Tarkio, Mo.
What’s the matter with Kansas? It’s a decade since Thomas Frank launched a thousand headlines with his book of that title, itself a reference to a famous 1896 essay by Kansas journalist William Allen White. Frank’s thesis was simple: Kansans, and by extension the rest of the red states, vote against their economic interests. Or as he puts it in the first page of his book: “People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about.”
Is he right? Do voters in the great middle of the country ignore their economic interests to vote for the cultural populism that so offends Frank? Do they sacrifice their pocketbooks to issues like abortion and gay marriage? Frank’s quarrel is not with populism, of course, but rather the right’s use of populist rhetoric about social issues.
At the same time, Frank is no fan of the Obama administration, finding its response to our present predicaments far short of the full-throated class war that he would recommend. But for those of us who reside where Republicans are successful in politics and government, the Obama administration’s performance is the only metric available against which to measure the consequences of not voting Republican.
By that standard, then, how have red state voters fared? How are we doing, now that President Obama and his allies have carried the day?
There is no doubt that this has been the slowest recovery in modern history, and it has been particularly bad for the kind of investors who populate flyover country. While low interest rates are good for Wall Street and a government that is $18 trillion in debt, they are ravaging Midwesterners, whose idea of a retirement plan is a certificate of deposit or two at the local bank. Perhaps even more alarming, low interest rates have contributed to an unsustainable boom in farmland prices, a boom that is destined to end badly. While Midwesterners have enjoyed the increase in asset values that follows historically low interest rates, the recent drop in crop prices will squeeze Midwestern agriculture in ways we haven’t seen since the 1980s.
Not only that, but the Obama administration’s environmental and regulatory policies have been devastating to industries that deal in actual commodities rather than ideas and silicon.
Missouri, my home state, doesn’t rank in the top 10 states for the percentage of our electricity generated by coal-fired generating plants, but we’re certainly more dependent on coal than most, and we do rank in the top 10 for carbon emissions. People here understand that the recent greenhouse gas rules advanced by the Obama administration will increase the cost of electricity. Most folks who live in rural Missouri are served by electric cooperatives, whose power grid was built during the Depression with the direct help of the federal government. These aren’t investor-owned utilities, but rather public-private partnerships of a kind that ought to please the left. Despite this pristine provenance, the cooperatives will be among the hardest hit of all utilities because of their reliance on coal-fired generating plants. Candidate Obama made no secret of the fact that the coal industry was in his sights, and that’s one campaign promise he has fulfilled. Unsurprisingly, not one of the top 10 coal-burning states awarded President Obama its electoral votes in 2012. Contra Thomas Frank, people voted, if not their economic interests, at least their electric bill.
This spring the Obama administration introduced a rule outlining its latest interpretation of the Clean Water Act. The original act gives the federal government jurisdiction over the “navigable waters” of the United States. The EPA has spent the four decades since the passage of the act attempting to expand the definition of navigable waters. The agency has been called to account at least twice by the Supreme Court, notably in Rapanos v. United States in 2006. In that case, Justice Kennedy, for the majority, wrote that the “waters of the United States” included all waters with a “significant nexus” with the navigable waters of the United States. Although overall the decision reined in the EPA’s former practice of claiming jurisdiction over every mud puddle in which a goose might land (for real—it was called the glancing goose test), the term “significant nexus” has led to no small amount of mischief, including the latest rule by the EPA. After conducting what it terms a “connectivity study,” the EPA has discovered connections between the navigable waters of the United States and almost every place where rainwater gathers. But are the connections “significant”? Clearly, by using the term “navigable waters,” Congress intended to place some limit on the EPA’s reach, leaving some small part of the country to state and local regulation. By using the term “significant,” Justice Kennedy was trying to do the same thing. The Obama administration disagrees.
There is much ambiguity in the proposed rule, which may be by design. Farmers will never know whether they’re liable for fines of as much as $37,500 a day when they work in their fields or kill weeds. There are well over a million farms in the United States, and it will be impossible to regulate them all. Of course, we know enforcement will be fair and nonpolitical—just like enforcement by the IRS when it rules on tax exemptions.
If you are writing code in Silicon Valley, working for the federal government, or living and working in a metropolitan area, this matters very little to your future. If you are looking for oil and gas, building homes, or trying to farm or ranch, it is a very big deal. In fact, one might say it directly affects your economic interests. Now, most residents of flyover country haven’t followed the 40-year regulatory and litigation history of the Clean Water Act. I’m pretty sure the average resident of Kansas can’t quote Justice Kennedy’s musings on significant nexuses. But Kansans do understand that environmental rules impose a much greater direct cost on people in the extractive or agricultural industries than they do on folks living in coop apartments on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Here in Missouri, the Fish and Wildlife Service has added the Grotto Sculpin, a blind cave fish, to the endangered species list. Landowners are scrambling to write voluntary plans to protect the fish in order to avoid classification of their land as “critical habitat.” If they’re successful, perhaps residents can pay enough protection money to lawyers and consultants to save themselves from the fate of loggers in the Northwest. Missouri is also home to two other species up for designation as endangered species.
To read the pages of Thomas Frank’s hometown paper, the Kansas City Star, is to see Frank’s dystopian dreams through the eyes of graduates of our nation’s journalism schools. The editorial page is quick to pick up the slightest whiff of theocracy in both Kansas and Missouri, and the news pages have a hair-trigger response to suspected Republican outrages in either state. If, like Frank or some journalists in the Kansas City area, you see yourself as Robinson Crusoe stranded on an intellectual island surrounded by an ocean of corn and miles and miles of wheat, every trip outside the city’s beltway is a frightening journey into uncharted territory, where there be dragons and the cast of Deliverance waiting just over the horizon.
Economic stories rarely make thrilling headlines, and balancing urban dwellers’ desire for open, unsullied places with the needs of people (often obese) who actually till the soil and drill for hydrocarbons is difficult. So much easier to write about contraception and marriage “freedom.” Trust me, you can spend years in my small town without having a conversation about birth control. Maybe decades. We’re socially conservative, I suppose, but our social conservatism expresses itself in much the same way our economic conservatism does. We’d really just like to be left alone. You wouldn’t know that by reading the region’s leading newspaper, and you wouldn’t know it by reading Thomas Frank.
People here are worried about flooding, now that we’ve quit concentrating on flood control and are managing the Missouri River to protect endangered species. They’re worried about hiring a consulting engineer and a construction firm to build a government-required concrete bunker worthy of an Iranian nuclear site around their farmyard fuel tank. They’re worried that the Grotto Sculpin lurks under their farm, that they won’t be able to dry their grain this fall because electricity is too expensive.
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision protecting the religious liberty of closely held corporations, the editorial pages spent hundreds of column inches worrying that female employees whose health insurance doesn’t cover the full cost of all forms of birth control will no longer be able to afford their $25 monthly contraceptive bill. Our farm in the corner of Missouri will face thousands of dollars in increased electric bills each fall as our electric cooperative replaces coal with natural gas and wind.
People vote the way they do for any number of reasons, and partisans believe, by definition, that the folks voting for the other side are voting against the nation’s best interests. Frank disapproves of how folks in flyover country vote and finds a ready audience among the chattering classes for his thesis that conservatives are, well, stupid. That’s no surprise, and it does sell books, but the last few years have not been kind to the theory. Folks in Kansas were right to be skeptical of candidate Obama’s promises. With another election looming, the accumulating evidence makes it pretty easy to see that folks in the middle of the country will continue to vote with their hard heads, not just their soft hearts. There’s nothing at all the matter with Kansas.
Blake Hurst is a farmer in Missouri.
