Worshiping at the altar of acquisition

When David Brooks published “Bobos in Paradise” to wide acclaim four years ago, it was hard not to wonder what Thomas Frank thought about all the fuss. Frank, after all, had been writing about the same theme -- the merger, among the upper class, of consumer culture and the counterculture -- for years from his perch as founding editor of the Baffler, a journal of cultural critique. Frank had included some of those essays in the anthology “Commodify Your Dissent” three years earlier, scorning what Brooks mostly applauded.

Now Brooks and Frank have written new books that once again cover, very broadly speaking, the same terrain. This time the subject is new: the connections between spirituality and materialism in American life. The dynamic, however, is the same: Brooks celebrates what Frank disdains.

The differences between their two books can be chalked up partly to dispositions. Brooks views the world with the amused detachment of a self-styled “comic sociologist,” whereas Frank writes with the biting edge of a world-class polemicist. Brooks is a modern conservative who admires capitalism’s ability to create wealth though he isn’t blind to its flaws. Frank is an old-fashioned New Deal leftist who refers to the “borderline criminality” of capitalism though it’s not clear what exactly he wants to replace it with. Brooks writes about the winners in the free-market economy. Frank grieves for the losers.

Brooks and Frank come at their subjects from reverse directions: Brooks wants to know why Americans find the pursuit of material prosperity so spiritually righteous, while Frank wants to know why so many poor Americans prefer the feeling of spiritual righteousness -- in the form of social conservatism -- to the material prosperity he claims would come from voting Democratic.

In “On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense,” Brooks turns his eyes to the glittering new cities being created in middle-class and upper-middle-class (and, though he doesn’t say it, plain old upper-class) suburbia. But rather than finding a bunch of shallow, secular materialists, Brooks sees American shoppers infused with “sacred intent.” The utopian fervor that led colonial Americans to build a “city on a hill” now expresses itself through getting and spending, he writes.

Brooks sees consumption as so imbued with transcendent significance that he describes the transformation of spiritual desire into physical objects that occurs while shopping as a “transubstantiation of goods.” With shopping, Brooks seems to be saying, we commodify our assent to John Winthrop’s Puritan dream.

Where most observers see materialism and class, Brooks sees religion. Likewise, where most Americans see religion, Frank sees class. In “What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America,” Frank heads to his home state to figure out how rural Midwesterners, who 100 years ago raged against Wall Street and the “money power,” came to embrace the Republican Party.

The conventional answer is a religious one, involving first abortion politics and now gay rights. But Frank turns up a “class war.” He calls the trend the Great Backlash, and what makes his analysis so interesting is that he shows how much backlash conservatism shares with the leftist backlash of Populism in the late 19th century.

Frank takes the title of his book from an 1896 essay by the Kansas newspaperman William Allen White, who was engaged in precisely the opposite enterprise: White argued that the Kansas Populists of the 1890s made the state poorer with their angry, misguided attacks on the Eastern Republican establishment. Frank turns this upside down to contend that these same working-class Kansans, 100 years later, are inviting economic ruin on their state by voting Republican -- all because they’ve become convinced that liberal Democrats are the new Eastern establishment.

One of Frank’s targets is the punditry’s conceit of America as two geographically distinct nations, “blue” on the West Coast, Northeast and upper Midwest and “red” everywhere else, as divined from the color-coded map of the 2000 presidential election.

And Brooks quickly emerges as one of Frank’s central villains for helping to popularize the idea, particularly in a 2001 essay in the Atlantic Monthly. What angers Frank is that, in Brooks’ telling, the differences between Republican red America and Democratic blue America are expressed as differences in how the two regions shop.

In the two-nations mythos, Republicans become NASCAR-watching common folk, while Democrats get cast as wealthy Starbucks-sippers on the coasts who look down their noses at the trashy denizens of flyover country. Frank dubs this “the latte libel.” The point of the latte libelers, he says, is to portray liberalism as “an affectation of the loathsome rich, as bizarre as their taste for Corgi dogs and extra-virgin olive oil.”

Frank makes a smart, convincing and never dull case that the same class resentment that fueled Populism is behind the animosity that many working-class Kansans -- and other Americans -- have for liberals. (Kansas is a particularly instructive case, he says, because racial politics -- the boogeyman many Democrats blame for the exodus of white working-class voters from the party -- aren’t a factor there.) The Republicans have successfully repeated the trick of the 1840s Whigs, “putting on backwoods accents, telling the world about their log-cabin upbringings, and raging publicly against the over-educated elites.”

Conservatives like Brooks -- whom Frank is determined, unfairly, to paint as nothing more than a genial version of Ann Coulter -- convince Americans that economic class matters less than a vague notion of “authenticity” and that everyone, regardless of bank account, is on the same team as long as we shop at the same stores and eat at the same restaurants.

Frank acknowledges that there are two Americas, but his two Americas are divided by economic class, not geography. “The idea that the United States is ‘two nations’ defined by social rank was first articulated by the labor movement and the historical left,” he laments. “[T]hese days, it incorporates all the disillusionment, all the resentment, but none of the leftism.”

He repeatedly mocks Brooks’ argument -- used in the Atlantic essay as well as “On Paradise Drive” -- that the mobile nature of American society means that the nation’s class structure is akin to a high school cafeteria, filled with self-organizing and noncoercive cliques rather than rigid social classes. (Neither Frank nor Brooks points out that this isn’t an accurate description of high school.)

In Brooks’ America, the red gets redder and the blue gets bluer because people pull up stakes and move to a place that suits them, a place where nobody “is socially far above or below you.” But Brooks’ decision to examine only the most comfortable classes undermines his claims to universality. He concedes that the rural America he ignores has faced decades of economic hardship. And, as compared with the rest of the world, “It is easier to get rich here, but more miserable to be poor here,” he writes. Similarly, Frank concedes that laissez-faire capitalism has done marvels for wealthy suburbanites.

Brooks and Frank have other areas of agreement. Brooks isn’t entirely sunny on the subject of American capitalism and the changes it is wreaking on the upper classes. In particular, Brooks fears that too many Americans are engaged in “objectless striving.”

This critique -- and much of Brooks’ book, in fact -- resembles Max Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in which Weber worried that capitalism, stripped of the religious underpinning given to it by the Protestant work ethic, had become an “iron cage” of meaningless accumulating.

Frank’s concession to the right is that the backlashers have their finger on something when they blame the mass media for coarsening culture and offending the values of everyday Americans.

“Ordinary working-class people are right to hate the culture we live in,” he writes. “They are right to feel that they have no power over it, and to notice that it makes them feel inadequate and stupid.... Conservatives are good at pinpointing and magnifying these small but legitimate cultural grievances. What they are wrong about are the forces that create the problem.” Frank points out that capitalists, not Washington liberals, run Hollywood.

Frank doesn’t wholly excuse the Democrats, however. He says the party could bring working-class Americans back into the fold by pushing populist economics and blaming the capitalists in Hollywood and elsewhere for moral decline. But if that’s the case, why didn’t Pat Buchanan, campaigning as a social conservative and an economic leftist, garner more votes four years ago?

“On Paradise Drive” and “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” are both occasionally hilarious, mildly repetitive, but ultimately pleasurable reads that will be persuasive only to people who already agree with them. Brooks and Frank went out and found two different Americas. But neither tries very hard to get those two countries to talk to each other. *