Bankruptcy And Debts

What's the matter with Kansas?

Date 12/9/2004 12:00 AM | Topic: Opinion

One of the most-cited statistics of the 2004 election came from a Zogby exit poll in which 22 percent of respondents cited that moral values was the most important issue in deciding which candidate they voted for. According to this poll, moral values appeared to have trumped economy/jobs (20 percent), terrorism (19 percent), Iraq (15 percent), health care (8 percent), taxes (5 percent) and education (4 percent).

Many commentators have spent time deconstructing this poll and pointing out its fallacies - we are not here to do that today - but as the "values" question looms quite large for the Democratic party following a third straight electoral defeat, it is worthwhile to examine what has almost become party mantra: "What's the Matter With Kansas?"

In a book by the same title, author Thomas Frank, native Kansan and frequent contributor to Harper's and The Nation attempts to answer that very question. In Frank's America, the modern electorate is largely voting against their economic and personal interests and is instead motivated by a "conservative backlash" in which their candidate of choice must pledge to end abortion and deny homosexual rights.

Using Kansas as a case example, the most normal of normal places (so popular thinking goes, and an extremely red state), Frank determines that a vast majority of low-income Americans have been completely duped by the Republican Party.

As low-income Kansas conservatives vote to end abortion, they receive electricity deregulation, and so on and so forth. In short, Republicans are playing a large scale bait-and-switch game in which "plen-T-plaints" like Bill O'Reilly goad an angry public, upset about the coarsening of American culture into electing right-wingers that would make Herbert Hoover proud and do nothing to end abortion or keep nipples out of the Super Bowl.

Furthermore, Kansas is "pretty much in a free fall" due to the unrestricted capitalism that has accompanied the conservative backlash. According to Frank, Kansans are literally voting themselves into economic depression because Gavin Newsome issued marriage licenses to Adam and Bob.

While Frank makes many interesting arguments and is a talented writer, his book, and ultimately argument, falls short. As Steve Malenga in the Dec. 6 2004 Wall Street Journal notes, Frank's main arguments about the effect of free-market capitalism on Kansas are actually dead in the water. As are Frank's oversimplifications about the role of "values" when it comes to voting - Frank believes that conservative value-voters are sending voters to "fix" unfixable problems, such as legalized abortion or the coarsening of American culture, and thus are wasting their time at the expense of their pocketbook.

However, the same argument could be made about the war on poverty - decades after LBJ's Great Society we still have poor people - would the populist Frank believe that voting Democratic to help poor people is misguided? We doubt it.

And so Frank's large question remains: why do low-income Americans support the Republican Party? The answer is quite simple - values matter - and the heart of the values question goes beyond attitudes towards gay marriage or abortion - but into deeper issues like the government's role in creating a moral society.

The GOP has not mastered the political bait-and-switch that Frank alleges, but rather, is viewed by many Americans as an institution that is conservative in a most traditional Buckley-esque sense, standing athwart modern history and yelling "stop!" Americans who are tired of nipples during the Super Bowl appreciate it.

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Tim Lundquist and Jake Torgerson

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