www.nybooks.com/articles/17982
Thomas Frank 1 For more than thirty-five years, American politics has followed a populis t pattern as predictable as a Punch and Judy show and as conducive to en lightened statesmanship as the cycles of a noisy washing machine. The an tagonists of this familiar melodrama are instantly recognizable: the ave rage American, humble, long-suffering, working hard, and paying his taxe s; and the liberal elite, the know-it-alls of Manhattan and Malibu, sipp ing their lattes as they lord it over the peasantry with their fancy col lege degrees and their friends in the judiciary. Conservatives generally regard class as an unacceptable topic when the su bject is economicstrade, deregulation, shifting the tax burden, express ing worshipful awe for the microchip, etc. But define politics as cultur e, and class instantly becomes for them the very blood and bone of publi c discourse. Indeed, from George Wallace to George W Bush, a class-base d backlash against the perceived arrogance of liberalism has been one of their most powerful weapons. Workerist in its rhetoric but royalist in its economic effects, this backlash is in no way embarrassed by its cont radictions. It understands itself as an uprising of the little people ev en when its leaders, in control of all three branches of government, cut taxes on stock dividends and turn the screws on the bankrupt. It mobili zes angry voters by the millions, despite the patent unwinnability of ma ny of its crusades. And from the busing riots of the Seventies to the cu lture wars of our own time, the backlash has been ignored, downplayed, o r misunderstood by liberals. The 2004 presidential campaign provides a near-perfect demonstration of t he persistent power of backlashas well as another disheartening example of liberalism's continuing inability to confront it in an effective man ner. So perfect, in fact, that it deserves to be studied by political en thusiasts for decades to come, in the manner that West Point cadets stud y remarkable infantry exploits and MBAs study branding campaigns that co njured up billions out of nothing but a catchy jingle. With his aristocratic manner and his much-remarked personal fortune, the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, made an almost perfect villain for the backlash pantomime. Indeed, he had been one of its targets since his ea rliest days in politics. In the 1972 proto-backlash manifesto, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, Michael Novak interpreted that year's TV show down between Kerry and his fellow naval officer John O'Neill as a skirmi sh in this then-novel form of inverted class war. While the two men seem ed to be debating issues related to the Vietnam War, and while Kerry was on the left and thus, theoretically at least, an ally of working people , Novak believed he saw the brutal social truth beneath it all: Comparison was immediately drawn between Kerry's Yale pedigree, good loo ks, smooth speech, powerful connections, and the limited resources, pla inness of manner, ordinariness of O'Neill.
Class resentment was more than just "tangible" in 1972 when Kerry ran for Congress in the area around the crumbling Massachusetts industrial citi es of Lowell and Lawrence: the Democrat was snob-baited for days on page one of the local newspaper, mocked for his Yale education, his celebrit y supporters, and, of course, his money. An advertisement placed by his Republican opponent asked: What do Otto Preminger of Hollywood and Louis Biron of Lowell have in co mmon? Otto Preminge r contributed $1,000 to John Forbes Kerry.
From the dying Massachusetts mill towns of 1972 to the dying Ohio steel t owns of 2004, the backlash response to John Kerry would remain remarkabl y consistent. To judge by the candidate's actions, though, it was as if none of it had ever happened. Kerry had been hounded his entire career f or being a snooty, distant aristocrat, but like so many of his Democrati c colleagues, he seemed to take little notice. For the 2004 campaign, Kerry moved to the center, following the well-worn path of the corporate Democrats before him, downplaying any "liberal" e conomic positions that might cost him among the funders and affirming hi s support for the Iraq invasion even after the official justifications f or that exercise had been utterly discredited. Kerry's pallid strategy o ffered little to motivate the party's traditional liberal and working-cl ass base, but revulsion against Bush was assumed to be reason enough to get out and vote. And besides, such an approach was supposed to protect the Democrat from the inevitable charges of insufficient toughness. A newcomer to American politics, after observing this strategy in action in 2004, would have been justified in believing that the Democrats were the party in power, so complacent did they seem and so unwilling were th ey to criticize the actual occupant of the White House. Republicans, mea nwhile, were playing another game entirely. The hallmark of a "backlash conservative" is that he or she approaches politics not as a defender of the existing order or as a genteel aristocrat but as an average working person offended by the arrogance of the (liberal) upper class.
These are powerful words, the sort of phrase that could once have been a slogan of the fighting, egalitarian left. Today, though, it was conservatives who claimed to be fighting for the little guy, assailing the powerful, and shrieking in outrage at the direction in which the world is irresistibly sliding. The only centrism to be seen on the Republican side was the parade of GOP moderates across the stage of Madison Square Garden, an exercise clearl y intended more to pacify and reassure the press than to win over actual voters. When the cameras were off, it was a completely different affair : what Karl Rove called a "mobilization election" in which victory would go to the party that best rallied its faithful. What this meant in prac tice was backlash all the way: an appeal to class resentment and cultura l dread that was unprecedented in its breadth; ingenious state-level bal lot initiatives on "values" questions that would energize voters; and paranoid suggestions from a ll sides inviting voters to believe the worst about those tyrannical lib eral snobs. Senator Sam Brownback's activities at the Republican convention offer us a glimpse of this strategy in microcosm. In his speech before the assemb led delegates and the eyes of the world, the godly Kansan came off as a thoughtful, caring Republican who wanted only to heal the sick and halt religious persecution overseas;
For the conservative rank and file, this election was to be the cultu re-war Armageddon, and they were battling for the Lord. Residents of West Virginia and Arkansas received mailings from the Republ ican National Committee warning that liberals would ban the Bible if the y got the chance. In numerous other states, voters were energized by bal lot initiatives proposing constitutional amendments reacting to the illu sory threat of gay marriage, an institution that was already illegal alm ost everywhere, but that conservative activists nonetheless decried as a mortal, immediate menace to civilization itself. James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family, endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time ever and, proclaiming that "everything we hold dear is on the line " because of the threat of gay marriage, addressed gargantuan political rallies of evangelical Christians around the country. Even the College Republicans got into the act, blanketing the land with l etters exhorting recipients to send in $1,000 and a flag pin so that the President would know that "there are millions who are giving him the sh ield of God to protect him in the difficult days ahead."
a cquired the Ten Commandments monument that had been removed from the Ala bama Supreme Court building the previous fall and hauled it around the c ountry so that this holy relic, this physical reminder of the tyranny of liberalism, could strike fear into the hearts of the godless and stoke the flames of anger among the righteous and the persecuted.
Calling themselves the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of Kerry's former...
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