 'the ivory tower' primary in order to evoke architecture. To the extent to which the Left has been hiding out there, it has hampered the flourishing of left-wing ideas. It has probably prevented many good ideas even from entering the public sphere, to say nothing of capturing the public's political imagination.

(Think of things that once existed in the public sphere that have by now retreated for safe harbor in the academic sphere: poetry, visual art, Lacrosse, etc. Do these things appear to be enjoying widespread influence? Can you name more living poets than you can count on one hand? Thus: Academia is the place where once-vital ideas, practices and traditions go to die long, painful deaths.)

Resentment is not an idea
Now, of course, the corollary I have just proposed doubles as a straightforward description of why right-wing political hacks like Horowitz bother proffering these self-evidently idiotic assertions in the first place. When it comes to the Horowitzes of the world: It's not what they're saying, it's what they're talking about.

In other words, since Horowitz and Company are not men of ideas, but rather, merely corporately-funded propagandists for far-Right interests (who previously had been well-funded propagandists for the most militant and radical causes of the far-Left), it is most appropriate to assess their utterances on the basis of how these utterances function and not on the basis of what or how these utterances might 'mean'. Their meaning is their function.

As Crib From This has noted on previous occasions, the vast majority of the intellectual energies among the hired brains of the Reagan Revolution, of the Gingrich Revolution, of the Bush/Cheney Reign Of Terror, of Sarah Palin's Wardrobe and beyond have been expended in pursuit of tactical positioning, not -- as had been at least partly the case in its early years -- in the service of real ideas.

Authoritarian populism
This brings us to the issue that has prompted my little excursus: that of authoritarian populism.

A coinage -- I think -- of the sociologist and Marxist Stuart Hall, authoritarian populism refers to the now-familiar methods by which conservative political forces forge, nurture and/or manufacture political support -- and often sizable majorities -- by, in part, slyly embedding Rightist/ultra-capitalist/neoliberal ideology into the "common sense" of everyday life.

Hall's formulation draws from the thought of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who theorized that, in industrialized nations in the twentieth century, the dominant class established and maintained political control over the working class not only through the use and threatened use of conventional force, but through hegemony: the systems of socialization, the ingrained assumptions, the modes of valuation, etc. that imbue a society and serve to legitimate status quo power relations. Hegemony refers to the processes by which ideology does its real work.

Of particular relevance to Hall's thesis is that Gramsci's concept of hegemony might go part of the way toward explaining how exploited populations can be manipulated into voting against their own economic interests. (Follow this hyperlink for a decent primer on Gramsci and hegemony [with particular emphasis upon Gramsci's significance to educational theory].)

The age of Reagan and Thatcher
Hall's discussion of authoritarian populism emerged from a series of frenzied conversations conducted among leftists and liberals in the United Kingdom wherein Hall and his comrades watched in stunned horror as Margaret Thatcher's Tory Party rose to power in a seeming popular groundswell. To make matters worse, the Labour Party was starting to get routed and the once-steadfast support of the working class seemed to be slipping.

Soon afterward, Ronald Reagan ascended to the White House, with significant assistance from the Democratic Party's disillusioned, blue-collar base ("Reagan Democrats.")

Despite the parallel developments between the United Kingdom and her former upstart-colonies, it is important to remember that England's working class, in contrast to that of the United States, actually had a fairly strong tradition of a political consciousness. Whereas the relationship that had developed between the Democratic Party and American workers, beginning with FDR, had resembled a longstanding yet typical political transaction based upon mutual benefit, English workers were organized and had secured many welfare state protections through collective demand.

So: along came this woman Thatcher, who promised to undermine all of the reforms and protections that this class had fought so hard to obtain. And she swept into power in the midst of what was ostensibly a populist groundswell! How could this be?

Enter: authoritarian populism. Here's Hall's assessment of Thatcherism's populist flair, against which he juxtaposed the ineptitude of the Left's tactics, attitude and rhetoric. It's striking how similar his characterization is to those that emerged fairly recently within the American Left, particularly in the wake of the disastrous candidacy of John Kerry [boldface added by the present blogger]:

