The Chris Moeller Archives

The status quo revolution

I've been re-reading Thomas Frank's 2004 book "What's the Matter with Kansas?" this week, and Frank did a fantastic job of outlining the division within the Republican Party that is now manifesting itself nationally as the so-called Tea Party revolution. This rift between more socially-liberal "country club" moderates and social conservatives has been playing itself out in the Sunflower State for some time already, really since the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue came to the public's attention in the late 1980s, and moderate GOP lawmakers such as Nancy Kassebaum started getting replaced by reactionaries like Sam Brownback.

The split is signified somewhat by church affiliation and by an urban/rural divide (Sarah Palin, anyone?), but the major demographic determinant of where a Republican falls is the one that everyone in the party refuses to acknowledge exists-- the socioeconomic one. Establishment Republicans have money, and the Tea Party-identifiers, for the most part, don't. And this is what slays liberals like me. The social conservatives without money have been played like a fiddle in voting against their own economic self-interest. They almost uniformly backed George W. Bush along with an entire generation of socially-conservative Republican candidates, yet we're no closer to having abortion outlawed in America today than we were 25 years ago, and the restrictions that have been achieved relate only to poor people's ability to have abortions. Gay rights are gaining a strong foothold of acceptance in America in a very short amount of time, and wealthy Republicans, by and large, know more openly-gay people than do poor ones, most of them serving in the structural apparatus of the national Republican party.

The establishment Republicans, living comfortably behind their remote-controlled security gates, have succeeded in getting business deregulated and the corporate tax rate cut by two-thirds, while the poor reactionaries blame "liberal-elites" for ruining their lives. "Hard times" have been good politics and good private business for Republicans going back to the Depression. That's when Kansans, for example and according to Frank, "learned a healthy fear of the Almighty." During those "end days," it was never the absence of things like agricultural price supports or soil conservation programs that were doing them in. It was God's spite for the sins of a socially-permissive nation. The reactionary poor are still in the streets today: "Repeal taxes." "Dismantle public programs." And the wealthy Republicans are winning even when they lose.

Frank summarized it best in his book, with a glance towards his home state, and tell me if you don't think about the Tea Partiers when you read this passage-- even though there was no "Tea Party" yet in 2004-- "This situation may be paradoxical, but it is also universal. For decades Americans have experienced a populist uprising that only benefits the people it is supposed to be targeting. In Kansas, we merely see an extreme version of this mysterious situation. The angry workers, mighty in their numbers, are marching irresistibly against the arrogant. They are shaking their fists at the sons of privilege. They are laughing at the dainty affectations of the Leawood toffs. They are massing at the gates of Mission Hills, hoisting the black flag, and while the millionaires tremble in their mansions, they are bellowing out their terrifying demands. 'We are here,' they scream, 'to cut your taxes.'"

posted by CM @ 5:44 PM