Coup in the heartland?

National Review, June 28, 2004 by Richard Nadler

In reality, the political and economic situation in Kansas has a much simpler explanation. Ordinary workers shifted to the GOP precisely because it was the Right, not the Left, that secured their interests. The implementation of NAFTA and GATT in the early 1990s constituted a multi-trillion-dollar international tax cut that boosted the export agriculture of the Great Plains, stemming a historic contraction. Simultaneously, the growth of "worker-capitalism"--the accumulation of capital by ordinary workers through 401(k)-type plans--triggered a growing worker appreciation for market-friendly policies and the party identified with them. Workers became more Republican because their material interests became more bourgeois. In George W. Bush's first year as president, market retrenchment, corporate crime, and 9/11 threatened the easy prosperity of the 1990s. But the administration's tax cuts fostered continued productivity growth, with rising personal income and job creation.

Frank opines that social issues--righttolife, creationism, gun ownership, and religion in the public square--are opiates all: substitutes the Right creates to divert the attention of workers from their eternal class struggle with owners. But today's workers generally are owners, both of real estate and of business equity. It is simpler to take conservatives at their word: that God-given rights guarantee all others.

Not all chapters of What's the Matter with Kansas? are mendacious. Almost alone among national commentators, Frank presents accurately the controversy over the Kansas Board of Education's "science standards": The Board sought not to ban the teaching of evolution, but to derail its monopoly status in public schools. Nor is the author always ungracious: His personal affection for such grassroots conservatives as Tim Golba and Kay O'Connor is palpable. But his book will probably be most admired by its partisans for what is worst in it--for instance, the lunatic assertions that Sen. Sam Brownback has Nazi connections, or the belittling of the Christian faith of Congressmen Tiahrt and Ryun. And that worst is bad indeed.

Mr. Nadler, a Republican precinct commiteeman from Overland Park, Kan., is the political director of the Republican Leadership Coalition, a group dedicated to increasing the base of the GOP by promoting conservative ideas.