How cultural anger can be marshalled to achieve economic ends...

Ο τίτλος προέρχεται από το βιβλίο "What's the matter with Kansas? (How conservatives won the heart of America)" του Thomas Frank. Άρχισα να το διαβάζω σήμερα μόλις, αλλά καθότι είναι αρκετά ενδιαφέρον, είπα να καταγράψω εδώ μερικές ενδιαφέρουσες επισημάνσεις του συγγραφέα, στην προσπάθεια του να ερμηνεύσει ένα από τα μυστήρια των ημερών: Πώς γίνεται τόσο πολλοί αμερικάνοι (αναφερόμενος κυρίως στους κατοίκους των κεντρικών πολιτειών) να ψηφίζουν ενάντια στα οικονομικά και κοινωνικά συμφέροντα τους, δηλαδή να ψηφίζουν ρεπουμπλικάνους!

The Great Backlash
Πρόκειται για το νέο στυλ των συντηρητικών, που κινητοποιεί τους ψηφοφόρους με εκρηκτικά κοινωνικά ζητήματα (βλέπε το θέμα των εκτρώσεων για παράδειγμα) για να τα "παντρέψει" στη συνέχεια με οικονομικές πολιτικές υπέρ των μεγαλοεπιχειρήσεων.
Παραθέτω εδώ ένα σχετικό απόσπασμα:
"In fact, backlash leaders systematically downplay the politics of economics. The movement's basic premise is that culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concern- that Values matter most, as one backlash title has it. On those grounds, it rallies citizens who would once have been reliable partisans of the New Deal to the standard of conservatism. Old-fashioned values may count when conservatives appear on the stump, but once conservatives are in office the only old-fashioned situation they care about is an economic regimenof low wages and lax regulations. Over the last three decades they have smashed the welfare state, reduced the tax burden on corporations and the wealthy, and generally facilitated the country;s return to a nineteenth-century pattern of wealth distribution. Thus the primary contradiction of the backlash: it is a working-class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working-class people.
The leaders of the 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 consistent 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..."

The two nations
"In the backlash imagination, America is always in a state of quasi-civil war: on one side are the unpretentious millions os Authentic Americans; on the other stand the booklish, all-powerful liberals who run the country but are contemptuous of the tastes and beliefs of the people who inhabit it. ...
The current installment of this fantasy is the story of the 'two Americas", the symbolic division of the country that, after the presidential election of 2000, captivated not only backlashers but a seizable class of the pundit class. The idea found its inspiration in the map of the electoral results that year: there were those vast stretches of inland "red" space (the networks all used red to designate Republican victories) where people voted for George W. Bush and those tiny little "blue" coastal areas where people lived in big cities and voted for Al Gore. "

Προς το παρόν η παρουσίαση του Frank είναι αρκετά πειστική και η οπτική του επί του θέματος μου φαίνεται πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα και διαφωτιστική. Να δούμε τι επιφυλάσσει η συνέχεια...