from What's the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank
6 - The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate. Values may "matter most" to voters, but they always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won. This is a basic earmark of the phenomenon, absolutely consistent across its decades-long history. Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act. Even the greatest culture warrior of them all was a notorious cop-out once it came time to deliver. "Reagan made himself the champion of 'traditional values,' but there is no evidence he regarded their restoration as a high priority," wrote Christopher Lasch, one of the most astute analysts of the backlash sensibility. "What he really cared about
7 - was the revival of the unregulated capitalism of the twenties: the repeal of the New Deal."
This is vexing for observers, and one might expect it to vex the movements true believers even more. Their grandstanding leaders never deliver, their fury mounts and mounts, and nevertheless they turn out every tow 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 deindistrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat-packing. 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.
23 - "Rural America is pissed," a small-town Pennsylvania man told a reporter from Newsweek in 2001. Explaining why he and his neighbors voted for George Bush, he said: "These people are tired of moral decay.
24 - They're tired of everything being wonderful on Wall Street and terrible on Main Street." Let me repeat that: they're voting Republican in order to get even with Wall Street.
74 - So it is with Sam Brownback right down the line: a man of sterling public principle, he seems to take the side of corporate interests almost regardless of the issues at hand. This is true even when the corporate interests in question are industrieswhose products Brownback considers the source of all evil. Such, at least, was the case in 2003, when one of Brownback's Senate committees was called upon to consider the growing problem of monopoly ownership in radio since the industry's deregulation seven years previously. Brownback, of course, has made a career out of denouncing the culture industry for its vulgarity, its bad values, presumably for the damage it has done to America's soul. Taking this opportunity to rein it in should have been a no-brainer. After all, as the industry critic Robert McChesney points out, the link
75 - between media ownership, the drive for profit, and the media's insulting content should be obvious to anyone with ears to hear. "Vulgarity is linked to corporate control and highly concentrated, only semi-competitive markets," McChesney says. And for many conservatives, "the radio fight was the moment of truth. If people are seriously concerned about vulgarity, this was their chance to prove it." For that reason, McChesney notes, certain right-wing culture warriors were happy to join the fight against further relaxation of radio ownership rules. But Brownback was not one of them. Faced with a choice between protecting corporate profits and actually doing something about the open cultural sewer he has spent his career deploring, Brownback chose the former.
82 - Let me take you first to the tiny western Kansas
83 - town of Lucas, home to a remarkable sculpture garden illustrating that grandest of subjects, the condition of mankind. Constructed out of concrete by an old fellow named J.P. Dinsmoor, the "The Garden of Eden" mixes biblical stories with the unmistakeable political iconography of Populism: Here is Cain, having just slain Abel. There is "Labor Crucified" and surrounded by his tormentors--doctor, lawyer, preacher, and capitalist. Bigger animals eat smaller animals in an endless chain of exploitation and oppression.
[. . .] I noticed a sculpture of an octopus grasping at a map of the Americas, with one tentacle reaching menacingly across Panama. For a viewer of the early twentieth century, such a tableau would ahve been easily recognizable as a left-wing denunciation of the imperial ambitions of the trusts [. . .]
[. . .] That a regular guy like J.P. Dinsmoor would have opposed U.S. imperialism, well, that's simply unthinkable out here; everyone knows that such views are the affectations of latte-drinking rich kids at fancy colleges, while the average working man stands tall for firearm and flag.
114 - This sounds like a complicated manuever, but it should be quite familiar after all these years. We see it in its most ordinary, run-of-the-mill variety every time we hear a conservative pundit or politician deplore "class warfare"--meaning any talk about the failures of free-market capitalism--and then, seconds later, hear them rail against the "media elite" or the haughty, Volvo-driving "eastern establishment."
[. . .] The conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan even uses the straightforward term class war to describe the face-off between rich liberals and more humble Republicans. But it is a class war in which, as David Brooks puts it, there is "no class resentment or class consciousness." The paradox--a class divide in which class doesn't matter--is repeated virtually without fail through the "two Americas" literature [. . .]
118 - Apparently, there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer. Ann Coulter's case is instructive. A daughter of the creamy suburb of New Canaan, Connecticut, she grew up in what she describes as a happy right-wing family headed by a corporate lawyer who, in 1985, helped engineer a landmark union decertification (that is, the total destruction of a bargaining unit) for the greater glory of the Phelps Dodge mining interests. This coup was one of the earliest fruits of the anti-union policies of the Reagan administration, which over the years have done so much to shrink the power of organized labor and to rain down blessings on the inhabitants of New Canaan and their upper-bracket brethren across the nation.