Horrendously, the Right has been far more successful in recent years than the Left in connecting with some of these popular movements and trends in civil society. Of course, they have connected with them in their own populist way. The intention of the radical Right, which has been most penetrative, has not been the conversion of masses to the religion of the market and unemployment. Rather, it has been the subtle capacity to identify the positive aspirations of people with the market and the restoration of the capitalist ethic, and to present this as a natural alliance. Thatcherism has been remarkably successful at moving the counters around so as to forge a connection between the popular aspiration for greater freedom from constraining powers and the market definition of freedom. It has created a chain of equivalences between the reaction against state bureaucracy, so deeply inscribed in the Fabian version of social democracy, and the quite different passion for self-sufficiency, self-help and rampant individualism. But, like all ideological and political interventions — which is what Thatcherism is — these connections are neither 'natural' nor necessary. They represent an attempt to inflect and expropriate and absorb what are often democratic currents into free market channels. We have suggested already how and why in the earlier period the market came to be a popular mass experience. The Right, after all, has no hang-ups about making money and stimulating the instinct for money making as the driving force of society. In simple terms, that is what the capitalist system is. So to address itself to isolating and developing the competitive side of that contradictory experience was an obvious and natural way for the radical Right to align itself with popular aspirations or, to put it another way, make itself populist. This is one feature of the wider phenomenon we have seen in this decade of the Right showing itself once again capable of recuperating itself, renewing itself, taking on the challenge of the social democratic consensus and eroding its basis, and learning once again to address the people in accents which seem to groove more naturally with life as they live and experience it. This is the naturalisation of the Right which has proven the real changed ground on which the Left in the 1980s has been forced to operate. It is part of the Right project to turn the tide on every front — in civil society and moral life as much as in economic habits and expectations. Its project, in short, is to become hegemonic, to address the common experience, to speak to and for 'the nation'.  [Stuart Hall, "The Culture Gap," originally published in Marxism Today, January 1984. Click here to access the entire article in .pdf format.]

Sound familiar?

Thomas Frank on American politics in the mid-00's
Although the parallel breaks down in some important respects, perhaps the most famous contemporary point of reference that comes to mind with respect to the relation between culture (and the "Culture Wars," a term that Hall at times used specifically in describing Thatcherism) and political "common sense" is Thomas Frank's influential What's the Matter with Kansas? (now also a film, directed by Laura Cohen and Joe Winston).

Here's an excerpt of Frank's book -- published in 2004 -- that recalls aspects of Hall's 1986 assessment of UK politics, but which then takes the conversation into new territory, elements of which I have rendered in boldface.

That our politics have been shifting rightward for more than thirty years is a generally acknowledged fact of American life. That this rightward movement has largely been accomplished by working-class voters whose lives have been materially worsened by the conservative policies they have supported is a less comfortable fact, one we have trouble talking about in a straightforward manner.

And yet the backlash is there, whenever we care to look, from the "hardhats" of the 1960s to the "Reagan Democrats" of the 1980s to today's mad-as-hell "red states." You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America – "going out of business" signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush.

I chose to observe the phenomenon by going back to my home state of Kansas, a place that has been particularly ill-served by the conservative policies of privatization, deregulation, and de-unionization, and that has reacted to its worsening situation by becoming more conservative still. Indeed, Kansas is today the site of a ferocious struggle within the Republican Party, a fight pitting affluent moderate Republicans against conservatives from the working-class districts and the downmarket churches. And it's hard not to feel some affection for the conservative faction, even as you deplore their political views. After all, these are the people that liberalism is supposed to speak to: the hard-luck farmers, the bitter factory workers, the outsiders, the disenfranchised, the disreputable.

Who is to blame for this landscape of distortion, of paranoia, and of good people led astray? Though Kansas voters have chosen self-destructive policies, it is just as clear to me that liberalism deserves a large part of the blame for the backlash phenomenon. Liberalism may not be the monstrous, all-powerful conspiracy that conservatives make it out to be, but its failings are clear nonetheless. Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and we can say that liberalism lost places like Wichita and Shawnee, Kansas with as much accuracy as we can point out that conservatism won them over.

This is due partially, I think, to the Democratic Party's more-or-less official response to its waning fortunes. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far outweighing anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and – more important – the money of these coveted constituencies, "New Democrats" think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as "class warfare" and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for the working-class voters who were until recently the party's very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what politician in this success-worshiping country really wants to be the voice of poor people? Where's the soft money in that?

This is, in drastic miniature, the criminally stupid strategy that has dominated Democratic thinking off and on ever since the "New Politics" days of the early seventies. Over the years it has enjoyed a few successes, but, as political writer E. J. Dionne has pointed out, the larger result was that both parties have become "vehicles for upper-middle-class interests" and the old class-based language of the left quickly disappeared from the universe of the respectable. The Republicans, meanwhile, were industriously fabricating their own class-based language of the right, and while they made their populist appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats were giving those same voters – their traditional base – the big brush-off, ousting their representatives from positions within the party and consigning their issues, with a laugh and a sneer, to the dustbin of history. A more ruinous strategy for Democrats would be difficult to invent. And the ruination just keeps on coming. However desperately they triangulate and accommodate, the losses keep mounting.

Curiously enough, though, Democrats of the DLC variety aren't worried. They seem to look forward to a day when their party really is what David Brooks and Ann Coulter claim it to be now: a coming-together of the rich and the self-righteous. While Republicans trick out their poisonous stereotype of the liberal elite, Democrats seem determined to live up to the libel.

