I've often lain awake at night wondering how it can be that so many working-class American citizens lustily embrace the Republican party, whose pro-corporate agenda is aggressively rolling back the economic security of average Americans, and reducing future opportunities for their children to find employment and healthcare. Whatever do I mean with these dubious and unpatriotic claims about our commander in chief, you ask? For example, the Bush administration:

• Has given $37 billion in tax breaks to US firms for job offshoring operations*, reducing employment opportunities for Americans

• Has actively fought federal healthcare initiatives, pushing millions of Americans out of the ranks of the insured (since Bush took office, the number of Americans without health insurance has increased by 4 million, to nearly 44 million**)

• Is using your social security taxes to fund the currently obscene federal budget deficit,*** plundering money earmarked for your retirement  

• Is doing nothing to aid the current state budget crisis (states face a fiscal year 2004 budget shortfall between $70 billion and $85 billion), causing states to cut school programs, restrict access to health care, and eliminate state jobs****

If the polls have it right, a majority of American voters will say a big enthusiastic yes in November to more tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, and an even bigger yes to treacherous public policies that are eroding employment, health, and education opportunities for themselves and their families. This is incredibly outrageous, my fellow Americans. You can't possibly be on board with an agenda directly attacking your right to be healthy and earn a living, and redistributing your resources and opportunities to oil men and CEOs. And yet, if you are voting for Bush in 2004, you are doing just that.

Thank goodness a book has come along to explain this incredible phenomenon to me: What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Thomas Frank. If you read only one book this year (said in movie trailer baritone), please make it this one. It promises to answer the following question that is of critical importance to the future of this country:

Why do so many Americans vote against their economic and social interests? Where's the outrage at corporate thievery? Why do illusory slights to the Ten Commandments trouble some people more than falling wages or monopoly power or the destruction of their very way of life?

Indeed, why? You will find out, if you choose to read along with me, that Republicans have tied a pro-corporate agenda to completely unrelated emotional issues like religion, and sold it as a package deal to American voters on the assumption that they were too ill-informed to realize, as the book so astutely says, that when you vote Republican, you:

"Vote to stop abortion, [but actually] receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again, receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors, receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government of our backs, receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorism, receive social security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism, receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.  

The Republicans, in short, are betting that you, the voter, are too stupid to understand this fundamental disconnect between cause and effect. They think that you are too emotional and ill informed to understand the true corporate tenor of the conservative agenda, and can be easily sidetracked by bogus red herrings like gay marriage or false affronts to patriotism.

And the polls are telling them that they are exactly right.

*AFL-CIO 3/31/04
**Washington Post, 8/22
***Slate, 1/9/2004
****AFL-CIO, 2/13/04

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