We are getting within a month of the elections in November, and as I reflect on the contests, my mind goes to a book published last year called What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank. It is one progressive's attempt to understand those goofy people whose state line is just .4 miles down a hill from my house in Kansas City, MO. A review at Amazon.com reads:
“The largely blue collar citizens of Kansas can be counted upon to be a "red" state in any election, voting solidly Republican and possessing a deep animosity toward the left. This, according to author Thomas Frank, is a pretty self-defeating phenomenon, given that the policies of the Republican Party benefit the wealthy and powerful at the great expense of the average worker. According to Frank, the conservative establishment has tricked Kansans, playing up the emotional touchstones of conservatism and perpetuating a sense of a vast liberal empire out to crush traditional values while barely ever discussing the Republicans' actual economic policies and what they mean to the working class. Thus the pro-life Kansas factory worker who listens to Rush Limbaugh will repeatedly vote for the party that is less likely to protect his safety, less likely to protect his job, and less likely to benefit him economically.”
In short, Kansans are stupid twits who don't know how to vote in their best interest.
When I heard about this book last year, it took me back to another book I had read twenty years ago called The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau. (See the Garreau Group for more current data.) Based on an analysis of sociological and economic factors, Garreau believes that nine nations make up North America. One of those nations is what Garreau calls the "Breadbasket," and the nation's capital is Kansas City. You can see its boundaries on the map below.
(Map Source: Wikipedia, Nine Nations of North America)
One passage in the book about Breadbasket natives made me laugh and still brings a grin to my face today:
…To this day, a visitor to the Breadbasket who, when asked, must admit that he lives in the East, repeatedly has to put up with natives going through their “aw shucks” routine.
Before the stranger has a chance to peep the slightest opinion about his surroundings, the local goes through this song and dance, shaking his head and allowing as how it’s tough to find fresh abalone in Tulsa and the Library of Congress isn’t in Wichita, and he knows how that must weigh heavy on the mind.
He doesn’t believe a word of it. He’s just trying to find out if the outlander is ignorant enough to bite at the statement. His conviction is that the Breadbasket is the best place to live in the whole world.
The defensiveness is not based on the Breadbasket’s being insular. From “The University,” as Texans refer to the school in Austin (one local wit referred to his alma mater as the Harvard University, just to keep things straight) to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and excellent and enormous system of land-grant colleges make superior educational opportunities here universal. The question is how intellectually isolated other people are. It’s not uncommon to here people remark that it seems to them that the East is less parochial than it used to be.
The Breadbasket, in fact, is the home of a highly sophisticated sense of international interdependence. Ordinary people here make everyday calculations about events on the far side of the globe. [Referring to agricultural markets.] (337-338)
Granted, this was written twenty-five years ago, but I think much of it still holds today.
I write all this to set up a tremendous observation that Crunchy Con Rob Dreher made in a post yesterday called Testing Convictions. He writes:
In a thread below, we're having a "What's the Matter With Kansas?" discussion, in which one of the stalwart combox liberals can't understand why a Kansas farmer in a news story we're discussing refuses to vote Democratic, despite his progressive/populist economic views, because the Democrats, generally speaking, support gay marriage and abortion. Susan, the reader, voices the Thomas Frank position, which is, "How bizarre it is that people like this throw their vote away on meaningless social issues instead of voting their economic interests." The idea is that the GOP has bamboozled them.
But the fact is, there are a lot of decent rural people who don't understand what's going on in a world in which men want to marry men, and women want to preserve the "right" to have a doctor stick a knife into their wombs and cut their little babies to pieces before sucking the severed legs and arms and head out. And they are asked to vote for a party that believes in these things, and that thinks people like him are rotten bigots for believing these things are deeply wrong — and that these are issues that matter a lot more than money.
Here's how you can tell that a liberal who makes the "What's The Matter With Kansas?" argument is doing so in bad faith. Say you offered a deal to cultural liberals, saying, "Look, if we bear right on gay rights and abortion, and make room for social conservatives in the party, you're not going to like what these people stand for, but we can build a working majority for a Democratic Congress, and maybe even the presidency. We can get our economic platform enacted, even though we'll be stymied on abortion and gay rights. But that's a small price to pay, because economics is what really matters. What do you say?"
Ninety-nine out of 100 of these liberal Democrats would say not no, but hell no. Because the cultural stuff matters to them more than their economic interests. I get that. If I thought abortion and gay rights/marriage were matters of fundamental justice, I'd be unwilling to compromise either. But I would hope that I didn't have the nerve to put down culturally conservative Kansans for caring as much about these issues as I did.
Democrats say that Breadbasket folks are ruining the country because we are hung up on abortion and gay marriage but don't care about the poor and the environment. Shoot, we won't even vote for what is in our own economic best interest. Fine, abortion and gay marriage are peripheral. Let the Democrats abandon their positions on these issues, and we can put together a winning Democrat majority to do what is in our own economic and environmental best interest!
National Democrat leaders too often fail to realize that they are dealing with masters of the "aw shucks" ploy, and folks in the Breadbasket can smell out condescending elitist posturing miles away. One recent Democrat used to post a sign that said, "It's the economy, stupid." Democrats might want to rethink that one. Until they are ready to sit down and truly converse about these issues, instead of poking in the eye with elitist derision the very people they are trying to persuade, I don't see much hope for them winning and sustaining a ruling coalition.
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