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Kansas Bleeds Again

The murder of Kansas abortionist George Tiller has sent the media into a frenzy about antiabortion activism and the culture wars. But does the Tiller killing have as much to do with the peculiarities of Kansas itself as with the abortion? My review of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas, from 2004, has been […]

The murder of Kansas abortionist George Tiller has sent the media into a frenzy about antiabortion activism and the culture wars. But does the Tiller killing have as much to do with the peculiarities of Kansas itself as with the abortion? My review of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas, from 2004, has been newly added to the website as part of our week focusing on the theme of “place.” There’s much in Frank’s book — which is flawed but valuable — that shows how Kansas has long been peculiarly radical, even as it is often on the leading edge of trends that later shape the country. Frank’s book is also, well, frank about the interplay of culture, class, and political frustration in kindling the flames of prairie radicalism. As I wrote:

Frank is a man of old-time left-wing sensibilities; he isn’t inclined to take social issues at face value. Instead he subjects Kansas politics to an analysis of class interests, the results of which present him with a paradox. Grassroots conservatives vote for an end to abortion, bringing faith back to the schools, and cleaning up the culture. But what they get from their elected officials are lowered taxes for the state’s wealthiest few and big perks for big business. The abortion clinics never close, but factories do. Frank is not explicitly a Marxist but his bottom line is that the backlash, the movement of religious and social conservatives against the perceived power of liberal elites, is a form of false-consciousness, substituting for a real and ongoing class war a symbolic and ineffectual—and never-ending—culture war.

… But blue-collar Kansans are not up in arms over their economic plight. Instead, it’s the culture, stupid. What worries the folks who work in bottling plants and Boeing factories is the moral decay of the nation and the sense that the country is being run by alien interests, by liberal elites. While never abandoning his economic emphasis, in rare moments Frank concedes some points here. He writes, for example, “whatever else the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision might have been, it was also a monument to the power of the professions”—medical, journalistic, and above all legal. “Roe v. Wade demonstrated in no uncertain manner the power of the legal profession to override everyone from the church to the state legislature.”

There’s less and more to the murder of George Tiller than the press may care to admit: less in the sense that this murder tells us little about the antiabortion or anti-government groups in general; more in that there are many more sources of discontent in the Sunflower State (and elsewhere) beyond anger at late-term abortionists.

Of course, reaction to the murder also brings to mind Philip Jenkins’s warnings about recurrent bouts of anti-Right hysteria under liberal presidents.

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