This book is about the political change. The one that has puzzled me all my life and that’s what I am going to talk about today. And I want to begin talking about it today by asking you to think about the poorest county in America, which isn’t in Appalachia anymore and it’s not in the Deep South. In fact, it’s out near where I was born, out in the Great Plains ­ a region of struggling ranchers and dying farm towns. And in the election of 2004, the Republican candidate for President, Mr. George W. Bush, carried the poorest county in America by a majority of greater than seventy-eight percent. Counties in North Dakota or it was in 2004, the second poorest county, which is in Nebraska, he carried by eighty-one percent, which would have been an astounding accomplishment for a Republican back in the day, back in the forties and fifties. Anyhow, this puzzled me when I first read about it and it puzzles a lot of the people that I know because for us, it’s always the Democrats that is supposed to be the party of the poor, the weak, and the victimized. And figuring this out, my friends and I think, this is basic stuff. This is part of the ABC’s of adulthood. So when I told a friend of mine about that impoverished High Plains County that is so enamored of President Bush, she was perplexed. And she asked me this, “How can anyone who’s ever worked for someone else vote Republican? How could so many people get it so wrong?”

And I thought her question was apt. I thought this was right on the money. I thought, in many ways, this is the preeminent question of our time. This is the question that we all should be asking because these days, people getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about. This species of derangement, if you will, this is the bedrock of our civic order. This is the foundation on which everything else rests. This derangement has put the Republicans in charge of all three branches of government. It has elected Presidents, Senators, and Governors. It shifts the Democrats themselves to the right and then impeaches Bill Clinton just for fun you know, just to throw it in as a little bonus. Now, if you earn over three hundred thousand dollars a year, I want to suggest that you owe a great deal to this derangement. Raise a glass sometime to those indigent, High Plains Republicans as you contemplate your good fortune because it is thanks to their self-denying votes that you are no longer burdened by the estate tax or by those troublesome labor unions or by those meddling banking regulators. It’s thanks to the allegiance of these sons and daughters of toil that you are able to buy two Rolexes this year instead of just one. And take that tour of Indochina by sedan chair. That’s what they’re all doing now. But perhaps you’re one of those many, many millions of average Americans that see nothing deranged about this at all. And for you, this picture of hard-times conservativism, well it makes perfect sense and it’s the opposite phenomenon. You know, working class people who insist on voting for liberals ­ that’s what strikes you as an indecipherable puzzlement. Maybe you see it the way a bumper sticker I once spotted back in Kansas City puts it - A working person that supports Democrats is like a chicken that supports Colonel Sanders! You know, maybe you’re one of those who stood up for America way back in 1968, sick of hearing those rich kids in beads badmouth the country every night on tv. Maybe you knew exactly what Richard Nixon meant when he talked about the silent majority. The people whose hard work was rewarded with constant insults from the network news and those know-it-all college professors - none of them interested in anything you had to say. Speaking of which, what is that bumper sticker we saw this morning? Nixon now more than ever! Fantastic. Maybe Ronald Reagan pulled you into the conservative swirl with that way he had of talking about that sun-shiny, Glenn Miller America you remembered from the time before everything went to hell. Or maybe you were pushed, maybe it was Bill Clinton who made a Republican out of you with his patently phony compassion and his obvious contempt for average, non ideal league Americans ­ the ones he had the nerve to order into combat even though he himself took the coward’s way out when his turn came. By the way, not an argument that the right makes anymore.

Anyhow, this great shift to the right that I am describing is so familiar that I am willing to bet that every single person in this room has some kind of conversion story that they can tell. How their dad, say, had been an Union Steel worker and a stalwart Democrat, but how their brothers and sisters one day just started voting Republican or how their cousin gave up on Methodism and started going to the Pentecostal church on the edge of town or how they themselves just got so sick and tired of always being scolded for eating meat or for wearing shirts with Chief Illiniwek that one day, FOX News started to seem fair and balanced to them after all. No one knows who Chief Illiniwek is ­ this is the mascot of the University of Illinois. It’s one of these offensive Indian mascots and every couple years there is a campaign to do away with Chief Illiniwek and I swear every time this happens, you turn on the Bill O’Reilly Show and there he is getting furious about it. He’s like, “They’re going after the Chief again, and I can’t believe it!” And ten thousand new Republicans minted right then and there, every time they do it.