Now, here's the part with respect to which, in my opinion, Frank's prescience is being revealed before our eyes in the political events and Democratic electoral/political gains of Obama's 2009:

Such Democrats [Bill Clinton, the DLC, et al.] look at a situation like present-day Kansas where social conservatives war ferociously on moderate Republicans and they rub their hands with anticipation: Just look at how Ronald Reagan's "social issues" have come back to bite his party in the ass! If only the crazy Cons push a little bit more, these Democrats think, the Republican Party will alienate the wealthy suburban Mods for good, and we will be able to step in and carry places like super-affluent Mission Hills, Kansas, along with all the juicy boodle that its inhabitants are capable of throwing our way.

Has this very demographic shift not been cited as one of the chief components of Obama's victory? The Loony Right has stepped beyond the point of no return for many middle- to upper-middle-class suburbanites in the Northwest, the Midwest, the West and even in key portions of the South. So what's the problem, we might ask? Frank decries the long term prospects of and, to be sure, the very point of a Democratic Party that severs its ties with economic populism:

While I enjoy watching Republicans fight one another as much as the next guy, I don't think the Kansas story really gives true liberals any cause to cheer. Maybe someday the DLC dream will come to pass, with the Democrats having moved so far to the right that they are no different than old-fashioned moderate Republicans, and maybe then the affluent will finally come over to their side en masse. But along the way the things that liberalism once stood for – equality and economic security – will have been abandoned completely. Abandoned, let us remember, at the historical moment when we need them most.

Truer words have never been -- etc., etc. I mean, I'm with Frank on this: The lack of responsiveness on the part of either party to the needs of poor people -- from the victims of Katrina to the countless victims of predatory lending who are now being evicted from their homes -- is morally repellent. There is absolutely no doubt about the fact that Republican Party is chiefly to blame for this state of affairs. It is furthermore true that Obama has at least been addressing and acting to solve some of these problems -- far more so than it's possible to picture any Republican president doing.

Unfortunately, it's also true, as Frank has pointed out, that a sizable share of the blame for the dismantling of the few remaining traces of the welfare state, consumer protections, corporate/financial regulation in the wake of Reagan and Bush Sr. sits squarely on the shoulders of our former President William Jefferson Clinton.

The true lesson for liberals in the Kansas story is the utter and final repudiation of their historical decision to remake themselves as the other pro-business party. By all rights the people of Wichita and Shawnee should today be flocking to the party of Roosevelt, not deserting it. Culturally speaking, however, that option is simply not available to them anymore. Democrats no longer speak to the people on the losing end of a free-market system that is becoming more brutal and more arrogant by the day.

The problem is not that Democrats are monolithically pro-choice or anti-school-prayer; it's that by dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the sneers of Hollywood whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns. We are in an environment where Republicans talk constantly about class – in a coded way, to be sure – but where Democrats are afraid to bring it up.

What Frank might have mentioned here -- and which he'd be sure to mention somehow were he revisiting these thoughts given the ratcheting-up of this species of GOP rhetoric in the hands such Fr. Coughlin-epigones as Glenn Beck -- is race, which can never be far removed from any serious discussion of socioeconomic class in America. From Nixon's "silent majority," to propagandists from Lee Atwater, to Karl Rove, the GOP has relied upon unspoken -- and, indeed, often subconscious -- racial animus in the cobbling together of its majorities, particularly with respect to its 'South Strategy'.

Of course, in a way, what Frank found so alarming about the radicalization of the Republican Party in Kansas was precisely that its activism began increasingly to resemble that of the fanatics of the Deep South. (Frank discusses this fascinating observation, with particular reference to the politics of abortion, in the film version of What's the Matter with Kansas?). Paradoxically, at precisely the moment at which the Southern Strategy stopped working -- i.e.: at the moment of Obama's resounding victory -- the Republicans are no longer even bothering to couch their race-baiting rhetoric in "coded" terminology. I wonder what Frank makes of that?

In the meantime, let's rejoin Frank for the conclusion of his lecture, in which he almost seems to have anticipated Obama, specifically with respect to his belief in the necessity of a political movement.  Of course, the only kind of movement politics that he argues will work effectively in the long run is one that is focused upon economic populism:

Democratic political strategy simply assumes that people know where their economic interest lies and that they will act on it by instinct. There is no need for any business-bumming class-war rhetoric on the part of candidates or party spokesmen, and there is certainly no need for a liberal to actually get his hands dirty fraternizing with the disgruntled. Let them look at the record and see for themselves: Democrats are slightly more generous with Social Security benefits, slightly stricter on environmental regulations, and do less union-busting than Republicans.

