Resentment at the roots.

Homeland

By Dale Maharidge, with photos by Michael Williamson Seven Stories Press. 384 pages. $24.95.

What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

By Thomas Frank Metropolitan Books. 320 pages. $24.

Dale Maharidge's task in the newly released Homeland is to understand the internal divisions in post-9/11 America. Based in New York, he views himself as a foreign correspondent. Maharidge has collaborated with Homeland photographer Michael Williamson on three prior books on the underclasses of Middle America and the American South. He is thus no stranger to that vast "Homeland America" that he describes as starting "over the George Washington Bridge."

He makes a sweeping claim, asserting that the changes in America after 9/11 "were so great I realized I was witnessing the dawn of a new nation."

What kind of new nation is this? For Maharidge, its character is evident in the firing of teacher Stephen Jones from a rural school in Maine for attempting to teach a class on Islam. Paranoid parents accuse him of trying to convert their children. The character of the new nation is also evident when anarchist high school student Katie Sierra is suspended from school for wearing an ironic shirt in October 2001 protesting the war in Afghanistan.

But it is not merely a nation of repression. It is also a nation whose people often accept this repression and take refuge in fear and anger. Maharidge cites a group of Pittsburgh frat boys who--without any sense of irony--place a banner on their house reading "BOMB IRAQ. WE WANT THEIR OIL." He recalls the Sikh man who was killed for wearing a turban on September 15, 2001, just hours after he donated to a September 11 relief fund. And he tells the story of an angry white mob that marches on a mosque in Chicago.

The stories of Jones and Sierra together largely make up the first of Homelands four sections. Sierra receives threatening messages via the Internet, hateful stares and calls of "nigger queer faggot lover." Things get so bad that she eventually drops out of her West Virginia school even after a partial victory against the school in court.

The second section deals with post-9/11 racism, and here the experience of Anna Mustafa, who is harassed at the airport and misses a plane to her father's funeral in December 2001, stands out as the most powerful. A police officer who fingerprints Mustafa at the airport tells her, "What I recommend is they get all the Arabs in one place, interview them one by one. And the ones they feel are not a threat, don't bother them. The ones they feel might be a threat? Deport them, or put them in some kind of camps."

The third section looks at poverty and the hard struggle against it, and Maharidge starts here to consider the relationship between these economic phenomena and the troubling political environment. The final section is dedicated to considering hopeful responses to what has been happening in America.

If the work of Maharidge and Williamson whose thirty-eight-page photo essay begins the book--was merely to document the post 9/11 repression, Homeland would already be an important piece of journalism. But the writer-photographer team looks beyond the reality of intolerance and examines one of its roots: the suffering of the American working class.

The book's overarching theme is that the rage of post-9/11 America is primarily a cry for help from the underemployed, the underpaid, and the underinsured. "What happened on 9/11 was not a genesis," Maharidge writes, "but an amplifier of unease that had long been building."

The fear of terrorism is but one element that mixes quite well with a set of fears that are nothing new to millions of working class Americans. They have been hit with three decades of economic civil war, says Maharidge. They have to contend with the fear of losing their job and the health insurance that goes along with it.

Many people feel a rage about their circumstances, and Bush has channeled that into the war on terror. "Prick the anger which on the surface may be pro-war and pro-Arab," Maharidge writes, after interviewing some white participants in a protest outside of a Chicago mosque on the first anniversary of 9/11, "and one hears of ruined 401 (k)s, health problems, lost work."

On the topic of nationalism, Maharidge spends a good number of pages fleshing out a comparison between America today and Weimar Germany. Though he distances himself from crude Bush-Hitler comparisons, his rhetoric still feels overly alarmist. He cites a South Asian woman who feels compelled by fear to put an American flag on her window as cautionary evidence of a comparison.

While troubling, if this is the beginning of the road to Nazism, it's a long, long road.

