BuzzFlash: Intervew with Author of "What's the Matter with Kansas?"

[Larkspur]

Part I http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/04/08/int04044.html

BuzzFlash: "If Kansas is the concentrated essence of normality, then this is where we can see the deranged gradually become normal, where we can look in that handsome, confident, reassuring, all-American face – class president, quarterback, Rhodes scholar, bond trader, builder of industry – and realize that we’re staring into the eyes of a lunatic."

Your book explains that statement. It’s a kind of shocking statement in many ways -- it could be Ronald Reagan you’re talking about, that head of the Rotary Club.

Thomas Frank: That’s very good. The image that I was thinking of when I wrote that was John Brown. It was a famous painting in Topeka, a mural of John Brown. Every kid in Kansas gets brought to Topeka to see it. John Brown is three times life size, holding a rifle in one hand and a Bible in the other, with this wild look in his eyes. Behind him, soldiers of the two Civil War armies slaughter each other. That’s what I was going for -- that image of Kansas.

Part II http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/04/08/int04045.html

BuzzFlash: Although this is a very, very small part of your book, you do, in effect, chastise the Democrats and say they have been so hesitant to use class as an issue, while the Republicans have usurped it as an issue, and successfully so. The Democrats keep saying, we’ll lose if we run on that, while the Republicans are winning running on that.

Thomas Frank: Yes, exactly. And it’s precisely because the Democrats won’t take up that battle and won’t talk that old language of economic populism that Republicans are able to get away with this kind of hallucinatory class world that they live in. The Republicans talk about social class all the time, and it’s delusional. It’s the stuff that Limbaugh and O’Reilly talk about all the time. The Democrats need to challenge that.

The way you challenge it is by talking about the real economic world that we live in. However, doing that would mean turning away or making Wall Street very unhappy and the corporate world very unhappy. That is political death in this day and age because that’s where the money comes from.

Since I moved to Washington, I’ve learned a lot about the ways of the Democratic Party, and one of the things that they are constantly trying to prove is that they are safe to corporate America and that corporate America doesn’t have to worry about them –- you know, Harry Truman threatening to nationalize some industry, or Franklin Roosevelt jacking up the tax on various corporate transactions, or something like that. They want to persuade the corporate world that they’re never going to do that sort of thing again, and so they have sworn off this language.

Excellent read!!!

[deutsey]

1. It's a very good book, too

I just started reading it. Frank has done some other interesting commentary in books, Harper's, and his journal The Baffler.

[Larkspur]

2. Howard Dean must have read Frank's book

Thomas Frank: ...I have a friend, Rick Perlstein, who wrote a book about the Goldwater campaign in ’64. It’s a very interesting book with a lot of lessons for liberals and for Democrats, in the sense that Goldwater didn’t have a prayer, but his politics are now normal. Goldwater, at the time, was regarded as being beyond what was acceptable, saying things that were outrageous and maybe even crazy, and he lost in a huge landslide. Today, Goldwater would be a moderate Republican. In fact, by the end of his life, he was a moderate Republican, because his ideas had become so mainstream and were so widely accepted.

Democrats need to be able to challenge the existing system in that way. Progressives have to be able to do this. Democrats -- who knows? Progressives have to take up this kind of challenge. They have to find their Goldwater -- somebody who can get things moving in the right direction.
Based on DFA 2.0's mantra, Dean is rising to the challenge Frank describes that Democrats must address. Dean is definitely inspiring people run for office and challenge the Repuke demagoguery.