Culture is politics: two views of America.

Two new books offer occasionally illuminating but frustrating perspectives on contemporary America, from very different angles. From the left, Thomas Frank (What's the Matter with Kansas? Metropolitan Books) wonders why so many Americans vote against their own economic and social interests. In recent years, blue-collar voters have begun voting for Republican candidates whose policies, Frank believes, benefit only the wealthy. David Brooks (On Paradise Drive, Simon & Schuster) is concerned less about partisan politics than about culture, with a focus on what America's sprawling suburbs tell us about the American mentality, about what the American dream really means.

Frank's politics are old-line Left, and he does a fascinating exploration of the history of his own native state, Kansas. He tries to show how Republicans have taken good advantage of a political backlash against what the Right has successfully labeled "liberal" values, making a formerly respectable word a slur. This has more to do with cultural than with political and economic issues, and Frank never really succeeds in explaining why people have drifted this way. But he makes some good points. Right-wing politicians who are elected on a promise to work against permissive abortion laws, left-wing college professors, and obscenity in the media, in fact vote for lower taxes for the wealthy, deregulation of industry, laws that weaken unions, and, of course, never deliver on the issues that serve as perennial irritants and get the base stirred up. The Right has seized on the old leftist idea of a nation divided between interest groups, of aggrieved people denied their rights, but "the way the 'two Americas' image is used these days, it incorporates all the disillusionment, all the resentment, but none of the leftism."

Frank longs for the days when populism fueled the union movement and popular sentiment kept farm subsidies on the front burner of any farm state legislator who wanted to keep his job. But the unions have declined in influence for reasons more complicated than Republican wiliness, and the subsidies he longs for are more complicated than he seems to know, or maybe he doesn't care: the same subsidies that keep small farmers going in Kansas (along with their European equivalents) have made competitive agriculture impossible for third-world countries, and can be seen as a cushion--for relatively comfortable people--that suffocates the poorest farmers in the world.

Frank skewers the phoniness of the far Right, and is dead-on about how centrist Democrats have handed some of their former constituents to the Republicans. He understands some of the resentment many people feel when rich Hollywood liberals tell them how to live. But he doesn't understand the depth or resonance of the cultural resentment that has driven some voters to the right. He seems to be saying, "You should care about your paycheck and our awful capitalist system, but abortion and euthanasia really aren't worth worrying about, since you can't do anything about them anyway and you're pretty silly to worry about them at all." Here's a passage where he tips his hand (I have added the emphases):

    Movement literature now abounds in lurid tales of the medical
    profession gone mad, of doctors giving the thumbs-up to infanticide
    and euthanasia, of abortionists trafficking in fetal body parts, and
    of deranged scientists manufacturing embryos from which stem cells
    can then be harvested. The Nazi eugenics programs, they will even
    tell you, were sanctioned by the German medical community, the
    flower of European rectitude.

I add the emphases because when you drop out Frank's rhetorical flourishes, what you have is a simple statement of fact. People are rightly worried about it. They may vote in the wrong people, but they aren't crazy. In What's the Matter with Kansas? Frank gets much of the politics right (or, appropriately, left); he doesn't begin to fathom the importance of the cultural issues. Until more people on the Left do, the divide will continue.

Frank attacks David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, because Brooks makes fun of stereotypical liberals. Frank fails to see that Brooks has fun with just about every kind of American, including many who can be counted on to vote Republican. Brooks, is a funny, perceptive observer of American culture who wants to describe what life is really like in middle-and upper-middle-class suburbs, to explain why Americans work so relentlessly and move so often, and, he says, "I'll try to answer the question: Are we as shallow as we look?"

Brooks makes the case that a study of suburban culture goes a long way toward explaining our current situation. Americans flee: he cites Witold Rybczynski, who has said that the American population continues to decentralize faster than any other society ever: in 1950, 23 percent of Americans lived in suburbs. Now most Americans do. The concentric rings the suburbs make tell stories as you go through them, and Brooks can hit great comic notes in describing, for example, the behavior of an SUV-driving guy about to buy a grill for the patio.

Although this book is often funny, it has a serious edge. Brooks is pushing toward something here that he never quite reaches, but he may in a future book: the combination of something shallow and noble, to use a word he likes, and should like, about the striving Americans do for something better, and yet how vague and formless and domineering this ghost that calls us forward into the unknown can be. (I saw this in many of the immigrants who were part of my parish, the hope and its vagueness and its maddening qualities.)

Brooks is not an unqualified cheer-leader for the conservative point of view: "Fired by hope, Americans have built a society that opens up opportunity and undermines security. We have relatively low tax rates to encourage entrepreneurialism and the accumulation of riches, but relatively little job protection, making it easier to fire workers and close companies. We encourage venture capital but discourage--compared to most other countries--regulation that might soften the blows of the marketplace .... It is easier to get rich here, but more miserable to be poor here."

What we hope for remains forever out of reach, Brooks says, and the hopeful person can't live truly in the present because of future dreams: "She doesn't appreciate what she has, because she is consumed by the thought of what she might have." The American dream "is the dream of finding a place where one will feel liberated from the burden of the future, though that place is always in the future. The American Dream devours its own flesh."

There is a strong moral edge to Brooks's writing. He worries about what we are not giving our children, pushing them to succeed materially while we ignore larger questions of character. "Today's schools, unless they are religious schools, do not transmit a concrete and articulated moral system--a set of precepts instructing men and women on how to live, how to see their duties, how to call upon their highest efforts."

These two books have some things in common, among them a padded feeling. There is enough repetition in both so that you say, "I get it, I get it ..." Both authors know that America is a seriously strange, challenging place. Frank gets much of the politics right, and gets the culture wrong. Brooks doesn't delve enough into the political and economic aspects that have made the culture what it is, but gets close to something intriguing and disturbing in the culture, without quite arriving there. He ends up drawing a happier picture than some of what he says should allow. The polarization Frank writes about and the strangeness Brooks delineates make me worry about the future of our already strange and burdened country.