CHIC A

GO

’S FREE W

EEKL Y

|THIS ISSU

E IN F O

UR

SE CTION

S

FRID

AY, FEB 10

, 200

6| VO

LUM

E 35, NU

MBER 20

Miner on an Illinois Suprem

e Court disaster, Joravsky on m

essing with

City H

all, lonely pop genius Devin D

avis, record reviews, and m

oreP

L US

What’s R

eallythe M

atterW

ith Kansas

A num

bers guy challengesTom

Frank’s spinon

how the red

states got red.

Haute cuisine at a tiny B

YOB

Section2

BooksThe chainw

e loveto hatep 33

What c an

you do with

45 ,00

0H

appyM

ealtoys?p 14

February 10, 2006

Section One Letters 3ColumnsHot Type 4Our privileged justices

The Straight Dope 5Hang up and drive, jerko.

The Works 8The beefer’s complaint

Chicago Antisocial 10Why burlesque is still sexy

The Sports Section 12Football with the look and feel of pinball

Our Town 14Beautiful junk; Big Ten wrestling just got exciting

ON THE COVER: JOE BLUHM (FRANK), ROBERT DREA (TOY), ROB WARNER (FOOD)

JOE

BLU

HM

C onservatives often say thatAmericans who work for a livinghave gone Republican, and some

people on the left agree, though they givethe phenomenon a different spin. TomFrank, cofounder of the Baffler, labeled itthe Great Backlash in his scathing,impressionistic What’s the Matter WithKansas? How Conservatives Won theHeart of America. Few books onAmerican politics can approach HunterThompson’s Fear and Loathing on theCampaign Trail ’72 for readability.Frank’s does; published in June 2004, itwas widely read by despairing Democratsbefore and after the election and drewplaudits from such luminaries as MollyIvins, Barbara Ehrenreich, and the NewYork Times’s Nicholas Kristof. But a good read isn’t always entirely true, andLarry Bartels, a political continued on page 20

What’s Really the Matter With Kansas

In his influential best-sellerWhat’s the Matter With Kansas?

Tom Frank wove acolorful andpersuasive tale of working-class

backlash againstthe Democrats. But

when a Princetonprofessor ran the

numbers, he foundnothing of the sort.

By Harold Henderson

ReviewsMusic 26Tortoise & Bonnie “Prince” Billy, East West Blast Test, Cunninlynguists

Art 28“The Fluidity of Time” at the MCA

Theater 29I Have Before Me a Remarkable DocumentGiven to Me by a Young Lady From Rwandaat Victory Gardens, A Number at Next

Books 33Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First CenturyCapitalism, edited by Nelson Lichtenstein,and The Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman

PlusWhat Are You Wearing? 18A couple hundred Crown Royal bags

Ink Well 35This week’s crossword: Key Phrases

20 CHICAGO READER | FEBRUARY 10, 2006 | SECTION ONE

scientist at Princeton University,recently called Frank’s facts intoquestion.

Frank describes the GreatBacklash as “a style of conser-vatism that first came snarlingonto the national stage inresponse to the partying andprotest of the late sixties.” Folkswho were outraged over issuessuch as busing, abortion, gaymarriage, evolution, and trashyTV have cast more and more oftheir ballots for Republicans.The conservatives they’ve electeduse their power to enact probusi-ness economic policies, but, likeRonald Reagan, they never quiteget around to delivering on thesocial issues that provided theirmargin of victory. Frank sees aclassic bait and switch: “Thetrick never ages; the illusionnever wears off. Vote to stopabortion; receive a rollback incapital gains taxes. Vote to makeour country strong again; receivedeindustrialization. Vote to screwthose politically correct collegeprofessors; receive electricityderegulation. . . . Vote to strike ablow against elitism; receive asocial order in which wealth ismore concentrated than ever

before in our lifetimes.”According to Frank, the Great

Backlash has worked wondersfor the conservative economicagenda. “Having rolled back thelandmark economic reforms ofthe sixties (the war on poverty)

and those of the thirties (laborlaw, agricultural price supports,banking regulation), its leadersnow turn their guns on theaccomplishments of the earliestyears of progressivism (WoodrowWilson’s estate tax; Theodore

Roosevelt’s antitrust measures).With a little more effort, thebacklash may well repeal theentire twentieth century.”

