An hour with Thomas Frank

from forum hall at the kansas state student union kbr presents an hour with thomas frank and came at entire thomas frank is the author of the bestselling book what's the matter with kansas a native of mission health kansas looks at how this state once known for its radical progress of this and became one of the most conservative states in the union has appearances part of kansas state's lieutenant was lecture series on public issues co sponsored by the us and canadian tenor and down day and play with inflection thing and now when i see all year i'm sorry it's going to be a very boring lecture and i apologize in advance and by community knew most boring part of it right there mr i'm really sorry i'm just that's who i am i'm at the end of them really boring person is are inescapable in my opinion economic fact of our time is the return of inequality in

america i mean it's so it's people in the administration in washington has not talk about it ms bernstein that was but if you go back to nineteen eighty when the great conservative revolution in america was just get knocked the ground you'll find that over twenty percent of the private sector workforce in america belong to a labor union and that american ceo's beckham are paid about on average forty two times with their wine workers receive and that was a number that was pretty comparable to the numbers coming out of western europe and japan today i read this newspaper does today today's ceo's receive four hundred times as much as their average mine workers while unions have now fallen to eight percent of the private sector workforce are still dropping that however you measure this it has

made for a monumental change in the american landscape back in nineteen eighty the richest strata of american life own twenty percent of the nation's well my body and the nineteen nineties they own forty percent and economists have a way of charging most of seemingly appear out there we have the low wage saying as well economists have a way of turning this about the gene that's arm and if you look at the historical g index you see that we are oh this is this is a share of the top percentage upper strata their ownership of the sea where our way back to the nineteen twenties if not the nineteenth century saw a wave of looking at this this is another way of my great aunts who are leaving france and uk behind exxon is yet another way that were within ours and i know it won't broadcast this on a tricky because we are now on an

idiot i am i know a thing about this in the period from nineteen eighty nine to nineteen ninety nine the median family income in america stayed roughly the senate didn't grow but in order to earn that median family income of the very end of the night of the nineteen ninety a median family had to work six weeks longer here right not six hours but six days six weeks longer do all this is going on as everybody knows the cost of medicine and education are spiraling out of control as they still are not because of this enormous shift i think has been lee has rejuvenated conservatism since nineteen eighty the sweeping reconfiguration of the economic order with tax cuts deregulation privatization and the unionization we're you know we're accustomed to here in america to hearing that we live in such amazingly prosperous times

that they can't even be understood by traditional economic state but what has changed the most i think over the years as he has not been the productivity somewhat suspend distribution of wealth the way that different actors in society are rewarded for their economic efforts productivity goes up and open up an open up in america but wages don't grow at all are growing very very little this has not been an engineering triumph in my opinion it has been a political crime the traditional enemies of the business class had simply been beaten that's what's happened that's what explains all those but if that's right if that's true but that's all the what's going on and how this conservatism continued to win elections and work its will write it's the question of what the historians were now how does in particular how his conservatism happen to do so very well in places where people been hard hit by the new economic order example of a place like west virginia which at the time or twenty of four election that was the poorest state in the country measured by

per capita income and yet it is just in the last few election cycles has become republic this was a state that was that was you know rock ribbed democrat this is the one for michael dukakis yeah let's do that and that's a democratic they were there but now it's now to be what proportion by by a substantial margin i mean it wasn't it wasn't even really contest now so while the triumph of conservatism has caused this view that inequality that we see in america is also argue profit from this huge inequality at the way in which conservatives and addresses us away which it speaks to us as citizens i think is very well suited to an unfair age for example that the conservatism as we see of the force today it's not social or when asked you know wrestling and the destruction of the week it's not a romantic write in the manner of young friedrich wilhelm before officially the pining for the last year of feudalism right like franco in spain to work that it doesnt

conservatism doesn't insist on the divine right of money when john d rockefeller used to do that doesn't demand that the lowly learn their place in the great chain of being what it does instead think what it does is it hijacked the language of the angry seeker of justice it presents itself as a revolt against false authority it is populist and that's just the keyword populace right now and that's a subject we live in a populist age which everybody waving the banning of there is a banner proudly for the little guy average american you know its war with the elite but the political choices that we make under the leadership of these new populist are precisely the opposite political choices that you know all time populism used to like that thing that we used to know so well here in kansas were doing exactly the opposite but using the same language the populism that we embrace today only makes these

