What's the Matter with Kansas?

By Madeleine Kando

I am ill-equipped to write about politics. All I have in my arsenal is an instinct for the ‘right’ thing. But even that is failing me as I am struggling to make sense of the events of the past year: the economic crisis, the ruins left behind by the Bush administration, the unemployment rate.. above all this nation’s resistance to health care reform.

I don’t think that even the most knowledgeable academician could explain to me what is going on in America today. How did we get to a place where it is tacitly accepted that the poor have to bail out the super rich, or the whole country might sink into a depression (as we are told).

One source I found to cope with my confusion is in a book by Thomas Frank: ‘What’s the Matter with Kansas’. Frank tries to make sense of the transformation of his home state of Kansas, which has turned from a populist left-wing state to a state controlled by conservative, pro-business, right-wing evangelical Christians.

He asks the sensible question: how so many people can vote against their own economic interests? His explanation rings true in my opinion. Conservative politicians have managed to deny the ‘economic’ basis for the difference in social classes. They have replaced it with a ‘cultural’ basis. They have branded left-wing liberals as those latte drinking vegetarians who don’t like guns. It is clever. By removing the ‘economic factor’ as a source of discontent conservative leaders find no opposition to their free-market, laissez-faire, lower taxes for the rich policies. By keeping people angry about cultural issues such as family values, intelligent design or abortion and gay rights, they are masking their true motivation: keeping the system friendly to unregulated, run-away capitalism.

This might explain why so many poor people are against health care reform. Health care reform equals government intervention. It infringes on a person’s privacy and right to self-determination (the right to not get affordable health care when they are sick?)

But this phenomenon of polluting true politics with ‘cultural’ issues is also a disease of the liberal left. Rather than pushing for more equality and economic security they concentrate instead on gay rights, pro-choice and anti-school prayer. As important as those issues might be, I consider them far less important than the fact that 14% of families in america suffer from food insecurity. That on any given night there are a million homeless people on the streets.

How did we come to accept the inevitability of so much inequality? The liberals have long ago stopped talking to the ‘working class’ and in a sense they have what is coming to them: an opposition that is much better at manipulating politics.

Sometimes it seems that the word 'liberal' is becoming a dirty word and that its true meaning is becoming so tarnished that before long there may only be different shades of conservatism. We have a Democratically dominated House and Senate and a Democratic Presidency, and yet the government is unable to pass a health care bill, which is clearly the wish of a majority of Americans. leave comment here