Continuing the trend of blogging about books I haven’t read (and probably won’t read), I’ve recently read two interesting reviews of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? For those not in the know, Frank’s thesis is that culturally conservative red-state voters have been duped by the GOP’s ostensible (and, according to Frank, largely fake) concern for things like abortion and gay marriage into voting for economic policies that are directly counter to their class interests.

In First Things, James Nuechterlein accuses Frank of a “vulgar leftism” that attributes mass false-conscious to the middle-American proletariat taken in by those crafty conservatives:

The concept of sincere error is largely foreign to [Frank]. Contemporary conservatives and liberals alike are not just mistaken in their understanding of politics; they are for the most part venal sellouts for whom hypocrisy and mendacity are second nature.

Not so, to be sure, with the deluded folk. Their problem is not venality but, well, a certain form of stupidity. They are apparently just too dumb not to be taken in by the “hallucinatory appeal” of backlash cultural issues. Frank, one assumes, would quarrel with this way of putting his argument, but he offers no alternative explanation for how millions of middle Americans are so blind to their real interests and so self-destructive in their political behavior. The backlash, in his own words, “is a working-class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working-class people.” Or consider the typically ripe rhetorical flourish with which he concludes his book: “Kansas is ready to lead us singing into the apocalypse. It invites us all to join in, to lay down our lives so that others might cash out at the top; to renounce forever our middle-American prosperity in pursuit of a crimson fantasy of middle-American righteousness.”

Nuechterlein goes on to point out (rightly, in my view) that it is entirely possible and right to vote on issues other than economic ones:

Frank is led to this bizarre binary view of contemporary American politics—people are either knaves or fools—by his insistent (if entirely unexamined) assumption that the only rational politics is a material politics. Voters who place cultural or moral concerns above economic self-interest are obviously beset by a form of false consciousness (Frank never uses the term, but his analysis presupposes it). […]

It is fair enough to question the true significance to the lives of ordinary Americans of some items in Frank’s litany of backlash issues. But consider the three that regularly come to the fore: the role of religion in public life, gay marriage, and abortion. It is not irrational or irrelevant to consider the elimination of public acknowledgment of religion a likely contribution to the loss of moral seriousness in our civic life. It is not irrational or irrelevant to view with grave concern a redefinition of marriage that would overturn the practice of millennia. And it is certainly not irrational or irrelevant to insist on that most basic of civilizational requirements: the protection of innocent human life.

Meanwhile, at Reason Jesse Walker questions Frank’s insistence that what middle America really wants is big-government liberalism (a.k.a. social democracy). He suggests that working-class middle Americans may well have good reasons for distrusting bossy liberal elites as much as bossy conservative elites. For better or for worse, many working class people stopped seeing the government as acting in their interests. This, combined with know-it-all social engineering, may have contributed to the “backlash” Frank laments as much as conservative “wedge issues”:

If liberalism, in Frank’s words, “ceased to be relevant” to this “traditional constituency,” it was at least partly because the leading liberals were acting against that constituency’s interests. The hardhats of Charlestown didn’t face a laissez-faire Democratic Party that ignored their economic interests and a Republican Party that appealed to their values. They faced a big-government Democratic Party that was actively working against them and in favor of a wealthier group. […]

In short, perhaps the Great Backlash regards liberals as an elite because sometimes, just like conservatives, liberals really do act like an elite. You can do that when you have a powerful government at your command. Back in the Progressive Era, Eastern reformers offered a platform of “scientific” management, of giant enterprises and giant government working for the collective good. This set the template for the most destructive species of 20th-century liberalism: the liberalism that bulldozed neighborhoods to build freeways, that flooded farmers’ land to erect the Tennessee Valley Authority, that drafted kids to fight in what Bob Dole so accurately called “Democrat wars.”

Relatedly, over at The American Scene, Reihan Salam ponders what a fusion of blue-collar social conservatism and economic liberalism might look like:

I start with the premise that the government is necessarily crafting family policies whenever it makes economic policies, and that we ought to bias said policies in the direction of encouraging self-reliance by building the capacities for self-reliance. This emphasis on strong families and communities, in turn, reflects a “blue-collar social conservatism” as it exists in the wider world. I’ve always associated “blue-collar social conservatism” with local democracy, and respecting the habits and mores of decent communities.