problems and talk about worse now speaking in the most general terms there are two main branches to present day american conservatives on the one hand you're familiar culture war writing you know so well here in kansas and then on the other hand the economic variety that free market libertarian stuff that you we read the wall street journal that's what we're reading we live in a place that was nbc's what you encounter every day and that's right now so i know that he tricked into the two species of access are the two species of conservatism appeal to different different groups and they are ill by large expanded by different set of people that don't they don't really meta really overlap except for in a few important individuals but one thing that they do have a lot of these strains of conservatism has in common is that they're both populist both of them lane to speak for the little guy in his war against the high and mighty about both

of them are anti elitist and for both of them this war against the elites always boils down the same thing which is anti intellectual might recognize anti intellectual as intellectual as the number one enemy of our new style let's take the us economic species of conservatism first of a kind of conservatism whose primary tenet is the near divinity of the free market a centerpiece of this ideology is a belief in the oneness of markets and democracy and the two things are just not they're one and the same i call this market populism the idea here being that the market in addition to being a medium of exchange is a medium of consent and this was very much the idea great idea of the nineteen nineties with your commentator's all across the political spectrum agreed that all alternatives to the free market system more now

permanent we discredited so with the market mechanisms of supply and demand whole and focus group superstore an internet markets were thought to express the popular will more articulately more meaningfully then new elections by the very nature of markets were supposed to confer democratic legitimacy markets were supposed to bring down the pompous and the silly markets were supposed to look out for the interests of the little guy markets were supposed to give us what we want right indeed markets which was to be a form of revolution member this fast company magazine so thanks to long road this was the fists as well such rubbish and i'll never let them forget it is so thanks to markets little old ladies were supposed to be trading stocks online and within the wall street pros and thanks to mark its

workers responsibly getting rid of contract and becoming a free agents right he secured freedom fighter thanks to markets the internet was allowing each and every one of us to be ourselves it's rebellious tradition remember those days what ken lay corporate revolutionary right next to dennis kozlowski is really doing time somewhere else right now it's the markets or revolution as bad as we hear in cans now of course populism what populism used to be a hundred years ago when people use the term the capital p right populism what they meant by it was a rebellion against the corporate order in the court order hated populous base to call it anarchy and repudiation this is

a picture that was the governor of illinois john peter out still holding william jennings bryan a poem from his face to mask his real aims which are enacting repudiation i totally bizarre on its health bill again with debtors off to his left and you see on the foreigners chin whiskers you see that that's our only kansas senator william path for that as well yet without this is how conservatives view populism hundred years ago it was insane as william jennings brian wilson but anyhow market populism you know what we have now sees things a little bit differently course that's the capitalists who are the rebels and love this one weak economic statistic that was so forget about the boss right forget about the robber barons regular economic royalists the real class enemy in the nineteen nineties as intellectuals are always forced to stand very top

last year's point of the american social hierarchy in the nineties the businessman's each old suspicion of the meddling highbrow in addition to just being repeated everywhere across the culture also became a kind of a practical everyday thing something like a rule the universe just a reflection of the new economic you know you're of that we had injured and you hear this all time you remember this phrase things had changed so dramatically the experts didn't understand what experts couldn't measure the dynamic the progress of the late nineteen eighties he couldn't figure out how to value the internet stocks which actually cannot be pretty wise thing not think they can the experts couldn't understand the importance of brands they couldn't figure out the new the nonlinear non rational new style corporation and the shares how could not adjust things using their traditional tools of it is that the world was moving according to new rules and intellectuals just didn't get it and either sometimes at levels are some exceptions to this

rule oh this was also the golden age of the computer programmer in the brand builder and advertising man the creative accountant she ended all very badly of course in this theater that you don't want a creative accounting but business leaders in the nineteen nineties love to compare themselves to these you know unpredictable geniuses like the impressionists and the great jazz musicians are they developed taste for frank gehry architecture says the business school at the in cleveland case western suffered it where is frank gehry designed i love the place cleveland another building you know we're going to get into that stuff for things like the social sciences and for the broader idea that human intelligence could actively remake the social world you know economy thinkers had only contempt ok simon to run through a couple of the big thinkers of the new economy and for those of you don't remember the nineties are only like ten

