Thomas Frank

THOMAS FRANK
TCG National Conference, June 16, 2005

Thomas Frank Introduction

ABEL LOPEZ, Associate Producing Director, GALA Hispanic Theatre; TCG Board Member:
Thomas Frank was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. He graduated from Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, Kansas, attended the University of Kansas for one year, and then transferred to the University of Virginia where he graduated in 1987. In 1988, he founded The Baffler Magazine with a group of his undergraduate friends. The Baffler is a journal of cultural criticism, for which he still serves as editor. In 1994, he received his PhD in American History from the University of Chicago. His dissertation later became The Conquest of Cool. He has authored three books that address the cultural inversions of our times. The first book was The Conquest of Cool and looked at the advertising industry. It was published in 1997. It was followed in 2000 by One Market Under God about the myths of the New Economy. And, in 2004 he published What’s the Matter With Kansas? about the red-state mindset. He has contributed to numerous publications, including Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, In These Times, The Chicago Reader, and Le Monde Diplomatique. He has also edited two anthologies of essays from the Baffler: Commodify Your Dissent, co-edited with Matt Weiland, and Boob Jubilee, co-edited with David Mulcahey. The title of Boob Jubilee refers to the "New Economy" madness of the 1990s.

Of his books, Mr. Frank has said, "All three books are about the colossal abuse of the language of democracy in the aftermath of the '60s. All three are about the many bizarre cultural inversions of the world we live in. Consumerism is non-conformity. Wall Street as an ally of the common man. The CEO as deadhead. And now the Republicans as the party of the working class. In other words, they're all about the sheer weirdness of our times. [laughter] We inhabit a nation where the culture screams constantly about how rebellious and nonconformist and extreme we are, but where the politics constantly move to the right. My larger point," he stated, "is that these two aspects of our times are connected to each other. That our pseudo-revolutionary culture in some way helps to generate our reactionary politics and vice versa. We talk a lot about both parts of American life, but always separately, pondering one on the front page and other in the business or style section. My object is to consider both at the same time, to point out that these two aspects of America thrive symbiotically on one another's excesses."

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Thomas Frank. [applause]

THOMAS FRANK:

Well, dang it. See, now, the problem with that introduction is now I don’t have anything left to say. [laughter] Well, that’s what it’s about, all right.

By the way, we’ve all been talking about Seattle and what a wonderful town it is—I also want to point out that its nickname is the Emerald City. So I’ve come here from Kansas to visit the Emerald City. [laughter]

And I’ve come here to talk about our polarized world. And the way I want to start talking about that is by reminding you of some of the basic facts about the root of all polarizations, which is the issue of social class. Social class in America: I know you all love to talk about that. And I’m going to do it in as dry a way as I possibly can. [laughter] Because that’s how we get a meeting like this off to a great start, with some really boring statistics.

So, now, you all know that we Americans love to think about ourselves as a classless society. But you also know that isn’t true. Either in fact or more importantly in terms of our dominant ideology. We’ve got profound class differences here in America. And we have a uniquely American way of talking about them as well. Now for years, as many of you know, as all of you probably know, the class divide in our country has been getting worse and worse. And it gets worse in the good times and it gets worse in the hard times.

Back in 1980, if you can remember back when you were seven, back in 1980 when the great conservative revolution was just getting off the ground, over 20 percent of the American private sector workforce belonged to a labor union, and American CEOs were paid on average about 42 times what their blue-collar line workers received—a figure that was, by the way, pretty much comparable to the numbers that were coming out of Western Europe and Japan. Today, or I should say by the end of the 1990s, they made 500 times as much, while unions have fallen to below 8 percent in the private sector and are still dropping.

Back in 1980, you still used to hear these kinds of comforting descriptions of our country as an “affluent society.” Remember that phrase? It was supposed to be a middle-class land, where there was a rough equality of condition in addition to all the other forms of equality that we’re so proud of here in America. In fact, at around that time, may have been ’81 or ’82, the literary critic Paul Fussell wrote a book about class in which—a really mean and snarky book, also kind of funny—but he wrote this book about class in which the basic conceit was this idea that you could have a blue-collar person living next door to a white-collar person, that they’d make virtually the same amount of money, and that all that would distinguish them were there tastes and their consumer choices.

