Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [38]
In 2004, Thomas Frank documented the emergence and eventual triumph of the paranoid right on the Kansas political scene in his powerful and influential book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Frank blamed conservative demagogues for fomenting class resentment among working-class Kansans. According to his well-developed version of the rage thesis, the discontented populace of the Great Plains sought liberal culprits to blame for their bleak economic conditions and feelings of cultural alienation. Frank argued that right-wing leaders had cribbed the class war rhetoric of nineteenth-century left-wing populism almost verbatim, replacing yesterday’s robber barons with today’s “liberal elites” to provide an appealing target for working-class anger.
The rage explanation is attractive because the paranoid rhetoric of the right wing obviously expresses anger. Frank deftly describes what he calls the plen-T-plaint, “a curious amassing of petty, unrelated beefs with the world . . . The plen-T-plaint is the rhetorical device that makes Bill O’Reilly’s TV show a hit, as he gets indignant one day about the Insane Clown Posse and gets indignant the next about the Man-Boy Love Association [NAMBLA].”8
If O’Reilly is a master of staged indignation, Glenn Beck, who was still confined to radio when What’s the Matter with Kansas? came out, is a virtuoso of dramatized rage. He shouts, sobs, and thunders at the progressive vampires who are “sucking the blood out of the Republic.”9 In one made-for-YouTube moment, he literally shrieked at a caller, his voice breaking into a nearly unintelligible squeal, “GET OFF MY PHONE, YOU LITTLE PINHEAD!”10
Tea Party participants also make a big show of how angry they are—shouting epithets at Washington and carrying signs with gratuitous exclamation points. In the New York Times-CBS poll, 53 percent of Tea Party supporters described themselves as “angry” about the way things are going in Washington, as opposed to 19 percent of the general public. A prominent Tea Party organization in Nevada even named itself Anger Is Brewing.
It’s the Economy, Stupid (Or Is It?)
But what is the source of this frothing river of rage? What has made conservatives so angry that they have lost their wits and begun imagining terrible liberal plots to persecute them? Here, the rage explanation becomes speculative. A poll can question people about what they feel angry about. When asked, Tea Party supporters cite a hodgepodge of injustices including health care reform, government spending, socialism, and lack of representative government.11 But such answers beg the question by invoking the very paranoia that we are trying to explain. To fill in the details of the rage hypothesis, we would need to locate the true source of the anger for which the paranoid right has substituted its convenient fictions. We would need a poll to somehow probe, “Come on, what are you really angry about?”
When reading What’s the Matter with Kansas? it can be difficult to keep track of what exactly Thomas Frank believes that Kansans are really angry about. At times, he cites a backlash against the cultural shifts of the 1960s. Later, he roots the anger in traditional populist resentment against elites. And, sometimes, the bitterness just seems endemic, an unpleasant personality trait of a certain type of irascible Kansan.ao But most often, Frank blames economic changes. Specifically, he argues that Kansas’s tumbling manufacturing base and growing income disparities produced an underground reservoir of working-class resentment that conservative demagogues channeled into hostility toward liberal “elites.”
Economic frustration also seems to be the consensus choice for explaining the growth of the Tea Parties and the popularity of Glenn Beck. Newsweek provided readers with “a historical tour of populism” that cited past examples of economic turmoil coinciding with populist