Working-Class Republicans and 'False Consciousness'

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Working-Class Republicans and 'False Consciousness'

By Jon Wiener

If only working-class and poor people would register and vote, liberal Democrats would win every election-that's what we thought, until November 2, 2004. Democrats work on voter registration, Republicans work on vote suppression. So tens of millions were spent on Democratic voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts over the summer and fall. But on November 2 we discovered how wrong we were. Turnout in poor and working-class precincts was unprecedented, but many of those voters cast their ballots for George W. Bush-especially white people from non-union households, especially outside of cities. How did the Republicans do it? How did they get poor people to vote for tax cuts for the rich?

Thomas Frank became the pundit of the hour for his answer to those questions. In his best-selling book What's the Matter with Kansas?, published before the election, he argued that Republicans distracted and confused ordinary voters with a phony kind of class-war rhetoric and with the culture wars. In short, they fostered what we used to call "false consciousness." In Marxist theory, when workers accept the ruling ideology that justifies their exploitation, they have false consciousness. It's "a failure to recognize the instruments of one's oppression or exploitation as one's own creation, as when members of an oppressed class unwittingly adopt views of the oppressor class"-that's the dictionary definition. It's when ordinary workers "insist on re-electing the very people who are screwing them" - that's Tom Frank's definition.

The notion of "false consciousness" has always been appealing. But it's not hard to critique what is false; the problem is to know what is true. It's not just the postmodernists who object to the notion that we know the truth; almost all the people on the left who have lived through the political reversals of the last thirty years have developed a more humble sense of their analytical powers.

Although Frank uses the term "false consciousness" only a couple of times, his book provides the best example of both the strengths and the weaknesses of this kind of analysis. He brings to life the notion of false consciousness by focusing on the way the poorest counties on the Great Plains have turned Republican and "drifted into delusion" (Barbara Ehrenreich's phrase). He shows how the Republicans and their media voices-Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and so on-appeal to ordinary people with a class-conscious anger at "the elite." This elite is not the capitalist class; it is the liberals, who are held responsible for the "decline" in "values" that voters are called on to reverse. This ideology demonizes the New York and L.A. types who got rich by pushing sex and violence in the media; they are Volvo-driving, Brie-eating, latte-sipping snobs who have nothing in common with the problems or values of ordinary people.

In a wonderful phrase, Frank terms this argument "the latte libel." He paints an irresistible and hilarious picture of this "mutant strain of class war." And he has great fun pointing out its flaws: there is more sex and violence on the Murdoch-owned Fox networks than on the supposedly left-wing CBS-TV; "the mighty ACLU" does not control Hollywood; Desperate Housewives gets higher ratings in the heartland than it does in Manhattan or West L.A. In fact it is the free market that is destroying "traditional values." Because of the free market, all that is solid melts into air.

The culture wars foster false consciousness above all by focusing on abortion. Take away people's good industrial jobs, Frank writes, and the "next thing you know they're protesting in front of abortion clinics." How do you get poor people to vote for tax cuts for the rich? By convincing them that the issue is not tax cuts for the rich, it's stopping the slaughter of the unborn. And if you really believe the fetus is a person with a right to life, saving the lives of those helpless "babies" is a moral imperative that makes tax policy pretty insignificant. And if abortion is not your thing, there is school prayer, gun rights, and gay marriage-lots of issues to get angry about. This consciousness is false because it depends on "a systematic erasure of the economic." It really is a trick, a kind of sleight of hand: don't look at people who are taking away your jobs; look at the people who are taking away your guns!

Today the Republicans control almost everything-the White House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, most of the governorships and state houses. So how can they continue to demonize Democrats as the cause of the problems of ordinary people? Here Frank is at his most provocative: the "vague cultural grievances" fostered by the right are "incapable of ever being assuaged." Abortion is not going to be criminalized; the Ten Commandments will not be inscribed in the courthouses; school prayer is never going to become mandatory; sex and violence will not be eliminated from movies or television. The right has declared a war in which victory is impossible; in Frank's unforgettable phrase, "the backlash was born to lose." False consciousness about "values" makes for political war that is permanent.

The question about this false consciousness, of course, is still, "What is to be done?" We have two competing answers. Conservative Democrats like Bill and Hillary Clinton say it is time to "engage the American heartland in a conversation about religion and values." Jim Wallis is the leading strategist on this front. In his book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, Wallis points out that Jesus never said anything about tax cuts for the rich. Thus Wallis would enlist Jesus on the side of class consciousness.