Now, it would be impossible to write a book like that today. Because the gulf between the two classes now is just too huge. I mean, the very idea of workers living in the same neighborhood as executives strikes us as something fundamentally foreign, something they do in the Scandinavian countries or something like that. [laughter]

Today nobody talks about “shared affluence” as being a basic American characteristic. Instead they tell us that what makes us who we are as a people is our tolerance for, and our acceptance of, great extremes of wealth and poverty. That’s what makes Americans who they are. That’s what makes us unique among the nations, and so miraculously profitable. And just to back that up a little, I was reading the other day that the median family income in America—to give you some of these dry statistics—the median family income in America was basically unchanged from 1989 to 1999. It dipped a little and then got back to where it had been. So 10 years, no advance, but to earn that same median family income that never changed, the median family had to work in 1999 six weeks longer a year, six weeks more a year than they had 10 years previously.

Another example: I read this one in the New York Times the other day, that the CEO of Wal-Mart, who didn’t get an award here tonight [laughter], the CEO of Wal-Mart makes as much in two weeks as his average employee on the floor makes in their entire lifetime. Yeah. That’s the country we’re living in.

And what’s true for American CEOs is also true for the social class to which they belong. Back in 1980, the richest stratum of American society owned about 20 percent of the nation’s wealth. Today it’s doubled, it’s 40 percent. Of course the economists have a way of measuring this: They call it the genie index, and if you look at a historical chart of the genie index, you can see that our country has now achieved levels of wealth inequality that are unique among the industrialized nations, and that we haven’t seen here in the U.S. since the 1920s.

Accompanying all of this, as you know, has been the intrusion of corporate power into more and more aspects of everyday life. Your average American works harder, and more hours, today than in decades past. They see more ads on more surfaces than ever before in history. They take more personality tests and drug tests at work, they’ve run up huge household debts, they have less power than at any time in the previous 50 years over the conditions in which they live and work.

The world of business, it sometimes seems, is becoming the world, period. You all remember Fast Company magazine? I think I saw it in the airport today; I think it’s still being published. But this is how they describe the situation that I’m talking about. A few years ago, they wrote: “Corporation have become the dominant institution of our time, occupying the position of the Church of the Middle Ages and the nation-state of the last two centuries.”

All right. So that’s the story of social class in America. But to hear our media talk about the subject, you’d get a very different impression. Oh, we’re a nation divided, all right—we’re at each other’s throats here in America. But the real divide, they tell us, is between those Republican red states, you know, where dwell the humble, patriotic, God-fearing common people, and then on the other hand the blue states, places like this one, where reside the wicked know-it-alls of the two coasts, you know? [laughter] Who affect foreign manners as they steer their Volvos around their degraded, boutique latte towns. [laughter]

That’s social class in America. As for the politics that goes along with social class, you’ve heard this before, you know how it goes. The elite blue state snobs, like me, are supposed to be the kind of people who put their trust in government. While the common folk of the Great Plains, you know—the prairie populists who burn with such a righteous, Limbaughian fire, are said to trust “the people.” Which means, in the parlance of the day, that they trust the market. And the man they elected, George W. Bush, heard the vox populi and saw that it was good and moved swiftly and surely to shower his corporate donors with favors of every kind, to roll back workplace safety, to deregulate in every way, to privatize Social Security and crack down on those interfering labor unions.

Because in America, when we talk about social class, that’s just how it is, that’s just how we understand the terms. What the common people want is more power to General Electric, right? More power to Citibank. They want to see that Dow Jones average hit 36,000, dammit, they want another crack at that dot-com bubble. They want to pile up their money at the feet of Bill Gates or Larry Ellison—the other guy down the coast a little ways—or Sam Walton, right? Or whatever the hero CEO happens to be this year.

But should it turn out that they don’t want to do those things, if they go out and protest or strike or vote for the wrong guy, then our Op-Ed pages stand ready to call them “elitists.” And that’s always the word that you hear, isn’t it? Elitists. Self-absorbed snobs who by their failure to believe in the goodness of market forces are helping to trample down the unfortunates of the Third World. And a thousand corporate PR departments stand ready to chime in that business is just an altruistic operation dedicated to raising up the little people of the world. Every time they bust a union in America, a worker somewhere cries out for joy. [laughter]

All right. Now, I’m exaggerating a little bit. [laughter] Not much. Not much, I mean the reality scarcely requires it. Now this word “elitist,” I want you to remember that, I want you to think about that. Because I think the ways in which we are encouraged to think about elites and elitism are the key to what’s the matter with Kansas and what’s the matter with all of us.