years old or whatever when it happens it'll be really exciting ok because it sells so let's start with what the wrist and he was the ceo of the citibank you actually passed have gone just a few months ago but he was the ceo citibank in the eighties and then in nineteen ninety two you published his book called the twilight of sovereignty in which he celebrated the worldwide triumph of the corporation as a triumph for the humble people little people a new technology i'm not exaggerating regime change out of tripoli because of new technologies that have changed everything's was his turn to change their unit launched an information revolution in which all efforts to regulate industry or now is outmoded as the sun dial and particularly in particular reason was really into the idea that the measurement economic measurement was futile government economists he wrote for you to be pretty sure what made what made economies were in no longer even measure was going on world and of course you cannot find

him you cannot measure so this horror of economic measure that was one of the sort of it was a recurring theme in a new country comes up again in that song refers to it just today the wall street journal when one of the colonial last colonial governors of hong kong die and they had an obituary for him as a how did he turn hong kong has great success story by not allowing economists to measure the economy that's how he did that was a stroke of genius why they hate measurement my theory is that it's because econometrics and all the other modern tools for measuring economic activity basically been introduced in the us in the thirties as part of a new deal you know you know whether this course you do when you know that the business community hated the new deal has far too soon claude ever since the nineteen thirties on some measure of that in their minds was related by birth to regulation too high taxes and to the rise of organized labor but in the information revolution a great anchor walter wrist and maintain all of this high

flying hubris would have to end government would have to learn humility before the e tron or principles of the market they would have to learn modesty they would have to know that they do not know certainly the same church with the almighty so the intellectuals are always fools according to new cars rethinking and among other examples of us to be one newt gingrich thinks the intellectuals are responsible for causing the business cycle you know which would not exist in his mind a government economist didn't always try to regulate constraints all the business cycle therefore they end up causing it and they're to blame for the whole thing to the elections are fools but the common people are resilient people indeed even the experts can't measure things in more individuals remained fully rational economic actors totally capable of making art every little needed know in the marketplace and of looking up for our interests so

we're perfectly fine as a self interested economic actors just don't let us up and it sociology phd the summit they tried figuring out the big picture that is absolutely off the table similarly real when they're they love that phrase they say the economic users love the phrase free to choose that as long we don't choose to be a labor union or vote for one of the liberals or some like that right you find this attitude all across the nineties even in like practical best selling investment books are more anti intellectualism this hatred of intellectuals comes together with wall street's traditional desire to bring in investors and cast itself he's great friend of middle america for example your lover peter lynch was he was like at the best stock picker of all time or so it was ran out there in the the biggest mutual fund for fidelity or something like that you still use all around we see is simmering down in

a but he wrote a series of best selling investments in the nineteen nineties and he became famous for his personal average less so instead of having on the harbor he went to boston college he bragged about how he spends his spare time at the shopping mall unison go to studio fifty four and you hire wherever it has an and he's up here which is investing strategy is also relentlessly populist an anti intellectual but back in the sixties of your reader wall street history back in the nineteen sixties your wall street superstar is used to always say that the one the way he would make a profit was to figure out what the public was doing in and do exactly the opposite direction or great contempt for up for the common man appealing to zachary up there he said exactly opposite to stop listening to professionals any normal person can pick stocks just as well if not better than the average wall street expert so instead of some huge complex system for up picking stocks went proposal to be called the power of common knowledge in which is your average miss that

determines your success in the stock market and this was the greek motif over decades investment literature the common man triumphant over the wall street professional the bankruptcy of expertise the foolishness of the experts consider for example the saga of the beardstown ladies you remember the feeling small town grandma's from downstate illinois who became the object of this media storm in early nineteen nineties when their investment club racked up some fantastic not receive them at the bottom at it later turned out to not be true terms of we were very good now that that's the point of this episode was no i was not that their families have really good investment advice they didn't if you read this book it's mainly about like how to read the stock listings in the newspaper and they have a lot of recipes for muffins stuff like that's not the point of this of the

media storm about the beard some ways was this moral fable this idea that even societies loneliest feeble worst and worst and form people write these small reddish from small town midwest that these people could be what they call the self important nba is of new york sir tokyo is that could be in that demographic but there's but there's a hundred examples of this what are the motley fool or you know they run these columns in newspapers all across the country where it is the fools a triumphant over the experts or the millionaire next door or my favorite of the mall james glassman says nineteen ninety nine best seller dow thirty six thousand that went from an idiot here and i actually read this book i think i was the only people who did the idea of his books with but then the stock market in nineteen ninety nine should rightfully have been standing at thirty six thousand not ten thousand and the reason for this the reason why the stock market should be going so so high