Maharidge tries to show how reactionary forces might be overcome, though he acknowledges this will be difficult. "The impact of three decades of virtual war on working class Americans will not vanish with the next Presidential election cycle," even if that cycle brings a Bush defeat, he writes.

In spite of this depressing reality, Maharidge finds hope for a new politics. He rather oddly cites the explosion of MoveOn.org, which brought tens of thousands of Americans into active engagement with politics for the first time during the Iraq War. Odd because this was not primarily a working class or rural phenomenon but more of a middle class one. He also sees hope in the Apollo Project, the proposed ten-year, $300 billion renewable energy project that aims to bring back together the Teamster-Turtles coalition that famously coalesced--for a brief second--in the 1999 WTO protests.

"Our ultimate escape from the nationalism of the American Weimar," Maharidge writes, "means taking care of the interests of a broad range of workers--not just the elites. That means a return of well-paying manufacturing jobs."

At the heart of Homeland is the assertion that our country is split into three: the progressives of the coasts, the college towns, and the big cities; the "megaconservatives" who have seized power; and another third whose political and social loyalties are not etched in stone. In the post-9/11 era, this third has thus far leaned Republican, in part because it is "afraid of terrorism," Maharidge notes, a fear that Bush is only too willing to exploit. But some of these leaners might tilt in a more progressive direction, he argues, if we can tame nationalism and offer decent paying jobs and a secure future.

Maharidge's political matrix is, in the end, too simple.

He doesn't say outright that you can't find progressives between the coasts and big cities, but he implies it. He at times goes too far in proclaiming the political malleability of middle and working class Americans. And while there is a compelling element to his argument about the relationship between economic hardship and political anger, his contention that the former must be dealt with before the latter is more problematic than he lets on.

As the nation's economic agenda drifts to the right without any sign of ceasing, progressives have to figure out again how to seize on tough times as a way to politicize people, rather than fear tough times as a force that can only or primarily be marshaled in support of the politics of anger and war.

Thomas Frank begins his book with his own stark example of working class conservatism. En route to a study of his native state of Kansas, once a bastion of fiery populism and now one of the reddest of the red (now that red means Republican, of course, rather than communist), Frank stops in neighboring Nebraska. In that state's McPherson County, which is the single poorest county in the United States, George W. Bush beat Al Gore with more than 80 percent of the vote.

Move over William Jennings Bryan, and come right in, Sam Brownback. The U.S. Senator from Kansas is a proud member of the rightist Catholic cult Opus Dei and a culture warrior and supply-sider of the first degree. Brownback happily calls himself a "farm boy from Parker, Kansas," even though he is a scion of one of the state's wealthiest families.

But in Kansas today, calling oneself a farm boy is less about magnifying modest roots and more about displaying devotion to a far-reaching cultural conservatism. By taking the economic out of the equation, rightwingers have overthrown the once-moderate Kansas Republican Party and are now highlighting the issues of abortion, violent and sexual movies, and homosexuality. The State Board of Education even tried to take evolution out of the state's science curriculum a few years ago.

Frank dates the conservative revolution that ushered in folks like Brownback to 1991, the year that the fanatical pro-life group Operation Rescue staged a summer-long protest in Wichita. The "Summer of Mercy" could not have started off better for the group when the city's abortion clinics decided to voluntarily close for a week at the start of the protests.

"Although this disastrous strategy had been undertaken on the advice of the Wichita police," Frank writes, "to certain elements of the pro-life movement it represented a bona fide miracle. For once, they had completely stopped what they called the 'abortion industry' in its tracks."

As a result, thousands of evangelical Christians from all over the country started streaming into Kansas for the Summer of Mercy, and the state's Christian Right was energized and inspired to move into the political realm.

Three years later, in 1994, Sam Brownback was elected to the U.S. House as part of the conservative revolution ushered in by Newt Gingrich and the "Contract with America." But perhaps even more astonishing was the election of Representative Todd Tiahrt, an ultraconservative Christian whose agenda was simply to "Bring America Back to God." Tiahrt defeated Democrat Dan Glickman in Wichita, the one place in Kansas that had long been considered a labor and Democratic stronghold. (Kansas, by the way, was one of the few states that had actually made abortion legal before Roe v. Wade.)