And there is something the matter with us—don’t be mistaken. There is something wrong when the places that are hardest hit by conservative economic policy are the very same places that are most enthusiastic for conservative politicians, for conservative gains, tax cuts and laws cracking down on bankruptcy—there’s something going on. When the poorest state in America, which these days is West Virginia—and that’s, by the way, a place that is home to some pretty ferocious class consciousness—but when a state like that goes for the Republican by 13 points, which it just did, there’s something wrong. And when the poorest county in America, which these days is up in North Dakota, goes for Bush by 78 percent, there’s something amiss. By the way, the second poorest county, which is in Nebraska, went for Bush by 81 percent.

It’s not that people in these places have suddenly become complacent and satisfied, like the Republicans of old. That’s not what’s going on. On the contrary, they’re mad as hell. They’re red with rage. They’re participating in what I call in the book a “great backlash.” But who are they angry at? Who are they mad at? You know who it is. It’s liberals. It’s people like me. Hell, it’s probably people like you. [laughter]

And this is, I think, the great historical fact of our time: millions of angry average people who vote for politicians that only make their situation worse. Sometimes I think that it’s like a French Revolution in reverse. [laughter] Now wait—it’s like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the streets screaming “More power to the aristocracy!” [laughter]

So how are we supposed to explain this paradox? How is it that conservatives in these places can profess to hate elites—which they do, you know it, you’ve heard it—how do they profess to hate elites but at the same time excuse from their fury the corporate world, even when it has sometimes so manifestly screwed them over? How can they join in an uprising of the common people that only winds up making the upper crust even crustier than ever? How do they decide that one man is a Frenchified snob for being rich—and here of course I’m referring to John Kerry, yachtsman, right?—but that the riches of another fella, i.e. George W. Bush, humble man of prayer, that his riches show him to be a regular fella? One of us. How do they make that distinction?

Now, at the center of it all, I want to suggest, is a way of thinking about this subject of class, the root of all polarization, it’s the way of thinking about class that they have that both encourages class hostility and that at the same time denies the economic basis of the grievance. Class, conservatives will tell you, isn’t really about money, or birth, or occupation. It is primarily a matter of authenticity, that most valuable cultural commodity. Class is about what kind of car you drive, and where you shop and how you pray, and only secondarily about the job you do or the income you make. So what makes you, according to this view of the world, what makes you a member of the noble proletariat is not work, per se, but moral qualities: unpretentiousness, humility and all the rest of the virtues that our pundits never tire of finding out in red state America.

So according to this view the producer-class doesn’t care about unemployment, or a dead-end life, or a boss that makes 500 times as much as they do, no. Out in places like my home state of Kansas, both workers and their bosses are supposed to be united in righteous disgust at those affected college boys sitting at the next table prattling on about French cheese and villas in Tuscany and the big ideas for running things that they read about in books. Right? These are the real parasites. Not Enron, not Halliburton, not Merrill Lynch. It’s you guys, it’s me—that’s who it is.

Now, the key element in this repackaging of the idea of class, the key element in all of this, is the notion of the liberal elite. This is the important idea. It’s been around for years, and it’s taken many different forms over the decades. But in its basic outlines, it’s always remained pretty much the same, and it goes like this: Our culture and our schools and our government, conservatives will tell you, are controlled by an overeducated ruling class that is contemptuous of the beliefs and the folkways of average people. So those who run America, the theory holds, are these despicable, self-important show-offs. They are effete, to use one of Spiro Agnew’s favorite words. Remember that guy? [laughter] I was seven, a matter of fact, when he... [laughter]

They are effete, they are arrogant, they are snobs, they are, in a word, liberals. Now conservatism, on the other hand, is supposed to be the doctrine of the oppressed majority. Unlike your classical 19th-century conservatism. The backlash that I’m describing doesn’t defend some established order of things. What it does is it accuses, it rants, it points out hypocrisies and briefly pounces on contradictions.