with the people we're getting smarter and smarter more more rational realizing that they should trust in the market and driving prices high as weasel so high stock prices by glass and said reflected not the people's unhappiness with their sanity soliciting the fluctuations the dow jones industrial average the author claimed she could see the sort of class war in miniature with small investors in their glorious wisdom being what people rationally exuberant what he did experts were always trying to slow their drive to the top by accusing the little people of being screwy to every train you made was that a vote on what you thought of the common man now i don't need to tell you how badly this and the political implications of this it it should be obvious if it is an act of elitism to believe that society can be organized in any way other in a free market way if what the market does is the will of the people than any city operate

outside of the market's us to seize or to control its ravages is by definition the hubris of false expertise don't think about how to fix them as the market pappas tells surrender your arrogant egotism and humbly he with the market whispers of the politics and and you see playing out right now in the debate over wal mart aisle josiah joy on newspaper to sudan says that wal mart right the largest retailer of all time and liberals these days are saying that walmart is using monopoly power to cannibalize its suppliers drive down wages and destroyed small towns and conservatives counter by saying you're a snob a graveyard instantly back to the populace you just don't like that given the problems with the liberals as you just don't like the kind of people who shop at wal mart and the sites we the people love wal mart we approve of every business decision that wal mart

management of may have we know that we love wal mart because we shop there and thus we vote for the wal mart way markets are democracies that democracy itself though it allows liberals to get in you know a brick wall mount everest right that democracy itself is tyranny it's a you know a form in which sushi eating a lot like shows of volvo drivers can threaten to the real wal mart's business plan and tell the rest of us how volatile markets our democracy in that coconut know this ever struck me as a picnic convincing a doctor and you know there are some people who buy the wall street journal op ed page now that silly picture and there's you know that nero news that liberals like thomas friedman people buy but it has very little resonance among average people especially in the aftermath of things like enron and worldcom when you saw the insiders just fleecing the little people yet again and besides telling people really believe that a corporation is holy that outsourcing is just you know a step in the

process to self actualize asian i mean it's preposterous a culture war was a narrow switch to the other form of conservatism culture war populism is different and this is something that intellectuals brush off i don't want to talk about i don't want to think about it and he refused to take it seriously but the culture wars have enormous appeal of the grassroots again something that we know very well here in kansas i think the reason that the culture wars are so popular is that they do something that other forms of conservatism don't we talk about class this is the key at the center of culture war populism is a way of thinking about class the boat encourages class hostility and at the same time the nih is the economic basis of the grievance of class conservatives a player this kind of conservatives are social conservatives will play a

class isn't really about money or birth or occupation what it is but it is primarily a matter of authenticity you serve cold sure commodity by the way this is going to do this kind of concerted this is a map of the american class system is seen as a snobbish regions where i live in there is the move the humble and virtuous regions where we are today so class and you can tell what a snob i am by my time classes of toughness it's about what kind of car you drive and where you shop and how you pray and only secondarily about the job when you're the incumbent you make so what makes you a member of the noble proletariat agree to this way of looking at things isn't work per se but you know these moral qualities unpretentious this humility and all the rest of the red state virtues that are public or never tires of celebration incidentally these are the same virtues is back in the nineteen nineties they told us made

you predict we do day trader ironically and also this populism just to mention this has the same enemies iran which is namely france and hunt for it socialists now upstate in france so a court in this way of looking at the world the producer class doesn't care about unemployment or a good in life or a boss that makes four hundred times much as they you know none of that stuff matters out in the red states both workers and their bosses are supposed to be united in writers discuss to those affected college boys secure the next table you know prattling on about french cheeses that was in tuscany and the big ideas for writing things that they wrote about you bollocks rise because these are the real parasites now is not enron is not maryland it's me asking this i think because