Coulter was there at the union-busting creation [. . .] but she insists nonetheless that discussions of that aspect of social class are simply a figment of liberal propaganda. [. . .] In saying this, Coulter is not referring to the cold shoulder that Bill Clinton's New Democrats have turned to the labor movement; like most conservatives, she believes that Clinto was in fact a man of the radical left. Rather, she is trying to construct
119 - an entire system of class relations on the observation that the haughty hedonists of Hollywood are largely Democrats. Republicans, on the other hand, drink beer, go to church, and own guns; they are, ipso facto, the true representatives of the common man. Economics simply do not count in her world.
160 - Dwight Sutherland, Jr., the Kansas City brahmin [. . .], also uses the analytical framework of the left, but in a far more measured and thoughtful way, employing it to decipher the denatured Republicanism of his wealthy neighbors in Mission Hills. When I talk to him, he inveighs against "wedge issues," deploring the way abortion, gun control, and evolution have been used to manipulate voters. But he means this in precisely the opposite of the usual way. For Sutherland "wedge issues" aren't a Republican strategy to split off parts of the New Deal coalition, but a moderate and maybe even a Democratic strategy to keep conservatives in check, to split working-class conservatives from the upper-middle-class conservatives who ought to be their allies. "They cynically play these social issues to scare the soccer mommies with guns," Sutherland tell me, "scare the Jewish community with the bugaboo of the religious right, scare the suburban ladies that Planned Parenthood is going to be shut down, when there's no chance that any of these [conservative] people, even if it was their fondest desire, could overturn Roe v. Wade."
It's all sham battles and empty culture-war issues, distracting the rich from their real concerns. It is even "false consciousness." In using this Marxist term, the archconservative Sutherland is not referring to workers being tricked by some misguided fear of black people into ignoring their interests and voting Republican, but to wealthy people being tricked by some misguided fear of the religious right into ignoring their interests and voting Democratic. "A friend of mine who's a multimillionaire," he says, "told me in all seriousness that he couldn't vote for [George H.W.] Bush's reelection because Bush was less that committed to a woman's right to choose. Of course in '93 this guy's taxes go up, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he's screaming and
161 - yelling about Clinton and the Democrats, and I said, 'Yeah, but you made the symbolic choice and repudiated those nasty pro-lifers, and that's worth it in psychic income alone.'"
[. . .] All the contradictions come together in the person of Jack Cashill [. . .]
But above all else, Cashill is a class warrior, fond of telling stories from his own working-class childhood and heaping scorn on the precious affectations of Kansas City's Johnson County overlords. He derides Cupcake Land's cars and its clothes and its shrubbery and the names of its subdivisions and its compulsive fear of East Coast disapproval and its lemminglike tastes in consumer goods. And he does it well.
What's peculiar is that he does most of this bourgeoisie-baiting from his perch as the executive director of Ingram's, the local business magazine. Does this mean that Ingram's is a crusading business magazine, like Dwight Macdonald's Fortune, sniffing out local Enrons before they explode? On the contrary; it is in fact a run-of-the-mill booster sheet, offering "Forty Under Forty" lists and plans for how KC can position itself for this or that future windfall. Its most notable innovation is the aforemen-
162 - tioned annual feature, "The Power Elite," which is startling in its forthright sycophancy. The same Jack Cashill who loves to mock upper-middle-class etiquette usually writes it.
171 - O'Conner seems peculiarly given to dizzy ideas such as this one. Like many of the Cons, she gives the impression of intelligence, choosing and enunciating each word carefully, but she also seems oddly naive, like a person who has sat down and worked out the world's problems all on her own.
172 - The O'Conners are not wealthy people, by any standard. Her husband works as a monitor technician at a nearby hospital, and she went out of her way to impress upon me their lack of means. But her thoughts on the issues seem all to have been drawn from the playbook of the nineteenth-century Vanderbilts and Fricks.
175 - On the left it is common to hear descriptions of the backlash as a strictly top-down affair [. . .] What the Wichita Republicans have accomplished, though, should dispell this myth forever.
177 - With Democrats and Republicans having merged on free trade, the issues that remained were abortion and guns. And, of course, government itself.
