This paternalistic book by Thomas Frank seems to be still the dominant way that liberals understand the working class voting Republican.
BBC journalist Helen Lewis tells the Decoding the Gurus gang in a discussion that is exclusively on Patreon that she still “clings to the What’s the Matter With Kansas thesis that the Right welded on guns and abortion to keep people voting against their economic interest.”
In his work in progress Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia, Rony Guldmann writes:
* When a few misfits behave outrageously at Republican campaign events, this is taken by liberals as evidence for the latent racism and general depravity of conservatives. But no objections are raised, Scarborough noted, when a renown liberal commentator like Thomas Frank writes What’s the Matter with Kansas?, a book that took aim, not at one man, but at an entire state, dismissing its conservative-voting citizens as a bunch of “yahoos.” A conservative like Scarborough was willing to turn around and criticize his own when they crossed the line. Yet liberals seem unwilling to engage in similar self-policing, unwilling to acknowledge, let alone denounce, the hatred and bigotry that grows in their own ranks.
In a book that delighted liberals, Frank argued that his fellow Kansans had been duped into voting against their own economic interests—that is, into voting Republican—by cynical politicians of the Right. These operatives have succeeded in transmuting economic frustrations into cultural resentment against a fictional “liberal elite,” inciting an irrational cultural class war against these elites to displace the rational economic class war against the powerful business interests that these Kansans should fight and once did fight. Whereas the working Kansans of yesteryear were fiery progressives resisting their exploitation by plutocrats,1 Kansas had recently become a place where workers are more conservative than their bosses,2 driven on by a crusade that suspends material interests in favor of vague, unappeasable cultural grievances.3 The “in many ways… preeminent question of our time,” Frank observed, was how so many voters could get their basic interests so wrong, how so many could forget that “it is the Democrats that are the party of the workers, of the poor, of the weak and the victimized.” This was once “part of the ABCs of adulthood.”4 Yet conservatives have now distracted voters from those ABCs by replacing a hard-nosed economic conception of class with an airy cultural one. Class oppression is now understood to be the result, not of the unprecedented concentration of economic power in the hands of business elites, but of the unprecedented concentration of cultural power in a haughty intelligentsia. It is a perennial struggle between the unpretentious, authentic majority and an egg-headed yet all-powerful elite contemptuous of this majority’s tastes and values.5 Kansans’ real economic powerless vis-à-vis real plutocratic overlords has been recast and distorted as a vague sense of cultural disenfranchisement by liberalism, which conservatives condemn as an alien, menacing sensibility that any authentic American rejects instinctively.
By thus reconfiguring the meaning of class and class conflict, conservatives have arrogated to themselves the mantle of the outsider and underdog. Frank observed:
“From the mild-mannered David Brooks to the ever-wrathful Ann Coulter, attacks on the personal tastes and pretensions of this [the liberal] stratum of society are the stock-in-trade of conservative writers. They, the conservatives, are the real outsiders, they tell us, gazing with disgust upon the ludicrous manners of the high and mighty. Or, they tell us, they are rough-and-ready proles, laughing along with us at the efforts of our social “betters” to reform and improve us. That they are often, in fact, people of privilege doing their utmost to boost the fortunes of a political party that is the traditional tool of the privileged is a contradiction that does not trouble them.”
