what's the matter with kansas and feminism and thomas frank and brown christian fellowship

In the previous two essays I reviewed Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? and then began to lay out my thoughts on where we are and why were are where we are as a culture. I emphasized, as my first point, that liberal arrogance in the wake of the 1960s, manifest in areas of race, sex and religion, so torched people that there simply had to be a reaction of massive proportions, a reaction we now are experiencing. I will begin by giving a final personal example of how the third area, sex, naturally provoked a backlash. This doesn't explain why lower middle and middle class fundamentalists are raging, and perhaps unwitting, defenders of the super rich, but it helps set the tone for understanding this point.

The Issue of Sexism

On two occasions in the 1970s I realized how the newly-christened women's liberation movement was fueled by an attempt, at least in part, to denigrate men. The leaders of the first generation of the movement were slightly older than I (I think that is why so many men today viscerally don't like Hillary Clinton; she is, and she simply can't avoid being, a first-generation feminist), but I hung around them a lot, especially at Church of the Covenant in Boston after 1976. But even before this, while I was still at Brown I decided to apply for a vacancy on the student council, that same council that had rejected the Brown Christian Fellowship's application for funds. I was one of several candidates, and was questioned by a male who was very interested to hear my perspective on equal funding for women's sports. I think an education act had just been passed (1972) which would, within a few decades, try to "equalize" spending for men and women's athletics, but at this point the debate had not even really begun in earnest. So I said that I wasn't sure but that it seemed to me that men's athletics should continue to receive relatively more funding, since men had a football team and the most costly women's team at the time, I think, was field hockey. I was greeted with such stares of incredulity that I began to wonder if I was a sort of Neanderthal in hush puppies. Needless to say, I didn't get the position.

But the feminism of the late 1970s, where patriarchy was seen as the big enemy of the West, where all men were "potential rapists," where oppressive systems were kept in place by testosterone-driven males, where working women wanted "raises not roses," all conspired to convince me that I was, as a male, very small indeed. In any case, liberal arrogance coming out of the 1960s and 1970s had to provoke a reaction of the most immense proportions. I think, indeed, that some of the caricatures of liberals today, that they cynically control systems that exlude the righteous little people from participation, arise directly from the sense of shame and humiliation that conservatives and even moderates felt at the hands of the liberal arrogance of past decades. But, in my view of America, there is much more than reactions to liberal arrogance to account for today's cultural climate.

2. Creation of Lots More Rich People

I do not have accurate figures, but I would venture to say that the number of what I would call "super rich" in America, with assets over $5 million, probably doubled from 3 to 6 million in the last half of the 1990s. That is, our society became very rich under a Democratic President, Bill Clinton. Whatever people might be inclined to say about him, regarding how he might have "disgraced" the office of the Presidency, he made people rich. And they know it. In any case, the reality of the 1990s is that a large number of people vaulted into this special class. They were investment bankers, dot.com workers, lawyers, "financial services" professionals and a host of those who invested wisely in the computer and internet companies that sparked the 1990s gold rush. The biggest concern of those who just enter the room, so to speak, is to make sure they don't become ushered out as soon as they make their entrance. Therefore, I see the past 10 years in American life as a twofold effort, through legislation and through enlisting the Fundamentalists, to make sure that this expanded group of very rich people stays as big as it is. That is, I see that the Fundamentalists are being brought in as "wall constructors" of sorts, people who are making sure that the bigger walled city of the super rich in our culture has firm boundaries so that no one slips out.

But this brings up two issues. What are the mechanisms through which new wealth is assured (i.e., that it won't disappear) and why have the Fundamentalists been willing to build the walls protecting the new and old super rich? The mechanisms through which this was done were statutory changes to the tax code, massive tax cuts to those who were already rich and sage financial advice to those who pulled out their money before the financial bubble burst in 2000. The most obvious change to the tax code is the lowering of taxes on dividend and interest income. As one tax lawyer said to me, why anyone in his right mind would think it was fair to tax d & i income (almost owned exclusively by the wealthy) at a lower rate than income (which almost all have to earn) was beyond him. Of course it was explicable if you wanted to transfer money in American society to those on the upper ends of the scale.*

[*And the effort to do this is by no means over. Debates over abolition of the "death tax" will heat up as soon as Katrina is dealt with.]

3. Psychic Benefit to the Fundamentalists

But the real issue of importance for Frank, which he never answers, is why the Fundamentalists eagerly joined in the crusade on behalf of the wealthy when they seemingly had little to gain. A whole book could be written on this, but my brief suggestion is that the Fundamentalists drew psychic wealth from joining in liberal bashing and articulating a "moral agenda." They, who understood themselves to have been cut off from the mainstream of American society since the ascent of modernism in the earlier parts of the 20th century, now can be at the heart of the cultural debates. They can march and get coverage. They can get legislatures to talk about "creation science" or "intelligent design." They can get abortion protests in the headlines. They can make sure that no state approves homosexual marriage. The psychic (i.e., non-economic) victories that result are immense for people who have long believed that their only consolation was that this world was not their home but a greater joy awaited them in heaven.

Much, much more could be said, but I am out of space here. Suffice it to say that these four points: liberal arrogance, creation of vast numbers of new rich people, desire to protect these riches, and enlisting the Fundamentalists for the psychic rewards it provides, are sufficient to explain a lot of what is happening now in American culture. What remains unexplained and unexplored, however, is why the large millions of fairly progressive people, who have access to wealth and lots of ways to exercise their power, are seemingly fairly silent in all this. There is a reason, but I won't explore it here...

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