Tom Frank says this response to the Republicans is a betrayal. The way to fight false consciousness is not to debate about Jesus, but rather to reassert the primacy of class in America. Instead of fighting on the Republicans' terrain, Democrats should make class war the answer to the culture war, and restore economic issues to the center of the progressive political message: the primary cause of suffering in America is not the liberal elite, but rather the big corporations and their Republican friends.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

FRANK'S CASE is a powerful and compelling one, but it has come in for some sharp and significant criticism from writers who know a lot about false consciousness. According to the theory, for consciousness to be false, a challenge to the ruling ideology must be available to ordinary people. That challenge would lead to "class consciousness"-an awareness of social conflict and of the potential power of working people to transform the status quo.

But if it's false consciousness for poor and working people to vote Republican, does a worker with class consciousness automatically vote Democratic? Here Frank's argument gets shaky. The "true" interests of the working class in America today start with jobs. But the de-industrialization of America, and the export of good industrial jobs to Mexico and now to China, was the policy of Bill Clinton, who introduced, fought for, and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. John Kerry went along with that project. His jobs program in 2004 was pathetic: tax cuts for the rich-in this case, for corporations that don't export jobs. But if unemployed industrial workers in Kansas wanted to vote their true interests in protecting decent jobs, why would they support the candidate and the party that established the policies that did away with those jobs?

Frank knows this history. He holds the Democrats responsible for helping to create our "landscape of distortion, of paranoia, and of good people led astray." The Democratic Party abandoned class issues; under the malevolent leadership of the Democratic Leadership Council, the party followed Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Joe Lieberman to "forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues." The real strategic turn came when the DLC began relying on contributions from the corporate world. The result is that the Democratic Party is now rock solid in its commitment to preserving choice, but happy to concede to the corporations on economic issues like the North American Free Trade Agreement, labor law, deregulation, and tax cuts. Just when ordinary people most needed equality and economic security, the Democrats abandoned them. And because the Democrats no longer speak the language of class, their former base is left open and vulnerable to false consciousness around abortion, school prayer, guns, and gays. Frank terms this strategy not only "ruinous" but "criminally stupid."

The opposite of false consciousness is class consciousness. Where does class consciousness come from? Does it arise spontaneously from the experience of ordinary workers? Frank says no-people do not necessarily understand their situation or know how to act to defend their interests. The role of a political party is to explain these things, to define interests, and then to fight for them. But the Democrats have little to say about the interests of ordinary people, while the Republicans are full of angry arguments that identify problems and propose solutions.

Here is where the objections arise. Tom Mertes, writing in the New Left Review (Nov-Dec 2004), notes that, in Frank's 250-page book, only 8 pages are devoted to criticizing the Democrats. And while the critique is "robust enough," it fails to ask the obvious question: why does the Democratic Party act the way it does? By calling the Democrats "criminally stupid," Frank implies that the solution is simply for them to get smart-to bring them to their senses, to recall their true mission: fight for equality, solidarity, and social progress.

But the Democrats' problem, Mertes argues, is not simply stupidity. The party is controlled "largely by the super-rich," and in understanding and fighting for their own interests, they have been fairly smart. The evidence lies in what Mertes terms "the blue plutocracy": virtually all of the wealthiest electoral districts in the country have become Democratic bastions. Bill Clinton may have been a poor boy from Hope, but the Democrats' candidate in 2004 was the richest man ever to run for the White House. More of the super-rich favored the Democrats in 2004-the divide was 59-41 among individuals with assets above $10 million. That's why working-class consciousness was not part of the Democratic Party message.

Frank's second great failing, according to Mertes, is his romantic idealization of the Democratic Party of yesteryear. Is this Frank's own false consciousness? Forty years ago, he suggests, the Democrats were "the party of the workers, the poor, the weak and the victimized." Mertes's response is a familiar one: from Wilson to Truman to Kennedy, and, yes, including Roosevelt, the Democrats practiced "the ferocious protection of capital at home and abroad." It's true, of course, as Marxists have often argued, that FDR saved capitalism. But it can hardly have been false consciousness for workers in 1936 to support the party and the president that had just passed the Wagner Act, which put the power of the federal government behind the creation of the CIO.

MIKE DAVIS (in an unpublished conference paper) has a different critique. He points out that culture war is hardly an invention of the last two decades-on the contrary, it is "the default condition of American politics." Religion, race, and ethnicity have "structured the field" of party politics for the last two centuries. The Protestants versus the Papists, the Nativists versus the immigrants, and of course the whites versus the blacks-that's been the story in American political life. In fact, there have been only a few decades in which any form of class conflict came to dominate the issues-the 1890s, the 1930s, with the latter being almost unique.