Conservatives can overlook this contradiction because they have reinterpreted the concept of class in a basic way. No longer defined in traditional terms—as a matter of money, birth, or occupation—class has now been reconceptualized as a matter of authenticity as measured by consumer preferences, recreational predilections, and religious affiliation.7 Conservatives’ “dearest rhetorical maneuver,” observed Frank, was the “latté liberal,” the idea “that liberals are identifiable by their tastes and consumer preferences and that these tastes and preferences reveal the essential arrogance and foreignness of liberalism.”8 In contrast to the effete pretentiousness and snobbery of liberalism, the conservative denizens of red-state America are promoted as sincere, down-to-earth, reverent, and “attuned to the rhythms of the universe.”9 Fixating upon the personal tastes and pretensions of liberals, conservatives have cast liberalism, not as a political creed that speaks to the needs of the many, but as a lifestyle choice that appeals to the tastes of the few. Regular Americans are oppressed, not by multinationals polluting their air and water, but by the “earnest young vegans of Washington, D.C., two years out of Brown and already lording over the hardworking people of the vest interior from a desk at the EPA.”10 Conservatives have persuaded Kansans that government regulations should be assessed, not according to the concrete interests they advance, but according to the cultural pretensions they channel. The preference for environmental regulation over pollution is now placed in the same category as the preference for veganism over meat, or café latte over black coffee—just another manifestation of an imperious liberalism tightening its tentacles at every opportunity. This narrative has proven irresistible to many, and is what allowed conservatives to seize the reins of the country.
Scarborough, however, was of the view that Frank’s thesis was more akin to racial hostility and xenophobia than to legitimate social commentary. The thesis wasn’t just mistaken, but also an act of aggression that was on some level morally equivalent to racist outbursts at Republican rallies. Unwilling to recognize Frank’s thesis as disinterested sociological reflection, Scarborough condemned it as one more elitist gesture, yet another slander by a liberal trying to reform his social inferiors. Far from discrediting the cultural grievances it examined, What’s the Matter with Kansas? provided a further illustration of their justice. Is respecting those with different views not, Scarborough may have been thinking, also among the “ABCs of adulthood”? Heartfelt disagreement notwithstanding, are we not obligated to accept others’ opinions at “face values”—rather than dismissing them as epiphenomena of forces that we alone we have the sagacity to discern, as Frank seemed to be doing? The “preeminent question of our time,” then, isn’t why many in the working class vote against their economic interests, but why conservatives are routinely held accountable for the slightest hints of real or perceived bigotry while liberals can casually indulge their own bigotry in plain view without fear of reproach.
Scarborough’s comparison will strike liberals as strange indeed. How, they will object, could the very thinly veiled racism that overtook Republican rallies possibly be compared with Frank’s attempt to make sense of a historically unprecedented shift in voting behavior? However, Scarborough might retort that the perceived unfairness of the comparison only testifies to the dominance of the liberal culture, which has rigged the rules of civility in its own favor. Are hatred and incivility not evenly distributed across the political spectrum, he might have asked. The mechanism of incivility may vary from one milieu to the next. For a certain breed of conservative, it is crude epithets. For a liberal commentator like Frank, it is an eloquent essay. But superior eloquence is no a substitute for the ABCs of adulthood. Whether one calls someone who is plainly not a terrorist a terrorist or attributes his views on abortion to the political manipulation of economic frustration, the upshot is the same, which is to exclude him from the equal respect due our fellow citizens. Is this just another vague cultural grievance, or something which liberals unequivocally condemn in every case but that of conservatives?
Scarborough is hardly alone in suggesting that liberals mistreat conservatives in a way that mirrors how privileged, dominant majorities have mistreated and marginalized minorities, and that liberals therefore occupy a position akin to the one they would impute to conservatives—callous overlords aggrandizing themselves at the expense of the weak and voiceless.
* conservative claims of cultural oppression can turn anything into a cultural issue. Being merely the mediums through which these claims are articulated, the “issues” selected will vary according to a range of factors—including electoral politics, economic trends, international developments, and others. Religion and morality are among the claimants’ preferred topics. But their claims of cultural oppression are defined, not by their contingent subject matter, but by a set of objectives, a mode of analysis, and above all a spirit of argument. Frank observes that conservatism is no longer concerned to defend “some established order of things.” Instead, it “accuses, it rants, it points out hypocrisies and gleefully pounces on contradictions.”82 It is this glee and impish delight, this sense of oneself as the defiant outsider speaking truth to power, that defines the conservative claimant of cultural oppression. Conservative claims of cultural oppression are a form of political and intellectual judo. They seek, not to resist liberalism directly, but to redirect the prestige of liberalism against liberalism itself, to “pull the rug” out from under liberalism in the most brazen of fashions. With impish delight, the claimants undertake the ultimate political chutzpah of stepping without invitation or permission into the shoes of the very people they stand accused of oppressing, at the same instant thrusting liberals into the shoes of the oppressors.
