Back to Kansas

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted August 20, 2004.

Why does the pro-life Kansas factory worker who listens to Rush Limbaugh repeatedly vote for the party that is less likely to protect his safety, his job, and his pension? Why do blue-collar workers all over America, who embrace a moral agenda focused on things like opposition to abortion and gay marriage and support for school prayer, consistently vote against their own interests?

In 'What's The Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America,' Thomas Frank looks to his traditionally "red-voting" native state of Kansas to examine the GOP's success in building the most unnatural of alliances: between blue-collar Midwesterners and Wall Street millionaires, between workers and bosses, between populists and right-wingers.

The bio on Thomas Frank's website reads: "Born on the wild plains of Kansas, Tom pulled himself up by his bootstraps, learned to read, write, and cipher. He likes big steaks, bar-b-que, and most other meat dishes."

Let me add: Founding editor of The Baffler, Frank is the author of One Market Under God and The Conquest of Cool, and a contributor to Harper's, The Nation, and The New York Times op-ed page.

Thomas Frank: First let me point out that we put that bio up on the website as a joke and I just never got around to taking it down.

Terrence McNally: I reckon you were ciphering good by the time you got to the University of Chicago.

...First briefly, Thomas, I want to ask what were you like growing up in Kansas, when did you leave, and why did you choose to return there to write this book?

I grew up in a very affluent suburb of Kansas City. I was a teenage conservative, if you can imagine that. I was a big fan of Ronald Reagan. As I look back on those years, I internalized the politics of world that I was growing up in. The adults around me were all well-to-do businessmen who regarded things like taxation as being fundamentally illegitimate. Government was just a nest of criminals and so were labor unions.

My parents were both from Massachusetts, both Catholic, both lifetime Democrats. At twelve I said "This Nixon guy isn't so bad." We rebel in whatever ways we can or we go along in whatever ways we can.

What changed it for me was when I got out into the wider world and discovered that business wasn't the kind of perfect meritocracy that these adults had told me it was. The free market wasn't a system that fairly rewarded people for their contributions.

I left Kansas for good in about 1987 and moved to Chicago. Why did I go back there to write this book? In about '99 a friend of mine from Kansas City was getting married. He'd kept in touch with all the political goings on there, and he said "You know, those people that you grew up around that you used to think were the most Republican people you would ever meet, well those people are now on the left edge of the spectrum because the state has moved so far to the right. That's was about the same time that Kansas was making headlines fighting again over evolution (being taught in schools). That's when I decided "Wow, I should look into this to see what's happened there."

You're focusing on one of the problems that most troubles me about politics and democracy over at least the last 30-35 years: people voting against their own interests. What is it going to take to once again have a party in this country that will do two things: (1) serve the interests of the majority of Americans, and (2) find a way to successfully communicate that fact to voters?

It's funny. That seems like such a rational thing to want, so, so "normal" ...And yet it's farther from being reality than ever, in my opinion. We have wandered off into a place where if the Democrats, heaven forbid, return to their roots and start talking about workplace issues, the other of our two big political parties will invent some new hot button cultural issue to bring us back onto the path. This year it looks like gay marriage is going to be the big thing.

When a group has a shopping cart full of cultural issues and they've also got terrorism, they've got an awful lot to fog the mind, don't they?

Oh, yeah.

Though the margin's been closing since the '70s, and the real growth has been among Independents and "Choose Not to Vote' – there are still fewer Republicans than Democrats, yet the Right dominates the White House, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court and much of the rest of the federal courts, plus the military and a majority of governorships. When one adds unrepresentative reapportionment and election by TV ads, they no longer even need majorities to dominate government. How have they pulled that off?

You've really laid out the big picture, but if you were to say that to a Republican, they would immediately point out that they are in fact victims, that they are on the receiving end of modern life, because our culture is still being made by Hollywood and liberal elites in academia and in the newspapers. Just turn on Fox News some time. These people understand themselves as victims. They are on the receiving end of history. The fact that they control all three branches of government never enters into it. They understand themselves as a victimized majority fighting for their usurped rights.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org), where he interviews people he believes can help create 'a world that just might work.'

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