And while liberals, like me, are always supposed to be using their nefarious control of the airwaves and the newspapers and the schools to persecute average Americans, the conservatives tell us that they are they the real party of the disrespected, the downtrodden, the forgotten men. They’re always the party of dissent, always in rebellion against a haughty establishment, always rising up from below.

All claims on the right, in other words, advance today from victimhood. It’s an important thing to remember, especially watching O’Reilly or something, who’s forever complaining about liberals and their victim mentality. I was even on a radio show, I believe it was here in Seattle, and one of the host’s catchphrases was, “The victimhood stops here.” But then as soon as they say this sort of thing, they go on to talk about how average people are persecuted here in America. And I use this word advisedly, because Rush Limbaugh’s brother, David Limbaugh, has actually written a book with that title—one word title, something conservatives love—and the title in this case is Persecution. And you get one guess as to who’s persecuting whom. That’s right, it’s average Americans, conservative Christians being persecuted by liberals.

Backlashers revel in fantasies of their own persecution and marginality. If you spend a lot of time on their listservs, it’s not uncommon to read e-mails where conservatives address one another with phrases like “fellow rubes of the fly-over.” It will really happen. They love to speculate about the ways that liberals are supposed to look down on them. Laura Ingraham wrote a book, I think two years ago now, and I once saw an ad for it, this is an ad trying to get you to want to buy a copy of the book, trying to make this an attractive purchase to you. And the headline of the ad says, “Are you stupid?” And then the text says, “The elites think so.”

There’s an article I once read in the American Enterprise magazine—by the way, published by the American Enterprise Institute, the people who dreamed up the war in Iraq. But back before they were doing that, they were running this series of articles about the virtues of the red states and the good honest humble Chevy-driving Maxwell House–drinking people who live in the red states. And the article started with this phrase, “I’m stupid! And if you’re reading this, you probably are too.” [laughter] Now, another thing that they...isn’t that funny. And the war with Iraq, hey hey! [laughter] Another thing that they love to do...sorry. We weren’t going to be condescending, I know. I’m trying, I’m a very partisan guy. I apologize. I’m actually generally not condescending—well, we’ll get to that later. Anyhow... [laughter]

Another thing that conservative leaders love to do is boast of their own subversiveness. They love to talk of this. They love the phrase “politically incorrect”; it’s even the title of a book by Ralph Reed. John Leo, who’s a columnist for US News & World Report, wrote a book in 1994 that he called Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police. Right, because the liberal Gestapo was after him and he’s just barely staying ahead of them. [laughter] And then a few years later he wrote another one that he called Incorrect Thoughts. Which ironically, as it happens, is also the title of a 1981 album by the hard-core punk band the Subhumans. [laughter] Incorrect Thoughts. And I am the only guy in America that owns both the album and the book. [Laughter] Now. By the way, the Subhumans were from Vancouver, just up the road a bit.

But the object of all this breast-beating underdoggery on the right is not to un-victimize the average American for whom conservatism claims to speak. That is ruled out almost from the get-go. While most of us think of politics as a kind of Machiavellian drama in which actors make alliances and then take practical steps to advance their material interests, the backlash is something very different. It’s a crusade in which your material interests are suspended in favor of vague cultural grievances that are both supposed to be all-important and yet incapable of ever being assuaged.

I’m not exaggerating this. Think about it. When the movement’s leaders pick their cultural battles—and remember the leaders of the conservative movement are very smart, very canny, very strategic people. In fact, I’ve been told that Karl Rove reads and rereads Machiavelli at least once a week, gets it down from the shelf and goes over it and hell, you gotta hand it to him, he kicked my team’s ass. But very smart guy, very canny player. But when conservatives choose their cultural battles, they almost always choose battles where victory is impossible, where their followers’ feelings of powerlessness will simply be dramatized, and their alienation aggravated.

For example, the backlash fury object du jour while I was writing a lot of the book was that Alabama Ten Commandments monument. You remember, the chief justice down there had it put in the Supreme Court building in Alabama, deliberately to draw a lawsuit from the ACLU, and everybody knew, as soon as he did it, how that lawsuit was going to end. It was going to end with the monument being pried loose and carted away.

