Coup in the heartland?

What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Thomas Frank (Metropolitan, 306 pp., $24)

WE don't find it paradoxical that the sun rises, then sets; or that flowers blossom, then fade. The intervening processes are well understood, so these opposites no longer surprise. But to a mind innocent of astronomy or botany, they might appear paradoxical indeed. In a similar predicament is author Thomas Frank, who asks in his new book: How can ordinary working people support a Republican party hellbent on destroying their livelihoods?

This, he contends, is what is happening in "red state" America, the America of George W. Bush. The capitalist class diverts the just anger of workers from the ills inflicted upon them by the free-market system to "the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending cultural wars." By this process, workers are tricked into supporting conservative politicians inimical to their class interests. Kansas, that most Republican of states, is his proof and paradigm: Free-market politics has given Kansas huge pockets of poverty, a diminishing tax base, an endangered public-school system, and general working-class insecurity.

Despite these facts, says Frank, Kansas politics has veered radically to the right. Starting in 1991, a grassroots movement of cultural conservatives--focusing on such issues as abortion, creationism, and tax limitation--conquered the GOP and elected such conservatives as Sen. Sam Brownback, state attorney general Phill Kline, and Congressmen Jim Ryun and Todd Tiahrt.

Every aspect of this revolution leaves Frank ablush in amazement. It flies in the face of history, because populist Kansas used to offer reliable support for railroad regulation, farm subsidies, free silver, and abortion-on-demand. It is class treason, because working-class organizers like Kansans for Life's Tim Golba and state Senator Kay O'Connor support free-market policies traditionally associated with the bourgeoisie. Above all, the conservative populists themselves are just plain awful: "Though they speak today in the same aggrieved language of victimization, and though they face the same array of economic forces as their hard-bitten ancestors, today's populists make demands that are precisely the opposite. Tear down the federal farm programs, they cry. Privatize the utilities. Repeal the progressive taxes. All that Kansas asks today is a little help nailing itself to that cross of gold."

Fortunately for Kansas, however, its economics and politics are dramatically different from the description of them in this book. First of all, the economy has done well. The state's per capita income increased 19 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars from 1990 to 2002--precisely the era in which Frank says hard economic times sparked the right-wing "backlash." Frank uses tearful anecdotes to describe rural desolation in the state; but these stories reflect particular hardships, not a trend. Kansas, like the rest of America, has been losing farms since the 1890s--but not in the recent years of supposed right-wing ascendancy. In 1992, the year Kansas conservatives captured the state's GOP machinery, the Census Bureau reported 63,000 Kansas farms averaging 738 acres. In 2002, there were 63,000 farms averaging 752 acres.

A similar fancifulness informs Frank's analysis of Kansas politics. To the regret of its conservatives, the state's government remains obstinately centrist. At no time during the 1990s, or since, have conservatives captured the governorship or a working majority in the state senate. Republican moderates have generally held the balance of power. During the 1990s, the legislature--thanks to the efforts of a genuine conservative, Phill Kline of Shawnee--managed to cut tax rates. But spending continued to outpace inflation-plus-population-growth. Today, Kansas remains the highest-taxed state in its region, its per capita state levies exceeding those of Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. Nor did the conservatives manage to destroy the progressivity of the state's tax system. Kansas business property taxes remain the highest in the five-state region.

On education, Frank writes: "Ask [conservative] leaders publicly how they feel about the state's public schools, and they will insist they love education as much as the next guy ... But read the screeds they circulate privately to one another, and their loathing of public education comes out in the open." In fact, the state spending on K-12 education has more than doubled over the past twelve years. If the conservatives really hate public education, they are keeping it a secret from their budgeteers.

Frank's book fails, analytically, largely because of the intellectual weakness of its Marxist worldview. The author describes the "primary contradiction" of backlash politics in Kansas as follows: "It is a working-class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working-class people." This harm must be systemic and pervasive, lest the premise dissolve. So Frank has to foist a false consciousness of Kansas economic depression upon a basically prosperous decade--and build upon that imagined ruin a false consciousness of Kansas politics, in which fanciful enemies oppress the virtuous everyman.

In reality, the political and economic situation in Kansas has a much simpler explanation. Ordinary workers shifted to the GOP precisely because it was the Right, not the Left, that secured their interests. The implementation of NAFTA and GATT in the early 1990s constituted a multi-trillion-dollar international tax cut that boosted the export agriculture of the Great Plains, stemming a historic contraction. Simultaneously, the growth of "worker-capitalism"--the accumulation of capital by ordinary workers through 401(k)-type plans--triggered a growing worker appreciation for market-friendly policies and the party identified with them. Workers became more Republican because their material interests became more bourgeois. In George W. Bush's first year as president, market retrenchment, corporate crime, and 9/11 threatened the easy prosperity of the 1990s. But the administration's tax cuts fostered continued productivity growth, with rising personal income and job creation.

Frank opines that social issues--righttolife, creationism, gun ownership, and religion in the public square--are opiates all: substitutes the Right creates to divert the attention of workers from their eternal class struggle with owners. But today's workers generally are owners, both of real estate and of business equity. It is simpler to take conservatives at their word: that God-given rights guarantee all others.

Not all chapters of What's the Matter with Kansas? are mendacious. Almost alone among national commentators, Frank presents accurately the controversy over the Kansas Board of Education's "science standards": The Board sought not to ban the teaching of evolution, but to derail its monopoly status in public schools. Nor is the author always ungracious: His personal affection for such grassroots conservatives as Tim Golba and Kay O'Connor is palpable. But his book will probably be most admired by its partisans for what is worst in it--for instance, the lunatic assertions that Sen. Sam Brownback has Nazi connections, or the belittling of the Christian faith of Congressmen Tiahrt and Ryun. And that worst is bad indeed.

Mr. Nadler, a Republican precinct commiteeman from Overland Park, Kan., is the political director of the Republican Leadership Coalition, a group dedicated to increasing the base of the GOP by promoting conservative ideas.