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Feeding the Hand that Bites You: On Thomas Frank
by Russell Cobb
August 2004
The title of Thomas Frank's new book, What's the Matter with Kansas? is a question to which liberals might be tempted to respond with any number of clichés: those rabid anti-abortionists in Wichita, the wingnuts on the State Board of Education who advocate “creationism” alongside evolution “theory,” that anti-erectile dysfunction crusader Bob Dole, or the 600,000 Kansans who helped George W. Bush carry the state by nearly twenty percent in 2000.
There are many reasons, it would seem, for liberals to look down their noses in horror at Kansas, which appears to blend in with a handful of other rectangular “flyover states” awash in the Bush red of the 2000 presidential election map. But to condescend to Kansas, Frank argues, means buying into one of the biggest media fantasies of recent times—“the story of ‘the two Americas.'”
Frank notes that although the election was essentially a tie, the punditocracy “divined in the 2000 map a baleful cultural cleavage, a looming crisis over identity and values.” Commentators observed blue slices of Gore country on the coasts cut off by a large swath of Bush red down the middle, and saw “two different Americas at loggerheads with each other.” For Frank, this interpretation is wrong on at least two counts: it blithely ignored that many Midwestern states such as Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin went for Gore, and, more importantly, it led to the anointment of the red states as the one true, authentic expression of American values.
Citing an anti-Howard Dean ad, Frank claims that in the eyes of the media, Blue America became the rarified land of “‘tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading'” whiners, while Red Americans remained the salt of the earth. Red staters' virtues sounded like a Boy Scout motto: “humble, reverent, loyal and hard-working.”
Consequently, not only were politics more righteous in red states, the very character of a Red American became more honorable than that of her blue state compatriot. In the words of Frank's nemesis, New York Times columnist David Brooks, in the blue states, “the self is more commonly large,” while in modest red America, “people declare in a million ways, ‘I am normal.'”
For Frank, a cultural critic who has made a career of what Marx called the “ruthless criticism of everything existing,” this is bunkum. What separates people in America, Frank claims, is economic class, not lifestyle choices or some spurious notion of “the authentic.” The idea that “people in places like Kansas are part of one big authentic family, basking in the easy solidarity of patriotism, hard work and the universal ability to identify soybeans in a field,” masks the true machinations of the political economy of capitalism, which has actually made things worse for these “normal” Kansans. Yet, instead of rebelling against the economic policies that lead to farm foreclosures and Wal-Martization, the hoi polloi attack the “liberal media” and “effete intellectuals” for the disintegration of Heartland values.
A European Marxist critic like Theodore Adorno or Antonio Gramsci would surely label this development an outcome of proletarian “false consciousness,” and be done with it. Frank—more polemicist than sociologist—gives us a much more piquant phrase for understanding the middle-American zeitgeist: “the thirty-year backlash.” Here's Frank explaining the backlash's potent recipe of laissez-faire capitalism and conservative cultural politics:
"While earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business economic policies. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends... The backlash is what has made possible the international free-market consensus of recent years with all the privatization, deregulation, and deunionization that are its components."
Or, to put it more bluntly: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, U.S.A.”
As a consequence of this backlash, people in places like Kansas are undergoing the biggest “derangement” in American history, as the “center of gravity pulls to the right, to the right, and farther of the right.” On the surface, Kansas may look like the prototype of “down-home, stand-pat, plainspoken, unvarnished American goodness,” but, in fact, the state serves as a testing ground for the worst in corporate greed, atavistic evangelicism, and ultra-right wing demagoguery.
Frank's argument is primarily conveyed through a series of vignettes about Kansans who embody the backlash mentality. In a tiny town near Topeka, for example, Frank meets David Bawden, otherwise known as Pope Michael I. The “Pope of Kansas” is an Oklahoman with a “backwoods accent” who, in the venerable Catholic tradition of scholasticism, has worked out that reforms enacted by the Vatican II—such as the approval of pants on women—are heresies. In a complicated line of reasoning that involves a lifetime of study of canon law, Bawden came to the conclusion that, “thanks to the manifold heresies of the church since the sixties, there is no one occupying the papal throne”, and had himself elected Pope by a small group of family and friends.
Elsewhere, on the bleak, treeless expanse of western Kansas, Frank examines Garden City, one of a rare breed of “rural boomtowns” on the Great Plains. “Garden City is the future,” he hears over and over again: its booming meat-packing industry, fueled by immigrant labor, seems to offer the only escape from the inexorable decline of small-town life on the Plains. Together with the nearby towns of Dodge City and Liberal, this part of Kansas slaughters 24,000 cattle a day and produces twenty percent of all beef consumed in the United States. For all Garden City's newfound boosterism, though, the place remains an economic and aesthetic wasteland, in which “feedlots the size of cities transform the corn into cowflesh; and the windowless concrete slaughterhouses squat silently, on the outskirts of town, harvesting the final product.” Frank informs us that multinational corporations like Tyson and ConAgra set up shop in Garden City so they can undercut unionized butchers in city grocery stores, far from the meddling of big city lawyers, union leaders and journalists.