the key element in this repackaging of class c there's two classes in america that americans in that liberals this week qian says repackaging of classes the idea of a liberal elite as an idea that goes way way back but in its basic outlines is always remained pretty much the same and it goes like this our culture and our schools and our government a culture warrior say all of these are controlled by an over educated ruling class that is contemptuous of the beliefs and practices of regular people so those who run america very old police are despicable self important show last they are a seat he's women spiro agnew his favorite words they're arrogant they're snobs they are liberals so i'm so i could get a bigger picture of that i lost my copy from the mild mannered david brooks to the ever wrathful ann

coulter attacks on me personal tastes and pretensions of this strategy is it our best basically that's the stock in trade of kids of culture war writers but they are conservatives are the real outsiders because gazing with disgust upon the ludicrous manners of a high and the mighty or the tours there you're rough and ready polls laughing along with the efforts of our social matters to reform improvements to the conservative cast their massive gaze on you know some college towns in new england where self righteous young students for intensely with some species of lifestyle experimentation party wave and i can consume their special special waters can you get those here but within the conservatives laugh derisively at the ernest young wii u washington dc two years out a brown already lord it over the hard working people of the

interior from a desk at the epa conservatism on the other hand is supposed to be the doctrine of the oppressed majority unlike your classical nineteenth century style you know edmund burke conservatism the culture wars that i'm talking about they don't defend some establish order to accuse the rat they point out hypocrisy to and gleefully pounce on contradictions and while liberals are always supposed to be using their remember this guy using their control of the airways in the newspapers in the schools to persecute average people the republicans tell us that they are the true party of the disrespect and the downtrodden forgotten they are always the underdog always in rebellion against the party establishment always rising up from below and richard viguerie he reviewed henri was eighty three already given up on reagan years ago republicans saw that when you knew conservative party is not conservative enough what he's doing it again now with

bush exactly the same think it's very interesting if all claims on the right on the culture war right in other words events today from victimhood and this is important to remember this is why a quarter were conservatives revel in these fantasies of their own marginality and persecution and i used that word deliberately because of that actually the title of a book by russian was brother day or another example think of the famous my favorite the war on christmas and which vieux world's humble hundreds of millions of christians are so the big trod upon by a handful of oversensitive intellectuals from the very best all the warren meet a new one which i only heard about a few weeks ago which is even more purely fanciful liberals to clear warning them that have become republican myself as with the market populism that is primarily the sort of free market

conservatives and culture war populism is deeply concerned with the rationality of the public in theory us with the rationality of public and how this has always must be constantly underestimated by liberal intellectuals and he spent a lot of time on their list serves and read magazines and i don't suggest you do this it's you'll you'll find mrs were conservatives greet each other with phrases like oh fellow roosevelt to fly over writers' lives are swiftly looking down to go back and forth from la to dc and that is is there is a the american enterprise magazine was running a whole series of articles right after push them what are some of the virtues of people in the red states and here's how one of them started i'm stupid and if you're reading this you probably are too the comical thing about that is that the american enterprise institute of course is the brilliant think tank that dreamed up the war in iraq that's the same bunch of people you know and laura greenberg wrote a book about the leads a few years ago on this is how the discusses how her publisher describes

media elites they think you're stupid they think all freedom loving americans are stupid they think patriotism is steve that they think churchgoing is stupidly think flag flying is stupid they despise families have more than two children they're sure that where we live you know anywhere near in a few major cities isn't set the cultural wasteland now the implications of this conservative culture of offense taking is that liberalism can be held responsible for the world around us that each of these petty objections that you'll find in movement literature use any objections to the way people drive the way people cut in line the way people talk with their mouth full that each of these is somehow an indictment of the left it and i'm not exaggerating here and it doesn't matter liberals have long since lost their power over kevin i mean check it out i was born in nineteen sixty five there hasn't been a proper liberal elected president his country since before i was

born but that doesn't matter in the culture war mind liberalism is still what what changes our morays what determines what goes on tv and in the magazines and what makes her shift interprets the laws and there is nothing that the constitution not guns not even sweeping electoral victories there is nothing that can protect us from liberalism or even slow it down it is an alien conspiratorial force that can't be held accountable and it doesn't care when its projects go awry and this is why conservatism in my opinion anyway why conservatives tend to choose cultural battles where victory is impossible where their followers feelings of powerlessness are just ramped up in their alienation dramatize for example why was writing what smell of kansas the big backlash theory of the usual order was the alabama ten commandments on your member that they put them on and

