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"What's the Matter With Kansas?" by Thomas
Frank. Metropolitan Press, 2004, 306 pages.
Guns, God, and Gays in the
Heartland by Bruce Ramsey
"What's the Matter with Kansas?" is the hot book for
progressives. Its author, Thomas Frank, grew up in the entrepreneurial culture of
a Kansas City suburb in the 1970s, imbibing "laissez-faire thought." But at the
state university he was confronted with the "oozing insincerity" of the College
Republicans and "finally learned about social class." He escaped to Chicago,
founded The Baffler and wrote a book called "One Market Under God."
| | Bruce
Ramsey is a journalist living in Seattle. |
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Say this for him: he is a fine writer. He has done his legwork, knows what he
wants to say, and says it clearly. And he is not nasty to his opponents.
In this book he revisits Kansas and finds it "burning on a free-market pyre," its
farmlands depopulated, its Main Streets sacked by Wal-Mart, its politics infected
with radicalism. This radicalism is as religious as that of William Jennings
Bryan, but completely inverted. In the 1890s when people were angry, they went
left; now they go right. Frank can't fathom their logic. The farmers and
the lower middle class ought to be supporting unions, liberals, intellectuals,
and the government, he believes, because these are their friends. Instead, their
political fascinations are abortion, guns, and gays, none of which they can do
anything about by changing state or local government. But they have swept new
people into power, people with an economic agenda to cut taxes. In sum, Frank
writes, "Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends." There are
some exaggerations here. First, Frank exaggerates how many fetters have been
removed from today's capitalism, and blames deregulation for everything from
outsourcing to Wal-Mart. He writes as if the decline of unions is mainly the
result of attacks by employers rather than a 50-year shrinkage of unionized
companies. He says the welfare state has been "smashed," which is surely an
exaggeration in a country in which food stamps are packaged as debit cards and a
large percentage of births are paid for by Medicaid. |
| Someone could write a
mirror-opposite book called, "What's Wrong with Seattle?" If people in Kansas
should be leftists, people in Seattle should be free-marketeers — and
they're not. |
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I don't know Kansas. I live in the state of Washington, and many of the same
things have happened here. In 2003 I drove through the town of Colfax, a
once-important center of the eastern Washington wheat country. There was a
storefront on the main street offering a used PC for $100, and a place next door
occupied by the Department of Social and Health Services. Towns like Colfax have
not prospered in the market. But the proportion of Americans working on farms has
been shrinking for 150 years. What would government do about it? Subsidize it
more? Europe has done that, and not with happy results. Its farm policy is a
heavy burden on taxpayers, and irritates its foreign relations. As with
similar towns in Kansas, Colfax used to support Democrats: it was in Rep. Tom
Foley's district. Foley was the Democratic Speaker of the House who lost his seat
in 1994. Now, though Washington is a "blue" state, its eastern part is "red," and
the two congressional seats east of the Cascades are in the safe hands of
conservatives. The Republicans have become the rural party, and the Democrats the
urban party — which has made the Democrats impregnable in King County
(Seattle), with the state's highest per-capita incomes, and has wiped them out in
the poor counties. As in Kansas, many of the Republican voters in my state
care more about social issues of the sort the state can do little about, and vote
for candidates who, once in office, cut taxes. Is there a disconnect? I wouldn't
deny it. But surely there is as much on the other side. Every two years in my
left-wing district, candidates say they're saving abortion rights from imminent
destruction. They apply a "pro-choice" litmus test to candidates for governor,
state legislator, county council, and even the commissioner of public lands, an
official whose main concern is forestry. In the 2004 election the progressives
leaped onto the issue of stem cells. They might not have known a stem cell from a
paramecium, but they got the politics of it instantly: it was a way to show
Republicans as rubes. In my state, the Democrats captured the legislature
and (after a hand recount) the governor's office. And what are they itching to
do? Save abortion? Why, no. Save government programs by raising taxes.
| Frank writes as if the
disconnect between money and politics is weird, but it's not. Strong politics is
about belief. |
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"Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends." Frank's description
applies to both sides. Someone could write a mirror-opposite book called, "What's
Wrong with Seattle?" — a city that has achieved so much in the free market,
and is the home of Microsoft, Starbucks, and Amazon.com, yet elects a congressman
who supports socialized medical insurance. If people in Kansas should be
leftists, people in Seattle should be free-marketeers — and they're not.
And yet Frank's portrait of Kansas conservatives is often brilliant. One
of the high points of the book is his interview of Tim Golba, the organizer of
Kansans for Life. Frank is impressed that this man of power is a mere line worker
in a soda-pop plant. Frank visits him in his little house, unscreened by trees,
baking in the prairie sun, far from the leafy neighborhoods of the bourgeoisie.
Apparently Golba is not conducting his crusade out of an economic interest.
"Ignoring one's economic self-interest may seem like a suicidal move to you and
me, but viewed in a different way it is an act of noble self-denial," Frank
writes. "This is a man who has turned his back on the comforts of our
civilization — who defies the men in great palaces. He smites their
candidates; he wastes their money; he ends their careers." Later he
interviews Kay O'Connor, a state senator from Olathe, who champions tax relief
and says, "Robin Hood was a thief." The woman is not rich; her husband is a
monitor technician at a hospital. Frank writes as if the disconnect
between money and politics is weird, but it's not. Strong politics is about
belief. The socialist-progressive movement in America, which Frank wishes would
return, had a hard core of belief. So does Frank. Many on the Left assume
that while they are motivated by a belief in fairness and justice, the Right is
motivated by money. The economic beliefs of the Right are such obvious horse
manure — all this stuff about the "free market" — that the real
motivation has to be something else. Obviously, it's greed. Frank, to his credit,
does not use the word, but he keeps expecting to find the reality. He thinks of
the businessmen who are in favor of low taxes (because they don't want to pay
them) as the real Right, the Right that knows what it is doing. But people in
politics have many other motives than money-making; to say of Kay O'Connor that
"her thoughts on the issues seem all to have been drawn from the playbook of the
nineteenth-century Vanderbilts and Fricks" misses the point, and thus loses any
chance of tracing the real connection between robber-baron capitalists in the big
city and congressional housewives in Topeka.
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