The morning after Election Day 2004, when Democrats and liberals started asking what had hit them, Thomas Frank had an answer ready and waiting. What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, his biting analysis of the culture wars and the bamboozlement of the American working class, was quickly on every wagging tongue in Washington. Since then the book has hit multiple best seller lists and Frank has turned up as a guest on everything from Hardball With Chris Matthews to The Daily Show. A former Chicagoan (and Reader contributor) and the longtime editor of the Woodlawn-based Baffler, Frank now lives in D.C. with his wife, Wendy Edelberg, and their two children. He’ll be in Chicago this week to promote the book’s paperback edition, which includes a new afterword on the presidential election.
TF: No, I wasn’t saying that. I know all these people here in D.C., they were all convinced that Kerry was going to win. And they all had good reasons for it, and, you know, they’re experts and I’m not, so I believed what they were telling me. But I never claimed to be an expert. I was studying stuff that’s in the past, I had no idea what would actually happen.
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TF: It’s the culture wars. As the gap between the classes grows, and the lot of working-class people gets worse and worse, those people are becoming more and more conservative. And they are more and more endorsing the very economic policies that are screwing them over. Why are they doing it? Because of the 30-year culture war. Which in some ways started in Chicago, in Grant Park.
The classic example here is the Social Security privatization scheme that Bush is promoting now. This is deeply unpopular. And if the election had been fought over that issue, Kerry might have won. I think of those small towns out on the plains where the whole town is surviving on Social Security payments, that’s all they’ve got, and these people are unbelievably pissed off at Bush–you know, they didn’t vote for this, they didn’t vote for Social Security privatization, it was barely even discussed in the campaign. It came up once in one of the debates, and then Kerry, his only objection to it was that it would blow a hole in the federal budget–which is true, but that’s not what gets people riled up, that’s not what Social Security is about, it’s something much more fundamental than that. There are numerous issues like that where you have to make the case.
TF: I don’t think it would be all that hard for them to make a comeback. One of the reasons is that all the language that the conservatives use to describe the sort of upside-down class war–you know, their war against the intellectuals, and their war against the latte sippers and Volvo drivers and all this stuff–all that language is stolen from the left. I always make the comparison between these guys, your contemporary conservatives, and Mike Gold, who was a columnist for the Daily Worker starting in the 30s. One of his favorite things to do was to mock what he would call bourgeois writers for all these same things–for being devitalized, for being affected, for liking things French. They didn’t have lattes in those days, but you know, every other kind of dainty, deracinated, devitalized product . . .
Thomas Frank