they knew they did it deliberately to draw lawsuit from the aclu and everybody knew that how that chapter was going to end with that one big private lives and part of the way but then of course the bizarre second act as a monument was dragged around the country on the back of a truck so that the so that the millions could share the persecution here visit mount rushmore chris things that we can all feel powerless and betrayed us you can just see washington weeping a little stone tears or a psychotic or other examples of this the federal marriage amendment which bush campaign on all three twenty four when he got reelected wash and posted eight interview with him and they asked him what you know federal marriage amendment wasn't for the family most important thing ever you've got your your political capital what he knew about the federal marriage amendment which he campaigned on all through last year your bush's answer was like a very long and winding

answers short he said nothing and we do nothing about it or the great abortion controversy which mobilized millions of people which but which cannot be put to rest without a supreme court decision overturning roe v wade or my family of course the war on evolution how many how many biologists you think they're gonna persuade is because i don't have a slide do you dig through the eyes of the backlash liberalism as in positions are so intolerable and so bizarre and take it with so little regard to the sensibilities of the regulated that it will literally stop that nothing i mean who knows what precedent the supreme court's going to pull out of a testament what which figure of of political speech bear arms or which figured everyday speech the commissar as a political correctness or going to criminalize

even as they and large the list of swear words permissible for broadcast on tv one of which i just uttered a second conservative movement culture a balance with this kind of bizarre speculation about what atrocities the lives they're going to inflict the most tomorrow each wild suggestion made and received with complete seriousness of chuck it out the liberal elite is going to help la major league sports arena for good red meat demanded special holidays for transgendered war veterans i'm not making any visa each of these campuses as a real cause of concern on a listserv that i was on people were very worried about this there are going to be hand our neighborhood over to india dried they're going they're going to decree that only gay couples can adopt children they're going to ban the bible this one it turns out the republican party

i thought that was a joke target when i first heard about it and it turns out that the republican national committee actually sent out this and mailing in arkansas and west virginia and since the election have actually heard people who cast their vote for bush on this basis that they won't see the bible you can i mean who does know let's remind ourselves before we go on to all of these things it's our class based complaints this is all about class at the end of the day or something white classmates complaints considered in this collection the remark made by gary gary oldman in very various ran for president in a few years ago and the new york times interviewed him radio four campaign asked him will have their own that's not beautiful but says it's his ingenious advertising cameras the message home in so many different ways gary bauer

the new york times asked gary bauer of why the culture wars just go on and on why don't these things ever and why does it persist and gary bauer answer is what he said he said joe six pack doesn't understand what the world in his culture are changing and why he doesn't have to say and when i read those my god that is it's totally true i mean the world is changing and the average guy doesn't have a say and it's absolutely correct but that's the way liberals used to talk we were the ones that stood up for joe six pack know the angry average man looking at this world that he had no control over and now it's very dour which republicans that make that claim use that language so to believe that liberalism is all powerful movement it makes for a singular singularly negative and depressing movement culture on the right to believe in the new economy i mean that's to

be like whoa loosen the tory optimist but to be a cultural more conservative is to be a mixed review passengers to believe in a world where your site can never win where your sight almost by definition cannot win or even the most shattering electoral victories dramatically hollow in that liberal stranglehold on life can never be broken to conservatives and in the culture war and this is a huge case that i can use to unite and say this or conservatives believe that they are without agency they are hapless victims adrift in a fatalistic universe where only liberals have the power to act and where every act undertaken by those liberals is an imposition on the good people of middle america that sometimes i think when i'm reading the stuff that this culture war vision of life is nothing more than a really old fashioned leftist vision of life only with the economics drained out of it

where your muckraker seven hundred years ago when we had a lot of those guys in kansas but where your mark rickards of a hundred years ago used to always blame capitalism for screwing up this institution that we caught or think or simply change the script to blame liberal it's the same stuff the press the university's art world you love him architecture law whatever the same things at them up repairs talk about a hundred years ago they just decide to you cross out capitalism and write and liberal is you know it's a sense that the high and mighty are doing this i'll give you one example up until the late nineteen sixties sort of classic critique of the press that you heard in america was that an american newspapers tilted to the right serving the interest of the capital as the advertising in the campaign was to publish that you know people like william randolph hearst sterling liberal or less for my favorite banker robert mccormick chicago of whom it was once said that he had the finest mind of the thirteenth century club

