The Republican tradition in Kansas is caught in a paradox, one that started before most farms had electricity and the only air conditioning was in town at the movie house. It involves the conflict between values steeped in religion, and politics rooted in tradition.
The chimes of this paradox are familiar as we ring in a new year, one of covid, of uncertainty and hunger for relief. When we need politics, we vilify the government. In times of need, we ask government to help.
This wasn’t always an option. Our system originally was built on a Protestant culture that dominated politics until 1932. Our national politics, Democratic and Republican, had derived from its ethic a basic creed that if people worked hard and took care of their families, either fortune or God would reward the effort.
This philosophy was a solid and unmistakable grain in the planks of both parties, but it collapsed when the national marketplace broke down and when, on the great plains, the nation’s breadbasket turned to dust. Hunger and unemployment flew in the face of Emerson’s philosophy of self-reliance. The independence so fiercely practiced on the plains and worshiped by the Republicans had been fractured.
Franklin Roosevelt sought to rescue the country’s ravaged political culture by reinforcing a lasting political truth: that in a modern industrial system all individual effort must be braced by a government that guarantees opportunity for those who want to work, food for the starving, pensions for the elderly, and aid to the sick and the poor. (Moderate Republicans have come to believe much the same.)
Our farmers today accept federal subsidies, price supports, loans and insurance. The poor have welfare and Medicaid. Older Americans accept Medicare. Business and industry have grants, tax loopholes and benefits. State and local governments have received piles of aid from Washington.
In this farm state, fierce independence remains cherished. Citizen responsibilities in private life and community life are as great, if not greater, than the responsibility of government to shape the life of communities.
But society has changed, and several developments have ensured even in Kansas that today’s community is not necessarily tomorrow’s. Great infusions of federal highway funds after World War II – and later the Kansas Turnpike and interstate highway system – provided farms with faster access to markets, city expansion to the suburbs and communities access to each other.
Long before the Internet, the remoteness of rural towns and the isolation of farms was diminished with rural mail delivery and electric power, telephones and television, newspapers and magazines. People began to discover that local issues were not exclusive, that what helped or hurt farmers in Meade had likely done the same in Marion. What bothered merchants in Manhattan troubled storekeepers in Hays. What delighted the banker in Pittsburg could please one in Colby.
Goals and dreams, trouble and elation were shared and became common over the years. But as transportation improved and communications sharpened, as cities grew and farming became an industry, the interests of each were narrowed. Distinct contrasts remained; residents in western and southwest Kansas often remarked that they were closer to three other state capitals than to their own. They began to draw lines and attract sympathetic loyalists for their separate and conflicting causes.
The divergence was not between Republican or Democrat but between rural and urban interests, the lengthening suspicions among representatives of farm and town, city and suburb.
They remain today. Covid threatens to deepen the divergence, sharpen the pain.
We forget too easily that, the people – all of us – are at the foundation of American government. Any doing or undoing is, at base, up to us.
The successful government will find ways to unify the state, go forward in common purpose beyond hack themes, cheap slogans, regional bias. Division is the fuel of demagogues and power mongers, but hope is for everyone. Government is no longer a franchise for one tribe above another, especially at a time like this.
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