Now each of these changes is an expression of what I call in the book, the Great Backlash ­ a style of conservatism that first came snarling onto the national stage in response to the parting and protest of the late 1960s. Now while your earlier forms of conservatism used to emphasize fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues. You know the values thing. Summing up our outrage over everything from busing to blaspheming art, but which, outrage it then marries to pro-business economic policy. And this is the key. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends and it’s always these economic achievements that are the movement’s greatest monuments. I mean the backlash is what has made possible the great international free market consensus of recent years with all the privatization, deregulation, and de- unionization that are its components. It’s the backlash that ensures that conservatives will continue to be returned to office even when their free market miracles fail and their libertarian schemes don’t pan out- and they never do ­ and their new economy collapses and ruins. It’s the backlash that makes possible the policy pushers’ fantasies of globalization and a free trade empire that we then forced on the rest of the world with such self-assurance. Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dumping Jesus in urine, every country on the planet has had to remake it’s economy along the lines preferred by the Republican party USA.

Now the great backlash has made the laissez-faire revival possible, but this does not mean that it speaks to us in the manner of the capitalists of Old ­ you know the robber barons of a hundred years ago, invoking the divine right of money. Or demanding that the low league learn their place in the great chain of gain. On the contrary, the backlash tells us that it is a foe of the elite. That it is the voice of the unfairly persecuted. That it is a righteous protest of the people on history’s receiving in. That its champions in fact, today control all three branches of government, matters not a lick. That its greatest beneficiaries are in fact, the very wealthiest people on the planet doesn’t give it posh. 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 famous book title has it. And on those grounds, it rallies citizens who would have once been reliable partisans of the New Deal to the standards of conservatism. Now once conservatives are in office, as we all know, the only old-fashioned situation they ever seem to care about reviving is the economic one of 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 returned our country to a nineteenth century pattern of wealth distribution. So this is the primary contradiction of the conservative movement. It is a working class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working class people. But the leaders of the backlash may talk priced, but believe me, they walk corporate. Values may matter most to voters, but they always wind up taking a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won.

Now this is a basic earmark of the phenomenon. Absolutely consistent across its thirty-eight year history now. Abortion has never halted. School prayer never comes back. Hell, George W. Bush abandoned the Crusade for Federal Marriage Amendment only one month into his second term. You know, all the while, of course sort of doing the heroic labors he has been doing on behalf of big business, the Bankruptcy Bill, Tort Reform, and he’s still promising to do Social Security Privatization. Now this sort of switch is vexing for people who want to write about the movement like me. You know, when I was researching it and trying to understand it, I kept running up against this and it was troubling. And you might to expect it to trouble the movement’s true believers even more. I mean their grand standing leaders never deliver. Their fury mounts and mounts and mounts and nonetheless, they turn out every couple years to return their right wing heroes to office a second, a third, a twentieth try. The trick never ages. The illusion never seems to wear off. You vote to stop abortion and you receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. You vote to make our country strong again and you receive de-industrialization. You vote to get government off our backs and you receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes. In which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded today in a manner that is beyond imagining. Like a French Revolution in reverse, in which the workers come pouring down the streets screaming more power to the aristocracy. The backlash pushes the spectrum of the acceptable to the right and to the right and further to the right. Now think about it for a second. Barry Goldwater, who is considered unacceptably extremist in 1964 was a moderate by the time he retired from the U.S. Senate. Bob Dole, from my home state of Kansas, was considered a right-wing conservative when he was Gerald Ford’s Vice-Presidential nominee in ’76. Again, by the time he retired, he was one of the more liberal Republicans left. Eisenhower and Nixon looked like the bona fide liberal article today, if you think back about it. But the movement pushes us to the right and to the right and to the right and now having rolled back the various landmark economic reforms of the sixties and many of those of the 1930’s, its leaders today turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of Progressivism. Things like the graduated income tax, anti-trust law with a little more effort I think. The backlash may as well repeal the entire twentieth century.

