How the Democrats lost the heartland

Thomas Frank talks about why Middle America, once a bastion of left-wing populism, has become red-state Republican.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Jun 28, 2004 | I'm fortunate enough to spend a lot of weekends in a house owned by my wife's family in Delaware County, in central New York state. It's a lovely, bucolic region of mountains, rivers and pastures that feels farther away from New York City than 140 miles. It's also one of the poorest counties in the entire state (poorer, for example, than the Bronx.) Two years ago, when the New York Times published a front-page feature story about the effects of welfare reform on the rural Northeastern poor, the reporter picked our town. (Strangely, the Chamber of Commerce doesn't have this article up on the wall.)

Another fact about this county won't surprise you at all, although maybe it should. Despite being an alarmingly depressed area smack in the middle of one of the bluest of all blue states -- with a truly alarming percentage of adults on government assistance -- Delaware County is bedrock Republican. George W. Bush got close to 70 percent of the vote here in 2000. Hillary Clinton swept to an easy statewide victory in the race for U.S. Senate that year, but her opponent, an undistinguished Republican congressman from Long Island named Rick Lazio, won 61 percent of Delaware County's votes. When we briefly considered living up here full time, we had to consider the fact that truly meaningful politics in Delaware County takes place inside the Republican Party. Being a registered Democrat up there is about as functional as voting Green or Libertarian or Socialist Worker.

As the writer Wallace Stegner observed, the rural Northeast is the prelude to the American West, and you could argue that the paradox of Delaware County rewrites itself in blazing letters over and over again across the Great Plains and the Mountain West. Nobody thinks it's strange that Nebraska and Nevada and Arizona and Montana vote for right-wing Republicans in election after election, consumed with tax-cutting fervor and a passion to shrink the government, even though it's the massive federal programs of the 20th century -- dams and aqueducts, agricultural subsidies, public lands thrown open to ranching and mining and lumbering -- that supports those states' economies to this day.

And as low-tax, free-market economic orthodoxies have bankrupted family farmers, sucked the life out of almost every small-town Main Street and displaced high-wage workers to Wal-Mart jobs, voters have flocked back to the Democrats, right? Well, not exactly. As cultural critic Thomas Frank observes in "What's the Matter With Kansas?" -- his dyspeptic tribute to his home state -- worsening economic conditions on the Midwestern plains have only driven voters further to the right, into grass-roots antiabortion activism, campaigns against the teaching of evolution, obsessions with cultural indecency and other largely symbolic crusades. The result has been an entire region of the country dominated by an energized, rejuvenated Republican Party that represents the material interests of the powerful and the cultural obsessions of the powerless, that thumps the Bible with one hand and shreds the tax code with the other.

So much has been written about the blue state-red state divide in the last four years that it may seem it has been with us forever. To read the words of David Brooks, the Homer of this quasi-specious conflict, one might think that the latte-swilling, Volvo-driving liberals of the Northeast and the plainspoken, barbecue-chompin' conservatives of the heartland were ancient tribes, sundered from each other and implacably opposed since the Peloponnesian War. (And of course, in Brooks' worldview, the homespun, unassuming tastes of the latter group are presumed to be normative. Hence, George W. Bush deserved to win the 2000 election because he carried the states where real Americans live.)

For Frank (previously the author of "The Conquest of Cool" and "One Market Under God"), what happened in Kansas -- and the rest of middle America -- was in no way natural or inevitable. He sees the conservative hegemony in the Sunflower State and elsewhere in the heartland as a unique product of Republican ingenuity, Democratic inefficacy and the region's innate tendency toward rebellion. Most of all, he believes the question of red and blue reflects the great unmentionable in American politics: social class. When the Democrats dropped any pretense of the working-class populism that had defined their decades-long reign as the majority party of the New Deal, veering first left (under George McGovern) and then right (under Bill Clinton) in search of various patchwork electoral coalitions, a vacuum was created at the grass-roots of American politics.

