Monday, July 11, 2005

Book Review: What's the Matter with Kansas

Thomas Frank's 2004 book tries to explain why one of the poorest states would vote Republican rather than for the Democratic platform that would seem to be more economically beneficial to them. The first half has a lot of history and facts, unfortunately the second half brings a lot more opinion and anecdotes into the mix.

Kansas has three main economic divisions. Kansas City in the east has wealthy suburbs from large businesses, Witchita has a large Boeing plant but has had many jobs losses (particularly after 9/11), and in the west are farms that have been hurt by big agri-business. Kansas has always been Republican but it's also always been moderate. It was founded to keep slavery from spreading west. It's always been religious (apparently Topeka is home of "What would Jesus do?") but that had a different meaning before the nineties, e.g., until recently Kansas was very pro-choice. In the late 1980s two US Representatives were Democrats and 2 others were moderate Republicans.

Things changed in 1991 with a division between conservative Republicans and moderate Republicans. Economics were removed from the debate and it became about moral issues with a strong pro-life movement. Hollywood presented immoral lifestyles from "latte drinking" liberals who were in charge of everything. Several moderates retired (and Bob Dole left the Seanate to run for President) which opened up positions of power. He mentions a few wealthy conservatives and how they funded this vicitmized backlash movement that pitted poor conservatives against rich elitists (whether they were liberals or moderate Republicans). In 1994 the rise of Newt Gingrich brought the conservatives to power and of course since 2001 they've had the White House. So the question is, how can they whine about vicitimization, they have the power and what have they done with it aside from cut Hollywood's taxes?

So ends part one, asking the question of the book. But I'm not sure part two answers it. The chapters seem like arbitrary collections of points. One talks about class warfare, the Ten Commandments monument in Alabama, the conservative media including O'Reilly, Coulter and Limbaugh, and how removing ecomonics from the debate is necessary for a backlash style movement (you can attack the media as having a liberal bias if you ignore the fact they are for-profit ventures offering what people are willing to buy). He describes a conservative stategy of "plen-T-plaint", lots of complaining about things that are unlikely to change. This allows you to have a long lasting strategy of playing the victim.

We get a chapter describing the authors experiences growing up in Kansas, but it seemed indulgent. He describes Tim Golba who's very religious, lives a monastic lifestyle and tirelessly campaigns for conservatives. Kay O'Conner is a state senator who says the poor are more spiritual than the rich and amazingly is against women's suffrage! Mark Gietzen reversed the view of Republicans being the party of the rich by showing how the Democrats do fund raising from rich liberals and view the poor as "trailer-trash". So if both parties are of the rich, the poor might as well side as the one that respects them and understands their values.

He make a comparison between the pro-life movement (including stem-cell research and cloning) and the abolitionist movement of the past. Abolutionists were persecuted for their views, views that are universally agreed today. Therefore, in this twisted logic, pro-lifers just need to persevere. He says the Republicans are the party of anti-intellectualism. The rank and file and many of the leaders of this conservative movement have no college degrees. He says the evolution issue was just grandstanding for an election but as it played out the scientific establishment won't debate the creationists so they come off feeding into the stereotype of elitists persecuting the average person. To the conservatives, persecution has taken on a new meaning. It's not the historical concepts of imprisonment, excommunication, or disfranchisement, but rather any form of criticism such as news reports that disagree with their position. And this from the group that taunts their opponents as pro-aborts, totalitarians and Nazis!

The last two chapters spend most of their time describing David Bawden and Phil Kline. Bawden thinks the Pope has stolen the church and proclaims himself to be Pope Michael to take it back; though Frank says he doesn't seem crazy when you meet him. Phil Kline is a conservative politician who's always been running for something. At a speech he says POWs in Vietnam risked torture to say the Pledge of Allegiance and yet a court in San Francisco banned it from the classroom and in Pennsylvania a court ruled that porn has to be allowed in the classroom (the ruling was against Internet Filters). Again, more examples of individuals but how do we know these are really exemplary?

His epilogue wraps it up saying the conservatives framed the debate the as the elite are liberal and the conservatives are the only other option. He puts blame on the liberals too for courting big business and giving up on the economy which was the liberal connection to the masses. So people hear nothing from the left and from the right they get an explanation and a battle plan, even if it doesn't actually solve the problems.

The book provides various examples of this backlash movement theory, but few real statistics to prove it. Maybe such facts are hard to come by and I'm demanding too much, but the second half of the book felt like plen-T-plaint to me as stuff never really came together. I was left wondering how the majority of voters bought into these ideas presented by various folks that came off as nutcases. While the Kansas economy was falling apart how did people accept economics being removed from the debate? Is what Tim Golba said correct or just one man's view?

The paperback edition adds a very good afterward. It walked through various points in the 2004 presidential election (swift boat veterans, Democrats downplaying liberal economics to woo the business vote, gay marriage an imminent crisis though illegal in 49 states, Zell Miller, etc.) and explained how it fit perfectly into the "backlash narrative [which was] more powerful than mere facts." "A cleaning lady voted for Bush because she couldn't vote for a rich man." And while the exit polls showed moral values as the deciding factor, the day after the election Bush ignored it and spoke about privatizing social security and reforming the tax code. It was perhaps the most convincing part of the book, but it wasn't a slam dunk. E.g., as an example of how the Republicans catered to big business he offers that wall street surged 8% after the election. Doesn't the market climb after every election (this is the closest I could find)?

There are a number of endnotes and they are worth reading, I wish a lot of the info would had been in the text proper. On page 72 a footnote says that Republicans framed the repealing of the estate tax as saving family farms, but that in 35 years of study, one economist said he found zero farms that needed to be sold because of the estate tax. Why is this lost in a footnote? And moreso why isn't it more than an unnamed, uncited "ag economist from Iowa State".

In the end, I liked the book. While I don't think it's proven its point, it does offer a good framework for a conversation and it does expose many fallices of the radical conservative platform.

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