Davis insists we need to question whether the various forms of ethno-religious politics in fact represented a consciousness that was genuinely "false." Often they were part of a "defense of perceived systems of privilege and entitlement." False consciousness in the classic sense, he argues, "embracing purely imaginary solidarities with one's exploiter," is "not common." Culture war "rages most fiercely when it is able to mobilize material self-interest, however ignorant or short-sighted."

Frank offers the poorest county in the United States-McPherson County, Nebraska-as his prime example of false consciousness. It voted 80 percent Republican in 2000. But the people who vote there, Davis points out, are mostly small cattle ranchers. Their incomes put them among the nation's poor, but their assets give them the interests of property owners. So voting Republican isn't necessarily delusional or self-destructive. And their assets make them the wrong people to serve as examples of voters who are poor or working class.

A more telling example of the political consciousness of declining workers, Davis argues, can be found in West Virginia, where deindustrialization has been catastrophic, and where the shift to the right has been more dramatic than any other state. It was once a Democratic stronghold, but Kerry lost West Virginia by 13 percent. And although many mine and mill workers voted against him, they voted for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, and Democrats held on to two of three congressional seats with an impressive two-thirds of the vote. Is this schizophrenic divide an example of false consciousness? Davis argues that it is not: the Democrats who were elected in West Virginia made jobs the center of their campaigns, while Kerry offered only that pathetic proposal for tax breaks for corporations that didn't export jobs. Bush, meanwhile, had imposed tariffs on imported steel in 2001, which could be spun as taking a stand against the European competitors who were killing West Virginia's mines and mills. That was certainly deceptive, but it was more than Kerry did.

There is one more problem that critics have found with Frank's argument for "false consciousness." Although the evidence is overwhelming that Republican media pounded away to foment culture war, it's not at all clear that cultural issues provided the basis of working-class votes for Bush. Despite the conventional wisdom the day after the election that "values" had been the Republicans' trump card, opinion polls showed that the number of voters who said they voted primarily on the basis of "values" in fact declined: in 1996 (Clinton-Dole) it was 40 percent; in 2000 (Bush-Gore) it was 35 percent; and in 2004 it fell to 22 percent. If these polls are accurate, we have to conclude that the culture war as a basis for voting has steadily lost ground over the last decade.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

WHY, THEN, DID so many working-class and poor voters support George Bush? The evidence is that abortion, gun rights, school prayer, and gay marriage were not the decisive issues. The key issues, as Mark Danner argued in the New York Review of Books of January, 13, 2005, were the attacks of September 11, 2001; terrorism; and war. You can call it "false consciousness" for workers to support war, and that of course is the classic Marxist position going back to the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. But that's not Frank's argument. Although his book was published in 2004, the September 11 attacks get two pages, "Iraq" doesn't appear in the index, and the only terrorists he mentions are the homegrown ones who struck in Oklahoma City.

I don't think it is false consciousness to fear another terrorist attack; I think it's rational. And it's not a class issue. Of course, the president has manipulated that fear, used that fear as the basis of an ideology, in the classic sense of that term. Crudely put, the claim is that working- class and poor people should vote for the party that is screwing them because that party is also protecting them from our enemies. That's a different kind of "false consciousness," one that is harder to fight because it invokes real problems and real dangers.

The most vivid and indeed unforgettable parts of Tom Frank's book are his detailed portraits of ordinary people in his home state of Kansas trying to make sense of their situations and not succeeding. Now we need him to go back and talk to them about terrorism and war, to understand the new forms of false consciousness that shaped the outcome of the 2004 election.

 
Jon Wiener (Wiener@uci.edu) is the author of Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower (The New Press, 2005). He is a contributing editor of the Nation and teaches history at UC Irvine.

[minionofmidas]

All the while I was reading this (and I agreed with almost all of it) I was waiting for this paragraph...

WHY, THEN, DID so many working-class and poor voters support George Bush? The evidence is that abortion, gun rights, school prayer, and gay marriage were not the decisive issues. The key issues, as Mark Danner argued in the New York Review of Books of January, 13, 2005, were the attacks of September 11, 2001; terrorism; and war. You can call it "false consciousness" for workers to support war, and that of course is the classic Marxist position going back to the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. But that's not Frank's argument. Although his book was published in 2004, the September 11 attacks get two pages, "Iraq" doesn't appear in the index, and the only terrorists he mentions are the homegrown ones who struck in Oklahoma City.

