What Thomas Frank got wrong in 'What's the Matter With Kansas?'
Social conservatives aren't suckers. Dobbs just proved it.
Back in 2004, when Democrats were pondering — again! — why so much of the country seemed to be so much in the thrall of conservative Republicans, Thomas Frank stepped forward with an answer: Social conservatives were suckers.
Frank, a native Kansan who’d gone on to bigger and better things, had a simple thesis: Corporatist Republicans used Fox News, talk radio and their vast advertising dollars to stoke a populist backlash by playing up culture war issues — including abortion — only to use that support to keep pursuing their profit-minded agenda while delivering almost zilch on those other things. Social conservatives were voting against their own interests, he said:
The leaders of backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate. Values may “matter most” to voters, but they always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won. This is a basic earmark of the phenomenon, absolutely consisten across its decades-long history. Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act. Even the greatest culture warrior of them all was a notorious cop-out once it came time to deliver. “Reagan made himself the champion of ‘traditional values,’ but there is no evidence he regarded their restoration as a high priority,” wrote Christopher Lasch, one of the most astute analysts of the backlash sensibility. “What he really cared about was the revival of the unregulated capitalism of the twenties: the repeal of the New Deal.”
What’s the Matter With Kansas? was a huge phenomenon. I went to the New Yorker Festival that year, and everybody I met who discovered I was from Kansas wanted to talk about the book immediately. It was really all they wanted to talk about.
But Frank’s central notion always bothered me. It was arrogant and paternalistic. It treated social conservatives like chumps — like they were too dumb to know their own interests. He didn’t seem to consider the possibility that they defined their interests differently than he would. Nor did he seem to contemplate that social conservative understood in real time they were being given a backseat on their top priorities, and were still in the game anyway because they had the long view in mind.
And in any case, we can now see that Frank was wrong.
Social conservatives weren’t suckers. They were biding their time.
What is the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning abortion rights, if not the triumph of social conservatives after a decades-long quest? What is it, if not an expression of power? And not for nothing, the man who wrote the opinion, Samuel Alito, got on the court because social conservatives pushed back against George W. Bush’s first choice for the Supreme Court seat as too unreliable to deliver on their priorities.
Eighteen years after Frank’s book, abortion is being halted. Affirmative action is on the chopping block. As for the culture industry cleaning up its act, perhaps you’ve noticed how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is putting the muscle on Disney for its opposition to that state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Capitalism is still the name of the game on the right — but a new generation of conservatives is vowing to subordinate Big Business to their social values instead of the other way around.
The truth is, it’s probably not an either-or situation. The Supreme Court that just overturned Roe v. Wade also just restricted the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases — which, I’m guessing, a fair number of business-minded conservatives are pretty happy about. The conservative movement can walk and chew gum at the same time. Or to put it another way: They’re walking Christ and walking corporate. Anybody who thinks otherwise is probably a sucker.