New Statesman: The right-wing revolution: ordinary Americans are fighting the wrong class war. Their

The Right Nation: why America is different

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge

Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 464pp, [pounds sterling]14.99

What's the Matter with America?: the resistible rise of the American right

Thomas Frank

Secker & Warburg, 306pp, [pounds sterling]12 (pbk)

It has long been known that America's political centre is to the right of every other modern democracy. But why has it lately lurched so much further right? A belligerent cowboy president who says he's doing God's work seems on the verge of being re-elected; both houses of Congress are in the hands of conservative Republicans who, 30 years ago, would have been considered wild extremists; most state governments are dominated by born-again Bible-thumpers. It is only a slight exaggeration to describe the recent takeover of America by the right wing of the Republican Party as a revolution. Liberal enclaves still exist along both coasts, and in big cities. America's radical conservatives are not nearly as bizarre or xenophobic as Europe's "far right". There should be no doubt, however, that the right has taken over, with revolutionary consequences for America and the world.

Republicans have used the attack on the United States on 11 September 2001 to justify their continuing dominance, but the ideological revolution at issue here preceded the "war against terror". Why did the revolution occur? Two new books offer starkly different answers. In The Right Nation, the Economist journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge see the rise of the right as a response to the excesses of 1960s liberalism. In What's the Matter With America?, Thomas Frank portrays it as a more recent phenomenon--a backlash against cultural liberalism. For Micklethwait and Wooldridge, the pendulum that swung left in the 1960s was bound to swing back to the right: "All it took was for the Democratic Party to lurch to the left for the sleeping giant of conservatism to be awakened." With the passage of the Civil Rights Act 1964, white Southerners began their slow but steady march towards Republicanism. The Republican presidential candidate of that year, Barry Goldwater, one of only eight Republican senators to have voted against the act, lost the election but sowed the seeds of the right-wing revolution.

The rest of the story is standard fare, but Micklethwait and Wooldridge tell it well. The moral sensibilities of Middle America were offended by a series of Supreme Court decisions prohibiting prayer in public schools, legalising the sale of contraceptives, barring the death penalty and allowing abortion. Northern working-class whites were also pushed to the right by the radicalisation of blacks, urban riots and court-ordered busing to achieve "racial balance" in schools. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, turned into a gaggle of anti-war protesters, feminists, environmentalists and claimants of government benefits. As crime surged and births to unmarried black women rose, "the conservative message--that government was the problem, not the solution, began to resonate". Richard Nixon's "silent majority" became a vocal majority.

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It's a tidy story, but things did not happen quite this way. American politics remained fairly moderate during the 1970s and 1980s. Until 1994, Congress was mostly controlled by Democrats and still harboured a number of liberal Republicans. Even under Ronald Reagan, civil rights and social programmes were extended, Medicaid for the poor was expanded, and environmental protections grew. "Supply-side economics", Reagan's singular contribution to wishful thinking, proved so unpopular that George H W Bush had to raise taxes. Foreign policy remained largely under the sway of liberal internationalists. Meanwhile, the targets of conservative ire began to disappear. By the 1990s, crime rates were dropping, illegitimate births (indeed, all births) were declining and the black middle class was growing.

Thomas Frank offers a contrasting and, to my mind, more convincing view. The right-wing backlash, he writes, is "a story of the recent". His template is his native state of Kansas, America's geographic, economic and cultural middle--the proving ground for test marketers, chain restaurants and suburban shopping centres. Like the rest of America, Kansas remained basically middle-of-the-road through the 1980s. It passed legislation to permit abortions even before the Supreme Court acted. In 1990, a Democratic majority was elected to the Kansas House of Representatives. It sent to the Senate Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum, both moderate Republicans. But then something strange happened:

  Nearly everyone has a conversion story they can tell--how their dad
  Had been a union steelworker and a stalwart Democrat, but how all
  their brothers and sisters started voting Republican; or how their
  cousin gave up on Methodism and started going to the Pentecostal
  church out on the edge of town; or how they themselves just got so
  sick of being scolded for eating meat or for wearing clothes
  emblazoned with the State U's Indian mascot that one day Fox News
  started to seem "fair and balanced" to them after all.

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The heartland of America was in revolt against elites which wanted to impose their own cultural values--who, in Frank's words, "commit endless acts of hubris, sucking down lattes, driving ostentatious European cars, and trying to reform the world". A great burst of righteous indignation was focused on God, guns and gays. The official 1998 platform of the Kansas Republican Party was a jeremiad against abortion, homosexuality, gun control and evolution ("a theory, not a fact"), warning that "the signs of a degenerating society are all around us". The next year, the state education board voted to delete all references to evolution and the age of the earth from science textbooks.