In the post-Reagan era of Rush, Hannity and O'Reilly, the right has filled that vacuum expertly. Its commentators and candidates have channeled the old working-class resentment against bankers and corporate fat cats into mistrust of an even more shadowy enemy, the "liberal elite" who are responsible, it seems, for mealy-mouthed P.C. rhetoric, foulmouthed rap music, Hollywood movies, teenage sex, school shootings, man-bashing feminism and a laundry list of other social ills, real or imaginary. (As Frank details, the conspiratorial fringe of the populist right buzzes with entertaining theories: Next the liberals plan to ban red meat, prevent white men from breeding, give entire Midwestern states back to the Indians.)

Frank borrows his title from an 1896 screed by Emporia, Kan., newspaper editor William Allen White, who was excoriating his fellow Kansans, believe it or not, for being too far left. That was the year of the legendary presidential contest between Republican William McKinley, who forthrightly represented the big-money interests of the Northeast, and firebrand Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who was, impossibly enough by today's standards, a left-wing populist and a fundamentalist Christian. It was almost a photographic negative of the 2000 election: The inflamed rabble of the plains states flocked to Bryan, but the population centers of the East Coast turned out for McKinley, the sober voice of capitalism. (He was elected, and later assassinated by an anarchist -- don't let anybody tell you America was a more orderly place.)

As Frank writes, turn-of-the-century Kansas was a hotbed of "religious fanatics, crackpot demagogues, and alarming hybrids of the two." Abolitionist John Brown was a Kansan, and Prohibition leader Carry Nation lived there. But more than anything else, Kansas was known for its "periodic bouts of leftism." In Crawford County, Kan., a socialist newspaper had hundreds of thousands of readers, and it was among a handful of counties in the nation to go for Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs in the presidential election of 1912. Kansas had been an ornery place, fueled by ideology, from its very inception -- the state was founded by Eastern abolitionists and "free-soilers" as a bulwark against the spread of slavery.

Frank's freewheeling examination of how and why the left-wing economic populism of the 1890s was transformed into the right-wing cultural populism of today is hilarious, angry and often riveting. It ranges from history to sociology to memoir to old-fashioned street journalism, and despite what you may have read in a thoroughly disgraceful New York Times review, Frank does not mock his fellow Kansans for their political beliefs. If anything, he is awed and amazed by the right-wing activists he meets on his visits home, highly principled and selfless people who have sacrificed much to fight for causes and policies that (he believes) will prove immensely destructive to their own way of life.

Frank is indeed angry that the proud progressive traditions of Kansas have been subverted. And he is angry at America for fostering a political debate that has increasingly become a style competition, a contest to determine which ultra-rich prep-school candidate can strike the most "authentic" pose. But he does not direct his rage at the impassioned (if perhaps misguided) working-class citizens of Kansas. He is angry at the hypocritical Republican politicians who have shamelessly manipulated the politics of class, at the spineless Democratic politicians who seem to have abandoned the struggle for working people, at the media who have compulsively oversimplified the conflict and relied on Brooksian stereotype.

I have certain misgivings about "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Frank barely touches on racial politics and the role of working-class white resentment in discussing the birth of the "Reagan Democrat" and the spread of the conservative backlash. That may not have been a crucial factor in Kansas, but it certainly played a central role in the South and elsewhere. I think he misjudges the danger posed by the antiabortion movement, and the passionate conviction of its activists. (He sees it as largely symbolic and not seriously devoted to the overthrow of Roe vs. Wade.)

But this book is a serious, daring and largely convincing exploration of a question most commentators approach with facile generalities: How did the right conquer middle America and turn the region's populist heritage to its own ends? If Frank is even half right about how and why this happened, the Democratic Party faces much bigger challenges than its quadrennial struggle to triangulate some tedious Kennedy clone into the White House -- in a vast swath of the country, it has lost its only viable constituency, and is in danger of extinction.

