patrick.net

Frank introduced the topic by imagining a very likely future — in order to show how very bleak the present is: “Let’s just assume that things keep going as they are,” he told them, “and the Democrats continue along the same trajectory and become more and more and more the party of the educated elite. And the Republicans continue to become more and more and more the party of capitalists, the Koch brothers, that type. And the rest of us just get to fit in…. I mean, where do we go? There is no party for — us.”

“Right,” Taibbi agreed, nodding. What Frank has said is very profound.

“But isn’t your thesis … that the Dems wanted this?” Halper asked. “I mean that’s the thesis in Listen, Liberal.” (I assume she had a passage like this one in mind: “When the left party in a system severs its bonds to working people — when it dedicates itself to the concerns of a particular slice of high-achieving affluent people — issues of work and income inequality will inevitably fade from its list of concerns” [Listen Liberal, p. 30]).

“Yes, exactly,” Frank said, “and I repeat it with more detail it in this [book]. They actively turned against working-class issues — and working-class people— in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. This is kind of the alarming part of the book. You all remember the last scene in Easy Rider — they’re riding along on their motorcycles — they’re in Louisiana….” Pause.

Taibbi didn’t remember. This is embarrassing. Halper teases him.

“What?!” Frank exclaimed, blushing.

Gee whiz, I thought. Having to explain the context of Easy Rider to Matt Taibbi is, when you get right down to it, a lot like having to explain Hell’s Angels initiation rites or Albert Hoffman’s discovery of LSD and crank to Hunter Thompson. Such a weird hermeneutic task will be gracefully accomplished only by means of the extra gentle irony of Thomas Frank. From his old boyhood bedroom in Kansas.

“I saw it when I was like ten,” Frank said. “They showed it on TV. It was a big big deal. But you have to first go back to that movie version [1940] of The Grapes of Wrath starring — Henry Fonda, Peter Fonda’s dad [as Tom Joad; here is a link to a clip of his sublime “I’ll be there speech.”

And it ends with the Joads, remember, the people from Oklahoma, the migrant workers, the tenant farmers, and they’re driving along in their crappy little truck, and Ma Joad says, and this is the great, classic line of ‘30s populism: ‘We’re the people. We keep on a-comin’.’ Movie ends. And they’re in their shitty little truck.”

“Mmhum,” agreed Taibbi, back in high gear.

So Frank continued: “OK, Easy Rider— made [in 1969] by Peter Fonda, Henry’s son. And it’s often regarded as a generational slap-back — it’s the comeback at The Grapes of Wrath: They’re going the other direction across the country — they drive through Oklahoma. The same scenery, basically. They’re in Louisiana somewhere, driving along on their motorcycles — they’ve got the awesome choppers, you know, and the Steppenwolf soundtrack…. And they’re just driving along, and these two, basically, rednecks — I mean they’re total stereotypes — driving along in a pickup truck [emphasis his] going the other way, for no reason at all pull out a shotgun and kill ‘em.”

Taibbi chuckled grimly. “Great.”

“It’s the inversion, the direct inversion, of the ending of The Grapes of Wrath. And that was the attitude in the late ‘60s: That the white working class were the foes now, the problem. These were the people — we basically had to do something about them. And you go back and look at the countercultural classics like The Greening of America [written by Charles Reich in 1970, one of the Clintons’ professors at Yale Law School; the book first appeared in excerpted form in — radical chic! — The New Yorker], … the Archie Bunker stereotype comes up at this same time. This incredible stereotype gets built in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s — that union members are the biggest problem in our society, and the Democratic Party turns away from them. And this is conscious: They talked about it all the time, they wrote books about it: We are the party of highly-educated kids coming off the campus, in other words, of the Professional — of the proto-Professional Class. Yes indeed. This is where all that begins, and they have never looked back from that moment.”

In the book Frank turns to the work of historian Jefferson Cowie (the author of Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class) to provide chilling additional detail to the Fonda vs. Fonda story. Cowie quotes Easy Riders creenwriter Terry Southern on what it meant for the stock rednecks in the pickup truck to blow the shit out of the Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper characters: Southern said that he understood the film’s horrifying final scene as, “‘an indictment of blue-collar America, the people I thought were responsible for the Vietnam War.’”

“Which is to say,” Frank resumes, “Southern thought the people serving in the Vietnam War were the people who got us into the Vietnam War.”

And thus did a new generation of college-educated and morally narcissistic American liberals reimagine the salt-of-the-earth Joads as deplorables, as irredeemables — “as fascists” (pp. 190-191).

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/09/democracy-scares-from-the-destruction-of-bryan-to-the-abdication-of-bernie-why-america-desperately-needs-a-second-populist-movement-but-aint-gonna-get-one-an-interview-review-of-the-peopl.html