Think about the tragic Terri Schiavo case, which was done strictly for political advantage, then the Republicans dropped it like a hot potato as soon as it turned out that the public was against them by something like 80 percent. Or think about the Federal Marriage Amendment, which President Bush, after saying it was the most important possible thing we could do in this country and campaigning about it, you know, all through 2004, in January of this year basically dropped it. In an interview with the Washington Post, they asked him, well what are you going to do about the Federal Marriage Amendment with all your political capital? And he basically said, to make a very long and winding answer short, he said, “Nothing.”

Or think about, my favorite, my favorite one, the crusade against Darwin which is going on right now in my home state of Kansas. How many paleontologists are they going to win over down there? [laughter]

Look, as culture war, the backlash was born to lose. Its goal is not to win cultural battles, but to take offense. Conspicuously, vocally, flamboyantly. Getting mad. This is where the backlash spends its energy—indignation is the great aesthetic principle of conservative movement culture. And I mean everything pisses these people off! And the way they react is not by getting un-pissed off, but by documenting and cataloguing their disgust, generating these endless piles of petty, unrelated beefs with the world—amassing thousands upon thousands of stories of the many many tiny ways the world that surrounds us assaults family values, uses obscenities, disrespects parents, foments revolution, and on and on and on.

The implication of this conservative culture of offense-taking is that liberalism can be held responsible for the world around us. That each of these tiny objections to the way that people drive, to the way other people cut in line, to the way other people talk with their mouths full—that each of these is somehow an indictment of the left—it doesn’t matter to conservatives, it doesn’t matter that liberals have long since lost their power over government. And I mean, there hasn’t been a proper liberal elected in this country for president since 1964. But that doesn’t matter. Because liberalism, in their mind, is still what changes our mores, what determines what goes on TV and in the magazine and what makes, or I should say interprets, the laws. And there is nothing, not the Constitution, not guns, not even sweeping electoral victories, there is nothing that can protect us from liberalism or even slow it down. It is an alien, conspiratorial force that can’t be held accountable, that doesn’t care when its projects go awry.

So viewed through the eyes of the backlash, liberalism’s impositions are so intolerable, and so bizarre, and taken with so little regard for the sensibilities of the regulated, that it will literally stop at nothing. I mean, who knows what precedent the Supreme Court’s gonna pull out of its ass next? Or which figure of everyday speech the commissars of political correctness are going to criminalize, even as they enlarge the list of swearwords permissible for broadcast on TV?

Backlash culture abounds with this kind of bizarre speculation of what atrocity the liberals are going to inflict on us next, each wild suggestion made and received with complete seriousness. Check it out, the liberal elite is going to outlaw major league sports! They’re going to forbid red meat. They’re going to mandate special holidays for transgendered war veterans. [laughter] I’m not making any of this up. This all came up on a conservative listserv I was on. They’re going to hand our neighborhood over to an Indian tribe! They’re going to decree that only gay couples can adopt children! [laughter] They’re going to ban the Bible!

By the way, that used to be a joke, right? When the book came out and I would talk about this, everyone would roar with laughter. And you know what happened? In the last election campaign, the Republican National Committee sent out mailings in West Virginia and Arkansas implying, strongly hinting, that if John Kerry was elected, liberals would ban the Bible. And I have since then actually heard of individuals who cast their vote for Bush on the grounds that they didn’t want the Bible to get banned. I was talking to a woman in D.C. the other day, and she said she works for a liberal U.S. Senator. And in the weeks leading up to the election she got dozens of phone calls a week from people who were furious about this issue, and they’d say, “Why does your senator want to ban the Bible?” And this woman was totally perplexed, and she’d say, “Well, the senator’s never said anything about banning the Bible.” And the caller would always say the same thing, they’d say, “Yeah, but she hasn’t said she isn’t going to ban it, has she?” Got that figured out.

Before we go on, let me remind you that all of this is a class-based complaint, or something like a class-based complaint. It’s always the honest, hard-working people of middle America—I mean, this is the set piece, right?—the honest, hard-working people of middle America, against a tiny self-righteous band of snobs lording it over the rest of us with their fancy college degrees. The culture war is a class war. Or a weird sort of inverted form of class war. And insofar as they take on the liberal elite, Republicans can represent themselves as the true rightful leaders of the working class, and they actually do this.

