American historian and journalist Thomas Frank (Kansas City, EE.UU, 1965) is a magnificent book published in Harper’s Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and Le Monde Diplomatique. The nine most outstanding books he has written are translated into Spanish, which we know, the X-ray of the counter-culture “The Conquest of the ‘cool’, “Poor Magnates” and “What about Kansas? How the ultra-conservatives conquered the heart of EE.UU”.

The latter has recently been published in French (“Pourquoi les pauvres votent à droite”), with the foreword of the director of Le Monde Diplomatique, Serge Halimi. “Thomas Frank,” he says at the beginning, analyzes what happened in Kansas, his hometown. For he has seen the dream of the conservatives come true: a part of the working class has given them the political power to destroy the protection system that the workers have previously achieved.” Halimi explains that what Frank described in Kansas is also applicable in France – and we can add it in Spain.

Frank mentioned, of course, religious or cultural explanations that may lead to divisions within a social group: abortion, marriage of homosexuals, prayer in schools, death penalty, freedom to have weapons, pornography, minorities, immigration... 

But there is something else: the economic insecurity caused by the new capitalism has led many of the proletarians and middle classes to concentrate security elsewhere, in the field of morality. Workers and employees will vote for Republicans because they have managed to skilfully put their conservatism in the field of values.

"By speculating with pension funds, at the same time, one can be against abortion. The right then wins in two fields, that of tradition and liberal,” says Halimi. The first achievements of the workers will be presented as the obsolescence of a turbulent era, which allows fraud, laziness and the living of aid.

The first component, that of religious values, is not the peculiarity of the United States. What are we going to be told, whether Spanish volunteers or forced, if not every fifteen days a cardinal who threatens us again with the civil war? But in France, where secularity is a symbol, it has also materialised.

Nicolas Sarkozy says in 2004 in his book “La République, les religions, l’espérance”: “In recent years too much importance has been given to sociology issues, valuing too little religion, spirit (...) Catechesis has given moral meaning to many generations. Religion was taught even in unfaithful families. Values that gave balance to society.”

Eating gathered in tears of laughter

The interference of Kansas and American society in general occurred in the crisis of the late 1960s. Until then, collective values and hope for the State, which finally surpassed the crisis of 1929, at the II National Congress of Social Economy. In the World War, they defeated Nazism, they showed the teeth to communism all over the world -- they froze. Yankee products found problems of international competition, jobs were moving away, serious incidents occurred in the streets of the neighborhoods... and insecurity became an obsession.

From 36 years of age between 1969 and 2005, the U.S. Right has been in power 24 times. It also controls the other State mechanisms. But it is never enough, and it has managed to pass its victimizing speech among many citizens: listening to the right seems to have left in power and they in opposition.

George W. Bush, the son of the President of the United States and the grandson of a senator, complained that he despised the establishment of New York. Sarkozy, who at the age of 29 has begun to be mayor of one of the richest cities in France and has held all the seats in the Republic, will tell the French poor that the elite is against it.

Halimi says: “It uses the old recipe on the right: not to talk about economic interests – well-determined, because it defends a few – it has to talk about values, culture and attitudes: order, authority, work, merit, morality, family”.

Who jeopardizes order, authority, work, merit, morality and family? That May 1968. Sarkozy continued: “They proclaimed that everything was free, that power had ended, that fine education, refined respect, that there was no longer anything big, nothing sacred, nothing admirable, no rules, no bans … The crisis of work is first and foremost a moral crisis, in which it has a great responsibility in May 68.”

But not everything is ideology. Profound sociological and anthropological changes have taken place, as in the United States, in Europe. The groups of workers have weakened, as the whole has been weakened, more individualistic calculations have begun to be made about the future of each. We want everyone to recognise the value of their work so that their merits are recognised. Although he does the black job, he is not paid properly.

The lives of many workers are more and more like those of the unemployed and immigrants. And they rush. “They want the right to choose school or place of residence, they don’t want to suffer worse (...). Seeing the privileges of the rich so far, they don't even dream of them. The line of the economic gap is not so much between the rich and the poor or the capitalists and the workers, it is more between the employees and those who live from subsidies. Whites and minorities, workers and scammers.”

The right has sold very well the story of the family living in the bibalapep of subsidies. Ronald Reagan was the inventor of the housewife who accumulated $150,000 a year in grants. Jacques Chirac took the state EUR 7,500 from the sloth of the paternal family, which was seriously ill. Sarkozy, in applause, warned in 2006: “To those who want to live from the work of others (…) who want everything without doing anything, I tell them that they are not obliged to live in our land.” Out of here, those ducks! Laziness, social aid and immigration, the cocktail also works in the Basque Country.

And it works, Halimi recalls, because the anti-intellectualism of simple people has its roots: globalization has treated better than many other users of the symbols: writers, lawyers, architects, bankers, journalists. “When the latter begin to give lessons of openness, tolerance, ecology, virtue, the pot bursts.” Against those of us who work with our heads.