| WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America Thomas Frank New York: Metropolitan Books, June 2004 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-8050-7339-3 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-8050-7339-6 | 306pp. | HC | $24.00 | |
There's a scene in Divorce American Style where Dick van Dyke's character, in a meeting with his soon-to-be-ex-wife and her lawyer, angrily protests the unfair division of property. He ends with, "The proceeds from our uranium mine" (shocking his wife and her lawyer) "to her, and the shaft to me." Thomas Frank displays a similar outrage in What's the Matter with Kansas? — except that his outrage comes not from any perceived victimization of himself, but from the systematic victimization of the ordinary people of his home state by the Republican Party and their corporate sponsors by inciting a movement he calls the Great Backlash.
"This is vexing for observers, and one might expect it to vex the movement's true believers even more. Their grandstanding leaders never deliver, their fury mounts and mounts, and nevertheless they turn out every two years to return their right-wing heroes to office for a second, a third, a twentieth try. The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity cutbacks. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining." – Page 7 |
Thomas Frank spent his childhood in Mission Hills, a small suburb of Kansas City. He canvassed his home state in the course of writing this book, finding economic devastation all over — except for a few wealthy enclaves like Mission Hills, now the domicile of elites like William Esrey. All of this has become familiar since the Reagan administration, which ushered in the "New Economy" — an age of deregulation in the service of free-market fundamentalism. I should say "has become familiar again" because the same sort of thing happened in the Gilded Age. So the growth of monopolies, the stagnation of wages, the offshoring of jobs, the dismantling of labor unions,1 the erosion of pensions; the rampant financial speculation: all of it was predictable and the federal government should have known it was predictable and should have taken action to curb the excesses.
But as Frank shows us here, Kansas politicians toed the corporation line, all the while keeping up a song and dance about the sanctity of God and the depravity of secular culture, with special reference to stem cells and abortion. Frank describes this in Chapter 3, mentioning in particular Sam Brownback, Jim Ryun, and Todd Tiahrt. I'll let the sketch of Tiahrt in the Wichita Eagle, quoted by Frank on page 73, stand in for portraits of all three men: "He's one of the new style of Republican conservatives. His social views are what most people talk about. But his thinking on economics is what company officials are more interested in. Tiahrt is stridently pro-business, deeply suspicious of government, convinced Big Brother is lurking behind volumes and volumes of government regulations."
Here's Thomas Frank's take on some of the planks from the state Republican Party platform for that year.
– Pages 75-76 |
I believe no more needs to be said.
Frank goes on in that vein, covering the many glittering facets of this Kansas "New Economy" gem: the merger mania; the bidding war Boeing sparked over where to build its new passenger jet; the steady stream of corporate-coddling state legislation. He covers the sociocultural facet as well: the strident right-wing revolt against atheism and evolution and anyone daring to declare themselves pro-choice. He has documented the progress of this train as it rolls on, farther and farther from Clue Town, through several more books. Those books are all worth reading. But What's the Matter with Kansas? is his magnum opus, the rock on which his reputation rests. Assiduously researched, it documents how the state's burgeoning conservative backlash impelled its economic decline. His work is thoroughly end-noted; the book is thoroughly indexed. I won't call it a keeper because it is too specialized; but it earns top marks and is a must-read, even today — because the malady it describes has not faded.
As I've mentioned before, one thing that makes it hard for me to read Frank's books is the sheer volume of disdain they heap on Republican heads. It is well-deserved, no question, but he piles it on too thick. Still, I don't regard this as a major defect, because the disdain is so richly deserved — and because what was true in 2004 is even more true in 2019: Republicans are never loath to mock or vilify members of the other tribe, with or without any rational basis for doing so. They need no justification; or rather, crushing their enemies is all the justification they need. It also remains true that "turnabout is fair play."2 That is even more vital fifteen years further into the onslaught of climate change, when many Republicans still haven't figured out that it's real and pressing — as real and pressing as the onslaught of rampant deregulation and privatization.3
In his Epilogue, Frank casts his memory back to the Kansas his father knew: a place where Wichita machinists celebrated completing their thousandth B-29, where streetcars connected working-class neighborhoods of Kansas City, and where swing bands like those of Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman highlighted the Pla-More ballroom.4 It was a different era; for all that cursed it, unpredictable storms and measles and polio and a world war and Josef Stalin and Joe McCarthy and Father Coughlin and racial segregation and more, ordinary people then were more aware of the larger world, more in charge of their lives. He waxes nostalgic. Then, contemplating Kansans' cluelessness, he falls into a funk."As you cast your eyes back over this vanished Midwest, this landscape of lost brotherhood and forgotten pride, you can't help but wonder how much farther it's all going to go. How many of those old, warm associations are we willing to dissolve? How much more of the "garden of the world" will we abandon to sterility and decay? "My guess is, quite a bit. The fever-dream of martyrdom that Kansas follows today has every bit as much power as John Brown's dream of justice and human fraternity. And even if the state must sacrifice it all—its cities and its industry, its farms and its small towns, all its thoughts and all its doings—the brilliance of the mirage will not fade. Kansas is ready to lead us singing into the apocalypse. It invites us all to join in, to lay down our lives so that others might cash out at the top; to renounce forever our middle-class prosperity in pursuit of a crimson fantasy of middle-American righteousness." – Pages 250-251 |
I can sympathize with Thomas Frank's nostalgia trip; nostalgia has its place. But he should not (and, I trust, in truth did not) resign himself to the grim prospect of inevitable decline. It seems today, as no doubt it did in 2004, that many people are sleepwalking their way along, living day to day, working paycheck to paycheck, failing to see what's being done to them because at least a part of their minds is mired in a mirage promoted by an elite class they barely understand.
"American conservatism depends for its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making certain mental connections about the world, connections that until recently were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet. For example, the connection between mass culture, most of which conservatives hate, and laissez-faire capitalism, which they adore without reservation. Or between the small towns they profess to love and the market forces that are grinding those small towns back into the red-state dust—which forces they praise in the most exalted terms."" – Page 248 |
So I'll take the liberty once again of dipping into popular culture with a reference to a now obscure work of fiction depicting ordinary people casting off the yoke of an immensely wealthy and powerful elite.
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