The Great Divide | PoliPointPress

November 28, 2004
American Psyche
By THOMAS FRANK

THE GREAT DIVIDE: Retro vs. Metro America
By John Sperling, Suzanne Helburn, Samuel George, John Morris and Carl Hunt.
Illustrated. 272 pp. PoliPoint Press. $39.95.

THE UNCIVIL WAR
How a New Elite Is Destroying Our Democracy.
By David Lebedoff.
191 pp. Taylor Trade Publishing. $24.95.

WHO WE ARE NOW
The Changing Face of America in the Twenty-First Century.
By Sam Roberts.
293 pp. Times Books/ Henry Holt & Company. $27.50.

MYTHS OF FREE TRADE
Why American Trade Policy Has Failed.
By Sherrod Brown.
228 pp. The New Press. $24.95.

THAT we are a nation divided is an almost universal lament of this bitter election year. However, the exact property that divides us — elemental though it is said to be — remains a matter of some controversy. One thing is certain in the search to unravel the mystery of the ”great divide”: we know for sure the answer isn’t class. We can rule that uncomfortable subject out from the start.

The best-known iteration of the theme is the red-state, blue-state theory, which won instant currency after the election of 2000. From the color-coded, state-by-state results of Bush vs. Gore, it was said, we could extrapolate the grandest of social conclusions. We could distinguish two separate civilizations living side by side in our land: one patriotic and the other self-loathing; one authentic and the other affected; one fond of Fords while the other swooned senselessly for Saabs.

Despite its naked partisanship and its extreme vulnerability to refutation, the red-blue narrative held the punditry in such awe that, inevitably, it generated its precise antithesis: ”The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America,” in which all the stereotypes are reversed and all the partisanship flows the other way; in which the noble heartland red-staters come off as subsidy-hogging boors while the effete blue-staters of conservative propaganda are transformed into a thoughtful, enlightened producer class.

”The Great Divide” was notable for its clever ad campaign, which ran in the various national newspapers in the summer of Bush vs. Kerry and which usually consisted of two photographs — say, Mel Gibson and Michael Moore — to illustrate the idea that there are two Americas with irreconcilable cultures. The book’s design is similarly polished; countless maps, charts and full-color photos mimic the reassuring pattern of a high-school social studies textbook (the package includes as well a CD with graphics and appendixes, slipped on the inside back cover).

The product, though, has nowhere near the clarity and simplicity of the packaging. The book was, as acknowledged on its Web site (www.retrovsmetro.org), a ”team” effort: its title page lists four authors (three of them economists), a pollster and two researchers, all of them led by John Sperling, a Cambridge-trained economist and the billionaire founder of the University of Phoenix, among other enterprises. The style varies so greatly over the course of the text — the innards dryly parse the problems afflicting the American workforce, while the first four chapters polemically lay out the neoregionalist theme — that the book is best approached as two separate volumes, riven by a great divide of its own.

The more valuable half is the interior, effectively a detailed appendix to the barging introductory chapters. Indeed, its discussion of the disconnect between wage growth (or the lack of it) and productivity growth, to choose just one example, ought to be read by all management theorists, Wall Street gurus and CNBC pundits before their next pronouncements on the magic powers of the unfettered free market to enrich us all. Unfortunately, the insides don’t seem to have been read by the authors of the book’s bluster-packed opening section. Here the goal is to blend together two of the worst big ideas of recent years — the new economy fantasy of the 1990′s and the red/blue thesis of the last few years — into a universal narrative that can simultaneously direct the electoral strategy of the Democratic Party and inform future scholarship. The essential cleavage in American life, the authors argue, is not between left and right or business class and working class; instead, it is a regional matter, a cultural divide between the states, polarized and unbridgeable. One America, to judge from the book’s illustrations, works with lovable robots and lives in ”vibrant” cities with ballet troupes, super-creative Frank Gehry buildings and quiet, tasteful religious ritual; the other relies on contemptible extraction industries (oil, gas and coal) and inhabits a world of white supremacy and monster truck shows and religious ceremonies in which beefy men in cheap clothes scream incomprehensibly at one another.

A stereotype, to be sure, but a stereotype that we must not underestimate; versions of it have been floating around in the new economy and New Democrat literature for years; and for a large number of centrist Democratic thinkers, this may be the real deal, a Rosetta stone to decipher and to win over America. ”The Great Divide” furnishes them with demographic, poll-based vindication for the strategy they have been pursuing all along: forget the focus on class conflict that defined the party in the old days, and rebrand the Democrats as the voice of enlightened industry versus dirty industry; of sensitive, artistic billionaires versus loathsome, racist billionaires.

