So… what did I think of the book? First, I should say that this is one book so widely cited and so talked about that I came to it already thinking I knew exactly what the argument would be. Fortunately, I was pleased to find a different book than I expected. Thomas Frank is a great writer; I had enjoyed his Conquest of Cool, and was pleased to find his trademark verve on full display here. The book is about Democratic strategy, but only incidentally. Primarily it’s an anti-David Brooks, an attempt to hold a H.L. Mencken-burning candle up to Red State excesses, to diagnose the political rhetoric of resentment. Brooks was concerned with the bohemian bourgeois, Frank with the working class and lumpen conservative.
As a reader of discourse, Frank is excellent, with a keen eye to odd cultural juxtapositions and unexpected developments. I loved his Quadrophenia-worthy account of the Mods and the Cons, his dissection of “liberal latte” media coverage, or his notion of the Plen-T-plaint: the horizontal litany of liberal excesses that never addresses real problems or their solutions, but merely performs outrage over and over again.
Still, something about the argument bothered me, and I don’t think it gelled until I got to the middle of the book.
In his discussion of Johnson County, a Kansas City suburban county divided into affluent and poorer sections, he writes:
One Johnson County lives in landscaped cul-de-sac communities with statuary in the traffic islands and a swimming pool behind each house and a neighborhood golf course that you occasionally glimpse form between the three-car garages… The other Johnson County is a place of peeling paint and cheap plywood construction and knee-high crabgrass and shrubbery dying in the intense heat and expired cars rotting by the curb… The difference between the two Johnson Counties is a class difference.
I mean this in the material, economic sense, no in the taste-and-values way our punditry defines class. (103-4).
Todd Gitlin accused Frank of vulgar Marxism, and at least in this sense the accusation fits: in Kansas? class means economic class - period. Status is merely the discursive construct of the “Hollywood elite” or the “latte liberal.” As a reader of political discourse, he’s certainly right that these rhetorical tropes take on a fantastic, ideological cast (ideological in the Marxist sense.) But Frank never addresses the possibility that there are cultural elites in America, or that status matters in voters’ perceptions.
The commentariat may err in the Brooks Fallacy - of viewing status markers as strangely dissociated from economic hierarchy - but there are valid reasons for viewing class as not merely economic but at least half status-based. Sociologists probably differ on the amount of emphasis on economics vs. status, but all except, yes, the vulgar Marxists see value in Weber’s insight that status matters. Status does connect to economic life chances but is not reducible to them; Weber himself said as much: “Status may rest on class position of a distinct or an ambiguous kind. However, it is not solely determined by it: Money and an entrepreneurial position are not in themselves status qualifications, although they may lead to them; and the lack of property is not in itself a status disqualification, although this may be a reason for it.” (Economy and Society 306).
The problem isn’t merely a pedantic one. Once you start to stray from his class model, the argument doesn’t hold. Frank thinks we should put more emphasis on economic issues, and I’d agree (even if I might disagree about actual policy), but in no sense are a cultural politics a betrayal of some fundamental reality of class. Status holds such importance for American voters not primarily because Democrats are too dumb to offer economic opportunities, but because American social life in general is more driven by status claims. Part of it has to do with the growth in white-collar occupations, part of it to the country’s general affluence. In any case, the status revolt took place before the Gingrich revolution or before the New Democrats. Conservatives have been adept at channeling class/status frustration, but the real driver is some place else.
As I wrote back after the election,
The reason these hurdles are in the way of liberals but not movement conservatives (who, too, are a minority of our country) is that the election was the expression of a status war overlaid on top of the culture war. Of course, competing economic self-interest hasn’t disappeared, but on so many levels it’s become sublimated into a conflict between those with competing status claims. Blue States (and Red State urban areas) are the home of the cultural elites and, just as importantly, a large population of those with stakes in the status game. High school teachers, struggling artists, anarchist college kids, and petit bourgeois gay men and lesbians (to take a few examples) are hardly the highest prestige holders, but they are invested in life choices that emphasize cultural capital to compensate for lack of economic capital. Red States (and Blue State exurban areas) harbor resentment against the coastal and urban cultural elites and their allies. Even business elites with considerable local prestige sense their devaluation on the national prestige market; geography doubles as a vector of class differentiation. Thus, for much of the population, liberalism has become identified with the coastal and the sociologically foreign. And voters who aren’t movement conservatives or the Christian right will tend to side with the Republicans as a way of expressing resentment against a class system they’re powerless to affect any other way.
I believe this assessment still holds: cultural capital (status) differences are real, and they wouldn’t be quickly ameliorated by economically populist platforms. I don’t have a full reason why status differences are playing such an inordinate role right now (more than previous times), but neither does Frank, except to write it off as one big con. However, that the Latte Liberal trope is both hysterical and highly ideological shouldn’t blind us to the kernel of truth in it.
Finally, we can’t look at a class system of one state alone. There are two Johnson Counties, with their Cons and their Mods, but equally there are two Suffolk Counties in Massachusetts, with Progressives and Party Hacks each lying on different sides of a class divide. Both vote Democratic and in fact comprise much of the State’s party machinery. Yet the left-leaning bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie is a structuring absence in Frank’s book. Both Cons and Mods in Kansas are important parts of the class hierarchy of the country, but they’re hardly all of it.
Thanks again to those who showed up to Thursday’s book club and provided a great discussion. We’ll tackle Guns, Germs and Steel the last week of August.
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