One explanation for the rightward-tilt in American politics that I’ve never found entirely convincing is the thesis put forward by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas? Granted, I haven’t read the book (though I’ve read about it and do, in fact, really want to read it soon, if that counts for anything), but what I take from Frank’s central argument is that the Democratic Leadership Council’s endorsement of triangulation—in other words, the abandonment of the welfare state and economic populism in favor of neoliberal market reforms—has been a disaster for the liberal Left and has allowed the Right to use cultural wedge issues like abortion and gay rights to make an unprecedented ascendency since the early 1980s.

While I totally agree with Frank on one thing—that triangulation has been a disastrous policy for the Democrats and continues to be under Obama—I think Frank’s argument contains a kernel of fantasmatic support that undermines his populist political project: if only the Democrats were to return to economic populism, then the playing field would be significantly altered in favor of the Left. The problem with this reasoning, I think, has to do with political economy: to put it bluntly, the very economic populism that allowed for the prosper of the social democratic welfare state is what gave rise to today’s Right, functioning as its very condition of possibility. Because the goal of social democracy is to lower inequality, this inevitably leads to a larger middle class. But obviously there are still going to be a large contingent of those who live just on the fringe of working and middle class, since social democracy can only go so far in wealth-redistribution. The expansion of this class—the so-called „Lumpenproletiarat“—has traditionally been the most reactionary since they constantly see themselves as threatened economically, just on the cusp of sliding back into destitution.

Hence, there seems to be something of a deadlock: progressive politics, in its desire to engender greater economic equality, inevitably destroys the existence of the working class, leading to the expansion of a reactionary lower-middle class bent on destroying progressive politics. The solution, then, isn’t populism, as Frank prescribes, but something that allows us to think of a more radical rupture with this kind of circuitous political death-grip.