What’s the Matter with Kansas?

David Michael Newstead | The Philosophy of Shaving

There’s a book I hate called What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. It came out during the Bush administration. Although books about a specific presidency don’t usually age well, I think this one is noteworthy and maybe even important. I hate it, because it’s super pretentious. That doesn’t mean the author is wrong though. At least, he is right about some things, but not always in the way he might have hoped. The book is about American populism. Kansas, the center of the heartland and a stand-in for all red states in the book, has a history of populism going back more than a century to the days of Eugene Debs. Yet, Kansas voters in 2004 and today tend to vote more conservative. How can this be, the author wonders, citing all the contradictions of average Americans supporting the Republican Party: corporate interests with a family values façade. Then, he pieces together the politics and populism that Kansas voters should support. He writes:

American conservatism depends for its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making certain mental connections about the world, connections that until recently were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet. For example, the connection between mass culture, most of which conservatives hate, and laissez-faire capitalism, which they adore without reservation. Or between the small towns they profess to love and the market forces that are slowly grinding those small towns back into the red-state dust — which forces they praise in the most exalted terms.

Looking back on it now, many of the observations in the book turned out to be a canary in the coal mine, just another indicator foreshadowing the country’s current trajectory. Residents of red states like Kansas did eventually turn against the hypocrisies of that version of the Republican Party the author rails against. After several wars, the Great Recession, the opioid epidemic, and more, support diminished. Or morphed, more accurately. Things changed. But the populism that people drifted towards didn’t turn out to be what idealistic outsiders wanted it to be. We didn’t travel back in time or transform into the mythically perfect populists of a hundred years ago. The country was radically different. Then, culture wars, social media, and endless partisanship unleashed a new phase in American politics, which is ironically just our oldest and worst demons in updated, annoying packaging. And populism, according to any of its wide-ranging definitions, seems especially unconcerned with how people should feel and should think and act and vote. Real people feel and think and act in as many contradictory ways as they want to. Where exactly they leaves us after every election is worth plenty of thought and, at this point, not much condescension.