Empire Notes

“What’s the Matter with Kansas,” the latest book by Thomas Franks, editor of the Baffler, is making waves. Joining the legion of liberal/left books on the New York Times bestseller list, it is also being reviewed across the country.

Described as everything from a brilliant analysis of the political culture of the country to a peevish, hate-filled Ann Coulteresque attack on evangelical Christians, the book is none of these things.

It is, as the title suggests, a description of the political landscape of Kansas and how it has changed over the past few decades. The reason it’s such big news, however, is the framing. In an introductory section called “What’s the matter with America,” he poses the central problem that motivates him: why do the poor and the working class so often vote for the party of their class enemies – the Republicans. The poorest county in the country is in Kansas, with a per capita income about $16,000, and yet it voted for George W. Bush by a margin of about 80-20.

The main explanation in Kansas is simple – cultural identification. The poor, especially those who are evangelical Christians, focus on “values” to the exclusion of their own direct material concerns. Those values encompass everything from being anti-abortion to opposing “filth” on TV and in the movies to promoting supposedly old-fashioned notions of individual accountability – that notion of accountability being for the white Christians of Kansas, just as it is for Bill Cosby, all about the poor pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and about sexual behavior and not about the elite taking responsibility for corporate depredations.

Franks, a native Kansan, gives a sympathetic account of the class divides in Kansas and how they have shaped its political evolution. An inveterately Republican state since the days of John Brown, Kansas has seen that play out as a battle between the moderate Rockefeller Republicans who care only about lowering capital gains taxes and represent the upper economic strata and the conservative Republicans who believe God has called not only for lowering capital gains taxes but also for national policing of what happens in people’s bedrooms. The conservatives not only claim to represent the poor in Kansas, they draw politicians and activists from their ranks.

With appropriate modifications, this political evolution has been the story of much of the country over the past 20 years. And there’s a lot to say about why. Although Franks explicitly discounts this in the case of Kansas, nationally the single most important factor is race. Just as Andrew Johnson and legions of Confederate mythologists rewrote the history of slavery to make it an alliance between rich white planters and of all people their slaves against the honest, hard-working poor whites, the legacy of the civil rights movement is once again an identification of the elite, not as people who exploit all of the rest of us, but as people who defend shiftless minorities against hardworking whites.

To me, the most interesting lesson of the book, and one that is also replicated nationwide is this: the radical right wing in Kansas has grown to dominate politics there by adopting a host of techniques and organizing ideologies all of which originated with the left. There is the rhetoric of victimization, of speaking for the oppressed but of being a dispossessed minority. There is the constant language of class polarization, a language liberals and parts of the left have largely abandoned. with all of this is a unifying anger that should be very familiar to those of us on the other side.

Most important, there are large numbers of people who, some of them dirt poor, have a sense of being lifetime dedicated parts of a larger movement. In the 1960’s, if you said, “I’m part of the Movement,” it was understood – anti-Vietnam War, pro-black-power, anti-systemic in a fundamental way. Now, there is no meaning to such a locution if you’re on the left, which the exception of small groups. People’s time and attention have fragmented between different issues, between any two of which there are Chinese walls being constantly erected. At the same time, for the mainstream of the liberal left, it’s no longer about a vision of how things can be different, just about piecemeal changes in a bad world.

The right, on the other hand, hosts a growing mass movement that more and more clearly understands that it has a world to win.