For the meatpacking business, Frank says, Garden City is the next best thing to outsourcing. Since government food regulations and transportation costs would make it extremely difficult to pack meat abroad and ship it back to the United States, the packers “bring the third world here,” by encouraging Latin American and Southeast Asian immigration to the region to provide low-cost, disposable labor. Despite the influx of Latinos and Asians, Garden City is not some multicultural oasis on the Plains, but a working-class town of trailer parks in which “brutal economic practices” of agribusiness have destroyed the last vestiges of family farms. I learned firsthand during a summer in Mississippi among immigrants in the poultry industry that workers' stories of exploitation at the at the hands of agribusiness can be heart-rending, infuriating and, at times, comical. To this end, however, Frank leaves too much to the imagination: Who are these new workers? Where do they live and how did they get there? What are their stories?
At the other end of the backlash spectrum is Frank's hometown, the wealthy Kansas City suburb of Mission Hills—as one wag dubbed it, “Cupcake Land.”
Cupcake Land is a metropolis built entirely according to the developer's plan, without the interference of angry proles or ethnic pols as in nearby Kansas City. Cupcake Land encourages no culture but that which increases property values; supports no learning but that which burnishes the brand; hears no opinions but those that will further fatten the cupcake elite; tolerates no rebellion but that expressed in haircuts and piercings and alternative rock.
This is the home of William Esrey, the CEO of Sprint, who in 1999 proposed a merger between his company and WorldCom that, at $129 billion, would have been the largest corporate merger of all time. Even though federal regulators shot the deal down, Esrey and an associate secured $311 million in stock options for themselves. Part of the deal, Frank claims, was that Sprint—Kansas City's largest employer—would have moved its corporate “campus” out of state, costing Kansans thousands of jobs. Although Kansas Citians were “shocked” by the scandal, they never thought to indict the system that made it possible.
These portraits are clever and convincing. In anecdote after anecdote, we see the unholy alliance of laissez-faire capitalism and religious fervor coming together to create an all-powerful hegemony that makes Democrats quake in their boots—or simply change parties. Indeed, this bleak landscape of holy-rollers and corporate fat cats may be frightening enough to cause one of Brooks' apocryphal “latte liberals” to spill his frappuccino on the leather upholstery of his Volvo. Yet by rigorously examining a seemingly ho-hum place like Kansas, Frank reveals much more about the contemporary American political scene than any grand theory of the “two nations” rattled off in a 700- word piece on the Times op-ed page.
The most striking conceit of What's the Matter with Kansas? is the juxtaposition of the state's current mood of hardcore conservatism with Kansas' equally radical, left-wing past. Readers may be surprised to learn that the state once crawled with Populists raging against “money power” and “American imperialism.” No one better illustrates this ideological current of Midwestern radicalism than the Nebraskan William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic nominee for president in 1896, 1900, and 1908, who became known simply as “the Great Commoner.” Bryan's opponent in 1896, the Republican William McKinley, was a conservative in every sense: an elitist, he detested Bryan's huge rallies among the common folk and relied on overwhelming support from the business community to eke out the election. The electoral map of 1896 looks like the familiar 2000 map turned inside-out: the Democrat Bryan won large swaths of the South and Midwest, with his strongest support on the Plains, while the conservative McKinley won the Northeast and West Coast. I might add that Kansas, while an instructive case in the decline and fall of leftist Populism, is certainly not an anomaly. In Oklahoma, a state whose reactionary politics make Kansas look like Berkeley, socialists—not Republicans—were seen as the “second party” until America's entry into the First World War. Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who never received more than six percent of the popular vote nationwide, actually carried three Oklahoma counties. Similar stories can be found in the most unlikely places: Texas, Alabama, Nebraska; in all these places, farmers once campaigned for reforms deemed “too radical” in New York and Washington.
One hundred years later, some of these reforms, like a progressive income tax system and female suffrage, are taken for granted. Others, like a nationalized rail system and a non-interventionist foreign policy, seem pretty good when seen through today's looking glass. But some are batty at best, chauvinist at worst. In this sense, Frank's enthusiasm for turn-of-century Populism can be a little troublesome. Lest we get too nostalgic about the 1896 Democratic platform, some words of caution should be in order, but Frank does not provide them. Bryan was in favor of shutting down America's borders with the “Oriental menace,” in addition to being an ardent segregationist, teetotaler and fundamentalist Christian who, later in life, successfully prosecuted a Tennessee science teacher named John Scopes for teaching the illegal doctrine of evolution. And while I don't think Frank would have volunteered for Bryan's 1896 Presidential campaign, he does ignore the Great Commoner's darker side, except to say that Bryan's combination of fundamentalist Christianity and left-ish economic policies would be “almost unimaginable today.”
