"That is, even as [Thomas] Frank explains compellingly how the rich and powerful have exploited the disappointment and frustration of working- and middle-class America, this explanation hews to a model of objective interests on one side and ideological obfuscation and manipulation on the other. Thus it resurrects a certain political hopefulness through the worn figure of 'false consciousness' and eschews the more troubling possibility of an abject, unemancipatory, and anti-egalitarian subjective orientation amongst a significant swathe of the American populace." - Wendy Brown, "American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism and De-Democratization"
isn't it even worse than this though? isn't the real issue that the "objective interests" of the white, suburban working class have been produced in the context of a perceived threat to the racial mode of accumulation that has delivered modest but real material gains to white workers on the basis of their whiteness? if, as hall says, in racially stratified social formations "race is the modality through which class is lived," then perhaps "kansans" (a metonym for this white suburban voting bloc) are being eerily consistent with their objective interests and voting to maintain the material basis of white supremacy--rhetorically filtered through "American values." this would mean collapsing our base and superstructure model and seeing the extraction of surplus value as always both economic--via the labor process--and extra-economic (in perry anderson's terms) or political--via the structuring of the sociospatial division of labor along racial lines.