The gigantic error in all this is that people don't spontaneously understand their situation in the great sweep of things. Liberalism isn't a force of karmic nature that pushes back when the corporate world goes too far; it is a man-made contrivance as subject to setbacks and defeats as any other. Consider our social welfare apparatus, the system of taxes, regulations, and social insurance that is under sustained attack these days. Social Security, the FDA, and all the rest of it didn't just spring out of the ground fully formed in response to the obvious excesses of a laissez-faire system; they were the result of decades of movement-building, of bloody fights between strikers and state militias, of agitating, educating, and thankless organizing. More than forty years passed between the first glimmerings of a left-wing reform movement in the 1890s and the actual enactment of its reforms in the 1930s. In the meantime scores of the most rapacious species of robber baron went to their reward untaxed, unregulated, and unquestioned.

An even more telling demonstration of the importance of movements in framing people's perspectives can be found in the voting practices of union members. Take your average white male voter: in the 2000 election they chose George W. Bush by a considerable margin. Find white males who were union members, however, and they voted for Al Gore by a similar margin. The same difference is repeated whatever the demographic category: women, gun owners, retirees, and so on – when they are union members, their politics shift to the left. This is true even when the union members in question had little contact with union leaders. Just being in a union evidently changes the way a person looks at politics, inoculates them against the derangement of the backlash. Here, values matter almost least of all, while the economy, health care, and education are of paramount concern. Union voters are, in other words, the reverse image of the Brown-back conservative who cares nothing for economics but torments himself night and day with vague fears about "cultural decline."

Labor unions are on the wane today, as everyone knows, down to 9% of the private-sector workforce from a high-water mark of 38% in the 1950s. Their decline goes largely unchecked by a Democratic Party anxious to demonstrate its fealty to corporate America, and unmourned by a therapeutic left that never liked those Archie Bunker types in the first place. Among the broader population, accustomed to thinking of organizations as though they were consumer products, it is simply assumed that unions are declining because nobody wants to join them anymore, the same way the public has lost its taste for the music of the Bay City Rollers. And in the offices of the union-busting specialists and the Wall Street brokers and the retail executives, the news is understood the same way aristocrats across Europe greeted the defeat of Napoleon in 1815: as a monumental victory in a war to the death.

While leftists sit around congratulating themselves on their personal virtue, the right understands the central significance of movement-building, and they have taken to the task with admirable diligence. Cast your eyes over the vast and complex structure of conservative "movement culture," a phenomenon that has little left-wing counterpart anymore. There are foundations like the one operated by the Kochs in Wichita, channeling their millions into the political battle at the highest levels, subsidizing free-market economics departments and magazines and thinkers. Then there are the think tanks, the Institutes Hoover and American Enterprise, that send the money sluicing on into the pockets of the right-wing pundit corps, Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, and the rest, furnishing them with what they need to keep their books coming and their minds in fighting trim between media bouts. A brigade of lobbyists. A flock of magazines and newspapers. A publishing house or two. And, at the bottom, the committed grassroots organizers going door-to-door, organizing their neighbors, mortgaging their houses even, to push the gospel of the backlash.

And this movement speaks to those at society's bottom, addresses them on a daily basis. From the left they hear nothing, but from the Cons they get an explanation for it all. Even better, they get a plan for action, a scheme for world conquest with a wedge issue. And why shouldn't they get to dream their lurid dreams of politics-as-manipulation? They've had it done to them enough in reality.

Like Hall, the indexes by which Frank traces the Republican Party's wholesale capture of the populist mantle are cultural and rhetorical. But, unlike Hall, Frank is not a Marxist. Not even a socialist. He dreams of a return to the left-populism that was -- throughout the vast majority of US history -- the norm for prairie states, Great Plains states and Midwestern states. It's true that even over the past thirty years, the Midwest never really became a GOP stronghold, and furthermore, it wasn't all that long ago that Kansas had a reasonably strong Democratic Party (it can still be strong, on the local level).

So...
I suppose my point is that I think that Frank -- and to some extent Hall -- are correct about the folly of any so-called Left that disregards economic populism and that disregards the economic needs of ordinary people, even (or perhaps especially) the ones who have been brainwashed by the Right through any of its innumerable channels of influence.

We have to (1) find a way to establish a greater, more cohesive and more sincere Left/populist presence that can put pressure on leaders in the Democratic Party or support Left third party candidates, and (2) stop letting cultural differences and even large differences of opinion on some cultural issues get in the way of establishing meaningful political solidarity. You don't have to be someone's bestest buddy in order to vote alongside him if and to the extent to which your and his economic interests coincide.

Why Obama's campaign is justified -- morally & tactically -- in bringing up McCain & Keating Five.(That is...in my opinion.)

