Ellen Willis: Escape from Freedom: What’s The Matter With Tom Frank (And The Lefties Who Love Him)?

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THE AMERICAN LEFT loves Thomas Frank’s latest book. A few quotes from the jacket of What’s the Matter with Kansas? capture the general adulatory tone. Barbara Ehrenreich: “the most insightful analysis of American right-wing pseudo-populism to come along in the last decade.” Michael Kazin: “the second coming of H.L. Mencken, but with better politics.” Molly Ivins: “A heartland populist, Frank is hilariously funny on what makes us red-staters different from those blue-staters (not), and he actually knows evangelical Christians, antiabortion activists, gunnuts,
and Bubbas.” Janeane Garofolo: “Over the last 30 years, the Right has managed to agitate and frighten the citizens of the heartland into consistently voting against their own best interests. It’s about time someone started telling the truth about it—kudos to Tom Frank.” No left meeting or
conference, it seems, is complete without a speech by Frank or a panel on the book. Trying to think of another piece of backlash-era social commentary that had had a comparable impact in left circles, the closest I could come up with was Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, which
articulated an emerging strain of left cultural conservatism and added “narcissist” to the lexicon of anti-`60s-liberationist putdowns. These two books could hardly be more different, yet in regard to their audience the comparison is oddly instructive. For throughout the tumultuous political changes
of the past three decades, one theme has remained constant: the mainstream left’s desperate wish that the culture wars would disappear. As Lasch appealed to that wish in 1978, so does Frank today.