FAMILY MATTERS

This article, one of the last by the recently-deceased Ellen Willis, is one of the more articulate, accurate, and biting critiques I've come across of Thomas Frank and What's the Matter With Kansas?, a book many pundits make reference to and few do justice. Willis takes on what I think is the most glaring weakness of Frank's latest book, one which goes totally unaddressed in the full-length reviews and tangential digs bashing him for his supposed elitism: Frank argues that Republicans elected on the basis of their social conservatism don't actually deliver socially conservative policy. As we say in Yiddish, "Halvai" - if only. As Willis notes, conservatives have successfully used the powers of their offices all too successfully to reshape the country's "social policy" more faithful to their dogma - including making it prohibitively difficult for women in large swathes of the country to exercise freedom of choice. Frank is of course right to recognize the Federal Marriage Act as a stunt and a sop, but the unfortunate truth is that many of the right's sops to social conservative activists pack a real punch in diminishing the freedom of the rest of us to access contraception, access knowledge, and access partnership rights. Rejecting Frank's insistence that the social conservative legislative agenda is a chimera doesn't much damage the rest of his argument though. Frank is right to argue that conservatives build a base for right-wing policy based on classed appeals to stick it to elites by fighting social liberalsim, and that that base make possible policies that make elites that much more decadent. And he's right that a progressive politics that speaks to class and is willling to condemn George Bush's congratulating a woman working three jobs as a mark of elitism would do something to sap the power that right-wing aesthetic class warfare has in the absence of the materialist class warfare Lee Attwater rightly rued could bring the left back into electoral power. Willis is right to suggest that that won't be enough, and that progressives need to speak with strength and candor in the culture war rather than simply feinting or punting (and she speaks perceptively to the way we project our owjn ambivalences onto the electorate, which then reflects them). But she's wrong to lump Frank in with Michaels (say, Lind and Tomasky) who are set on shutting feminists up. And of all the charges to level at Thomas Frank, excessive loyalty to the Democratic Party is one of the more inane ones Willis could have chosen. That said, it's a compelling read. Zichronah livrachah.