WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS?
How Conservatives Won The Heart Of America
Jonny read a book...
As much as I hate blogs, I need to get this part out of the way up front. What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America made me feel dumb. Not dumb like some of you familiar with the premise of the book might be thinking (that I went along with the culture war politics of the last two decades and as a liberal Democrat turned my back on the working class). No, I feel dumb because I should have written this book. Or a book very similar to it, seeing how I've only been to Kansas once, and Caney, Kansas at that (where the streets are lined with... bricks). But for years and years I have been trying to articulate the theme of author Thomas Frank's impressively well-written call to arms; wealthy, cruel Republicans play off the fear and ignorance of the poor and uneducated in order to get themselves (the moneyed elite) lower taxes, deregulation, lax environmental regulations and increased corporate welfare. I've been too busy jacking off--or whatever the hell it is I do--to even spend a few hours trying to cess out a more well-formed and articulate argument. It all just makes me more and more aware of my morality and rapidly approaching demise, and my lack of a significant legacy. Luckily for us, instead of having to think about my pathetic existential crisis, you can purchase/check out Frank's Kansas book and learn for yourself just how fucked up America is. And don't kid yourself; this country is really fucked up.
Here's the basic premise of Frank's book: In Kansas (and really the rest of the country) religious conservatives have overtaken the Republican Party at the grassroots level. Having been abandoned by the Democratic Party during the sixties in favor of Rainbow Coalition, urban cultural politics, these rep-Cons (Frank's term for conservative, working-class, bible-loving former Democrats that now vote Republican) stewed in their own religious fervor--which apparently is especially feverous in Kansas and has been since the state's radical founding--until they became a massive Jesus-infused political force and began chucking rep-Mods (Moderate, socially liberal, old school Republicans) out of office. And here's the rub. The rep-Cons, for a variety of reasons, fully support the rep-Mods economic ideas (ideals), even though that way of thinking, economically speaking, is analogous to a slave supporting slavery. As Frank puts it, "By separating class from economics, [those leading the cultural backlash] have built a Republican friendly alternative for the disgruntled blue-collar American." This of course is the only way that a man like George W. Bush, whose father is not only practically a billionaire, but a man who was a congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, Chairman of the Republican Party, Ambassador to China, Director of the CIA, Vice President for eight years and the God damn President for 4, appeals to many as a Washington outsider. To me and you, it is incredible! W was in Skull & Bones!!! But somehow, to the denizens of the "red states," Bush Jr. is one of them. It is insane.
Frank claims, and I agree, that people have become so blinded by single-issues (like abortion or gun-rights) that they hurt themselves by trying to follow their conscience. Worse than that, they hurt their children as well as others from their same social-strata. Here's what's going on. There are certain "values" issues very near and very dear to the hearts of rep-Cons. Mentioned again and again in Kansas are abortion, evolution being taught in the classroom, prayer in school and gay marriage. Now, here's the thing. All of those are really Supreme Court issues (fine, not so much evolution, but hang on) and so the nut job, Jesus lovin' political hacks (Senator Sam Brownback anyone?) and novices that Kansas is sending to Washington can't actually get rid of abortion. They can't get prayer into public schools. They can't actually ban gay marriage. And they can't legislate away evolution. But, what they can do, and what they do do, is to give huge tax breaks to the already wealthy, destroy the farm subsidies that have kept family farms in Kansas out of the hands of giant, corporate mega-farms for the last half-century, deregulate every industry including the once dominant aircraft industry in Wichita so much so that half of the city's well-paid, unionized Boeing employees were laid off between 1999-2002 (Boeing is the largest private employer in Kansas), and ship the rest of the jobs overseas or get underpaid migrant labor to fill the positions. And this is what they do to the people who elected them! Imagine what they do to enemies...
Again, en masse, the working poor of Kansas are electing politicians that make their lives worse. And the people are doing it gleefully, out of their own free will. So they think. Frank ends the book with this sobering and well-put idea, "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 else on the planet." Most notably he points out, the culture that they hate so much, is free-market driven. Britney Spears sells only because of the market, not because some Jew professor at Harvard thought it would piss off people in Kansas City and Topeka. They just don't see that connection.
Frank calls this marriage of business and worker (or "the robbers and the robbed") "the French Revolution in reverse." The larger term for this insanity is "the backlash," the line of thinking ushered in by Reagan and his nauseating "Reagan Democrats" (OK, fine, really it was Barry Goldwater, but Reagan just picked up his torch and ran with it). Angry white men, upset over a culture that has passed them by (and this has to do with the Democratic Party essentially forfeiting its working-class base) and everywhere seeing signs of "latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, bi-coastal sushi eaters" ruining their way of life and undermining their middle, or "real," American "values." Frank refers to this never-ending string of complaints as the plen-T-plaint.
Everything seems to piss conservatives off. And they react by documenting and cataloging their disgust. The result is what we will call the plen-T-plaint, a curious amassing of petty, unrelated beefs with the world. Its purpose is not really to evaluate the hated liberal culture that surrounds us; the plen-T-plaint is a horizontal rather than vertical mode of criticism, aiming instead to infuriate us with dozens, hundreds, thousands of stories of the many tiny ways the world around us assaults family values, uses obscenities, disrespects parents[...] It offers no resolution, simply reminding us that we can never win. The plen-T-plaint is the rhetorical device that makes Bill O'Reilly's TV show a hit, as he gets indignant one day about the Insane Clown Posse and gets indignant the next about the Man-Boy Love Association [NAMBLA].