* Scarborough’s comparison of What’s the Matter with Kansas? with calls for the assassination of Barack Obama does seem like a stretch. But few dispute that racial prejudice can, and indeed has, assumed more genteel and intellectualized forms than the cross-burning, black-lynching Klansman. And so we cannot dismiss the possibility that “conservaphobia” is an inherently sophisticated and intellectualized bigotry, for which reason it cannot readily be recognized as such. Conservative claimants of cultural oppression believe they see through the sophistication and intellectualization and seek a vocabulary through which their insight might be broadcast to the world. Just as critical race theorists hold that “not being black” is intrinsic to the social definition of whiteness and radical feminists hold that “not being female” is integral to that of maleness, so the claimants insist that liberalism is now defined by anti-conservative animus. Perhaps liberalism must no less than the racism, sexism, and homophobia it denounces define itself in opposition to an Other, a role now assumed by conservatives. A liberal conservaphobia, if it exists, would be an exponentially more complex creature than the traditional bigotries, something that blurs the line between the intellectual and the visceral, a complicated amalgam of rational and irrational elements, and so a phenomenon fraught with profound moral ambiguity in a way that racism, sexism, and homophobia are not. This, and not their inherent irrationality, may be the reason why conservative claims of cultural oppression have thus far resisted rational exposition.
* As an ostensible species of right-wing populism, conservative claims of cultural oppression strike most liberals as the same old rank anti-intellectualism. Frank writes that anti-intellectualism “is one of the grand unifying themes of the backlash, the mutant strain of class war that underpins so many of Kansas’s otherwise random-seeming grievances.”
* Frank characterizes the “Great Backlash” of the culture wars as “a curious amassing of petty, unrelated beefs with the world.”6 And this impression is confirmed in part by some conservatives. Codevilla writes that the “Country Class” of ordinary Americans “speaks with many voices” and “defines itself practically in terms of reflexive reactions against the rulers’ defining ideas and proclivities.”7 However, we shall now see how this seemingly anarchic diversity is underpinned by a unifying impulse to tear down liberalism’s veil of illusion and thereby restore equality between liberals and conservatives. What Frank dismisses as a “curious amassing” of petty grievances is better understood as a right-wing analogue of what Roger Kimball, borrowing from Fredric Crews, calls the “Left Eclecticism” that now dominates the humanities.
Left Eclecticism encompasses a “wide variety of anti-establishment modes of thought.” But these are unified by
“[a]n understanding, ultimately borrowed from the Marxist ethos, that analytic and theoretical discourse is to be judged primarily by the radicalism of its stance. The schools of thought thus favored make sharply divergent claims, yet all of them set themselves against allegedly repressive Western institutions and practices. In dealing with a given painting, novel, or piece of architecture, especially one dating from the capitalist era, they do not aim primarily to show the work’s character or governing idea. The goal is rather to subdue the work through aggressive demystification—for example, by positing its socioeconomic determinants and ideological implications, scanning it for any encouraging signs of subversion, and then judging the result against an ideal of total freedom.”