Despite the fact that by its very nature, it contradicts Obama's asserted platform that shuns 'negative' campaigning, here's why I believe Obama is justified, both morally and tactically, in presenting this documentary and information to the voting public:

The McCain campaign, particularly in the form of Sarah Palin's memorized talking points, has been unrelenting in the outright mendacity, slander and lies lies lies -- not to mention tons of coded racism -- of its outrageous and ridiculous attacks against Obama for his supposed connection to "terrorist" Bill Ayers: which is just downright disingenuous and everybody knows it. The McCain camp knows it's a lie too, but they have claimed time and again that they 'have no choice' but to continue spreading lies. You do too have a choice, Senator. You could save all of us a lot of headache and take a cue from your recent decision with respect to Michigan: withdraw your cranky-old-racist-asshole operation from other swing states. How 'bout it?

We've seen this kind of irresponsible and deeply dishonest activity from the McCain campaign so much over the last few months, that it has become difficult and tiring at times to bother to care. But we have to care and respond, just as Obama must care, and Obama must respond, even to the kinds of lies and tactics whose coarseness and spuriousness would -- in the company of civilized adults (that is, company in which the likes of McCain and especially Sarah Palin would be fish out of water, to be extra-generous) -- represent the kind of 'discourse' that one does not glorify with a response.

Think I'm exaggerating the level of desperation and dishonestly being perpetrated by Palin and McCain? (Of course you don't, unless you've been living under a rock...) Here's some objective proof for you, from Bloomberg News:

Over the weekend, McCain's running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, repeatedly linked the Democratic presidential candidate with a domestic terrorist group from the 1970s, telling supporters Obama used to ``pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country,'' a reference to his acquaintance with Bill Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground group that carried out a series of bombings in the early 1970s. Obama served on a charity board with Ayers and has denounced the bombings.

Obama ``is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country,'' Palin, 44, told donors at a fundraiser Oct. 4 in Costa Mesa, California. ``This, ladies and gentleman, is not the kind of change that I think we should be believing in.'' McCain adviser Greg Strimple said last week that they were "looking for a very aggressive last 30 days.''

"We're looking to turning the page on this financial crisis and getting back to discussing Mr. Obama's liberal, aggressively liberal, record and how he will be too risky for the Americans,'' Strimple told reporters on an Oct. 2 conference call.

So, as this McCain-minion Greg Strimple -- even his fucking name sounds shady -- points out: this is a strategy of out-and-out "aggression." Translation: McCain's filthy campaign wants now to play even filthier. And what that means is not an "aggressive last 30 days," but, rather: '30 days of LIES'. Even when it's stated in Strimple's simple-minded, Orwellian PR terminology, that's an awfully weird thing for a campaign to be admitting out loud, isn't it? Why not just say that McCain's going to endorse a liberalization of federal, state and local prohibitions on lynching.

This fucking Ayers bullshit just gets my goat, man. It is SO dishonest, I can barely believe that self-respecting journalists and politicos -- even those on the far, far Right, can sleep at night after spending a day repeating and spreading these lies and trying cast it as somehow credible. (Which is a difficult feat to pull off when you have zero credibility.) Whatever the details of his life as a young man, in the midst of the politically toxic and contentious political climate in the 60s and 70s, as a younger man -- during which time Obama was EIGHT YEARS OLD and nowhere near Chicago!! -- , William Ayers is a fucking Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. How Establishment can you get? Plus, he does good scholarship and, with his wife Bernadine Dohrn -- a law professor at Northwestern University -- is active in fighting poverty and working to combat racial and economic injustices.

The Ayers thing pisses me of for personal reasons, as well as the obvious moral, intellectual and political reasons. First, because I -- that's ME, y'all, along with my lovely wife and our two cats -- am a resident of the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. I don't live in the same section of town as Ayers, which is an area with nice houses -- some of them truly posh, but the majority of them just everyday nice houses -- in which lots and lots of professionals and academics live with their families.

A number of these professionals and academics are connected to, in some way or another, the University of Chicago and the University of Chicago Hospital, institutions which are, of course, located in Hyde Park. Many of the residents of the neighborhood are not connected to the University of Chicago, and simply live there because it's a nice neighborhood in which to live, or because it's got the kinds of houses that many people looking for houses are looking for. I shouldn't have to add that this place is NOT BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION some kind of hotbed of radicalism. I've met some of the people who live there, and I've read the books of others. It is as close to the ESTABLISHMENT as you're likely to find. Trust me.