In the half of the book making this argument there is an error or misstatement or indefensible historical interpretation on nearly every page (and this despite the formidable research demonstrated by the footnotes, which I should say include references to my own work). Some of these can be dismissed as the fault of the authors, of course, but most are intrinsic to the argument itself, to the impossible demands of tracing a cultural cleavage that seems to give Democrats an edge and that simultaneously denies the significance of social class.

Take, for example, the authors’ fixation on extraction industries (in which they mysteriously include farming), to which they return repeatedly to explain American conservatism. Since states that have large extraction sectors tended to support Bush, there must be something retrograde and Republicanizing about those industries, something beyond the simple facts that Bush himself came out of the oil industry and that many oil honchos are on the right. The closest the authors come to an explanation is the assertion that the extraction tradition is one of ”plundering the earth” with the help of ”poorly educated, low-wage labor.” Metro America, on the other hand, is the kind of rosy place depicted in television commercials for Microsoft, where lots of ”diverse” things go on because people have embraced a ”postindustrial digital economy.”

Economic determinism ordinarily rubs Americans the wrong way, but for some reason this particularly blunt variety enjoys extravagant popularity with the map-and-poll set in Washington. Economics are fate, in the most sweeping sense, with people of all classes bearing the political imprint of whatever industry is statistically dominant in their region. The actual process by which this imprinting operation takes place, however, is never explained or even really examined. The even more glaring question of why poorly educated, low-wage labor in Retroland would vote for a system that only benefits its masters is scarcely raised. In ”The Great Divide” we never find out precisely how it is that coal mining clouds the minds of the people who live in coal states; the map is supposed to be sufficient evidence of the effect. Coal mining is here and here and here, and these places voted Republican. Ergo, extraction industries make people ”Retro.”

The mysteries of religion are brushed off even more abruptly. We can see from electoral maps that the most Republican areas also tend to be dominated by Southern Baptists, Methodists or Lutherans; these three denominations are therefore lumped together as evangelical churches, a term which is soon upgraded to evangelical-fundamentalist and then charged by the authors with inexcusable backwardness. Bringing forward little evidence other than those maps, they write that ”evangelical/fundamentalist religion . . . leads to: rejection of scientific method, especially the belief in evolution; racial/ethnic prejudice and discriminatory behavior; sexist/discriminatory attitudes toward women and homosexuals.”

Between extraction and evangelicalism, Sperling and company conclude, entire regions of the country are lost to the Democrats. What’s more, they assert — overlooking the inconvenient fact that the explosive growth in fundamentalism is a relatively recent phenomenon — these regions have always been backward, always been lost. Metro versus Retro: the categories are eternal; they go back to colonial times. The authors’ advice to Democrats is simply to forget about those racist clods on the other side. Walk away from them. Don’t waste your time trying to figure them out.

As political strategy this is folly; as social theory it is something even worse. It is not just that the authors’ interpretations are insupportable or that they get the Methodist and Lutheran traditions wildly, inexcusably wrong. What I mean is that this way of judging entire regions, religions and classes by polls and current electoral maps inevitably does violence to historical truth. Surely one of the authors’ many researchers could have pointed out that while mine owners have indeed been reactionaries in the past, mine workers were once famous for their radicalism — think of ”Big Bill” Haywood or the United Mine Workers or ”Harlan County, U.S.A.” Similarly, it may smooth the narrative to lump agriculture with extraction industries, and dismiss farmers as subsidy addicts irreversibly deaf to the wisdom of Metro America, but to do so the authors must ignore the innumerable writers and politicians who have described farming as an occupation that teaches unforgettable lessons in the madness of the free market. And naturally they must downplay the many waves of radicalism that farming has produced over the years.

The substitution of region for class produces many distortions, but the worst is the treatment of the pitched electoral battle of 1896, in which Populists and Democrats united behind William Jennings Bryan while eastern industry backed William McKinley. Seen through the lenses of class conflict, that election was the precise opposite of today’s red-blue contests, with the South and the Great Plains on fire for reform rather than conservatism. Viewed through the Retro-Metro prism, however, there is perfect continuity. In this view, Bryan was no progressive but just another fundie who spoke for ”America’s major extraction industry: agriculture,” while McKinley, by serving the needs of big business, stood squarely in the Metro tradition, the line that was to yield ”our present urban, suburban, eclectic, multiethnic, multireligious and multigendered society.”