178 - The corporate powers-that-be in Wichita, it seems, don't really mind a politician's God-talk or his Operation Rescue sensibilities if he will help them fight their great enemy, government. After all, as Kay O'Conner put it so well, the people on top know what they have to do to stay there, and in a pinch they can easily overlook the sweaty piery of the new Republican masses, the social conservatives who raise their voices in praise of Jesus but case their votes to exalt Caesar. Dwight Sutherland, for his part, knows the gulf can someday be bridged--just look at how Mission Hills turns out for the born-again George W. Bus--and Jack Cashill's day-to-day fieldwork among the "power elite" suggests he knows it as well. The Mods, for their part, will probably never give Tim Golba the keys to Leawood, and they will surely never toast John Altevogt, the raging Marat of the Kansas revolution, at the finest restaurants in Corporate Woods. But somehow, I think, they'll find it in their hears to take the tax cuts, thank you, and the deregulation and the helping hand in dealing with those troublesome labor unions.
188 - And the abolitionists themselves? Strictly blue-state: effete, Anglo-Saxon, tea-sipping, college-educated--the sort of people that David Brooks would mock for turning up their noses at NASCAR and whom Bill O'Reilly would razz for not understanding real life as it's lived by tough mugs on the street. Indeed, they were strongest in those states--Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York--and on those liberal college campuses--Oberlin, Grinnell, Amherst--that are routinely reviled by conservatives today for their speech codes and third-world sympathies. And while they were indeed religious people, the denominations to which abolitionists belonged were the mainline Protestant churches now pilloried by the right for not spreading the damnation around sufficiently: Unitarians, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Quakers.
226 - The Kansas conservatives, it seems to me, can be divided into two basic groups. One one side are the true believers, the average folk who have been driven into right-wing politics [. . .]
On the other side are the opportunists: professional politicians and lawyers and Harvard men who have discovered in the
227 - great right wing groundswell an easy shorcut to realizing their ambitions. Many of them once aspired to join--maybe even did join--the state's moderate Republican insider club. Rising up that way, however, would take years, maybe a lifetime, when by mouthing some easily memorized God-talk and changing their position on abortion--as Brownback and other leading Cons have done--they could instantly have a movement at their back [. . .]
239 - A while back the Wall Street Journal ran an essay about a place "where hatred trumps bread," where a manipulative ruling class has for decades exploited an impoverished poeple while simultaneously fostering in them a culture of victimization that steers this people's fury back persistently toward a shadowy, cosmopolitan Other. In this tragic land unassauageable cultural grievances are elevated inexplicably over solid material ones, and basic economic self-interest is eclipsed by juicy myths of national authenticity and righteousness wronged.
The essay was supposed to be a description of the Arab states and their conflict with Israel, but when I read it I thought immediately of dear old Kansas [. . .]
259 - Again and again, in the course of the electoral battle, I heard striking tales of this tragically inverted class consciousness: Of a cleaning lady who voted for Bush [over Kerry- JH] because she could never support a rich man for president.
7 - was the revival of the unregulated capitalism of the twenties: the repeal of the New Deal."
This is vexing for observers, and one might expect it to vex the movements true believers even more. Their grandstanding leaders never deliver, their fury mounts and mounts, and nevertheless they turn out every tow 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 deindistrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat-packing. 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.
23 - "Rural America is pissed," a small-town Pennsylvania man told a reporter from Newsweek in 2001. Explaining why he and his neighbors voted for George Bush, he said: "These people are tired of moral decay.
24 - They're tired of everything being wonderful on Wall Street and terrible on Main Street." Let me repeat that: they're voting Republican in order to get even with Wall Street.
74 - So it is with Sam Brownback right down the line: a man of sterling public principle, he seems to take the side of corporate interests almost regardless of the issues at hand. This is true even when the corporate interests in question are industrieswhose products Brownback considers the source of all evil. Such, at least, was the case in 2003, when one of Brownback's Senate committees was called upon to consider the growing problem of monopoly ownership in radio since the industry's deregulation seven years previously. Brownback, of course, has made a career out of denouncing the culture industry for its vulgarity, its bad values, presumably for the damage it has done to America's soul. Taking this opportunity to rein it in should have been a no-brainer. After all, as the industry critic Robert McChesney points out, the link
75 - between media ownership, the drive for profit, and the media's insulting content should be obvious to anyone with ears to hear. "Vulgarity is linked to corporate control and highly concentrated, only semi-competitive markets," McChesney says. And for many conservatives, "the radio fight was the moment of truth. If people are seriously concerned about vulgarity, this was their chance to prove it." For that reason, McChesney notes, certain right-wing culture warriors were happy to join the fight against further relaxation of radio ownership rules. But Brownback was not one of them. Faced with a choice between protecting corporate profits and actually doing something about the open cultural sewer he has spent his career deploring, Brownback chose the former.