Gary Bauer, for example, he used to have something called the Family Research Council. But today he runs something called the Campaign for Working Families, I mean, explicitly IDs himself as a leader of the working class, and by the way, he’s one of the more intelligent, I mean, very sharp guy, and has a way with words. The New York Times interviewed him last summer and asked him to explain the continuing power of the culture wars. And here’s what he said, and I thought this was very revealing. Gary Bauer said: “Joe Sixpack doesn’t understand why the world and his culture are changing, and why he doesn’t have a say in it.”

And when I read that, it was like a light went on in my mind, because that’s the kind of thing that liberals used to say. We were the ones that stood up for the little guy against a world that really, honestly, doesn’t give a damn about him or his views. We were the ones that stood up for Joe Sixpack. We were the ones that would afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. But now it’s the conservatives that claim that sort of position in politics.

None of what I have described so far would make any sense at all were it not for a critical rhetorical move that conservatives have made, which is the systematic erasure of the economic. Now, as we all know, there are some species of conservatives that are happy to talk economics with you; you can find them any day of the week in the country’s business schools or business magazines, prattling on about the mystical inerrancy of the free market and the prevalence of global capitalism. But most of the conservatives—in fact I wrote a whole book about these guys called One Market Under God—but the conservatives I describe in this book don’t have much to say about the business world at all. The erasure of the economic is a necessary precondition for most of the basic backlash ideas.

For example, it’s only possible to think that the news is slanted to the left if you never take into account who owns the news media, and if you never turn your critical eye on something like CNBC, you know, the 24-7 stock channel, or the business section of any newspaper in America. The university campus can only be imagined as a place dominated by leftists if you never consider economic departments, business schools, or for that matter, university administrations. Most importantly, it’s only possible to understand pop culture itself as a product of liberalism if you have already blinded yourself to the most fundamental of economic realities, namely that the networks and the movie studios and the ad agencies and the publishing houses and the record labels are in fact commercial enterprises.

Now, in some ways, I think the backlash vision of life is nothing more than an old-fashioned—and I mean really old-fashioned—leftist vision of the world, only with the economics drained out of it. And where your muckrakers of a hundred years ago used to always fault capitalism for botching this institution and that, the backlash thinkers of today just changed the script to blame liberalism.

Up until the late ‘60s, the standard critique of the press that you would hear in America—and when I say standard, I mean everyone from Upton Sinclair to AJ Liebling, who was the press columnist for the New Yorker magazine—the standard critique you would hear was that newspapers in this country tilted to the right, serving the interest of the capitalists that advertised in them and the capitalists that published them, you know, such “liberal” figures as William Randolph Hearst. Or our own Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. By the way, funny anecdote about that guy, just to give you an idea of how liberal he was, he had a reporter that he hired to cover European affairs in the 1930s, and when the U.S. got into World War II the guy defected to the Nazis. Colonel McCormick had hand-picked this guy. They used to say of Colonel McCormick, “He has one of the finest minds of the 13th century.” [Laughter] A great liberal.

And you know the story, today though it’s the opposite. It’s supposed to be—the publishers don’t matter. It’s always supposed to be liberal reporters and liberal editors who twist the news to match their elitist personal preferences. And the same treatment has been administered to the old-fashioned leftist critique of higher education, or the legal world, or the foundations, or the foreign policy establishment, or architecture, or government itself—each of these institutions, now said to be a slavish servant, not of “the interests,” as they used to say, but of the liberals.

Even the rhetoric of the pop conservative movement, with all of its regular-guy flourishes, sometimes appears to me to have been lifted whole-cloth from the proletarian 1930s. For example, the idea that average people are helpless pawns caught in a machine run by the elite—this is basically taken straight from your vulgar Marxist copybook, which taught generations of party members that they inhabited a deterministic world where agency was something reserved for capitalists only—or, I should say, for capital itself. And your old-school proletarian writers loved nothing more than to mock the Frenchified pretensions of the effete devitalized upper class.

