What’s the matter with Alabama?

Even if, like me, you haven’t yet read Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter With Kansas?, you’ve probably read enough about it to be familiar with his thesis.

A few choice quotes — pulled from this review by Jason Epstein — summarize what I take to be his main point:

People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about …

When two female rock stars exchanged a lascivious kiss on national television. Kansas [went] haywire … scream[ed] for the heads of the liberal elite … ran to the polling place and … cut those rock stars’ taxes. …

The trick never ages: the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. … Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. …

[The result is] a panorama of madness and delusion … 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 children will never be able to afford college or proper health care; of working-class guys … deliver[ing] up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life [and] transform their region into a “rustbelt,” [and] strike people like them blows from which they will never recover.

Yep.

Working-class Americans have been duped into supporting a Republican agenda that destroys working-class American households under the guise of “culture war” issues like abortion, gay marriage or the supposed menace of “secular humanism.”

I’ve seen more than enough evidence to find this thesis compelling and accurate. I spent a decade working among evangelical Christians whose entire political outlook is shaped by the parties’ rhetoric and positions (in that order) on a handful of “social issues.” These folks were mostly middle class and working class, yet they gave a blanket endorsement to an economic agenda that undermined their own standing in order to benefit the wealthiest. Their families are dependent on wage income, but they support the Bush/Norquist agenda of punishing wage-earners and rewarding those who live on investment income.

All of which is to say that I agree with Frank’s assessment.

Except …

One recent landmark political event doesn’t correspond neatly with this hypothesis. I refer to what happened last fall in Alabama when Gov. Bob Riley’s sweeping tax reform proposal was defeated in a landslide. (For background on this debacle, see earlier posts here and here.)

Riley is a Republican. On so-called social issues, he is very conservative — even right-wing. He is a right-to-lifer, a “pro-family” Bible-thumper who talks like the born-again Southern Baptist that he is.

With Bob Riley as its prime advocate, it is difficult to fit the Alabama tax-reform vote into the bait-and-switch culture-war pattern.*

This wasn’t a case of poor Alabamans voting to stop abortion and then receiving a regressive tax structure. It was a case of poor Alabamans voting to increase their own tax burdens and to reduce those of industry and wealthy landowners. They received exactly what they knew they were voting for. Given a choice, they chose a feudal horror-show, a playing field raked steeply against the interests of their own families.

And this vote had nothing to do with the genital politics of abortion or homosexuality, nor with the evangelical anxiety that imagines a vague menace of religious “persecution” for the majority.

So what’s the matter with Alabama?

I still think Frank’s thesis is basically right. (And I’ve finally ordered a copy of his book.) But the Alabama disaster shows that something else may also be at work — something beyond the bait-and-switch culture war that says “abortion is murder, therefore we must abolish the estate tax.”

And unless we figure out what’s the matter with Alabama — and how to counter it — the Grover Norquists and Dick Armeys will continue to wage and win their class warfare. And then more and more of America will look like Alabama.

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* My own theories to explain the perversity of the Alabama vote include the following:

1) A massively funded, dishonest campaign by opponents of reform that characterized the proposal only as a “tax increase.”

2) The Roy Moore factor pushing the culture war further rightward, and thus making even a Christian Coalition poster boy like Riley appear to be part of the secular humanist/communist menace (which would put the vote more in line with Frank’s hypothesis).

3) The Powerball delusion, promoted by the states as heavily as they promote their crooked games of chance, that making millionaires pay their fair share is a bad idea since next week, when you win the lottery, you’ll be a millionaire yourself and then it’ll be your turn to go dancing on the backs of the bruised. David Brooks has tried to paint this delusional view as a noble expression of the American Dream, but it is no such thing. It’s a refusal to condemn exploitation based on the slim hope that someday I’ll be in a position to do the exploiting.