Now as a formula for holding together a dominant political coalition, the backlash sometimes seems so improbable and so self-contradictory that liberal observers have trouble believing it is actually happening. For the Republican Party to present itself as the champion of working class America strikes the liberals as such an egregious reversal of political tradition that they just dismiss the whole phenomenon. They brush it off. They don’t take it seriously and they sure as hell don’t want to talk about it. The great backlash, they will tell you, is nothing but Crypto-racism or a disease of the elderly or the random gripings of religious rednecks or the protest of American white men feeling left behind by history. Now each of these is true to some degree, but to dismiss the backlash in this way, I think, is to miss its power as an idea and its broad popular vitality. I mean it keeps on coming despite everything. A plague of bitterness that is capable of spreading from the old to the young, from Protestant fundamentalists to Catholics and Jews, and from the angry white man to every demographic shading imaginable. And it matters not at all that the forces that trigger the original backlash back in the late 1960s have long since disappeared from American life. It doesn’t matter. The movement roars on, undiminished. It’s rage carried easily across the decades. Think about it. The confident liberals that led our country back in those days are a dying species today. I mean we are a super country now. The new left, with its gleeful obscenities and its contempt for the flag is pretty much extinct altogether. The whole affluent society with its paternalistic corporations and its powerful labor unions fades further into the ether with each passing year. And yet the backlash continues to dream the same terrifying dreams of national decline, epic lawlessness in the streets, and betrayal at the top, regardless of what is actually going on in the world.

Now when you see the world through the lens of CNN, which often happens when you are an author and you spend a lot of time in hotels, but when you get your news that way, it sometimes seems that we live in a country where everything works. Where everything’s in its place. You know, where junior executives stride confidently through offices humming with purpose and determination. This is a new age of reason they tell us. A new economy even with the websites singing each to each. With a mall down the way that every week has somehow anticipated our subtly shifting taste and a global economy whose rich rewards just keep flowing. But on closer inspection, I sometimes think this country we live in seems more like a panorama of madness and delusion worthy of bosh. Of sturdy blue-collar patriots reciting the pledge while they strangle their own life chances. Of small farmers proudly voting themselves off the land. Of devoted family men carefully seeing to it that their kids will never be able to afford college or even proper healthcare. Of working class guys in mid-western cities cheering as they deliver up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life. Will transform my entire region into a rust belt. Will strike people like them, blows from which they will never recover. That’s chapter one of the book. Thank you very much.
That’s all I am going to do today.

Question and Answer
Audience Member #1: Your wonderful piece in the New York View books this summer, which I gather is the last chapter.

Response: That was just an essay and they stuck it in the paperback.

Audience Member #1: That was a wonderful critique of the Democratic Party for not standing up. Could you tell us just a little bit of what that said and more importantly, did you have any response form Howard Dean or any Democrats to that piece? It was a wonderful piece.

Response: Thank you. That is very kind of you. I should point out that that last chapter of What’s the Matter with Kansas? is a critique of the Democrats and in fact, that’s the next book that I am working on is to extend that because yes, it is a conservative movement and the conservatives are in the saddle, but the Democrats have a lot of responsibility for what’s happened because of the ways they have either encouraged this, misplayed it, or played right into it. Again and again, they just walk into the buzzsaw. You know? One of the things that I’ve noticed about liberals and Democrats is that they don’t want to take the backlash seriously and I am sorry I really did not give you enough detail about the precise things that the backlash believes about how America works but it is sort of an inverted form of populism where the country is in the hands of a ruling class that they call the liberal elite who work there in various ways, through the New York Times and the courts and so on. And the Democrats don’t like to take this seriously. What they do is they don’t think about how they might actually seem like an elite to people. You take the Democratic Convention last year. Compare the two parties’ conventions. The Republican Convention was angry, fire breathing. They had Zell Miller up there for God’s sake, an interesting guy by the way. And because he’s always talked this kind of class language. He has this sort of Georgia populist strain to him, only now it is swung way over to the right. But he is still using the same language - the sort of classic phenomenon of the backlash. But then you look at the Democratic Convention and the speakers were actually forbidden to criticize the administration from the podium. You know, there is not an ounce of this anger that you would use to appeal to the kind of people who have been alienated. You know working class people who vote Republican. You have to remember that those people, or their parents, or people very much like them in years passed, used to be Democrats. And this is why they call it the wedge issue or the various wedge issues because it peels away or shatters bits of the old New Deal coalition. So the problem before the Democrats is how to retain, keep those voters, stop the hemorrhaging and maybe win some of them back. But they don’t want to think that way. I mean yes, Bill Clinton was very good. In my opinion, the way Democrats used to speak to those voters was through economic liberalism or economic populism, if you will. The language that those conservatives use is stolen from not just liberals, but stolen from the left. The old time left of over a hundred years ago. That used to be a very liberal language. Democrats have to learn to speak it again and they might be able to win those voters back. They don’t want to though. They don’t want to weal out those old weapons because that would cost them in funding. I mean there is the problem isn’t it?