Frank doesn’t give clever con-servatives all the credit. He alsofingers what he calls the “crimi-

nally stupid” counterstrategy ofClinton Democrats, who neglect-ed their traditional base in orderto court corporations and afflu-ent white-collar professionals. Asa consequence the DemocraticParty remains staunchly pro-choice “while making endlessconcessions on economic issues,on welfare, NAFTA, SocialSecurity, labor law, privatization,deregulation, and the rest of it.”Each concession cuts one moretie that binds potential backlashvoters to their parents’ party,leaving them open to the machi-nations of Karl Rove and the var-ious Republican denominations.

Who are these voters? Frankcalls them “working class guys,”“the poor,” “sons and daughtersof toil,” “union members,” “appli-ance salesmen, auto mechanics,and junior engineers,” “hard-working citizen[s] of an impov-erished town,” and “blue-collarpatriots”—a list that confuses asmuch as it clarifies. We’re sup-posed to just know who he’s talk-ing about, though if we thinkabout it a little we really don’t.And his labels, with their whiff ofradical rhetoric, are slipperyenough to make his case seem

Kansas

JON

RO

EMER

/WO

OD

ROW

WIL

SON

SCH

OO

L

Larry Bartels

continued on page 22

continued from page 1

CHICAGO READER | FEBRUARY 10, 2006 | SECTION ONE 21

22 CHICAGO READER | FEBRUARY 10, 2006 | SECTION ONE

stronger than it is. Right-wing fabulists too

resort to convenient vague-ness, as when they blame ashadowy crew of “liberals” forsaturating our culture withsmirking sex and gory violence.If they got specific they’d haveto abuse, say, well-known liber-als like Rupert Murdoch, whoactually has power over how Fox chooses to make money,and lay off Hillary Clinton andHoward Dean, who have none.Left or right, clarity and goodlighting take away the fun.Define who you mean, check the facts, and you may find that your adversaries aren’twho you expected at all.

Republicans use the basicGreat Backlash story to bash

Democrats and to generate abandwagon effect. Frank and hisfans use it to bash Republicansand chivy the Democrats back totheir good old ways. But neithergroup is asking whether thepremise is true.

Last time I checked, Kansaswas still governed by a moderateDemocratic woman and GeorgeW. Bush’s polls were in the toilet.Obviously some people fit thebacklash story, but how typicalare they? How successful has theGreat Backlash really been andwith whom?

Those who study politics for aliving, like Larry Bartels, have atool for answering these kinds of

questions: the AmericanNational Election Studies(umich.edu/~nes), a series ofpolls conducted every two yearssince 1948 under the auspices ofthe University of Michigan’s

Institute for Social Research.During the 2004 election cycle,trained interviewers questioned1,212 randomly selected individ-uals face-to-face, a standardsample size that’s usually accu-

rate to within two or three per-centage points.

Last fall Bartels gave theANES a workout when he pre-sented a 42-page paper titled“What’s the Matter With What’sthe Matter With Kansas?”(princeton.edu/~bartels/kansas.pdf), at the American PoliticalScience Association conferencein Washington, D.C. Having justpublished an article in the liber-al magazine American Prospectdescribing gross inconsistenciesin Americans’ thinking aboutthe estate tax, he seemed well-placed to tackle what Frank calls “a panorama of madnessand delusion worthy ofHieronymus Bosch.”

The statistician taking on thestoryteller is a venerable aca-demic sport: a professor finds apopular book that speaks to hisor her specialty, extracts sometestable assertions, and teststhem. A sport shouldn’t be tooeasy, and extracting testableassertions from What’s theMatter With Kansas? isn’t. Firstof all Bartels had to figure outwho the Great Backlash peoplewere. Following Frank’s lead, hegravitated toward the term“working class,” though nowherein 294 pages does Frank sayexactly what he means by it.Bartels’s quandary was all theworse because there’s no stan-dard definition and the alterna-tives are flawed. AskingAmericans how they definethemselves, for instance, ispointless, since most call them-selves “middle-class” even whenthey’re clearly not. And defining“working class” as “people withrelatively low incomes” leaves outmany unionized workers andincludes retirees and young peo-ple just getting started.

