Kansas Republicans have been a divided party for more than a century. The populist uprising of the 1920s, the Fred Hall insanities of the 1950s and the sharp elbows of so-called social conservatives in the ’80s and ’90s were among highlights.
What divided Republicans then as now, was far more than social issues or religious differences. Here lay a class war. It was not about abortion or school funding, books in the library or gun control. It was about privilege and denial, autocracy and confinement.
By the mid-1990s, the party’s conservative populists had begun to gather energy in the Kansas House of Representatives and state Senate. They saw themselves as ranks of the long-suppressed or ignored. The Capitol establishment ― chiefly Gov. Bill Graves and his Senate Republican leadership ― were viewed as a privileged, cold-blooded hierarchy. Put another way at that time, it was Republican minions vs. the party’s upper class.
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A decade earlier, a new Republican order ― at first called “rebels” ― had germinated as a vigorous minority in the legislature. As a group they were seen as the oddballs, a small crowd of anti-abortionists, home-schoolers, gun nuts, libertarians and religious freaks. Even the plainest conservatives among them were labeled crackpots.
But in the rush to judge this new crowd, fundamental connections were ignored. Common threads ran through their diverse ranks ― the shared belief, for example, that government had become too big, too expensive, too entrenched; that there might be better ways to run things. But only their most controversial ideas were given headlines (or snickers). Even the idea of term limits was hooted down.
All the while, from one election to the next, the new Republicans began to acquire seats and power in the House and Senate. They would gain control at party headquarters and a majority of the Republican state committee. (By 2000, they had begun to hold separate meetings during the party’s annual Kansas Day celebration in Topeka.) They came one election at a time from the wards and precincts; they did not spring from the closed circles of political action committees or the board rooms of private clubs.
As the new Republican ranks grew, diversity set in. Their members were from shops, factories, farms, law offices, banks, the teaching and service professions. And yet they were considered antagonists. Beyond their individual conservative passions ― from abortion to zero-base budgeting ― emerged some classic liberal beliefs: open records, open voting, defiance of the old ways, challenging the established comforts.
By 1996, the Senate of the old Republican order, clinging fitfully to its power, was seen as a faded aristocracy that sought more to command the legislature than to lead it.
Today, same dynamics but a switch in character. The rebellious have become the rulers, an establishment fueled not by Kansas partisans, but by distant cause lobbies, their power base outsourced to Washington. House and Senate leaders rule with force, or with fond and proprietary gestures that spell power and entitlement. Their position secure and solvent, they reign as before, at a level above the rest, as the all-seeing appropriators of citizens’ fleeting lives.