Somebody earlier tonight mentioned Our Town, the play by Thornton Wilder, and I was instantly reminded of an incident in the 1930s when Mike Gold—he wasn’t yet the literary editor of the Daily Worker, but that’s what he became—he had a famous fight with Thornton Wilder, a critical battle with Thornton Wilder, where he wrote this incredibly harsh beat-down of Thornton Wilder. And I was reading this—just sort of a hobby of mine, I read stuff from the ‘30s for fun—and I was reading this and reading Ann Coulter at the same time. [laughter] Mike Gold is like, “Thornton Wilder writes with purple ink! He likes things that are French! He’s devitalized!” You understand, the standard insults they used to use back then. And I’m reading Ann Coulter and, by God, it is the same! It’s the same stuff. Only with the politics completely changed. They’ve just turned this old stereotype on liberals instead of on the bourgeoisie or whatever it used to be.

One problem that guys like Mike Gold never had was explaining how the world worked. Class struggles, they used to think, could pretty much account for anything that had ever happened in history. But if you drain the economics out of the world, you’re left with very few tools for explaining anything.

Why is our culture the way it is? Why does TV get coarser with each passing year? What makes certain styles, and certain words, and certain ideas, suddenly so visible while other ones disappear? And each of these questions is a matter of dark, bitter obsession among backlash conservatives. And the only answer they can ever provide to these questions is to blame liberals. Our culture is the way it is because scheming, manipulative liberals have decided to make it that way.

The truth is—this is where, after all that stuff, I’m going to give you the truth, this is where I tell you the truth. You came all the way to Seattle and by God you’re going to hear the truth! [laughter] Now, the truth is that the culture that surrounds us, and the same culture that persistently triggers new explosions of backlash outrage, that this culture is largely the product of business rationality. It’s made by writers and actors who answer to editors and directors and producers who answer to senior vice presidents and CEOs who answer to Wall Street bankers who demand profits above everything else. And from the mega-mergers of the media giants to the commercial time-outs during the football games to the plots of the Hollywood movies and the cyber-fantasies of Wired magazine, we live in a free market world.

Look, the Supreme Court doesn’t make American culture. Neither does Planned Parenthood. Not even the mighty ACLU. It is business that speaks to us over that TV set, always in the throbbing tones of cultural insurgency, forever shocking the squares, humiliating the pious, and mocking the patriarchs—it’s because of the demands of consumerism that our TV is such a sharp-tongued insulter of family values and such a zealous promoter of every species of soft deviance. It’s thanks to new economy capitalism and its cult of novelty and creativity that our bankers refer to themselves as revolutionaries, and they do, and our software billionaires build rock-and-roll museums, and they do, and our discount brokerages tell us that owning stock is going to smash conformity and usher in the trip-hopping millennium, and you know we’re encouraged to drink Dr. Pepper because it’s going to make us more of an individual, and to drink Starbucks because it’s so goddamned authentic somehow, and to pierce our navels and ride souped-up jet-skis and even eat Jell-O, because these are supposed to be such extreme experiences.

But counter-culture is so commercial and so business-friendly today that there actually exists in this country right now—hell they thrive—it’s a school of urban theorists that go around the country instructing municipal authorities on the fine points of luring artists and hipsters and rock bands to their cities on the grounds that where these cool people go, corporate offices will follow.

Now listen, the free market doesn’t respect family values any more than it respects the integrity of those small towns out on the lone prairie, or the architecture of Detroit. The free market is a destroyer, not a conserver. All that is solid it melts into air. I think that ordinary working-class people are right to hate this culture. I think Gary Bauer is right when he complains that working-class people don’t have a say in the world they live in. And Joe Sixpack is right when he notices that our culture makes him feel inadequate and stupid. Hell, it’s designed to do that! I mean, the middle Americans, these are the people that the ads and the sitcoms and movies warn us against: They’re the prudish preacher who forbids dancing. Remember that movie Footloose, set in Kansas, that’s right. They’re the buffoonish dad that cluelessly consumes Brand X. The square cowboy that gets gunned down by the alternative cowboy. And the hard-hat that just doesn’t get it, as every software commercial in the 1990s tried to remind us.