After some thought Bartelswent with income, defining“working class” as people in thebottom third of the country’sincome distribution. In 2004that meant everyone earning lessthan $35,000 a year. Despite itsshortcomings, this definitionseems as fair as any for the folksin Frank’s book—his very firstparagraph contains the discon-certing factoid that the poorestcounty in the U.S. gave Bushmore than 80 percent of its votesin 2000. Bartels also focused onwhite voters because Frank did—after all, he was writing largelyabout Kansas and the apparentdefection of whites from the oldNew Deal coalition.

Using this definition and theAmerican National ElectionStudies, Bartels found the GreatBacklash to be more story thansubstance. “Working-classwhites,” he writes, “have notbecome more Republican in theirpresidential voting behavior.”Between 1976 and 2004 “whitesin the bottom third of the incomedistribution cast 51% of theirvotes for Democrats, as com-pared with 44% of middle-income whites and 37% of upper-income whites.” As for trends, “Al

Kansas

continued on page 24

continued from page 20 To the extent that a Great Back-lash does exist, its actors aremiddle-income Americans, notthose at the bottom. So theoldest cliche in the Americanpolitical book is still true: thebetter off you are, the morelikely you are to vote Republican.

CHICAGO READER | FEBRUARY 10, 2006 | SECTION ONE 23

24 CHICAGO READER | FEBRUARY 10, 2006 | SECTION ONE

Gore and John Kerry did betteramong low-income whites in theclose elections of 2000 and 2004than John Kennedy and HubertHumphrey did in the close elec-tions of 1960 and 1968.”

Bartels found that fewer peo-ple in the bottom third identifythemselves as Democrats nowthan 50 years ago, but middle-and upper-income whites havebeen leaving the party faster. Inany case, since the low-incomepeople leaving have been almostall southern whites defectingfrom the party of civil rights, thephenomenon signals just thatthe south is now more like therest of the country rather thansolidly Democratic.

Bartels also discovered thatlow-income whites haven’tgrown more conservative overthe years, “except on abortionsince 1996—and even with thatshift they remain noticeablymore pro-choice than they werein the 1970s.” Cultural issueslike abortion don’t drive theirvotes that much in any case,either by comparison with tradi-tional economic issues or bycomparison with more affluentwhite voters. “What is moststriking in these figures,” Bartelswrites, “is the consistent moder-ation of low-income whites bycomparison with more affluentwhites . . . making them unlikelycandidates to appear in the van-guard of an ideological ‘back-

lash’ of any sort.” To the extent that a Great

Backlash does exist, its actors aremiddle-income Americans, notthose at the bottom. “If the ideais to appeal to a large class ofwhite voters who have becomenoticeably less Democratic overthe past half-century,” Bartelswrites, “the place to find them isin the middle and upper reachesof the income distribution.”

So the oldest cliche in theAmerican political book is stilltrue: the better off you are, themore likely you are to voteRepublican. By this definition,working-class conservatism israrer now than back whenRichard Nixon said he was not acrook. And the people Frank is

disparaging are more likely to behis former University of Chicagoclassmates than a bunch ofKansas burger flippers.

In an acerbic reply to Bartelsentitled “Class Is Dismissed”

(tcfrank.com/dismissd.pdf),Frank wrote, “Bartels’response . . . is simply to close hiseyes and define the issue away.”Then he rejected Bartels’s defini-tion of “working class” andplumped for defining it in termsof education, which largelydetermines life chances, ratherthan in terms of something aschangeable as income. The work-ing class, he wrote, consists of allthose Americans who don’t holdcollege degrees—a definition that

encompasses a whopping 73 per-cent of Americans, including BillGates. It also implies that theworking class has shrunk drasti-cally, down from 92 percent ofAmericans in 1960. The rowdrew some attention at the blogsCrooked Timber and TPMCafe,where people exchanged strongopinions about the proper defi-nition of “working class.”

Frank and Bartels agree onvery little, but they do agree that“working class” is just a label,sometimes useful, sometimesnot. “It probably doesn’t mattermuch what labels we use,” Bartelswrote in an e-mail he forwardedto me, “as long as we are clearabout the operational defini-tions.” In his reply Frank wrote,

Kansas

continued from page 22

CHICAGO READER | FEBRUARY 10, 2006 | SECTION ONE 25

“Forget ‘white working class’; call them ‘middle Americans’; call them ‘the Pepsi People’; callthem whatever you want.”