Like Left Eclecticism, the Right Eclecticism of conservative claims of cultural oppression is characterized by sharp internal disagreements as to both substance and rhetoric. But also like Left Eclecticism, it is marked by a certain unity of purpose. And this is to “subdue” liberalism through “aggressive demystification.” Right Eclecticism seeks, not to refute liberalism as a set of ideas, but to expose liberalism’s basic self-understanding as fraudulent, to reveal that the various existential, epistemic, and ideological motivations that Jost and other liberals would impute to conservatives are the hidden rot lying at the core of liberal virtue. It is liberals, not conservatives, who need order, closure, and structure. It is liberals, not conservatives, who pursue group dominance and endorse inequality. If conservatives are to discredit conservaphobia, they must first discredit those from whom it issues, the liberal elites, and this is what the critical theory of the Right ultimately endeavors to do.
* Frank would trace the cultural grievances of Kansans to the machinations of cynical Republican strategists. But this analysis cannot be extended to the entire Third World, with which D’Souza urges a conservative alliance based on a shared cultural oppression. If leftists dismiss the entire state of Kansas as a “bunch of yahoos,” as Scarborough alleges, this might be for the same reason why, according to D’Souza, “[m]ost people on the left won’t admit that they consider Muslims too backward and fanatical to entrust them with the ballot.”
* Can What’s the Matter with Kansas? be explained by the theory of human nature that guides its diagnosis of working-class conservatives? Did Thomas Frank embark on his career as a political writer in order to maximize his economic utility, or was he prepared to sacrifice this for a higher ideal, irrespective of whether it bore fruit? Liberals do not typically accuse that starving artists in Brooklyn have been “distracted” from their “real” interests by the bohemian culture, which can’t provide the tangible rewards of an MBA. Nor do they thus judge all the left-leaning academics in the humanities who forfeited higher salaries in the private sector in order to construct and deconstruct reality, as Sowell says. Nunberg charges that conservatives divert resentments originating in economic inequality into debates about values. But radical academics in the humanities would reject the analogous charge that their theories arise from diverted socio-economic resentment, functioning as psychic compensation for subpar salaries and subpar prestige. These are not the kinds of people who find themselves accused by liberals of self-deludingly sacrificing the substantive to the symbolic, of cultivating of vague cultural grievances that can never be appeased.
* By remaining tied to an “Old Enlightenment” framework according to which reason is “conscious, literal, logical, universal, unemotional, disembodied,”70 liberals have shown themselves out of touch with the actual springs of our political allegiances, inadvertently reinforcing liberalism’s reputation as foreign and elitist.71 The American public may not agree with conservative policies. However, those policies are never evaluated in the abstract, but always in the context of particular frames whose resonance for us is a function of the broader neural systems they activate. And conservatives have been adept at systematically cultivating those systems which serve their cause.
Though cognitive science has amply discredited the Old Enlightenment view of reason, we have yet to digest the full implications of what we already know:
“It should come as no surprise then that the ideas that our embodied brains come up with depend in large measure on the peculiarities of human anatomy in general and on the way we, as human beings, function on our planet and with each other. This is not surprising when discussed in vague abstractions, but it is remarkable in detail: even our ideas of morality and politics are embodied in this rich way—those ideas are created and carried out not merely by the neural anatomy and connectivity of our brains, but also by the ways we function bodily in the physical and social world.”