Conservatives are really good about complaining about all this. What they absolutely refuse to take seriously are the forces that create the problem. Take for example the backlash bestseller in the mid-1990s in which the author complains about the liberals that he works for thinking, this is his quote, these liberals thought “it was oppressive to have to wear a tie.” Now, it’s true, if you think all the way back to the 1990s, that there was a movement against formal dress in the white-collar workplace. Hell, that’s how I got these fine threads, because someone threw them all out at the thrift store, and now they’re mine. It’s true that there was a movement against formal dress in the white-collar workplace. The mistake is when conservatives attribute this change, as they do, to leftist traitors boring from within. As everybody who had a job in the 1990s remembers, the kind of people who thought casual dress was so great, I mean check it out, they weren’t communists, they were the hyper-capitalist heroes of the new economy. The business revolutionaries, as they liked to call themselves, whose taxes have now been cut by the votes of angry conservatives everywhere. It’s not because radicals have secretly taken over the world somehow that tradition-minded people feel so uncomfortable in it. It’s because the new turbo-charged capitalism has no place for them. And it reminds them of this every chance it gets. It tweaks a nation of squares in all of its signature cultural outlets—its management books, its TV commercials, its Tom Peters PowerPoint presentations. Consumer capitalism’s only use for the ramrod straight-man is in showing him to be visibly upset by the liberating potential of some corn chip, you know, filming him as he inveighs against some soda pop because it breaks the rules, lets the consumer be too much of an individual or taste too outrageous or whatever it happens to be.

But the backlash can never see it that way. Our culture is the way it is because liberals have made it that way. And this is the logical terminus of backlash reasoning. When you have rejected all the accepted social science methods for understanding the way the world works, and they do, or when you can’t talk straight about social class, and believe me they can’t, and when you can’t acknowledge that free market forces might not always be for the best—when you can’t admit the validity of the most basic historical truths, these blunt tools are pretty much all you’re left with. Journalists and sociologists and historians and musicians and photographers and actors and even paleontologists do what they do because they are liberals. And liberals lie, liberals cheat, liberals will do anything, as a matter of fact, that promises to advance their larger, partisan project—which is to create more liberals and somehow to win.

So liberal in the backlash mind is not a product of social forces, like the labor movement, the environmental movement, stuff like that—liberalism is not the product of social forces, liberalism is a social force. It’s a juggernaut that moves according to a logic all its own, as rigid and mechanical as anything dreamed up by the Stalinists of yesterday.

The great backlash that I have been describing began back in the late 1960s. It began back in ’68, ’69, with the coming together of two very different factions. On the one hand, your traditional business Republicans, with their faith in the free market, and on the other hand, your working class, what Nixon called middle Americans, the silent majority who signed on to preserve family values.

For the first group, the traditional business Republicans, the conservative revival that has resulted since those days has been fantastically rewarding. They are wealthier as a class today than ever before in their lifetimes. For the other group, those angry middle Americans, the experience has pretty much been a bummer all around. All they have to show now for their decades of Republican loyalty are lower wages, dangerous jobs, dirtier air, a new overlord class that comports itself like King Farouk, and of course a crap culture whose moral free-fall continues without any significant interference from the grandstanding Christers that they send triumphantly back to Washington every couple of years. By all rights, the charm of Republicanism should have worn off for this part of the conservative coalition a long time ago.

After all, how can you lament the shabby state of American public life while absolving business of any responsibility for it? How can you complain so bitterly about culture and yet neglect to mention the main factor making our culture what it is? How can you reconcile the two clashing halves of the conservative mind? I’ll tell you how. By believing in an all-powerful liberal elite. That’s how. Alone among the many many businesses in the world, backlash thinkers insist, the culture industry simply does not respond to market forces. It does the ugly things that it does because it is biased. And that’s always the key word, isn’t it? It’s biased by robotic, alien liberals, always trying to drip their corrosive liberalism into our ears. So liberal bias exists because it must exist for the rest of contemporary conservatism to be true. As in—you can see I’ve got a Ph.D. here, I’m going to show off a little—as in St. Anselm’s proof of the existence of God, which flummoxed generations of our ancestors, it simply cannot be any other way. Liberal bias has to be, therefore it is.

Thank you all very much for inviting me. [applause]

BEN CAMERON, Executive Director, TCG:

And so we are off and running, with a provocative start and a gauntlet thrown to us, I think a gauntlet that will invite spirited dinner conversation, that will invite us to debate ethics, to debate economy, to ask what we do to invite some perceptions, and indeed will ask us to consider, what does it mean for us in a field designed to promote artifice if the key division is about the authentic? What it will mean for us in the field of the arts if the culture war’s designed to be a source of eternal ranting rather than victory?