82 - Let me take you first to the tiny western Kansas
83 - town of Lucas, home to a remarkable sculpture garden illustrating that grandest of subjects, the condition of mankind. Constructed out of concrete by an old fellow named J.P. Dinsmoor, the "The Garden of Eden" mixes biblical stories with the unmistakeable political iconography of Populism: Here is Cain, having just slain Abel. There is "Labor Crucified" and surrounded by his tormentors--doctor, lawyer, preacher, and capitalist. Bigger animals eat smaller animals in an endless chain of exploitation and oppression.
[. . .] I noticed a sculpture of an octopus grasping at a map of the Americas, with one tentacle reaching menacingly across Panama. For a viewer of the early twentieth century, such a tableau would ahve been easily recognizable as a left-wing denunciation of the imperial ambitions of the trusts [. . .]
[. . .] That a regular guy like J.P. Dinsmoor would have opposed U.S. imperialism, well, that's simply unthinkable out here; everyone knows that such views are the affectations of latte-drinking rich kids at fancy colleges, while the average working man stands tall for firearm and flag.
114 - This sounds like a complicated manuever, but it should be quite familiar after all these years. We see it in its most ordinary, run-of-the-mill variety every time we hear a conservative pundit or politician deplore "class warfare"--meaning any talk about the failures of free-market capitalism--and then, seconds later, hear them rail against the "media elite" or the haughty, Volvo-driving "eastern establishment."
[. . .] The conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan even uses the straightforward term class war to describe the face-off between rich liberals and more humble Republicans. But it is a class war in which, as David Brooks puts it, there is "no class resentment or class consciousness." The paradox--a class divide in which class doesn't matter--is repeated virtually without fail through the "two Americas" literature [. . .]
118 - Apparently, there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer. Ann Coulter's case is instructive. A daughter of the creamy suburb of New Canaan, Connecticut, she grew up in what she describes as a happy right-wing family headed by a corporate lawyer who, in 1985, helped engineer a landmark union decertification (that is, the total destruction of a bargaining unit) for the greater glory of the Phelps Dodge mining interests. This coup was one of the earliest fruits of the anti-union policies of the Reagan administration, which over the years have done so much to shrink the power of organized labor and to rain down blessings on the inhabitants of New Canaan and their upper-bracket brethren across the nation.
Coulter was there at the union-busting creation [. . .] but she insists nonetheless that discussions of that aspect of social class are simply a figment of liberal propaganda. [. . .] In saying this, Coulter is not referring to the cold shoulder that Bill Clinton's New Democrats have turned to the labor movement; like most conservatives, she believes that Clinto was in fact a man of the radical left. Rather, she is trying to construct
119 - an entire system of class relations on the observation that the haughty hedonists of Hollywood are largely Democrats. Republicans, on the other hand, drink beer, go to church, and own guns; they are, ipso facto, the true representatives of the common man. Economics simply do not count in her world.
160 - Dwight Sutherland, Jr., the Kansas City brahmin [. . .], also uses the analytical framework of the left, but in a far more measured and thoughtful way, employing it to decipher the denatured Republicanism of his wealthy neighbors in Mission Hills. When I talk to him, he inveighs against "wedge issues," deploring the way abortion, gun control, and evolution have been used to manipulate voters. But he means this in precisely the opposite of the usual way. For Sutherland "wedge issues" aren't a Republican strategy to split off parts of the New Deal coalition, but a moderate and maybe even a Democratic strategy to keep conservatives in check, to split working-class conservatives from the upper-middle-class conservatives who ought to be their allies. "They cynically play these social issues to scare the soccer mommies with guns," Sutherland tell me, "scare the Jewish community with the bugaboo of the religious right, scare the suburban ladies that Planned Parenthood is going to be shut down, when there's no chance that any of these [conservative] people, even if it was their fondest desire, could overturn Roe v. Wade."
It's all sham battles and empty culture-war issues, distracting the rich from their real concerns. It is even "false consciousness." In using this Marxist term, the archconservative Sutherland is not referring to workers being tricked by some misguided fear of black people into ignoring their interests and voting Republican, but to wealthy people being tricked by some misguided fear of the religious right into ignoring their interests and voting Democratic. "A friend of mine who's a multimillionaire," he says, "told me in all seriousness that he couldn't vote for [George H.W.] Bush's reelection because Bush was less that committed to a woman's right to choose. Of course in '93 this guy's taxes go up, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he's screaming and
161 - yelling about Clinton and the Democrats, and I said, 'Yeah, but you made the symbolic choice and repudiated those nasty pro-lifers, and that's worth it in psychic income alone.'"
[. . .] All the contradictions come together in the person of Jack Cashill [. . .]