And, as if that wasn't enough, have people forgotten that the University of Chicago is the home of the Chicago School of economics, whose figurehead and intellectual architect was none other than the most influential proponent of extreme laissez faire economics that this country has ever seen? The Milton Friedman in whose name a shiny new economics/business-school building is soon to be erected on the University of Chicago campus as an enduring and no-doubt-well-funded monument to the conservative movement that gave us the Reagan Revolution, the Bush Administration(s) and with them, the Iraq War, the privatization of public infrastructure, the mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina, and the recent crash of the stock- and credit markets, which might ultimately usher in a SECOND GREAT DEPRESSION?? Nobody's gonna tell me that my neighborhood is some kind of hotbed of crazy radicalism. If it is, then man, nobody's inviting me to the party, because I sure don't see it anywhere.

Here's Thomas Frank -- former longtime resident of Hyde Park --, back on August 20, 2008, in his column in The Wall Street Journal, describing the soon-to-be constructed Milton Friedman Society. And here's Frank in that same column, on August 16, talking about the cynical, mendacious Republican ploy of portraying Hyde Park as an 'elitist' neighborhood, which..... I mean that's just prima facie the most ridiculous notion. For one thing, as I mentioned previously, I live in fucking Hyde Park.

I am way way way too poor to be an elitist.

But beyond that, the idea of Hyde Park as an elitist neighborhood in preposterous if you compare it to the real elite neighborhoods of Chicago. You want ELITE? Try Chicago's exclusive northern suburbs: Evanston, Glenview, Wilmette, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Highland Park, Lake Forest, Hoffman Estates; try western suburbs like: Oak Park, Naperville, try old money urban districts like the Gold Coast, and continue by considering the skyrocketing cost of living in the recently gentrified and continually gentrifying neighborhoods of River West, parts of Wicker Park, Lincoln Park, Lincoln Square, Logan Square, Lakeview, Andersonville, the South Loop.....I could go on, but I think maybe my point is kinda clear, at least?

Hyde Park is to be distinguished from most of Chicago's opulent/posh/trendy neighborhoods not by reference to its supposed 'elitism', but precisely by its comparative diversity: economically, racially, generationally/agewise and according to whatever metric of class, background, or level of education you can throw at it. It includes, over on 53rd Street, a commercial center that has historically and continues to be associated with the black professional class. Oh, by the way, in and around Hyde Park reside members of the South Side's increasingly large black professional class.

In contradistinction to the many posh neighborhoods I cited above, gentrification in Hyde Park is fairly marginal, to the extent that it could really be said to exist at all. I mean, it's not an 'opulent' place: when Hyde Park's lone, solitary grocery store -- one of the oldest (and most mis-managed [although I feel like a jerk pointing it out!]) food co-ops in the country -- went out of business last year, the entire neighborhood was left high and dry (that is to say, we had no grocery store anywhere nearby) for a matter of months -- as many as four or five, if memory serves -- before a replacement owner moved in and set up shop.

It's tempting for some to say that if you've ever been to a typical college neighborhood, you've been to Hyde Park. But that isn't quite right. Hyde Park is a much more down-to-earth, more diverse and more FRIENDLY place than most college neighborhoods. There is a spirit of goodwill here, and almost none of the stuffy elitism that one notices immediately upon entering -- for instance, Evanston, Illionois -- which is the wealthy suburb far to the north along Chicago's endless lakefront, on the other side of town, where Northwestern University is located.

In closing, I leave you with the words of an acquaintance of both Obama and Ayers, and additionally a colleague of the latter, in his former capacity as a high-profile administrator at University of Illinois at Chicago: Stanley Fish. Fish, who served as Dean of UIC's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences from 1999 to 2004, is a man whose politics I would describe as conservative. He's really a bit of a contrarian, in that self-satisfied, Socratic-method, law-school-professor-way. In his scholarship on law, he is just a bit too close to Antonin Scalia for comfort.

These quirks notwithstanding, he is and has always been an intellectually honest man. And so, Stanley Fish's take on this whole Ayers thing -- as published in his column on The New York Times Web site on April 27, 2008, in reference to the use of these 'Ayers-connection' fabrications and innuendo by both Hillary Clinton and John McCain during the primaries --, is eloquent and convincing. In my opinion, Fish is absolutely correct in his characterization of this sleazy political tactic as a new form of "McCarthyism."

Or more specifically, Fish says: "'McCarthyism' and 'Swiftboating' have come together in a particularly lethal and despicable form. I refer to the startling revelation — proclaimed from the housetops by both the Clinton and McCain campaigns — that Barack Obama ate dinner at William Ayers’s house, served with him on a board and was the honored guest at a reception he organized." Fish's response to this 'shocking' revelation, particularly in light of his own professional and regional encounters with Obama and Ayers, should, in my view, be considered definitive. I quote at great length in the hope of demonstrating this beyond a shadow of a doubt (I'm particularly fond of Fish's reference to the fact that the ultraconservative Judge Richard Posner is also among Ayers's neighbors):

Confession time. I too have eaten dinner at Bill Ayers’s house (more than once), and have served with him on a committee, and he was one of those who recruited my wife and me at a reception when we were considering positions at the University of llinois, Chicago. Moreover, I have had Bill and his wife Bernardine Dohrn to my apartment, was a guest lecturer in a course he taught and joined in a (successful) effort to persuade him to stay at UIC and say no to an offer from Harvard. Of course, I’m not running for anything, but I do write for The New York Times and, who knows, this association with former fugitive members of the Weathermen might be enough in the eyes of some to get me canned.

