Right-wing superiority complex
In "Superior, Nebraska," Dennis Boyles whacks at moderates and more.
By Denis Boyles
Doubleday. 288 pp. $23.95
Reviewed by Leonard Boasberg
The folks who live in Kansas and Nebraska have solid Midwestern values.
They're self-reliant. Resilient. Responsible. Honorable. They have common sense. They understand what government should be and how it should behave, which mainly is to let them handle their own affairs. Midwestern folks help one another.
These values "are not typically the qualities that come to mind" - or, at least, to the mind of Denis Boyles - "when you think about New York or Los Angeles, where rude pretension alone can be enough to make you famous."
Those people back East and on the Left Coast ignore, insult, condescend to the folks in small towns like Superior, Neb., pop. 2,055. They know little about them except that they tend to vote Republican.
"Blue-state pundits have reviled people, like the ones you see walking up Central Avenue, as Babbitts and bigots, hicks and Jesus freaks," Boyles declares in
Superior, Nebraska
.
Boyles makes sweeping statements like this throughout the book. To be sure, Kansas did become a national laughingstock when anti-evolutionist crusaders took over the Kansas school board in 1999. Most Kansans, though, were so embarrassed, so shocked that moderates soon succeeded in recapturing the board.
Superior, Nebraska
is billed as a response to Thomas A. Frank's 2004 best-seller
What's the Matter With Kansas?
, but actually supports its central contention.
Frank argued that conservatives, exploiting such issues as abortion, evolution, Bible-reading and homosexuality, have persuaded many Americans, working people and farmers, to vote against their economic self-interest. Boyles more or less concedes the point.
Yes, Kansans "sometimes put moral principles ahead of their economic self-interest." And "most of these 'economic interests' have little to do with the actual lives of Midwesterners."
They don't? Economic interests like jobs and job security, education, medical care, clean air and water?
Boyles is contemptuous of Kansas Republican "moderates" - he insists on putting the word between quotation marks-who have been at odds with the conservatives since the 1990s.
The clash started in 1991, when a group called Operation Rescue organized thousands of people to block abortion clinics, lie in the street, and picket the homes of abortion doctors. Before long, the conservatives had taken over the Kansas Republican Party. The old-line Republican moderates were appalled, as were most of the major Kansas newspapers.
The Mods managed to retake control, but the bitterness persists. To Boyles, a National Review columnist, the Republican "moderates" are really liberal. They so detest the Cons that in 2002 they helped elect Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, as governor.
Sebelius, Boyles writes, "stands firmly for the politics of Muzak, she understands the Midwest's deep, deep aversion to confrontational politics."
So the Cons help Republicans in Kansas and Nebraska win national elections - both states voted overwhelmingly twice for George W. Bush - but they generally lose when it comes to those social issues that so consume them.
Boyles sadly observes that "when conservatives are confronted by a common, cohesive enemy" - or, as he might have said, opposition - "their response is sometimes so bombastic, unpleasant, and diffuse that it completely fails to inform, let alone persuade."
Exactly.
Boyles himself is hardly persuasive with his bombastic attacks on moderate Republicans; on "most" journalists with their "knee-jerk hatred of conservatives"; on the "liberal fulminations" of large Kansas newspapers; on a "runaway judiciary," bureaucrats, lawyers, secularists, and anti-Christian Eastern liberals.
In Kansas, he asserts, "on average a partial-birth abortion takes place at least once a day." Where does he get that? Neither the State of Kansas nor the Centers for Disease Control collect such information.
In 2004 Pennsylvania went Democratic by "100,000 suspect votes." Where did he get that "suspect"?
As an appendix, Boyles reprints William Allen White's celebrated 1896 Emporia Gazette editorial "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Boyles apparently doesn't know that 50 years later, in his autobiography, White said that when rereading Gazette files of those days, "I am always shocked . . . at the intrepid complacency with which I viewed the universe."