Glickman's loss to Tiahrt provides a perfect opportunity for Frank to trash the electoral strategy of Bill Clinton, the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, and the rapidly multiplying army of "New Democrats" in Congress. "However well it was received on Wall Street," Frank writes, "Clinton's strategy played right into the hands of Mark Gietzen [the director of the Wichita-based Christian Singles Info-exchange] and hundreds of other Christian conservative organizers like him around the country. If basic economic issues are removed from the table, Gietzen has written, only the social issues remain to distinguish the parties. And in such a climate, Democratic appeals to people of ordinary means can be easily neutralized."

Frank argues that this was exactly what happened in Wichita in 1994, when Glickman, who had supported NAFTA and thus lost the enthusiastic support of the Kansas labor movement, was attacked by Tiahrt as a purveyor of pro-abortion amorality. Going along with Clinton's "Third Way" left Glickman without a leg to stand on.

In fact, the only thing that made his defeat less embarrassing than it could have been was that he received support from a new source--the high-income areas on Wichita's East Side, where moderate Republican elites were embarrassed and turned off by Tiahrt's Bible-thumping. "The inversion," Frank writes, "was complete."

How has it come about that the Kansas elite is voting for Democrats while the state's working class is turning out for far right Republicans? One answer is that culture has become more important than class in contemporary politics. Thus, whether you go to church every week is a better indication of how you will vote for President than what your income is.

Conservatives also play up the elitism of latte-sipping liberals while even millionaire Republicans pretend to be friends of the oppressed regular Joes. Frank pokes some serious holes in the logic of this argument, and points out the irony of its coming from some very elite sources (David Brooks of The New York Times; pundit Ann Coulter, native of New Canaan, Connecticut). But he also concedes that the leaders of the conservative movement back in Kansas--Gietzen, Tim Golba, the founder of Kansans for Life, and Kay O'Connor, a state senator who once questioned the morality of women's suffrage--in many cases are working class.

Frank is often too focused on the economic to allow that there is something rational about working class conservatism (early on, he even slips and calls it a "species of derangement").

But when he meets people like O'Connor, the book starts to zero in on a more complex explanation than simply asserting that the people have been duped.

"What's in it for Kay O'Connor?" Frank asks. "Why would a person of such limited means make such great sacrifices for a politics that would only make people like her worse off? ... The answer seems to lie at least partially in the breathtaking beauty of the conservative worldview itself. Everything fits together here; everything has its place; everyone ought to be happy in his or her station. The god of the market may not have much to offer you personally, but that doesn't change its divinity or blur the awesome clarity of the conservative vision."

Frank does not complete the circle here by addressing the issues of fear and anger that have made the allure of a conservative worldview that much stronger in the post-9/11 world. Indeed, his book reads as if the attacks of September 11 never happened, which is its biggest weakness.

Unlike Maharidge, Frank does not concern himself with issues of civil liberties and foreign policy. But this is no excuse for him to ignore the profound impact of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on the phenomena he is describing.

For much of the book, Frank writes as if the only thing that should compel the voting habits of working class Kansans is income level. This neglects the reality that many people may simply see religious and cultural issues as more important than their income, an attitude that cannot he dismissed.

And his lack of discussion of September 11 means that he cannot explain why the pull of a George Bush may be even stronger now than when Sam Brownback and dozens of other Republicans were swept into Congress in 1994.

This does not mean that the simplistic good-and-evil politics of George W. Bush must remain paramount far into the future. But it does mean, as Frank himself explains, that the Democrats will not win back the hearts of Americans by continuing to drift rightward on economics while playing to liberal interest groups on social issues.

Peter Ian Asen is a freelance writer based in Providence, Rhode Island. He can be reached at [e-mail].