Frank also cited an Augustrelease from the Pew ResearchCenter (people-press.org/commentary) to support his con-tention that Bartels was wrongeven about the low-incomegroup he’d chosen to crunch thenumbers on. Pew combined theresults of 129 public-opinion sur-veys since 1992 and found thatthe Republicans had made biggains in party identificationamong whites in the next-to-bot-tom fifth of American incomes:29 percent used to identify withthe GOP and 33 with theDemocrats, and now 35 percentclaimed to be Republicans, 28Democrats. But Bartels hadalready pointed out this shiftand the fact that it was almostcompletely a southern phenome-non, not a nationwide trend.Moreover, the polls Pew used arefrom different sources, andthere’s no guarantee the pollstersasked the question the same wayfrom one poll to the next or keptcareful track of the nonrespon-ders—things the AmericanNational Election Studies do,which is why they’re the goldstandard.

If you’re a journalistambushed by an academic, it’salways good to play the “ivorytower” card. Frank accusedBartels of hiding behind hiscomputer printouts, arguingthat ANES statistics are deceiv-ing. All those percentagesreduce the landscape ofAmerican politics to a “feature-less tundra swept of history,ideology, and any hint of the raw emotional resonance thateveryone knows politics pos-sesses.” The fact is, he went on, “the problem is still there, the Republicans stillentrenched in power.”

Entrenched? Ronald Reaganmay have crushed WalterMondale back in 1984, butClinton was in office for eightyears, and Bush lost the popularvote to Gore and barely squeakedby Kerry. If the Republicansreally were entrenched, the elec-tions of 2000 and 2004 would-n’t have been close. It’s preciselybecause the actual votes were soclose that Republicans are nowscrambling to entrench them-selves through nonelectoralmeans—by appointing activistconservative judges, imposingoff-year redistricting schemes,and sucking up lobbyists’ cashlike leeches in a blood bank.

Frank ended his reply by sim-ply moving the goalposts. Evenif Bartels were right about every-thing, he said, What’s the MatterWith Kansas? is a cultural studyof right-wing populism, and assuch it doesn’t “depend upon amajoritarian argument of anykind; it only requires that thecultural formation in question issignificant. . . . I make no sys-tematic claim . . . that the mind-set or beliefs I describe are the

only or even the predominantway of thinking among working-class Americans.”

That’s a bit much. In the book Frank claims the GreatBacklashers have repealed thewhole New Deal and are drag-ging the country back to 1900,and now, well, they might notbe predominant? And whatabout Frank’s case againstClintonism? It would be greatlystrengthened if he could back itup with Bartels’s kind of care-fully gathered evidence.

Bartels has been revising hisinitial paper for publication,

and in a draft version he con-cedes Frank the right to say thatthe people he’s talking about are

whites without college degrees,then proceeds to reanalyze theANES data using that defini-tion—to devastating effect. Thesepeople don’t look like GreatBacklashers either. The numbersdo show that their support forDemocrats dropped by about sixpercentage points between 1952and 2004—but once again it’s thesouth, not Kansas, that’s to blame.Among nonsouthern whites with-out college degrees, support forDemocratic presidential candi-dates has fallen by all of one per-centage point in the last 52 years.Not-so-great backlash, anyone?

Bartels also points out that ifpeople who didn’t graduate fromcollege were vulnerable to theGreat Backlash appeal and their

degree-holding counterpartsweren’t, you’d expect the twogroups to vote differently. In fact,they’ve tracked pretty closelysince 1980. You’d also expect thenongraduates to identify socialissues such as abortion and affir-mative action as very importantto them and likely to be a make-or-break factor when they vote.Instead, the numbers indicate a“middle-class” backlash: whitevoters with college degrees attachtwice as much importance toabortion as do those withoutdegrees. Contrary to what you’dexpect, nongraduate whites seethemselves as closer to theDemocrats on social issues thanon economic issues. Apparentlythey missed the Clinton message

Frank denounces—they still pegthe Democrats as quite liberal oneconomic issues, more liberalthan they see themselves. Thispattern probably should worryDemocratic strategists, but it’s thephotographic negative of the oneFrank described.

The Democrats need a strategythat’s based in reality—not anec-dote. But anecdotes can help, sodon’t throw away your copy ofWhat’s the Matter With Kansas?just yet. It remains importantprecisely because the country is soclosely divided. The GreatBacklash it describes may be over-hyped and underdefined, but arelatively small number of back-lashers in the right place could beenough to turn an election. v