|
Part I http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/04/08/int04044.htmlBuzzFlash: "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.htmlBuzzFlash: 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!!!
|