So, now you got all these whiney, bitchy dudes who can't stand the fact that their daughter's jeans ride so low, and they blame Bill Clinton and his friends for it and they vote Republican, and the newly elected politician then drafts legislation that takes away the voter's overtime pay and cuts deep into his healthcare. Now, as Frank says, "the backlash seems so improbable and so self-contradictory that liberal observers often have trouble believing it is actually happening... these two groups--business and blue-collar--should be at each other's throats." But, savvy rightwing think tanks have so totally co-opted and honestly stolen the language needed for this type of class-warfare debate to take place, that discourse is not only difficult, it is non-existent. Instead, "liberal elites" are painted as boogey men who do everything in their power to rob and destroy the American heartland. So, these people vote "Republican in order to get even with Wall Street." Yes friends, it is bizarro-land. Another quote from Frank re-sums the main theme of the book and does it beautifully, if not tragically. I also want to stress that I think the following is one of the very most important ideas being discussed in 2004.
But on closer inspection the country seems more like a panorama of madness and delusion worthy of Hieronymous Bosch: of sturdy blue-collar patriots reciting the Pledge while they strangle their own life chances; of small farmers proudly voting themselves off the land; of devoted family men carefully seeing to it that their children will never be able to afford college or proper health care; of working-class guys in Midwestern cities cheering as they deliver up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life, will transform their region into a "rust belt," will strike people like them blows from which they will never recover.
What's the Matter with Kansas is an excellent book and a surprisingly fast read considering how much info and how many ideas Frank manages to cram into its 250 pages. There are two main beefs I have with it, but both of them are omissions, rather than errors or incorrect statements/modes of thought/analysis. For the most part, Frank is dead on. My first complaint would be how inherently anti-Capitalist this brand of church and state politics is, this "backlash." Yes, I said anti-Capitalist. Anti-Adam Smith, at any rate, a figure that I'm sure most mod-Reps have masturbated to at one point or another. See, Smith felt that the best form of Capitalism was one where everyone worked for his or her own best interests. It must be stressed that Smith meant the people's own best economic interests, not "values," or "What Would Jesus Do," or any of that non class-struggle horseshit. I'll quote Smith a bit from his The Wealth of Nations:
Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society...
He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.
And look! The above is even where the whole laissez-faire (invisible hand), zero regulation, state's rights, small government crap took off from. And this is what Red state people swear allegiance to (by the by, one really cool thing Frank does is to debunk the whole "Red state, Blue state" myth. He quotes the hideously anit-intellectual David Brooks as saying that Red staters, "know what soy beans look like when they are growing in a field." Besides the absurdness of that comment, Frank points out that Brooks fails to mention that the three biggest soy bean producing states were all Gore-voting Blues in the 2000 election, Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota.) Again, though, Smith was talking about the invisible hand of a government that sets up environmental regulations, anti-trust laws, work week limits, overtime wages, sick and family leave, establishing strong schools, etc. Not the invisible hand of God, which is how the plen-T-plaint folks see it. So, what I am saying, is that Frank should have lambasted all these wrong-thinkers for being un-capitalistic, un-American, really (of course I know "un-American" is an empty phrase that means as much as "un-Czech," but I'm hoping that Frank was aiming his book at the heathen, not the converted). Of course, it would be hard to convince a whole bunch of folks who have never read Adam Smith, that by working against their own best economic interests they are hurting the country. Hence, the outrageously high price of ignorance. I feel Frank should have talked more about this.
My other complaint is as follows: Frank introduces us to Tim Golba, a factory worker on the bottling line of a Pepsi bottling plant; a self-described, "little old blue-collar worker." But this blue-collar worker has managed to turn Kansas from one of the more liberal leaning rep-Mod states during the early 90s to the third most rep-Con state in the union (behind "Big Oil" Alaska and Utah) today. Why did he do it? Turns out that Golba is really upset about abortion. It is a major sin. God hates abortion. Golba profited none from all his hard work, save for knowing that he has made God really happy; he has stood by the Lord's principles. So, once again, God is hurting people. As Frank so softly phrases it;
Ignoring one's economic self-interest may seem like a suicidal move to you and me, but viewed a different way it is an act of noble self-denial; a sacrifice for a holier cause.
But what Frank never comes out and says that it is God, the very belief in this imaginary being who supposedly created the earth and the heavens and love and the universe and puppies and yet is totally fixated on how many times a day you jack off, this blind-belief is what is wreaking havoc in our country. Not because the wall between church and state will actually every be torn down, but because crafty multi-millionaires are fomenting the perceived grievances of plen-T-plaint (a dorky word, but it works) subscribers, all the while making sure the haves have much more, and leaving the have-nots clutching their bibles, their guns and their dicks. Plus, probably a pink slip as the factory they worked in for a good, solid, union wage gets packed up and moved south of the border. Frank, however, never goes this extra step, content to just leave us with a yarn about them whacky Kansans and their crazy beliefs (like Pope Michael!). Again, I maintain the backlash and everything that comes along with it is all "God's" fault. I blame "Jesus," too. You should read the book.
