Thomas Frank on Class and Elitism in American Politics

Thomas Frank, author of What's The Matter With Kansas, a new editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, and the "inspiration" for Senator Obama's "Bitter" and "Cling" remarks, wrote an interesting column on the problem with "BitterGate:"

But I know one thing with absolute certainty. The media flurry kicked up by Mr. Obama's gaffe powerfully confirms an argument I actually did make: That as they return again to the culture war, what the soldiers on all sides are doing is talking about class without actually addressing the economic basis of the subject.

Frank describes the complaints against Senator Obama as an attack on his "sensibilities," leaving him open to be attacked as an Intellectual (George Will), a Marxist (William Kristol), or an Anthropologist (Maureen Dowd). By providing presence to the attitude we can avoid examining the actual economic policies that ensure that people are elite. Instead, we focus only on attitudes.
The editorial attacks both the left and the right for overlooking the actually economic argument in contemporary American politics. Liberals, according to Frank, "perfume themselves with the essence of honest toil" to show solidarity but support programs that perpetuate the elite divide and deny that people could be bitter as, "That there is no place for such sentiment in the Party of the People."

Conservatives forget the democratic pretense and live for the bitterness: "hey have welcomed it, they have flattered it, they have invited it in with millions of treason-screaming direct-mail letters, they have given it a nice warm home on angry radio shows situated up and down the AM dial. There is not only bitterness out there; there is a bitterness industry." Yet, even though there is bitterness, economic equality will not develop from this spectrum.

It seems that Frank's candidate is not Senator Obama per se as his thoughts appear closer to supporting John Edwards. Unfortunately, while Edwards raised the class issue, one, very few bought his message and, two, he lacked some level of authenticity to pursue it, though his announcement message in New Orleans was excellent, even if highly staged. Here is the way the article ends:

The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they've got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don't care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I'll fly the plane myself.

The article is highly worth the five-minute read, especially as it implicates both parties in contemporary politics.