Audience Member # 2: Could you talk a little bit more about why the ranchers in the mid-west ­ if you could help us get inside their head a little bit to understand when and how they lost sight of where their interest lies?

Response: It’s a good question. One of the great regrets of the book is that I didn’t really understand farmers enough. Farm issues, as you might know, are extremely complicated. If you did not live in a farm state, you’ve never thought about them. Kansas is a farm state, but I grew up in Kansas City. It never occurred to me to think about these things. It’s very complicated so I spent a lot of time understanding the nuts and bolts of the issues. But I really didn’t get into the heads of the farmers, which I really should have done more of. This is one of the failings of the book, but I will tell you one thing and it sort of gets back to the last question, which is that farmers are in a terrible bind these days, small farmers, especially in the mid-west. I think the south may be different, but I do not know. But as usual, you have disorganized. This is a classic problem in farm country, disorganized producers, millions of them unable to organize themselves. And you have very highly organized and concentrated middlemen, your handful of agri-businesses and it’s not even much of a battle. These guys win. It’s really really simple. And so when you talk to farmers about this, they all know that that’s happening, they know that it is going on. It’s not a surprise to them. They deal with these companies everyday. And then you say to them, “Well if you know about that, why did you vote for President Bush?” as they almost all did. And they say, “Well what does that have to do with it?” Because in their minds, yes they are suffering from this terrible burden, but it’s not political. It’s not something that is in the political realm. Economics has been basically deleted from that world. This is in, my opinion, largely the fault of the Democrats. These companies should be subject to anti-trust action, there is no doubt in my mind. But Clinton wouldn’t do it. The Democrats never talk about it. Kerry made virtually no effort to speak to farmers. The last national Democrat to appeal to the farm vote, was of all people, Jessie Jackson back in 1988. Did very well in Iowa you might remember. Farmers are very open to the kind of economic critique that I give in What’s the Matter with Kansas?. But they don’t hear either party making that critique so instead their anger and their alienation is sort of harvested by the right, in my opinion. It’s a much larger story that that though. It can go on and on and on.

Audience Member # 3: I really agree with everything you say about the great backlash and how it works, but I find myself wondering if every non-rich person in the United States woke up tomorrow and starting voting Democrat, how much it would change cause the conspiracy theorist in me sort of thinks that part of this process is a sort of false choice. It just seems that the Democratic Party is walking corporate as well as the Republicans. Do you think it would slow down if we voted Democrat?

Response: Yes I agree with you. It would make some difference, but not a huge amount of difference. One of the polls that they do every couple of years that always astonishes me is when a majority of people say that there is no difference between the two parties on economic issues. I mean there actually is. The Democrats definitely wouldn’t have passed the bankruptcy bill. The certainly wouldn’t privatize Social Security. But then on the other hand, Clinton did have a plan for some partially privatized Social Security. We were only rescued from that by Monica Lewinsky. And you think of the other things that Clinton did. Clinton basically accepted the Reagan economic agenda ­ deregulated banks, deregulated telecomm, deregulated electricity, deregulated farming, and more importantly on anti-trust ­ wasn’t going to enforce anti-trust the way Democrats had done in the past. And this allows people to have this kind of perception and there is some truth to it. And yes, the Democrats go to the same donors that the Republicans do. The high net-worth individuals and the big corporate players and that’s how they raise their money and those people do not want the Democrats to become the party of Franklin Roosevelt. They do not want the Democrats to talk like Harry Truman or something like that. They certainly do want to see Williams Jennings Bryant back on the national stage, you know. Anything but that. The other point about this is that Democrats weren’t liberal and didn’t come up with things like Social Security because they were such smart guys and all went to Harvard and woke up one day and said, we need to solve these problems in the country. They did it because they were forced. They did it because they were pushed by popular social movements; by the labor movement, by angry farmers, remember they used to have those in the Great Plains, but all these sorts of movements that you used to have in America and those movements are gone. So just voting Democratic is not enough. To move them to the liberal side is going to take a lot more than that in my opinion.