he was not a liberal these are very right wing within days everybody knows it's the exact opposite this is the critique it's mostly liberal reporters and liberal editors that twist news to match their elitist personal preferences as the editors of time doing it you see and toasting champagne underneath a chandelier no doubt on two inch thick shag carpeting and they basically the movement does the same thing to all year old leftists up critiques of the higher education legal world all these things into the institutions is now a slavish servant not of the intro us but of liberalism even those the rhetoric of the culture wars you with all of its regular guy flourishes villagers tip o'neill getting out of this cadillac the river's rhetoric but the culture warriors use is lifted whole cloth from the proletarian nineteen thirties and says that

is the thing that i noticed it's kind of a funny story there is this kind of literature back in the thirties a proletarian fiction real bad stuff and you can guess what it was all about and it's a hobby of mine to collect and you can get it cheap and zola now thirty i'm reading one of these novels real terrible stuff and reading ann coulter the same time and it hits me i can give is the same stuff you know you just switch the villains very very slightly and it's exactly the same stuff there is a lot of those are great minds of pro tour in literature speckled mike golde realized that consciously worked for the daily worker in new york and he had a famous beat the art form while they're somewhat some point if there is famous fight thornton wilder the playwright and he won his accusation against wilder away he made fun of thornton wilder's is a far wilder is revitalized weaves eight feet now he writes with purple think he likes things that are french he likes to hang around a discreet drawing or just has the

exact same stereotypes now we just we don't say the brewers was the light like they did back then we say liberals are young cartoon heart young was a socialist cartoonist and this is a part of making fun of the associated press right out there saying that the midi was mostly right wing back in those days it's a complicated or to not even to try to explain to you if you cover up those dollar signs and didn't see what all the words the words said you'd be the stereotype that renews the creative who is that that is a liberal last year or so where does this leave our conservative friends when you have rejected all the social science methods for understanding the way things were going to do when you can't talk straight about social class and they can't and when you can't acknowledge me was forbidden to you to acknowledge that free market forces might not always be for the best when you

can admit the validity of the most basic historical truths these want tools are all you're left with journalists and sociologist and historian to musicians and four top prison even paleontologist do what they do because they aren't liberals and liberal liberally anything as a matter fact the promises that you advance their larger purpose and project which is to create more liberals in there somehow to win so a part of this way of looking at liberalism is not a product of social forces you know the labor movement environmental movement that's not what liberalism is it is a social force it is a juggernaut that moves according to a logic of history all its own as rigid and as mechanical as anything dreamed up by the stalinists of the nineteen thirties the great shift to the right in america started

with the coming together of two very different political factions on the one hand you're a traditional business republicans with their faith in the free market no the other hand these guys the working class middle americans never resigned on to preserve family values but for the first group mr johnson county type republicans what were you looking at me that just getting republicans the conservative revival that has resulted since the late sixties has been fantastically rewarding i mean they are wealthier as a class today than ever before in their lifetimes my mind was every time i go back to mission hills and see the tear downs but for the other group are these guys you know the hard hats for nixon to angry middle americans the concert experience has pretty much been a bomber all around me always have to show that you're only confusion over there decades now of republican loyalty

are lower wages more dangerous jobs dirtier air the new overlords classic importance of like king farouk and of course a crap culture whose moral freefall continues without any significant intervention the grandstanding chrysler's the base and triumphantly back to washington every couple years by all rights by all rights i think the charm of republicanism should've worn off of these guys a long time ago i mean after all how can you limit the shabby state of american life while absolving business of any responsibility for how can you complain so bitterly about culture and yet neglect to mention the main factor making our culture what it is how can you reconcile these two clashing house of the conservative mind and we see in class everyday here in kansas will tell you how

you can do it by believing in an all powerful liberal elite that's how alone among the many many industries of the world conservatives say with a culture and there they are there and you're mad because it's so the concerns at no look the culture industry it just doesn't respond to those yolks you're in good market forces it does the crazy an ugly things that it does because it is the past by robotic alien liberals trying to drip or corrosive or liberalism into our ears so liberal bias exists because it must exist for the rest of its contemporary conservatism to make any sense at all as in saint anselm to proof of the existence of god which for mike's generations of our ancestors it just can't be any other way by us has to be therefore it is thank you very much

