Friday, July 9 2004
WHAT'S WRONG WITH KANSAS?: George Will had an excellent column yesterday deconstructing Thomas Frank's new book "What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America."

Frank says "the pre-eminent question of our times" is why people misunderstand "their fundamental interests." But Frank ignores this question: Why does the left disparage what everyday people consider their fundamental interests?

He says the left has been battered by "the Great Backlash" of people of modest means against their obvious benefactor and wise definer of their interests, the Democratic Party. The cultural backlash has been, he believes, craftily manufactured by rich people with the only motives the left understands -- money motives. The aim of the rich is to manipulate people of modest means, making them angry about abortion and other social issues so that they will vote for Republicans who will cut taxes on the rich.

Such fevered thinking is a staple of what historian Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style in American politics," a style practiced, even pioneered, a century ago by prairie populists. You will hear its echo in John Edwards's lament about the "two Americas" -- the few rich victimizing the powerless many.

Frank frequently lapses into the cartoon politics of today's enraged left, as when he says Kansas is a place of "implacable bitterness" and America resembles "a panorama of madness and delusion worthy of Hieronymus Bosch." Yet he wonders why a majority of Kansans and Americans are put off by people like him who depict their society like that...

If you believe, as Frank does, that opposing abortion is inexplicably silly, and if you make no more attempt than Frank does to empathize with people who care deeply about it, then of course you, like Frank, will consider scores of millions of your fellow citizens lunatics. Because conservatives have, as Frank says, achieved little cultural change in recent decades, he considers their persistence either absurd or part of a sinister plot to create "cultural turmoil" to continue "the erasure of the economic" from politics. ..

Will hits the nail right on the head as to why liberal Democrats do so poorly away from the coasts and the big cities. President Bush's comment the other day goes right after this vulnerability:

I'm going to carry the South because the people understand that they share -- we share values that they understand. They know me well. And I am -- I believe that I did well in the South last time, I'll do well in the South this time, because the Senator from Massachusetts doesn't share their values, and that's the difference in the campaign.

While the "here" the President was referring to is the South, he could just as easily have been talking about small town Ohio, Montana or yes, Kansas. The Democrats don't seem to have absorbed the reality that the only two Presidents they have gotten elected in the last 35 years have both come from small southern towns.

But back to George Will's column. At the end he writes:

The economic problem, as understood during two centuries of industrialization, has been solved. We can reliably produce economic growth and have moderated business cycles. Hence many people, emancipated from material concerns, can pour political passions into other -- some would say higher -- concerns. These include the condition of the culture, as measured by such indexes as the content of popular culture, the agendas of public education and the prevalence of abortion.

A word of caution to Will and all free-market Republicans: it is far from certain that "we can reliably produce economic growth and have moderated business cycles, " at least all of the time. Capitalism and free markets have had a great run these last 25 years and there is no disputing that the benefits have far outweighed the negatives. But it is the height of arrogance to think that economic problems have "been solved."

It is true that we have solved most of the economic problems that have bedeviled industrialized economies over the past 200 years, but some of these solutions have created economic and financial conditions for which there are no historical precedents.

The amount of debt and leverage that has systemically crept into our entire financial system (and thus the economy) over the last 25 years presents a multitude of risks. While this is not meant to be a doom and gloom prophesy, it's only prudent to recognize these increased risks. One might ask, if it was so easy to reliably produce growth, why did the Japanese economy essentially stagnate for entire decade after their enormous growth of the 70's and 80's?

I know, I know, the U.S. isn't Japan. But that's not the point. The point is that the business cycle and certainly the boom and bust cycle of the financial markets has not been repealed. And with a general population that has more and more of their wealth tied to the stock market, this is not a small concern. The concern is not only in the financial markets, but also a housing market that has encouraged the public to leverage up even further, with more and more refinancing and inflated appraisal values on top of a housing market that's, let's just say, not cheap.

While class warfare issues may not be driving voters in Kansas today, it would be a mistake to think that all economic problems have been solved forever. The key to Will's assertion - "the economic problem, as understood ...has been solved"- are the words as understood. The problem is what we understand today about the current economic/financial condition of the global economy might not be the same 10 or 20 years from now. - J. McIntyre 7:23 am Link | Email | Send to a Friend

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