The Retro-Metro authors may not have known it, but they weren’t the only ones drawing inspiration from the 1896 presidential contest this year. Karl Rove, too, spoke often of his admiration for William McKinley, and of his desire to win the sort of shattering victory over liberalism that McKinley did. The same weird coming together can be found in the book’s desire to identify Democrats with the new economy, in apparent ignorance of the fact that high-profile conservatives — from Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich to George Gilder — had already staked a pretty strong claim to that particular bit of cultural territory. My own political instinct in regard to the new economy is: Let the conservatives have it. And in the aftermath of Enron, WorldCom and the Nasdaq crash, let them have it good and hard.

Not these authors. What is most disheartening about ”The Great Divide,” or its first half, anyway, is its advice to Democrats to present themselves as the true party of business, and to cast conservatism as a superstitious doctrine that undermines our international competitiveness. Combine this longing to be the political choice of new-economy winners with the book’s thinly veiled contempt for Southerners and most Midwesterners, and Sperling and company have walked cluelessly into a familiar stereotype: the ”liberal elite.”

The authors of ”The Great Divide” do not much concern themselves with the thinking of the other side, preferring to brush it all off as extraction-spawned hallucination. They would have done well to read ”The Uncivil War,” a book by David Lebedoff that is in some ways an eerie mirror image of their own. Both pooh-pooh traditional notions of social class, insisting that the conflict of haves and have-nots has been supplanted by a new social divide. Lebedoff, a lawyer and the author of four previous books, including ”Cleaning Up,” considers it a ”new class war” in which a group defined by its faith in measured intelligence lords it over the ”Left Behinds,” an assortment of blue-collars and blue-bloods united by a commitment to traditional society. This book, too, is better read as an artifact of the current confused moment than as a persuasive text. Lebedoff writes elegantly but he scarcely bothers to substantiate his assertions: here what replaces class is anti-intellectualism, not regionalism. We are all said to be under the thumb of a ”New Elite,” an arrogant meritocracy that believes ”the experts know best” and that, in its hubris, ”hates the idea of majority rule.” Even if you’ve never heard of Lebedoff you’ve heard this argument repeated a thousand times on AM radio, on Fox News, in the pages of conservative magazines — and yet there is a warning here that Democrats ought to heed as they regroup for 2008. Suppose what Sperling and company say is true; suppose the professionals and ”creatives” really are becoming open to Democratic appeals: Lebedoff reminds us that becoming the party of an economic and cultural elite isn’t necessarily a winning move, since it only reinforces conservatives’ efforts to position themselves as the populists in a redefined class war. ”A new class is growing,” he writes, ”but the backlash against it is growing, too, and potentially involves a larger number of voters.”

After these dizzying theoretical ascensions, these minute examinations of demographic shadows, it is refreshing to be reminded of how convincingly the old, familiar categories can still explain the reality around us, if we will only bother to pay attention. In ”Who We Are Now,” his second book making sense of census and other data, Sam Roberts, a New York Times editor, offers a quick and brutal snapshot of the trends in wealth distribution: wages (not adjusted for inflation) have doubled since 1981, while compensation for the country’s ten top C.E.O.’s has increased 4,300 percent; meanwhile, the top one-tenth of a percent of the population, who collectively made about 100 times the average household income in 1970, now make 560 times the average.

Someone who understands the implication of this is Representative Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from the steel-producing 13th District of Ohio, and a liberal of the old school. In ”Myths of Free Trade” he describes the role that the false religion of unregulated free trade has had in reopening the class divide, and also what we might do about it. For him the word ”elite” refers not to someone who likes books, but to the industry lobbyists whose planes clogged National Airport and whose gifts inundated Capitol Hill during the debate over Nafta. Brown could easily have taken the anti-intellectual route to populism since, as he points out, virtually the entire pundit class, regardless of party, routinely supports free-trade agreements (and just as routinely depicts opponents as ”selling out the poor” or Luddites). The real battle he lays out is not between salt-of-the-earth folks and effete know-it-alls, or between tolerant Metro and screeching Retro: it is between all of us and the corporate power that today bombards labor and environment from the ideological heights of free trade. Deregulate, privatize and let the invisible hand have its way, this power tells us now, and everything will be just fine for everybody. But of course it has never been that simple. ”It has been a 100-year battle between the privileged and the rest of us,” Brown reminds us. ”We took on oil and chemical companies to enact clean air and safe drinking water laws,” he adds. ”We fought off Wall Street bankers to create Social Security. We battled entrenched business interests to enact women’s and civil rights, protections for the disabled and prohibitions on child labor. We fought for all of it. Every bit of progress made in the struggle for economic and social justice came over the opposition of society’s most privileged and most powerful.” As this bright new day of the free-trade faith threatens to take it all apart, Brown invites us to look where we might just be going.

Thomas Frank is the author, most recently, of ”What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.”

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