Dusty Bake Activate
Fukk your corny debates
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/16/the...party_the_1_percent_and_delusional_democrats/
It is a strange thing to say in the year 2014, as the political battle-lines grow harder and our bitter-enders ever more bitter, but there was a time when I didn’t think of my home state of Kansas as a particularly right-wing place.
It is true that the Kansas City suburb where I grew up teemed with standard-issue business-class Republicans back in the ’70s and ’80s; I had been one myself once upon a time. But I also knew that Kansas was the kind of place that valued education, that built big boring suburbs, that never did anything risky or exciting. Its politics in those days were utterly forgettable, dominated by a succession of bland Republican moderates and unambitious Democrats. We were the epitome of unremarkableness. When the notorious “Summer of Mercy” took place in 1991 — the event that marked the beginning of the state’s long march to the right — I remember reading about it from graduate school in Chicago and thinking how strange it was that Operation Rescue had chosen Wichita as the place to make its stand. After all, Kansas wasn’t in the South.
It wasn’t until several years later that I began to understand what a fascinating, upside-down extravaganza it was to see the right eat its way through the good sense of the nation. Of course, many others had written about the movement by then, largely in the key of horror and tearful deploring. But relatively few seemed to get the sheer literary potential of the nation’s big right turn, and as I surveyed the political headlines day after day, I grew more and more amazed at what was going on.
Here was a faction that had made the folkways of ordinary Americans into a kind of a cult — and yet its signature economic policies had brought catastrophic harm down on those same ordinary Americans. Here was a ruling philosophy that, thanks to its sacrosanct conception of itself as the foe of the state, could never acknowledge that it actually ruled. Here was a form of common-man-hailing populism that had raised up an economic elite the likes of which we hadn’t seen since the nineteenth century. What a spectacle it was! What a circus of delusion, deceit, devotion and disaster! Best of all, it was a movement in whose ranks I had once marched myself, which meant I had a certain innate understanding of it.
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As conservatism rolled up its victories and built out its culture of endless grievance — the Gingrich Congress was elected in 1994, Fox News launched a few years later, George W. Bush ascended the throne a few years after that — I wondered how I might best approach the subject. I wasn’t interested in producing a screeching denunciation of this Republican figure or that; the world had enough of those already. Nor did I mean to write a traditional Beltway-style “politics” book, about the heroic progress of some candidate in an election or some bill in Congress. Ugh.
The right needed to be taken seriously as a social movement, I thought. Its triumphs were at the same time preposterous and yet the greatest contemporary subjects of them all, and I wanted to approach them in the appropriate manner. I imagined myself somehow following the paths of both H. L. Mencken and W. J. Bryan — the pretension-puncturing of Mencken without the right-wing bullshyt, that is, and the crusading spirit of Bryan minus the fundamentalism. I wanted to plumb the deep ironies of the American condition, like my favorite historians Richard Hofstadter and Christopher Lasch. I wanted to hold up a mirror and show this country what we looked like. But how would I do it? Where would I set my story?
Well, in 1999, newspapers started reporting on a nasty dispute in my home state of Kansas over the right way to teach the theory of evolution. A mass conservative awakening, it seemed, had been sweeping across the place for several years, gradually gaining strength, causing headaches for establishment Republicans and extincting Democrats wholesale.
On inspection, it was obvious that this was the place. Everything came together in Kansas; it was the exact expression of what ailed us. For decades the state had served as journalistic shorthand for all that was average in our land, and yet it also had a history of revolt. What’s more, in the years after Bush’s election, it had been drafted into the most fatuous journalistic conceit of them all, the conflict of the “red states” and the “blue”; the great fake showdown between all-American authenticity and highbrow liberal phoniness. As I drove around the state, however, I noticed something else, something that was little remarked upon in those days: Like other heartland locales, Kansas had not exactly thrived during the neoliberal decades. Why were these people signing up for the politics of their bosses?
*
“What’s the Matter With Kansas?” was published in the spring of 2004, just about 10 years ago. I remember finishing the book in a state of some excitement, with a giant map of Johnson County hanging over my desk. I knew at the time that I was on to something: All across the country, the right seemed to have momentum and fiery self-righteousness — in service of a stupid and barbaric philosophy, to be sure — while liberals were cringing and weak and anxious to compromise, even though they were often in the right.
The main premises of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” were straightforward enough. First, I pointed out that the great right turn, which began in the 1970s and continues to this day, has not served average people well. Second, that a large and increasing number of those average people were voting for privatizing and deregulating Republicans even as their situation grew worse. From these two points arose the obvious question: Why?
Today, in the seventh year of the Slump from Hell, it is commonplace to decry the 1 Percent and describe, as (for example) George Packer does in “The Unwinding,” the ugly things deindustrialization has done to the Midwest and that depopulation has done to farm country. But back in the early oughts things were different. In those days we were coming off an economic boom during which consensus commentators had spoken of the Market as a kind of god and of its doings as the very incarnation of reason. I disagreed: To open your eyes and acknowledge the dilapidation of small-town America and the fate of manufacturing cities like Wichita, I thought, was to call the whole rotten consensus into question.
And thus we came to the book’s central problem: Why did the people on the receiving end of so many of these developments have such trouble seeing it that way? Once upon a time, the Midwest had been famous for its hard-times uprisings. And, yes, the people I encountered in Kansas there were angry, all right. But not at the forces that were tearing their world apart, or not directly anyway. For modern Kansans, economic destruction seemed to trigger the exact opposite reaction as it had for their ancestors. As I put it, in one of my favorite passages in the book,
“Out here the gravity of discontent pulls in only one direction: To the right, to the right, farther to the right. Strip today’s Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land and next thing you know they’re protesting in front of abortion clinics. Squander their life savings on manicures for the CEO and there’s a good chance they’ll join the John Birch Society. But ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed (unions, antitrust, public ownership), and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower.”
We see this paradoxical law of political gravity everywhere now, of course. The financial crisis of 2008, brought on by deregulated banks, triggered a movement whose holiest cause is deregulation and which, in turn, secured control of the House of Representatives for a ferociously market-minded Republican majority. (For the record, the Tea Party movement and the Kansas conservatives I studied 10 years ago also differ in certain important respects.)
When you looked at Kansas political battles up close, the beginnings of an explanation became clear immediately: It was about class. Again and again, the category that split the two sides — in this case, moderate Republicans and conservative Republicans — was social status. The mods triumphed in the rich suburbs; they were lawyers, newspaper publishers, professionals. The cons won in the blue-collar suburbs; they tended to hold humbler jobs. One conservative leader I interviewed was a line worker at a soda-pop bottling plant.
I filled the book with anecdotes about the inverted class struggle in Kansas, some of them shocking, some of them amusing, but the vignette that still makes me chuckle is one I read in the Washington Post. The state’s wealthy governor, a moderate Republican, was hobnobbing with the attorneys at a prestigious Kansas City law firm one day in 1998; the mood was one of pleasant professional joviality, till one person worked up her nerve and chastised the governor to his face. Who among them dared? A secretary at the law firm, who faulted this celebrated Republican for insufficient conservatism.