Did I conspire with Bill Ayers? Did I help him build bombs? Did I aid and abet his evasion (for a time) of justice? Not likely, given that at the time of the events that brought Ayers and Dohrn to public attention, I was a supporter of the Vietnam War. I haven’t asked him to absolve me of that sin (of which I have since repented), and he hasn’t asked me to forgive him for his (if he has any).

Indeed in all the time I spent with Ayers and Dohrn, politics — present or past — never came up.

What did come up? To answer that question I have to introduce a word and concept that is somewhat out of fashion: the salon. A salon is a gathering in a private home where men and women from various walks of life engage in conversation about any number of things, including literature, business, fashion, films, education and philosophy. Ayers and Dohrn did not call their gatherings salons, but that’s what they were; large dinner parties (maybe 12-15), with guests coming and going, one conversation leading to another, no rules or obligations, except the obligation to be interesting and interested.

The only thing I don’t remember was ideology, although since this was all going on in Hyde Park, there was the general and diffused ideology, vaguely liberal, that usually hangs over a university town.

Many of those attending these occasions no doubt knew something about their hosts’ past, but the matter was never discussed and why should it have been? We were there not because of what Ayers and Dohrn had done 40 years ago, but because of what they were doing at the moment.

Ayers is a longtime professor of education at UIC, nationally known for his prominence in the “small school” movement. Dohrn teaches at Northwestern Law School, where she directs a center for child and family justice. Both lend their skills and energies to community causes; both advise various agencies; together they have raised exemplary children and they have been devoted caretakers to aged parents. “Respectable” is too mild a word to describe the couple; rock-solid establishment would be more like it. There was and is absolutely no reason for anyone who knows them to plead the fifth or declare, “I am not now nor have I ever been a friend of Bill’s and Bernardine’s.”

Least of all Barack Obama, who by his own account didn’t know them that well and is now being taken to task for having known them at all. Of course it would have required preternatural caution to avoid associating with anyone whose past deeds might prove embarrassing on the chance you decided to run for president someday. In an earlier column, I spoke of the illogic of holding a candidate accountable for things said or done by a supporter or an acquaintance. Now a candidate is being held accountable for things said and done four decades ago by people who happen to live in his upper middle class neighborhood. Hillary Clinton and John McCain should know better. In fact, they do know better. To date, Clinton has played hardball, but hasn’t really fouled. I never saw anything wrong or inaccurate about her saying that Martin Luther King’s vision required a president’s action before it could be implemented, or Bill Clinton’s saying that Jesse Jackson won the South Carolina primary twice. He did, and if the implication was that Obama’s base constituency is African-American, that too was accurate and continues to be so.

As for her saying that all Obama had ever done was give a speech, she was being generous: he gave that speech against invading Iraq at a small event featuring other speakers (including Jackson); the local press coverage did not even mention him; and if this was, as his campaign claims, an act of courage, it was a singularly private one, maybe even a fairy tale. Clinton’s exaggerating the danger of her visit to Bosnia (most likely unintentional because, as she said, “I’m not dumb”) came a little closer to crossing a line, but didn’t. Re-telling a story (about a hospital’s refusal to treat an uninsured patient) that turned out not to be true was evidence of faulty campaign organization, not of deliberate duplicity.

But the literature the Clinton campaign is passing around about Obama and Ayers cannot be explained away or rationalized. It features bold headlines proclaiming that Ayers doesn’t regret his Weathermen activities (what does that have to do with Obama? Are we required to repudiate things acquaintances of our have not said?), that Ayers contributed $200 to Obama’s senatorial campaign (do you take money only from people of whose every action you approve?), that Obama admired Ayers’s 1997 book on the juvenile justice system, that Ayers and Obama participated on a panel examining the role of intellectuals in public life. That subversive event was sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals, an organization that also sponsored an evening conversation (moderated by me) between those notorious radicals Richard Rorty and Judge Richard Posner (also a neighbor of Ayers’s; maybe the Federalist Society should expel him).

I don’t see any crimes or even misdemeanors in any of this. I do see civic activism and a concern for the welfare of children. The suggestion that something sinister was transpiring on those occasions is backed up by nothing except the four-alarm-bell typography that accompanies this list of entirely innocent, and even praiseworthy, actions.