Although he's originally from Mission Hills, Kan., in the affluent western suburbs of Kansas City, Frank lived most of his adult life in Chicago -- where he founded the Baffler, the idiosyncratic left journal -- until his recent move to Washington. When I spoke to him by telephone, he was visiting his mother on the North Side of Chicago, and began excitedly describing his recent trip to Kansas, where the new book, it's safe to say, has gotten some attention.

I understand you've been packing 300-seat auditoriums, turning people away in Wichita and Kansas City.

These people, so far, are highly enthusiastic. I've only had one angry conservative show up, and he was a member of the media. The newspapers there are hopping mad about it. They do not address the substantive issues I raise, they just insist that I am insulting to Kansans. Well, here they are! They're at my reading and they don't seem to think that. I'm getting tons of e-mails from people in Kansas, telling me this is their life story. It's very weird for me.

Well, I assume anyone in Kansas who isn't a right-winger would be pretty excited about this book.

There are Democrats in Kansas. There just aren't very many of them. I've now met many Democratic politicians. The former mayor of Topeka, the current mayor of Lawrence.

Well, does the response you got out there change your views any? In the book, you forecast a pretty grim future for Kansas politics.

Yeah, well there's a guy who is running against [right-wing Republican Sen.] Sam Brownback. He's very confident he's going to beat Brownback. That's probably optimistic, but he tells me every farmer he talks to is angry as hell. All these people I talk to agree with the central thesis, that the populist spirit out there has been hijacked by Republicans with these cultural issues, and we've got to get people back on track. Now this is in Wichita, which is going through terrible hard times right now, so there are a lot of people who are receptive to what I'm saying.

Is the Iraq war, with its endless amount of bad news, changing the equation for anybody you meet in Kansas?

You know, the war in Iraq did not come up. That did not seem to be a big issue for these people. That's kind of predictable; the issues that people debate out there tend to be domestic. The Republicans aren't talking about foreign affairs, they're talking about the arrogant college professor who's telling you that evolution is true, even though you don't believe it. People mentioned the war in Kansas City, but that's an urban area that's more tuned in to the national media.

One of the strongest portions of your book is when you reveal that you understand the conservative backlash because you were part of it. It takes a big man to admit to having been a teenage Reaganite.

[Laughter.] What's really funny is that the transition that I made -- I wrote this entire book about how material self-interest has been submerged in this culture. If you think about it, it would've been much more in my interest, coming out of college, to be on the right. If I had stuck with it, I'd be sitting pretty today. Think about the right-wing magazines that are similar to the Baffler. There's a libertarian magazine, same cut size, publishes articles of about the same length. It's edited by quality people, they do a good job. Their circulation is smaller than ours, but everybody that works there has healthcare and generous salaries.

A welfare system for libertarians.

Yes! They go in and out of the think-tank world and the political world. I mean, they just go from one cushy gig to the next.

You quote this great piece of graffiti from your hometown that sums up the late-'70s backlash: "Russia Iran Disco Suck." And then you provide the corollary to that, to explain the way you felt at the time.

Yes. As sucks disco, so sucks Iran and communism. As rocked Van Halen, so rocks Ronald Reagan.

OK, this is a dumb question, but given your personal feelings about Reagan, did you have any emotional or visceral response to his death?

Well, I never like media frenzies. Those are annoying. But yeah, there was a little bit of wistfulness, and I'll describe it to you. I was watching TV and they were running a lot of news footage from that era, the late '70s and early '80s. It was images of the fabled Reagan Democrats, you know, blue-collar guys voting for Reagan. I was thinking about the world that those guys came out of, where 20 percent of the private-sector workforce was in a union, and blue-collar people could live next door to white-collar people. The gap between the social classes wasn't that huge. They loved that world so much, they loved that affluent society. They voted for this candidate who evoked it so well, who talked about it so beautifully. And he killed it. Conservatism killed that world. It's so sad. It's just tragic. What's that old term? One of the great ironies of American history. But this is way beyond irony. It's tragedy.

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