And then he totally lost me here:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

What? Fearing terrorist attacks, except in the sense in which you'd fear, say, death in a freak accident, is certainly not "rational". And if it were - if someone rationally feared death by terrorism and wanted to rationally reduce that risk, then Bush's foreign policies certainly would have pretty much precluded such person from even contemplating voting republican. America at War was the main cause (although gays were another important one) for Bush's turnout-inspired bounce in the South and Northeast, yes. But ration, or even fear, has little to do with it. The impulses involved are pretty much atavistic ones. Which doesn't mean politicians should just ignore them, of course. Just take the classic "not supporting our troops" trap damn, whole issue is so tangled that it's almost impossible to write a straight rational sentence about it that actually expresses what you want to express. Including this one. Especially in a foreign language. I give up.

[minionofmidas]

The right has declared a war in which victory is impossible; in Frank's unforgettable phrase, "the backlash was born to lose."

Nowt new about that - you might call that the defining theme of postmodern conservative politics. The classic is "anti-crime" campaigning, of course. The most hilarious lengths can be seen in legislating against child molesters. And in America, the Democrats have engaged in these politics as well - on their own pet issue of gun control. Immigration and integration-related posturing, especially over here in Europe, is another issue on which you see that kind of behavior, although here it quickly shades of into something even more disgusting.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

All the while I was reading this (and I agreed with almost all of it) I was waiting for this paragraph...

WHY, THEN, DID so many working-class and poor voters support George Bush? The evidence is that abortion, gun rights, school prayer, and gay marriage were not the decisive issues. The key issues, as Mark Danner argued in the New York Review of Books of January, 13, 2005, were the attacks of September 11, 2001; terrorism; and war. You can call it "false consciousness" for workers to support war, and that of course is the classic Marxist position going back to the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. But that's not Frank's argument. Although his book was published in 2004, the September 11 attacks get two pages, "Iraq" doesn't appear in the index, and the only terrorists he mentions are the homegrown ones who struck in Oklahoma City.

And then he totally lost me here:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

What? Fearing terrorist attacks, except in the sense in which you'd fear, say, death in a freak accident, is certainly not "rational".

Agree with you on that; main reason I posted this isn't so much the conclusion to the conclusion as the overall analysis of the situation and the extent to which it reviews other explanations. What's depressing is that only a tiny handful of works written about the general subject bother to do even that.

[minionofmidas]

I even had a half-baked argument on how it is, indeed, a class issue, namely insofar as it's an access-to-information issue, but I got sidetracked into other stuff while writing.

[Torie]

Of course the assumption out of the box is that Dem policies are in the economic interest of lower income voters. Then the next step, is that these voters have a failure of perception as to reality, or do perceive reality, but then vote against their economic interest anyway, I am not sure which. Another little problem is that some of these lower income counties, also have a much lower cost of living. It may be that these voters, even just on economic issues, are perfectly capable voters.

[minionofmidas]

Of course the assumption out of the box is that Dem policies are in the economic interest of lower income voters.

...or at least (and not nearly so large an assumption, this one) that Rep policies aren't.

[jokerman]

Of course the assumption out of the box is that Dem policies are in the economic interest of lower income voters. Then the next step, is that these voters have a failure of perception as to reality, or do perceive reality, but then vote against their economic interest anyway, I am not sure which. Another little problem is that some of these lower income counties, also have a much lower cost of living. It may be that these voters, even just on economic issues, are perfectly capable voters.

Hell, what do I know?  Maybe working class voters have been going to the polls thinking "we got to push tax rates up the Laffer curve" or "those cuts in the top income brackets are going to trickle down to me."  But only to a point.  The working man also has a healthy amount of common sense, and that common sense tells him that I was better off during Clinton's term than Bush's.  I have a feeling if the economy was really the prevailing and decisive issue that common sense would reign.

[Person Man]

This was a pretty good peice and what's interesting is that polls actually hammer out the conclusion of this article quite well though I wouldn't go so far to say that the GOPPERs are all about 9/11, but I would say that they are the party of having hard balls. Perhaps we should push to the center on military issues in order to start winning again. The bottleneck in that campaign would be how to finance the working class AND a powerful military. However, we could make the rolling back of tax cuts and "unpatriotic"....and we could probably still reach out to younger voters by privatizing social security to subsidize schooling and doctors' visits.

[dead0man]

Perhaps we should push to the center on military issues in order to start winning again. The bottleneck in that campaign would be how to finance the working class AND a powerful military.

Do that and you alienate 1/3rd of your base (at least), good luck with that!