But while left-leaning Evangelicals in the Heartland may not get much play on Fox News (or the pages of The Nation, for that matter), socially progressive churches in the South and on the Great Plains are often the only voices in their communities to speak up for labor, immigrant rights, and against racism. Often, though not always, these churches classify themselves as “evangelical”—that is, they believe that one must be “born again” in order to be truly saved. In fact, a majority of non-fundamentalist evangelicals voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. These victories were due in no small part to the overwhelming support African-American churches consistently lend to Democrats. The African-American population of Kansas may be relatively small (about five percent), but if Frank had spent any time among black Protestants, the sharp distinction made between cultural and economic issues would have been immediately obvious. Most black Baptists, for example, do not allow Democrats' liberal stance on issues like gay marriage or abortion to trump their support for social and economic policies such as progressive taxation, civil rights, and Medicare. If Frank wanted to see a vigorous challenge to the backlash formula of “talk Christ, walk corporate,” I'm sure he could have headed down to one of Wichita or Topeka's black churches and seen it in action.
The mélange of economic radicalism and cultural conservatism that one sometimes still encounters today in the rural South and Midwest can be difficult to process. I traveled halfway across Mississippi with Charles, a Baptist deacon and union representative, to preach the bible of union solidarity to recent immigrants in the poultry industry. Charles supports a universal living wage—even for illegal immigrants—and believes the Bible proves the Earth is only 5,000 years old. A Vietnam vet, he opposed the Iraq War. He is certain that those who do not accept Jesus as their savior are doomed to eternal hellfire. I found a similar mix of leftist social doctrine and religiosity among seminarians, teachers, and poultry workers in the piney woods of southern Mississippi; if you think I'm making a hasty generalization here, listen closely to the rhetoric of John Edwards and you will hear echoes of this ideology of righteousness.
Reading back through Bryan's famous “Cross of Gold” speech and his denunciation of Booker T. Washington's dinner date at the White House with Theodore Roosevelt, I can't help but feel that Bryan might prefer the company of Patrick Buchanan to Howard Dean in 2004. Have things gotten so bad for the left in this country that it must turn to antiquated crusades against the gold standard for inspiration? If so, the left is in worse shape than even Frank claims.
Debates have been raging for a century about the rhetoric of Populism, especially concerning its possible anti-Semitic and racist undercurrents; controversies that Frank doesn't address in depth. Interestingly, though, Frank points out that in Kansas, at least, the racist undercurrents that were prevalent in the Southern backlash (as best exemplified by George Wallace) played a less prominent role. Nevertheless, it is undeniable, as Frank claims, that somewhere along the line, conservatives turned anti-corporate Populism on its head. For Frank, it all began with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, and then gained widespread popularity with Ronald Reagan, who proclaimed that “America was back, standing tall.” The backlash, despite the ascendancy of the Bush administration, continues unabated to this day.
Paradoxically, however, conservatives are more pissed than ever. America rules, literally, but Republicans see nothing but moral decay and cultural crassness everywhere they turn. Call it the “plent-T-plaint,” Frank says. Never mind that the massive foreclosures on family farms and the slow, painful economic and social disintegration of rural America—especially on the Great Plains—began under conservatism's patron saint; Republicans mastered the “values” discourse and have used it to their full advantage.
The backlash formula Frank proposes works seamlessly for the most part, but in analyzing the vise-grip of conservative politics over the Great Plains, he fails to discuss the movement's real trump card: fear of terrorism. As Frank states, the Republican ascendancy over the past thirty years owes a lot to the weakening of labor unions, the demonization of “Eastern elites” and a Democratic party sold out to corporate interests. Still, “latte liberals”—no matter what Ann Coulter or David Brooks says—are dwarfed on the middle-American fear-mometer by Islamic terrorists. Thus, when President Bush justifies the war in Afghanistan as a “war to save civilization itself”, Limbaugh worshippers understand that campus movements for animal rights and gay pride are a pathetic sideshow to the impending Rapture. There are, of course, echoes of backlash rhetoric in Republican denunciations of Democratic fortitude in the “war on terror.” As the election approaches, we can be sure that Bush and his allies will suggest that John Kerry—an Eastern liberal millionaire—intends to put God-fearing Red-staters in danger by selling out American sovereignty to the U.N. and pursuing a “politically correct” foreign policy.
Perhaps this brings us back full circle to 1896. William Jennings Bryan, like George W. Bush, won over many supporters by inextricably linking evangelical Christianity to his political beliefs. “People often ask me why I can be a progressive in politics and a fundamentalist in religion,” Bryan once said. “The answer is easy. Government is man-made and therefore imperfect. If Christ is perfect, how can anyone be a progressive in religion? I am satisfied with the God we have, with the Bible and with Christ.”
This is a sentiment Bush, the entire G.O.P., and Bill Clinton all understand perfectly. Bush will no doubt attempt to ride this message to victory once again in November, but not before John Kerry stages his own public acts of righteousness. No matter which side of the economic fence you stand on, evangelicals—whether they happen to reside in Red or Blue America—are almost unanimous in their view of the United States as God's own country. Now you tell me what's the matter with Kansas.
Russell Cobb is comparative literature student at the University of Texas at Austin. He is working on the Great Oklahoma Novella.
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