What’s the Matter with Kansas?
Thomas Frank
Metropolitan Books. 320 pages, $24.
FOR THE MILLIONS of Americans, including most gays and lesbians, who awoke on November 3, 2004, aghast to find maps of the United States awash in Bush Red, Thomas Frank offers a witty yet incisive study of how conservatives swept the American heartland. What’s the Matter with Kansas? takes its name from a Republican essayists’ critique of the radical populism prevalent in the Great Plains states in the 1890’s. At the time, hordes of struggling farmers, led by Nebraska Democrat William Jennings Bryan, were rising against the strict monetarist policies of the capitalist elite of the Northeast, famously decried by Bryan in 1896 as a “Cross of Gold.”
Frank finds much in the economic fortunes of present-day Kansas that the 19th-century populists would recognize. Rural Kansas, devoid of opportunity, lost population between 1980 and 2000, some counties by as much as 25 percent, as the number of small, independent farmers dwindled. Meanwhile, unionized Wichita has seen its manufacturing base and concomitant blue collar prosperity wither due to overseas competition. New jobs in the fast-growing meat-packing industry offer little more than minimum wage and have spawned trailer-park cities in western Kansas. On the other hand, affluent Johnson County, which includes suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri, has seen a splashy reemergence of conspicuous consumption, as Kansans at the top of the food chain live in a style evocative of the Gilded Age. Yet Frank finds a stark disconnect in the political response of Kansans at the lower end of the economic spectrum to their real-world troubles. Instead of seeking government action to ameliorate harsher aspects of the free enterprise system, less well-off Kansans march lockstep in support of conservative policies like aggressive tax-cutting, ending farm subsidies, and free trade. Indeed, less affluent Kansans rival the state’s corporate elites in their zeal for conservative economics of the sort that have left so many of them disadvantaged. As Frank wryly puts it, “All that Kansas asks today is a little help nailing itself to that cross of gold.” Frank sees the explanation for this epidemic of false consciousness in the explosion of the culture wars, which have captured the imagination of millions in the heartland. The conceit, peddled energetically by talk-show commentators and right-wing pundits, is that they—the hardworking, God-fearing people who live disproportionately in the “red states”—are the authentically American folk, whose values and beliefs are being mocked and trampled by powerful, arrogant elites on the two coasts. This perceived degradation of the norms of decent, authentic Americans has sparked a grassroots movement that Frank describes as a “backlash.” Social conservatives have come to believe that their most cherished institutions—marriage, family, and religion—are under attack from liberal snobs in places like New York and Hollywood. Despite energetic efforts to combat liberal cultural influence, and the fact that they seem to hold all the political cards, social conservatives feel that they’ve accomplished little in their campaign to transform national life. Frank sees the culture wars as a diversionary exercise in political theatre, highly charged but largely unsuited to political resolution. Right-wingers are left to shake their fists impotently at the increasing visibility and acceptance of gays and lesbians, the prevalence of sex and violence in the media, teaching of evolution in the schools, and liberal abortion rights. A force more powerful than the grassroots conservative movement is the corporate interest in maximizing profits, which puts sex and violence on TV because that’s what sells. Working-class right-wingers expend their energies on symbolic cultural causes while corporate interests rule national economic life largely unfettered. Frank stresses the inconsequentiality of the culture wars to an extent a gay man or lesbian could never accept. To him, such fights as gay marriage and the debate over abortion are mostly sideshows serving to distract from economic realities. Abortion rights, we are assured, are safely protected by a solid majority on the Supreme Court, out of political reach. And real encroachment on gay and lesbian rights could never happen, since gays and lesbians are a trendy vanguard of the consumer class upon which corporate America depends for its burgeoning profits. Such conclusions have not been tested in the aftermath of the watershed conservative triumph in the 2004 national elections. Consider that the right-wing push for conservative judges, particularly on the Supreme Court, bolstered by a comfortable Senate majority, may yet initiate a sea change in constitutional adjudication. With two or more Antonin Scalia partisans on the high court, choice over abortion might just succumb to years of determined agitation from conservative organizations. Some states like Massachusetts and California will no doubt preserve legalized abortions in that eventuality, but choice would probably disappear in the heartland. And no observer of November 2’s outcome can miss the fact that the culture wars are determining issues of vital concern to gays and lesbians. Eleven states amended their constitutions to ban gay marriage, and the push for a federal anti-marriage amendment received fresh impetus from the election results. While Will & Grace may continue to entertain viewers (including, it is said, lots of Republican women), gays and lesbians can still be denied the basic legal protections that marriage offers. And, of course, in a Kansas stained deep red after the election, job and housing discrimination against gays and lesbians is still legal and will probably remain so for some time to come. From where gay and lesbian Americans are situated, it appears that right-wing culture warriors are firing real bullets, and their strength is on the rise. Frank overreaches his fine analytical work when he pooh-poohs the relevance of the culture wars. Social conservatism might offer but cold comfort to displaced manufacturing workers, but the formula of “bread and circuses” has been long and effectively employed to tamp down the discontented—to the utter misfortune of persecuted minorities.