sir thomas frank thanks kansas state university he now takes questions from the audience and it was as olive solve all how big the republicans that you give of that war to do the new of barton's oh my god isn't that it well that's what they early on they have some that one thing that he it got a handle the republicans on the other they're very canny political players are you know they're doing a very good at and all italy's they have understood that populism is how you win elections with a populist appearance and the ideas don't seem to get that you know they run these guys who you know i mean it's just it's shameful of sigh it i voted for kari i like the guy i mean you know the wind surfing

but the republicans worked very hard on a populist image and they do a very good job at it and as it is a testimony to their you know to their skill of the game that they have transformed bush entered into a popular figure away bush's view of the liberals often think he's a dummy bodies i've seen him speak several times the man is a user fees and i'm excellent political speakers also descriptive probably be very good and so the threat of this rally someone to be getting the purple tie it and then so we asked him that question about the movie right hi i'm a republican so i would return better and part mission anyway i want to know how and forties sweeping generalizations about events in syria from qvc ms diller enough when i'm not welcome or wealthy liberal parts of the state and i would just like to know how you come up with this

view cervical cancer since you're not wrong and also are you actually suggesting the voting for a member of like take at hillary clinton says free well those two teddy kennedy is a he's that he's at ease alright his heart's in the right place i think i don't know much about hillary clinton i like the idea of national health care and she went about it all wrong i think it would do something as good bit by large what were said earlier that that the other half of the story which i didn't talk about the night is that the democrats have really dropped the ball in a lot of ways they brought this reaction on themselves and the way they've done that is that they don't serve their traditional working class constituency and these people you when was the last time a national democratic politician really tried hard to win the farm vote when jesse jackson eat right and he'd get the nomination

but before that i mean if your back to always it just doesn't happen anymore they don't even try they don't even talk about music what they need to talk about an artist speak to average people in a place like kansas as it may bring this on themselves i don't think hillary clinton has all is all that wonderful and i like your shoes euthanized that i don't think should change things that much so that that's the that's the other half a questionnaire that's really where politics and that we have a lousy two isn't ours and we have a lousy jewish committees you know our ancestors took matters into their own hands here in this day and they set up their own party a populist party and there are all sorts of issues and at night you know it was very similar to now the two parties want addressing all sorts of subjects that you know equality was a thing of the past you have this concentration of wealth is great fortunes you had monopolies you have to be ready and regulated the business climate and neither party was addressing and people in kansas and a couple other places but mainly here so you have to talk

about those things and we put issues on the table when the two parties were dressing them and i think we have to do that again i learned what you think democrats can do in the upcoming elections great new strategy is nice playing in the population seems like sometimes hillary clinton's email talk about god well they going into energy grid and there's a very obvious tragedies and they all know what it is and i don't want to do it and the strategy is that they have to they have to return to who they were they have to rediscover what levels of these economic liberalism remains very popular in this country today national healthcare social security these things are getting paid well you know it turns out that's really popular economic liberalism is fantastically popular however to embrace economic liberalism is like to sign your death warrant is a politician your funding goes

away the next day was that because our politics in this country are about money you know what we're at war are cynical people in dc where you're at you're in our you have to go to the same people for fundraising and that is in every congressional district in america it's businesspeople and hand and you know high net worth individuals as they say and those people you know they might be a liberal on social issues many of them are when you look at a guy like soros right many of them are but they aren't on the economic issues that constituency for the economic issues is it were can people and they don't have that time i mean you have some gruesome gags here and there that imagine any house of war story short embrace that politics it's a popular nba it undercuts conservative populism and you just take that off the table makes it look asinine instantly and but they don't embrace it and we probably won't but i you know we talk about all the

reasons why those people can help people like to deny it knowingly go drink some beer and from just survive on a find for forgiveness confession fanfare form far from heaven faith in it was a presentation of a lewd douglas lecture series on public issues co sponsored by the us and community learning center and the donald j adam checked distinguished lecture series the recording engineer was ken nelson and j mcintyre keep your prisons is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas they knew would be ninety seven you and your children arriving from clinic to clinic in ancient fearful hypochondria asking directions trying to re complicate next time and yeah that's how

laurie at united states who read his poems that was burned university earlier this spring join at eight o'clock sunday night on campus public radio for the poetry of techies are all through the night the leaky faucet service is still most of the house with this lethal shooting a little force calls someone will help you keep your present poet laureate ted kooser and sunday night at eight o'clock on campus public radio