June 13, 2004
'What's the Matter With Kansas?': Heartland Security
By JOSH CHAFETZ| WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. By Thomas Frank. 306 pp. Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt & Company. $24. |
IKE the most vitriolic of right-wing pundits (Ann Coulter springs unbidden to mind), Thomas Frank has a distinctly Manichean worldview. The political universe, for him, is divided between the good guys and the conservatives. The conservatives are further divided between the fools and the knaves. The fools are ''the true believers, the average folks who have been driven into right-wing politics by what they see as the tyranny of the lawyers, the America-haters at Harvard, the professional politicians in Washington or the eviction of God from public space.'' The knaves are ''the opportunists: professional politicians and lawyers and Harvard men who have discovered in the great right-wing groundswell an easy shortcut to realizing their ambitions.''
Frank, the author of ''One Market Under God,'' devotes his newest work, ''What's the Matter With Kansas?,'' to explaining this red-state cycle of iniquity, using his native Kansas as the exemplar. Conservative leaders, according to Frank, care only about promoting the concerns of big business, which are inimical to those of the average Midwesterner. But those leaders have cynically seized upon and promoted a sense of cultural grievance and victimhood in order to win over the bumpkins and fool them into voting against their true interests.
Frank's economics are, of course, debatable -- his view that capitalism is ''borderline criminality'' puts him just a touch outside the mainstream (as does his view that the Democratic Leadership Council is a ''hothouse of the right''). But what is most odd is Frank's refusal to consider the idea that there might be such a thing as legitimate cultural grievances. The only legitimate interests, he believes, are material ones. ''By all rights,'' he tells us, ''the people in Wichita and Shawnee and Garden City should today be flocking to the party of Roosevelt, not deserting it.'' But instead, the poor fools have been led astray.
Frank's book is remarkable as an anthropological artifact. Although not terribly successful at explaining the cultural divide, it manages to exemplify it perfectly in its condescension toward people who don't vote as Frank thinks they should. Call this the Aretha Franklin version of the culture wars: people want respect, and they're more likely to vote for the party that gives it to them. More than that, people are unlikely to vote for a party that shows contempt for them.
And if there's one thing Frank's book has plenty of, it's contempt. Kansans are described as ''deranged'' and ''lunatic,'' people who live in a ''dysfunctional'' state. They ''revel in fantasies of their own marginality and persecution.'' Evangelical Kansans are often ''aggressively pious individuals'' who can be expected to ''bark and howl and rebuke the world for its sins.'' They are ''zealots'' who have created in Kansas a ''great bubbling Crock-Pot of Godliness.''
Frank is hardly alone. A large number of the Democratic faithful view the Midwest and evangelical Christians as socially backward, politically amusing and religiously nutty -- and the objects of this disdain are sick of it. The more than 65 million Midwesterners are sick of being considered ''flyover country'' -- that vast, flat, brown area glimpsed by people looking out of their airplane windows as they head from one coast to the other (perhaps with a stop in Frank's adopted hometown of Chicago). The estimated 70 million evangelical Americans are sick of being called wing nuts or Jesus freaks. And the socially conservative are sick of being derided as Neanderthals.
The Republicans saw this and catered to it. Whatever the effects of their economic policy, they treated the concerns of Midwesterners and evangelicals with respect. Of course, Frank is right that the Republicans have not won the culture wars, but they have championed values that many Midwesterners and evangelicals see as their own. It would be odd indeed if they were to turn instead to a party that is often contemptuous of them. But Frank is unable to take this obvious cultural phenomenon seriously.
It's not, of course, that he is unaware of cultural explanations of the political divide -- but he tends to dismiss them as based upon ''the blunt instruments of propaganda, not the precise metrics of sociology.'' He reserves much space for criticizing the anecdotalism of David Brooks, whom he accuses of ''good-natured loathing'' of the liberal elite. (Frank might consider rereading the introduction to Brooks's ''Bobos in Paradise,'' where he writes: ''Let me say first, I'm a member of this class. . . . We're not so bad.'') In fact, Frank sneers constantly at the lack of ''scholarly rigor'' of people who disagree with him, complaining that they reject ''all the accepted social science methods.''
When he talks about ''the precise metrics of sociology,'' Frank clearly doesn't have dry statistical studies in mind -- one searches his book in vain for anything other than, yes, anecdotes. What he really means by accepted social science methods is purely materialist analysis. Explanations that take cultural differences seriously are generally considered little more than ''propaganda.''
Because it is self-evident to Frank that people's true interests are material ones, it is also self-evident to him that conservatives can only be either deluders or deluded, knaves or fools. Good-faith, intelligent disagreement is ruled out from the beginning. In short, Frank resembles no one so much as one of his most frequent foils, a fellow commentator by the name of Ann Coulter.