[opebo]

...The working man also has a healthy amount of common sense...

In practice, 'common sense' is just unthinking predjudice.  It tends to support the Republican economic ideology, which is based not on reason, but on simplistic and stupid emotional reactions, myth, and working class hubris.  No, the working man is a fool, and completely duped.

[bullmoose88]

Just a thought, and perhaps a dumb one at that...but

Can you really get working class people, who may or may not be more socially conservative and more religious, in the same political coalition as latte liberals, who seem more fiscally moderate maybe even conservative and yet socially liberal/progressive, for any prolonged period of time?

ie more than one major and one midterm election?

I sometimes wonder if its near impossible to fuse those two blocs together for any considerable amount of time, barring some major disaster by the alternative political party.

Shrug

[opebo]

I think you can Bullmoose as I think you underestimate the economic leftism of the 'latte liberal'.  The real problem in the fusion is the hubris and hatreds of the working class side of the alliance.

[bullmoose88]

I think you can Bullmoose as I think you underestimate the economic leftism of the 'latte liberal'.  The real problem in the fusion is the hubris and hatreds of the working class side of the alliance.

I mean, even then...if you say the economic issues are basically a push...doesn't that alliance possibly fall because of social issues? when one side declares war on jesus, or war for jesus?

[opebo]

I think you can Bullmoose as I think you underestimate the economic leftism of the 'latte liberal'.  The real problem in the fusion is the hubris and hatreds of the working class side of the alliance.

I mean, even then...if you say the economic issues are basically a push...doesn't that alliance possibly fall because of social issues? when one side declares war on jesus, or war for jesus?

It would really just depend if the angry proles could forget about how much they hate a gay and a black for a while... I think that a significant number of them can do so - outside the South. 

Of course the problem is not actually how these proles get along with their betters within the Democratic party, but whether they can resist the constant and well-financed marketing of fear/hatred/religiousity that will be coming all the while from the Republican side.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If anyone ever wants proof that opebo is no Marxist, then they should read this thread.

[Person Man]

Opie's being an asshole. We are definately going to have to be more like Republicans on the military if we want to win and in order to keep the coalition together, we might have to find an alternative issue for the anti-war crowd. We are going to have to at least push to the center so that we can cast a patriotic aura on our beleifs in freedom and equality. I mean, is there another way?
...The alternative, of course, is to let a "permanent" republican majority run its course until they f.uck up so majorly that the old FDR coalition (free-spirited bankers, miners and machinists looking for a better deal and those stigmatised by their phenotype) just forgets the last 50 years. ...but will we be able to keep the country in one peice?

[Bleeding heart conservative, HTMLdon]

On one hand I feel gratified that this article recognizes that the interests of the Euro-American latte class and real Americans might be different... on the other hand, the partisan premise of the article is ridiculous.

[Person Man]

On one hand I feel gratified that this article recognizes that the interests of the Euro-American latte class and real Americans might be different... on the other hand, the partisan premise of the article is ridiculous.

I'm sorry, but this sort of intra-state nationalism is a threat to our national security. For one, I would expatriate if I felt I could not, in good conscience, productively contribute or participate in this country. It is a promise that I will either love or leave this country and find the country I can be more morally compelled to support. I can only hope that others take this promise to heart as well. 

[NDN]

Opie's being an asshole. We are definately going to have to be more like Republicans on the military if we want to win and in order to keep the coalition together, we might have to find an alternative issue for the anti-war crowd.

No we don't. The Democrats have lost support because they've delivered almost none of what they promised. It boils down to our leaders mostly being jokes (seriously, Nancy Pelosi?). It has nothing to do with us being too 'anti-war.' Most americans are sick of wars.

The Democrats do need to become more of a big tent party on a few issues. But if the Democrats adopt a Republican-lite stance on foreign policy (more than they already have...), they will lose for sure. And it will be much deserved.

[Rob]

And then he totally lost me here:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

What? Fearing terrorist attacks, except in the sense in which you'd fear, say, death in a freak accident, is certainly not "rational". And if it were - if someone rationally feared death by terrorism and wanted to rationally reduce that risk, then Bush's foreign policies certainly would have pretty much precluded such person from even contemplating voting republican.

Word.

[dead0man]

The real problem in the fusion is the hubris and hatreds of the working class side of the alliance.

No, the working man is a fool, and completely duped.

You're always good for a laugh aren't you?  Yep, working class are the ones full of hatred and hubris.  Poser intellectuals never have that quality do they?

[dead0man]

..and I totally missed the "get along with their betters" part!  You sir are a riot.