'Kansas' Author Frank Debuts With WSJ, Offers View Of 'Bittergate'

Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici, assessing the new redesign at the Wall Street Journal, notes more than just the changes in aesthetics - there's actually a conscious effort to bring some left-of-center ideas to the opinion pages. One such newcomer to the Journal is Thomas Frank, whose book, What's The Matter With Kansas, is an oft-cited piece of source material for Senator Barack Obama's recent "bitter" comments. Frank doesn't shy away from the kliegs, jumping right into the heart of the matter with an editorial entitled, "Obama's Touch Of Class."

And don't prejudge the piece by its title. Far from a piece of candidate flattery, Frank quickly gets to the heart of his old argumentative stomping grounds, reclaiming his 'Kansas' thesis and renewing its vitality amid the endless campaign hype:

In truth, I have no way of knowing whether some passage of mine inspired Mr. Obama's tactless assertion that the hard-done-by clutch guns and irrationally oppose free-trade deals. In point of fact, I oppose many of those trade deals myself.

But I know one thing with absolute certainty. The media flurry kicked up by Mr. Obama's gaffe powerfully confirms an argument I actually did make: That as they return again to the culture war, what the soldiers on all sides are doing is talking about class without actually addressing the economic basis of the subject.

Frank briefly parses the way the labels "elitist" and "authentic" can get kicked around with relative ease and without respect for the larger issues. And he catalogs a lot of phoniness, from candidates to parties to the media. But there's a larger lesson to be learned, and Frank states it with a fine-tuned succinctness:

But suppose we read on, and we find the news item about the hedge fund managers who made $2 billion and $3 billion last year, or the story about the vaporizing of our home equity. Suppose we become a little . . . bitter about this. What do our pundits and politicians tell us then?

That there is no place for such sentiment in the Party of the People. That "bitterness" is an ugly and inadmissible emotion. That "divisiveness" is a thing to be shunned at all costs.

Conservatism, on the other hand, has no problem with bitterness; as the champion strategist Howard Phillips said almost three decades ago, the movement's job is to "organize discontent." And organize they have. They have welcomed it, they have flattered it, they have invited it in with millions of treason-screaming direct-mail letters, they have given it a nice warm home on angry radio shows situated up and down the AM dial. There is not only bitterness out there; there is a bitterness industry.

Now that's some fresh, free-range truth, people. And in Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, no less! The whole piece is worth your time, and Frank is worth making a regular read - especially if he plans on continuing writing like this:

If Barack Obama or anyone else really cares to know what I think, I will simplify it all down to this. The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they've got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don't care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I'll fly the plane myself.

In concurrence with the rest of the internet, I'll nominate this as the best concluding paragraph of 2008.

Comments

[CTmom13]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obNcs0kqFjk&eurl=http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x122141

ABC Debate Protest

[CanProf]

Thomas Frank and others are right about the way that the conservative movement has used culture divisively, and they're right to try to explain why we should be bitter about economic inequality--the elitism of the rich. But the perceived elitism of the cultural elite is not equivalent to the elitism of the fiscal elite--what Frank calls the plutocracy. Cultural capital is not going to be judged in the same way as financial capital, no matter how hard we try to get people to see it that way. Here's why: regular people would be rich if they could, and they don't really fault the rich for being rich, though it's on their backs; but regular people would not necessarily embrace high culture, even if they had access to it. They like the idea of having more money; but more Beethoven or Marx or Woolf or Stoppard?--they don't much care whether they get that or not. And they don't like being looked down on by those who do. That's the problem we've got to solve.

[andyg]

does it matter if the hedge funders are backing Obama. like soros with his $3 billion a year.

[Herrington]

"I'll nominate this as the best concluding paragraph of 2008."

Or if taken heed of, the century.

[nellie]

"The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy."

I love the sound of truth in the Wall Street Journal.

[Americanium]

I bet that caused a lot of coffee stained shirts this morning.

[Fulcanelli]

Whew! Now there's the unvarnished truth.

It should be amazing to watch heads explode throughout the right-wing blogosphere, Fixt News and elsewhere as they grapple with that blast of spin-free common sense. Coming from the belly of the beast, no less...

He must e-mail his copy in or have a concrete reinforced office in the basement of the WSJ.

Red State, Rush and Hannity will be catatonic. That made my day.

[Tillie2]

Hear, hear. I have tried to follow Frank since his op-ed in the NYTimes. I have read up on his references to the Gilded Age historians and found that I am in total agreement with his notion that we are living in a dangerously parallel universe to the late 1800's. How on earth did we get to this point!??

[RI]

"How did we get to this point?" Just as he said: the right-wing masters of manipulation. They line people up to oppose gay marriage or some other "values" issue on the ballot to lure people into voting against their own interests. Or they do a "Willy Horton" scare ad to have people emotionally "cling" to the safe status-quo candidtate. Will Obama's chemistry overcome this? We shall see.