As for Senator McCain, in 2004 he repudiated the Swiftboat attacks against fellow veteran John Kerry, but this time around he’s joining in, and if Obama gets the nomination, it seems that the Arizona senator will be playing the Ayers card. Of course, McCain knows a little about baseless accusations and innuendos, given his experience in South Carolina in 2000. And in case he has forgotten what it feels like, he may soon be reminded; for there’s a story abroad on the Internet that says that rather than being a heroic, tortured prisoner of war, McCain was a collaborator who traded information for a comfortable apartment serviced by maids who were really prostitutes. I don’t believe it for a second, just as I am sure that Senators McCain and Clinton don’t really believe that Obama condones setting bombs or supports a radical agenda that was pursued (as he has said) when he was eight years old.

The difference is that I feel a little dirty just for having repeated a scurrilous rumor even as I rejected it. Apparently Obama’s two opponents have no such qualms and are happily retailing, and wallowing in, the dirt. (Link to article.)

No need to add anything to Fish's comments. Case dismissed.

Well, let me add two things. First: whereas the Palin/McCain/Bush/GOP tactic is nothing but slander and innuendo, Obama's calling out of McCain on his role in the Keating Five scandal pertains directly to McCain's claims that he is somehow a pro-regulatory/pro-oversight force with respect to economic questions. I mean, everybody knows McCain's claims are bullshit anyway, but I think Obama does well to fight back against an attack that's wholly devoid of substance with a counterattack that couldn't be more relevant to our current economic/regulatory situation.

Second, and final (and I haven't seen anyone else put it this way): in a way, the Right's childish, bullshit attack against Obama is worse than McCarthyism and worse than Swiftboating.

Why?

Because in essence, McCain's shameless tactic, were it successful -- which there's ZERO possibility of it being, in anything more than maybe a fund-raising sense among LOONY right-wingers -- would ultimately discourage anyone who has lived an actual life, outside of the beach houses and summer houses and ranches and country-clubs of a tiny elite. I live in fucking Hyde Park, and unlike McCain, I don't really have the luxury of choosing not to live here, even if -- let's say -- I disliked so vigorously the ideas of the Chicago School of economics that it caused a strain on me psychlogically to be so near such rightist ideology. Let's say I just hated the idea of buying my fruit and mil in the same grocery store as a Friedman-acolyte, SO MUCH SO that I wanted to move up north to Andersonville, just to avoid association, and thereby, guilt by association.

Guess what? Unlike George W. Bush, who could just move back to the family compound, and unlike John McCain, who can nestle himself comfortably underneath an awning of his choice, in one of nine houses of his choice, and unlike millionaire Sarah Palin, who can move back either to one of her two summer houses or go flying in her expensive airplane or take a snowmobile through the snowiest and most beautiful snowbanks of the expansive Alaskan countryside.....

Unlike these GOP con-artists, I can't afford to move to some other part of the city. Good thing that, unlike McCain and his Rovian goons, I know that 'guilt by association' is a fundamentally dishonest concept. I love living in Hyde Park. It might not be the most exciting or trendy place; it might not be all that near to CTA train routes, but doggone it, it's A-OK by me; just an ordinary, normal, everyday Joe Sixpack, doing regular-old, outside-the-beltway stuff in my humble but happy Midwestern digs. Paying my taxes, and trying to do what's right by the Lord Above.

You -- Gentle Reader -- and I know what's right: voting for Barack Obama this November.

Thomas Frank on how and why the Republican Party has spent the last 30 years dismantling the country's public infrastructure.

Author and journalist Thomas Frank, speaking recently in Portland, Oregon. He discusses his latest book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule for about half an hour, after which he takes audience questions.

Frank really hits his stride in this video, by which I mean he delivers a healthy and satisfying dose of eloquent and morally indignant populism. Exactly what I needed to get me through another day of Bailout-talk, with all of the lying, insulting, hypocritical, patronizing cant from Bush, Paulson and Bernanke. Enjoy:

Thomas Frank on The Colbert Report

Thomas Frank discusses his new book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule with Stephen Colbert, the latter in full-tilt on-screen persona mode. Frank: "What you have misunderstood, Stephen, is that the argument of the book is that conservatives suck."



Thomas Frank is unquestionably one of my favorite people: he's a great writer, he's funny as hell and his politics are exactly on the money. Most importantly, he takes the piss out of hypocrites and con-artists in a voice that updates the polemical stylings of the old-timey, mustachioed populists.

See his regular column in The Wall Street Journal 'The Tilting Yard', read his books, all of which are outstanding, and either recall fondly or discover afresh the grandeur that was/is The Baffler.