Help! Help! We're Being Oppressed!

Conservatives control the executive and legislative branches of the national government. Conservatives may not control, but they are a powerful force in, the judicial branch of government. Conservatives are common in most businesses and industries. Yet, for some reason, conservatives are also an oppressed minority. How did this happen?

In The Athens News, Jim Phillips writes:

According to author and historian Thomas Frank ... the values of corporate industry pervade the culture and the rich get richer, while pundits announce that the problem is those damned liberals, who control everything. If anyone complains about the growing disparity of wealth, Frank noted, or how corporate values are invading every corner of private life, "our op-ed pages stand ready to call them elitist, despicable snobs."

"These people are the biggest victim fantasists of them all," he said. Selling themselves to rural Midwestern voters as "fellow rubes of the flyover," they "boast of their own subversiveness," and cast themselves as dangerous rebels against liberal thought control. Conservative writer John Leo proudly designates his position as "two steps ahead of the thought police" -- in his widely syndicated newspaper columns.

In order to keep economic interests out of the discussion, and keep focus on the "culture wars," Frank said, the right maintains running firefights on issues unlikely to be resolved. "They almost always seem to choose battles where victory is impossible," he said. ... This all makes sense, he added, if the point is to keep anger at the boiling point and voters' minds off the economy. "Everything pisses these people off," Frank said, and they portray virtually every problem facing the country as, somehow or other, the fault of "liberalism."

"All of these are class-based complaints," Frank argued. "Culture war is class war -- or a form of class war, at any rate." The overall effect, he said, is "the systematic erasure of the economic" from political analysis, and the fostering of an irrational belief in "the mystical inerrancy of the free market." In talking about alleged liberal control of the media, academia and popular culture, Frank said, no one seems to the raise these questions: Who owns the big media companies? How many leftists can you find in college business and economics departments? And aren't the producers of pop culture "in fact commercial enterprises"?

"But the truth is, that the culture that surrounds us... is largely the product of business rationality. We live in a free-market world." TV and films, for example, are sleazy and violent not because of liberal decadence, but because sleaze and violence make money. To believe otherwise, Frank suggested, is to believe that "the culture industry just does not respond to market forces."

Frank's suggestion is, evidently, that liberals adopt a philosophy of economic populism. It would likely be very effective, but such populism can easily degenerate into nativism, anti-immigration, and irrational hatreds. Using economic populism is like playing with fire and has to be done very carefully and with great moderation.

That aside, Frank's analysis here is very interesting and, at least in some instances, spot-on accurate. How are liberal movie stars more the "elite" than wealthy business owners? The latter can have far more influence on politics and culture, especially when the latter own the media companies that hire the movie stars. Why do religious conservatives complain about market forces that operate on movies and TV, but not other markets?

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