Good insights.  I wonder if it is simply that we in America have always had the idea of upward mobility, going west, starting over.  We didn't have the rigid classes that Europe had, and we certainly always had at least the myth of upward mobility.  So we never had the class-based politics that Europe had, and instead had a politics more rooted in ethnicity and culture. 

All the more ironic that the mobility escalator seems to have stopped or reversed, so that (whether people realize it or not) Europe now has more mobility than we do.  But because of our history, it is hard to think that a more class-based politics will emerge here.  And if the myth of upward mobility is that ingrained, how much more difficult for the Dems, who are once again in the position of trying to tell hard truths to people instead of pretty myths, making us vulnerable to charges of "pessimism."

Maybe it is a failure of Frank's book to be clearer, but I understood his thesis a little differently:  it's not that cultural issues should are necessarily less important than economic issues, but that the right has banished economic issues from the discussion altogether.  Economic issues have been simplified to "We're all entrepeneurs now, and only a godless communist would feel otherwise."  Once only cultural issues are on the table, the game is played almost exclusively in favor of the true believers.

I further believe that this book provides the underpinning for an important shift in American politics:  Democratic politicians need to consistently argue that the God-fearing, humble man the Republicans present is almost always an arrogant economic royalist without an ounce of Christian charity in his soul.  This requires a "threading the needle" approach where we acknowledge that values play a role, but that emphasizes the strain laissez faire capitalism places on middle class people and enables the most unethical of business practices to go unchecked.  I think the Clinton's "safe, legal and rare" approach to abortion threads this needle nicely, and should be a template for an approach to a wide range of issues important to the middle class. 

Brew,
I agree that Dems should argue that there is no Christian charity in laissez-faire capitalism, but Dems won't gain any traction among the religious right with your argument on abortion.  In the view of the Religious Right, as long as it's legal, regardless of how rare it is, abortion is still the murder of innocent children.  Maybe there are gains to be made with people who aren't so adamant in their beliefs, but it's hard to be reasonable with an unreasonable opponent.

There is also an important thread woven within the economic and cultural sides of these arguments -- the anti government sentiment represented by attacks on progressive legislation.  George Wallace artfully exploited it and Reagan picked up the message.  Government is the problem.  If we can get it out of our way we would all prosper.  We don't need it telling us how to live our lives.  Republicans have interwoven the two threads of free market capitalism and cultural "liberation" by attacking the source that inhibits both -- government regulation and the courts.  It has yet to be shown or demonstrated how extremism in the defense of these liberties for some represent a threat to the liberties of all.  The conservative elites have always thrived on manufacturing unity with their interests by creating a common enemy.  Paint government blue and rule red. 

Thanks to Ed Kilgore for not rehashing the DLC vs. others fight in his review. That's been going on other blogs of late, and it's good to see it avoided here.

He's right about the cultural conservatism of populism. Not only Populists in the US, but also ones in Latin America and Europe have pushed ahead by claiming to avenge insults to God and the real folk, backbone, heartland, honest producers, or some other formulation of the masses versus a venal elite. 

Kilgore could also look farther back in U.S. history to find populism's multifaceted character. Patriot colonists justified their revolution against King George III as the act of a virtuous citizenry against a corrupt administration that had conspired to deprive the people of their liberty. America’s founders harped on the populist theme of simple virtue on one side and metropolitan corruption on the other. The Revolution included elements of both kinds of populism; a struggle for economic fairness on taxes and trade and a cultural war to disestablish the Church of England and show up the Tory snobs.

That said, it's not clear how Kilgore's conclusion that Democrats need "to deal directly with both cultural and economic concerns of voters as equally legitimate" undermines Frank's argument in _What's the Matter with Kansas_. One of Frank's most valuable insights is that the right fights economic issues on cultural ground; i.e. that cultural and economic concerns are intertwined, and should be addressed as equally legitimate and inter-related. Republicans have done this very well, Democrats have not.

Rightwing attacks on abortion, evolution, and homosexuality not only appeal to specific religious values of lower-income fundamentalists, they also address a larger concern felt by poorer Americans that the basic supports of their families and communities are falling apart. Globalization has been a major contributor to that feeling of insecurity, but as that vague catchphrase suggests, making the local global takes many forms, including but not limited to economic changes.

Frank makes this point in several places in his book. One of the best is his discussion of party realignment in Wichita, a city that turned Republican after having been a union-member, Democratic Party stronghold. The long-term loss of good-paying wage labor jobs prepared the ground for the short-term shock of Operation Rescue's mass action in Wichita in the early 1990s. While no one thought that ending abortions would bring back the city’s aircraft industry, Frank does show that the people who turned out at the stadium rallies staged by O.R. came away from them with a sense of empowerment, and a coherent message about how acting on abortion fit into the larger cause of stopping the erosion of the good life. 

The trick was that O.R. and the radical Republicans associated the loss of the good old days with changes in traditional gender relationships and religious values. One of Frank’s points is that the mass media, Madison Avenue, and Hollywood are intentionally condescending to Middle America, and that there is real populist outrage at the way our highly commercialized popular culture attacks the “square” conventions of monogamous churchgoers. In this respect, the populist right’s culture war addresses rational concerns, not “deranged” ones (even if the right's solutions are wrong).

For Frank, what’s “deranged” is not Middle America, but the absence of an alternative political argument about the impact of globalization. Some evangelicals will never be persuaded otherwise, but plenty of church-going pro-life working-class whites who vote Republican could be convinced that issues other than abortion and gay marriage more directly speak to their sense that the world has gone to hell.

We might revisit Kilgore’s example of W. J. Bryan on this point. Bryan not only fought against the corporate crimes of the Gilded Age, he also opposed the acquisition of an empire during the Spanish-American War and resigned his position as Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State because he opposed American entry into World War I. Instead of wondering whether Watson’s racism and Bryan’s fundamentalism overshadowed their progressivism on economics and imperialism, it would serve Democrats better to note that these forerunners of today’s grassroots conservatives were not so shackled by their cultural orientation as to support big business and militarism at every turn.  Kilgore’s right to say that populism is not always progressive, but the populist theme of the people fighting the powerful can still be put to progressive purposes.

Frank’s book isn’t a treatise on how economics are somehow more real than culture (see his reply to Todd Gitlin), rather it’s an indictment of the absence of an alternative to rightwing populism at a time when issues related to economic justice are so very pressing for the kinds of voters who turned Kansas from blue to red.

The working families of Kansas are hopping mad at rich people, but many of them see voting Republican as the most obvious way to express that rage politically.  When O’Reilly, Limbaugh, and company attack liberal snobbery they usually bring up the wealth of a select number of liberal icons, and keep quiet on the many more GOP millionaires or the ways that Republican policies hurt the pocketbooks of working people. 

It's as if the Boston Tea Party had been about a preference for black coffee over snootier  beverages (latte drinking liberals?) rather than about refusing to let a megacorpoartion, the British East India Company, undersell local merchants via a special government exemption for a crony of the King (Walmart and lax labor law enforcement?).  That is, populist conservatives hoodwink their audience by presenting all class issues as cultural conflicts, and only as cultural conflicts.

Frank asks for Democrats to call the Republicans on this phony economic populism, and argues that a consistent alternative populist message could channel that rage into progressive directions.

Finally, Kilgore’s post is great one that raises a lot of good points. It deserves attention. As for Todd Gitlin, beware of recycling old George Will columns (see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35560-2004Jul7.htm l)