It follows from this rich embodiment that people’s moral and political views cannot be altered as will by argument alone, because what we experience to be the force of an argument is always bound up with our broader social and physical functioning as embodied organisms.73 Our political attitudes emerge out of synaptically encoded moral narratives, which possess a dramatic structure comprised of heroes, villains, victims, helpers, and so forth. And this is in turn undergirded by an emotional structure which binds the dramatic structure to positive and negative emotional circuitry. Feelings like anger, fear, and relief are responses to developments within the dramatic structure—such as villainy, battle, and victory.74 This is why we feel elated when our political candidate wins and depressed when he loses. The candidate’s fate has been neurally integrated with our dopamine circuitry, which is activated by his victory and suppressed by his defeat.75 We aren’t born with these narratives, but their foundations become physically encoded in our brains quickly enough and constitute the lenses through which we see others and ourselves.76 Our choice of political candidate can sometimes change. But the “deep narratives” that ultimately drive our choices are strongly resistant to change.77 These have been synaptically encrypted into our physiology and cannot be altered absent a transformation in our broader brain structure.78 To the extent change is possible, this will be, not because arguments have changed our minds, but because language has changed our brains, because the right words and images have strengthened some synaptic connections while weakening others to the point that political reorientation becomes possible.79
* This is why the New Enlightenment can both illuminate and be illuminated by conservative claims of cultural oppression. As saw in an earlier chapter, Sean Hannity charges that liberals are prepared to bring “the full force” of their “rhetorical firepower” to bear in their attacks against conservatives. And the New Enlightenment suggests that the metaphor of “firepower” reflects an accurate intuitive appreciation of the neurological stakes, where the usual distinction between force and persuasion is dissolved. Mooney criticizes the traditional Enlightenment view that beliefs are “somehow disembodied, suspended above us in the ether.” Having misunderstood the nature of beliefs in this way, we imagine that “all you have to do is flip up the right bit of correct information and wrong beliefs will dispel, like bursting a soap bubble.” But the truth is that our “[b]eliefs are physical,” and that “[t]o attack them is like attacking one part of a person’s anatomy, almost like pricking his or her skin (or worse).”95 If liberals shrug off the suggestion that they are engaged in an “assault” against conservatives and their values, this can only be because they remain under the spell of the Old Enlightenment, imagining that beliefs are “suspended above us in the ether” and therefore immune from assault. Frank writes that when conservatives complain of their “persecution” by liberals, what they actually mean here is “not imprisonment or excommunication or disenfranchisement, but criticism,” like editorials expressing disagreement with them.96 But understood naturalistically, this “criticism” can be a rather intrusive thing, an endless pricking away at conservative identities that slowly erodes the synaptic strength of the neural connections underpinning Strict Father morality. This is surely a kind of “assault,” which is why the New Enlightenment endows conservative claims of cultural oppression with a new credibility.
* The highest ideals of Strict Father morality may not track human flourishing in the direct sense that Lakoff associates with Nurturant Parent morality. But the frustration of Strict Father morality can have consequences for some people’s flourishing. Frank writes that while conservative polemics against liberalism “might get the facts wrong, they get the subjective experience right.”101 This is an Old Enlightenment distinction, however, because the New Enlightenment tells us that the subjective experience is correlated with certain facts that are just as tangible as the economic realities that liberals privilege as uniquely “substantive.” This is why the New Enlightenment gives conservative claims of cultural oppression a new credibility that they lacked under the old one.
* Frank writes that the conservative “Backlash” is sustained, not by “the precise metrics of sociology,” but by “contradictions and tautologies and huge, honking errors,” by the “blunt instruments of propaganda.”140 It reveals that “American conservatism depends for its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making certain mental connections about the world, connections that until recently were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet.”141 But we have been examining a set of mental connections that liberals never make. Liberals may have “Open personalities.” But this personality is necessarily “closed” vis-à-vis its ultimate premise, the supremacy of a particular human type and hero-system. Liberals can dismiss conservative claims of cultural oppression as contrived only because they refuse to recognize the violence entailed by this ultimate premise. With the buffered identity and its epistemological framework having shaped the meaning of liberals’ naturalism, liberals cannot not take that naturalism to its logical conclusion and recognize the epistemological subject as the expression of a supra-epistemological imperative, of a hero-system that comes at the expense of another one. If conservatives are, as Lakoff observes, fond of saying that liberals “just don’t get it,” this is what they just don’t get.
* Frank observes that conservatives see liberalism as “in power whether its politicians are elected or not,” even when Republicans control all three branches of government, and even when “no Democratic presidential nominee has called himself a liberal since Walter Mondale.”3 For conservatives, liberalism is “beyond politics, a tyrant that dominates our lives in countless ways great and small, and which is virtually incapable of being overthrown.”