But above all else, Cashill is a class warrior, fond of telling stories from his own working-class childhood and heaping scorn on the precious affectations of Kansas City's Johnson County overlords. He derides Cupcake Land's cars and its clothes and its shrubbery and the names of its subdivisions and its compulsive fear of East Coast disapproval and its lemminglike tastes in consumer goods. And he does it well.
What's peculiar is that he does most of this bourgeoisie-baiting from his perch as the executive director of Ingram's, the local business magazine. Does this mean that Ingram's is a crusading business magazine, like Dwight Macdonald's Fortune, sniffing out local Enrons before they explode? On the contrary; it is in fact a run-of-the-mill booster sheet, offering "Forty Under Forty" lists and plans for how KC can position itself for this or that future windfall. Its most notable innovation is the aforemen-
162 - tioned annual feature, "The Power Elite," which is startling in its forthright sycophancy. The same Jack Cashill who loves to mock upper-middle-class etiquette usually writes it.
171 - O'Conner seems peculiarly given to dizzy ideas such as this one. Like many of the Cons, she gives the impression of intelligence, choosing and enunciating each word carefully, but she also seems oddly naive, like a person who has sat down and worked out the world's problems all on her own.
172 - The O'Conners are not wealthy people, by any standard. Her husband works as a monitor technician at a nearby hospital, and she went out of her way to impress upon me their lack of means. But her thoughts on the issues seem all to have been drawn from the playbook of the nineteenth-century Vanderbilts and Fricks.
175 - On the left it is common to hear descriptions of the backlash as a strictly top-down affair [. . .] What the Wichita Republicans have accomplished, though, should dispell this myth forever.
177 - With Democrats and Republicans having merged on free trade, the issues that remained were abortion and guns. And, of course, government itself.
178 - The corporate powers-that-be in Wichita, it seems, don't really mind a politician's God-talk or his Operation Rescue sensibilities if he will help them fight their great enemy, government. After all, as Kay O'Conner put it so well, the people on top know what they have to do to stay there, and in a pinch they can easily overlook the sweaty piery of the new Republican masses, the social conservatives who raise their voices in praise of Jesus but case their votes to exalt Caesar. Dwight Sutherland, for his part, knows the gulf can someday be bridged--just look at how Mission Hills turns out for the born-again George W. Bus--and Jack Cashill's day-to-day fieldwork among the "power elite" suggests he knows it as well. The Mods, for their part, will probably never give Tim Golba the keys to Leawood, and they will surely never toast John Altevogt, the raging Marat of the Kansas revolution, at the finest restaurants in Corporate Woods. But somehow, I think, they'll find it in their hears to take the tax cuts, thank you, and the deregulation and the helping hand in dealing with those troublesome labor unions.
188 - And the abolitionists themselves? Strictly blue-state: effete, Anglo-Saxon, tea-sipping, college-educated--the sort of people that David Brooks would mock for turning up their noses at NASCAR and whom Bill O'Reilly would razz for not understanding real life as it's lived by tough mugs on the street. Indeed, they were strongest in those states--Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York--and on those liberal college campuses--Oberlin, Grinnell, Amherst--that are routinely reviled by conservatives today for their speech codes and third-world sympathies. And while they were indeed religious people, the denominations to which abolitionists belonged were the mainline Protestant churches now pilloried by the right for not spreading the damnation around sufficiently: Unitarians, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Quakers.
226 - The Kansas conservatives, it seems to me, can be divided into two basic groups. One one side are the true believers, the average folk who have been driven into right-wing politics [. . .]
On the other side are the opportunists: professional politicians and lawyers and Harvard men who have discovered in the
227 - great right wing groundswell an easy shorcut to realizing their ambitions. Many of them once aspired to join--maybe even did join--the state's moderate Republican insider club. Rising up that way, however, would take years, maybe a lifetime, when by mouthing some easily memorized God-talk and changing their position on abortion--as Brownback and other leading Cons have done--they could instantly have a movement at their back [. . .]
239 - A while back the Wall Street Journal ran an essay about a place "where hatred trumps bread," where a manipulative ruling class has for decades exploited an impoverished poeple while simultaneously fostering in them a culture of victimization that steers this people's fury back persistently toward a shadowy, cosmopolitan Other. In this tragic land unassauageable cultural grievances are elevated inexplicably over solid material ones, and basic economic self-interest is eclipsed by juicy myths of national authenticity and righteousness wronged.
The essay was supposed to be a description of the Arab states and their conflict with Israel, but when I read it I thought immediately of dear old Kansas [. . .]
259 - Again and again, in the course of the electoral battle, I heard striking tales of this tragically inverted class consciousness: Of a cleaning lady who voted for Bush [over Kerry- JH] because she could never support a rich man for president.
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