Shame and Chagrin

My own, that is.

To wit, it is to my own shame and chagrin that I have postponed until recently reading the works of Thomas Frank, founder of the Baffler magazine and author of One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy and The Conquest of Cool. This is something I'm planing to rectify in the near future, having just finished his book What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Frank is from Kansas himself, so even though he's a leftie, he lacks any of the patronizing condescension of the "Aren't Our Fellow Americans Stoopid" school of analysis. As he points out himself, Kansas has a long history of support of radical left and progressive populist movements, so it's all the more worrying that it has swung so far to the right.

What Frank draws out is the way Republicans have rebranded themselves as the party of "blue collar values" even as the Democrats have abandoned policies that defended working-class economic interests in order to make the party more palatable to big business. As a result, although George Bush and John Kerry are both Yale alumni, the former presents as a down-home Pabst Blue Ribbon drinking good old boy whereas Kerry comes across as a Brie-eating Brahmin. Working-class Kansas voters are thus presented with two parties, neither of which defends their economic interests, but one of which appears to represent uncomplicated, authentic Middle American values.

There's much more to it than that, of course, and this is hardly news to anyone on the left who's been paying attention, but Frank's analysis is superior by virtue of his empathy for ordinary Americans and his consistently populist approach.

Also to my shame and chagrin is my ignorance heretofore of The Commoner magazine, available here in pdf form. Describing itself as "A web journal of other values," the most recent issue, entitled "The Carnival of Values and the Exchange Value of Carnivals," features an opening article by David Graeber, whom we mentioned recently, on a topic closely related to that examined by Frank, entitled "Value as the Importance of Action." Don't be put off by the high-faluting academic pomposity that the essay titles promise. There's some substantive material here if you're willing to dig a little.

Why not read it over the weekend?