"Class Animus Was—Is—Central to Who They Are and How They Think about the World"

"Maybe I concealed it too well, but this critique of the Democrats was supposed to have been one of the book’s big takeaway points. It was fun to mock the culture-war fantasies of the right but in doing so I also meant to challenge Clintonism. Yes, it had worked wonders in fundraising terms, but in forswearing the economic liberalism that appealed to working-class voters, it brought them electoral disaster. Again, the proof was all around us, in all the embarrassing defeats of those years, not to mention the needless capitulations like Al Gore’s in 2000. The bland centrist style that Democrats held so dear was political poison. To beat the right, I argued, they needed to move left.
"Today this sounds like advising them to dig a tunnel to Tasmania with their bare hands. It sounds preposterous. Not because the problems I wrote about in 'Kansas' have been solved—deindustrialization still defines the rust belt, depopulation is still clearing out the Great Plains, inequality grows worse and worse every year—but because every Democrat knows that the way you deal with a growing right is to make friends with Big Finance and do your part to fill the Big Prison. Left populism might sound nice, but everyone in D.C. knows it can never be a practical solution to any electoral problem."


Thomas Frank in Salon looks back at What's the Matter with Kansas? ten years later.