Frank does not dwell on it, but the same revolt happened all over America. The heartland (which, after the 2000 election, came to be known as "red America") was fed up of being dictated to by supposed East and West Coast elites ("blue America"). Small towns, the alleged custodians of "family values", did not want to be pushed around by urban centres. (Inhabitants of large cities voted for Al Gore by 71 to 26 per cent, while small towns and rural areas voted for Bush by 59 to 38 per cent.) Across America, rightwing radio personalities and TV pundits railed against coastal media, Ivy League universities, intrusive government bureaucrats, snobby professionals and Washington do-gooders.

As Frank emphasises, this backlash has been cultural rather than economic. Yet it took place around the same time that the heartland's economy was unravelling. During the late 1980s and 1990s, chain stores such as Wal-Mart crushed local retail businesses, while giant agribusinesses drove tens of thousands of small farmers into ruin. What was left of America's factory jobs skipped off to Latin America and China. Meanwhile, a steadily smaller number of wealthy Americans grew even wealthier. The free market did not accomplish this on its own, naturally; it was egged on by Reagan, George H W Bush and even Bill Clinton. No wonder the heartland has felt oppressed and angry. But why is the resentment expressed in cultural, not economic, terms? In its drive to stop liberal elites from "intruding", the backlash has embraced even free-market ideology--the very ideology responsible for its economic free fall. Kansas "sees its country side depopulated, its towns disintegrate, its cities stagnate--and its wealthy enclaves sparkle, behind their remote-controlled security gates ... But what do its rebels demand? More of the very measures that have brought ruination on them and their neighbours in the first place."

Republican fat cats must be laughing all the way to the bank and ballot boxes. They pose as heartland Americans and rail against Ivy League stuffed shirts when they themselves graduated from the same institutions. George W Bush, a president's son, educated at prestigious Andover academy, Yale and Harvard Business School, plays at being a down-to-earth Texan. Republican leaders of Congress curse haughty professionals, but are mostly lawyers and bankers. Rush Limbaugh condemns drug addicts on his radio show, and then turns out to be one. Newt Gingrich decries the gross immorality of liberals (especially Clinton's extramarital adventure) while having an affair. Bill Bennett, the Republican's self-appointed "morality tsar", is revealed to be a gambling addict.

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Hypocrisy is nothing new to politicians and pundits. The interesting question, which Frank never quite answers, is why America's vast middle and working classes haven't caught on. For 25 years, the wages of workers without university degrees--the vast majority--have dropped steadily in real terms, even though the US economy has almost doubled in size. Most of the rest has gone to the top. The richest 1 per cent of America's population now owns more assets than the bottom 90 per cent put together. The rich didn't get where they are solely through hard work. The captains of American industry and their Wall Street advisers have shown no lack of ingenuity in robbing small investors, duping blue-collar employees, showering campaign contributions on politicians, and bankrolling right-wing media.

Why doesn't Middle America realise what is happening? Why did it support George W Bush's tax cuts, two-thirds of which went to the very wealthy? The economic elite answer that "class warfare" won't fly here because everyone in America wants to be rich some day; the rich are admired and emulated, not scorned. Yet this convenient explanation glosses over Frank's cultural backlash: if Middle America resents the snobbish attitudes of the rich, surely it could resent their greediness as well.

The real reason is that no one is explaining to Middle America what is actually happening. Not surprisingly, Republicans are doing all they can to keep ordinary people in the dark. But what of the Democrats? The Democratic Party used to be the party of equality and social justice. Some 70 years ago, Franklin D Roosevelt, a true patrician, condemned the "economic royalists" who manipulated markets for their own purposes, and set up a system of wage protections and social insurance. Harry Truman took over the steel industry when its CEOs refused to co-operate during wartime. Lyndon B Johnson established Medicare for all retired Americans. Democrats did not worship at the altar of the free market; they regulated and protected to assure working families a modicum of security.

The modern Democratic Party has pretty much given up on all this. It has been courting upscale suburban voters--independents with no strong party affiliation--on the assumption that the working class has no alternative but to vote Democratic. Democrats no longer constitute a recognisable political movement. Clinton ended welfare, signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, slashed spending and balanced the federal budget--positions of which any moderate Republican would be proud. The cultural version of class warfare that Frank chronicles is the default mechanism when anger has no other means of legitimate expression. The Republican Party and its allies in the right-wing media now pose as angry populists protecting Middle America from liberal snobs and know-it-all professionals. They have even turned fighting terrorism into a class struggle. Republicans accuse John Kerry of being too "sensitive," too "French", to fight effectively. America, they say, needs a mean son of a bitch--a regular guy who shoots game and drives a pick-up truck, a cowboy from Texas.

Republicans have perfected the language of class, denuded of economics. By failing to put the economics back in, the Democrats are handing American politics to their opponents. Micklethwait and Wooldridge may disagree. They write that when Al Gore "tried to rekindle populism, he lost an unlosable election". They are wrong twice over. It was only when Gore began talking about "the people against the powerful" that he began making headway in the 2000 election. And, incidentally, Gore won.

Robert B Reich was secretary of labour under Bill Clinton. His latest book is Reason: why liberals will win the battle for America (Knopf)

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