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Though Thomas Frank tells an engaging story about recent events in Kansas to illustrate the rise of the religious/political right, their takeover of the KS Republican Party, and their pursuit of policies not in their economic interest, he is not very helpful in trying to descry the larger context in which he places his narrative. This and the next essay attempt to begin that process. I think four themes help us explain America today: (1) liberal arrogance, (2) 1990s boom, (3) legal and cultural change and (4) the role of psychic connection for historic outsiders.

I. Liberal Arrogance/Conservative Resentment

One way to look at the post-WWII world is to see it as the triumph of liberal and inclusive themes that had their birth as early as the Progressive movement at the beginning of the 20th century. Three themes of immense importance in the 1960s and early 1970s were inclusion of Blacks in mainstream American life, discovery of new roles for women, and the attempt, figuratively speaking, to cabin religion to the Saturday religion page of the newspaper. Those who enforced liberal orthodoxy in these areas, and there definitely was a liberal orthodoxy, sometimes did it because they had a statute at their backs (the Civil Rights Act of 1964), an outburst of rage (the feminist movement) or the US Supreme Court (limiting the role of religion in American publc life..the Lemon test of 1971). The "enforcers" of the liberal orthodoxy were not above hacking and hewing an unsuspecting public into compliance. Many were the people, including myself, who were so humiliated or berated by the liberals for our supposed ignorance or lack of orthodoxy that we either meekly fell into line by adopting the philosophy of the movement or seethed with a resentment that, in my mind, is now boiling over in all its frothy whiteness.

On Race

Let me give an example of each new pillar of liberal orthodoxy in the late 1960s and 1970s, pillars into which I, a sort of liberal-leaning male, crashed very hard. First, on race. I wanted to be a liberal on race. After all, how could you justify the kinds of overt or covert racism that characterized American society for centuries? MLK's statement--that he hoped his children would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, rang so true to me and to millions of others that you just had to believe that racial discrimination was wrong. But just because you believed that it was wrong didn't mean you weren't get cut down to size once you wanted "to help out." The principal way you were cut down to size is when you didn't have the "right" vocabulary to describe Black people.

I recall being ostracized by a professional black colleague because I happened to "slip" up and call African-Americans "Blacks" on one occasion, and she frostily told me that they were "people of color" now, a decision that I am sure had been made by someone about 10 minutes previously. In other words, language was used against me as a barrier, as a way of saying, "Bill, you are not pure enough, you are not 'with it' enough, you really can never understand us and as evidence of that fact, you don't even know what to call us." And so we evolved from "Negroes" to "Blacks" to "Afro-Americans" to "African Americans" to "People of Color" to "Peoples of Color." But, there is one reality that would never change. I couldn't get it right what to call them. And, because of that, I was made to feel stupid. There is nothiing that will lead people to the depths of resentment more than if you treat them like they are hopelessly out of it. Now, more than 20 years after that slight, I can chalk it up to my colleague's personal insecurity and need to have her own "space" that was not assaulted by well-meaning whites. If I had voiced those concerns at the time, I am sure that Jesus' crucifixion would have been a mild penalty next to what I would have faced.

On Religion

I, who wanted desperately to be a liberal, was also rebuffed on the religion front. I happened to be an Evangelical in college, a breed that was not yet hated even in liberal places at the time because the arrogant liberals in charge didn't yet know what to make of people who took religion very seriously. But we received the brunt of liberal disdain in the following way. I was President of the Brown Christian Fellowship, an Evangelical Protestant group of about 50 students in the early-mid 1970s at Brown. There was an alternative (and "establishment") religious group on campus, funded generously by the university through the Chaplain's office and peopled by about a dozen pipe-smoking, tweed jacket-wearing, Barth- and Tillich-quoting, barbate, dyspeptic-looking, spectacled individuals who looked as if they were born in an overstuffed chair. In 1972 or 1973, the Brown Christian Fellowship decided to approach the student council for funds for some of our operations. After all, the University Christian Movement (as it was called) was liberally supported by the university; why not throw a few dollars our way, since we were all students and were paying with precious body parts to attend this Ivy League school? Indeed, this issue would become an issue for the United States Supreme Court twenty years later; none of us knew at the time, I think, that we really were pursuing an issue which would have that much cultural significance. We just wanted some money for our operations.

I gave the presentation to the council. A few representatives seemed willing at first to grant us a few hundred dollars, but then the religious separationists vaulted into the discussion. Ignoring the fact that religion was generously funded already in the university, they said that it would be "improper" for them to fund something that was "sectarian" or "divisive" (as if they didn't breath divisiveness with every puff of the pipe). Indeed, if we wanted to go to school-funded religious activities, the work of the UCM stood ready to assist. Of course, the UCM people, if they ever thought about us at all, concluded that we certainly either were anti-intellectual morons or so hopelessly misguided that they wouldn't have given us a cent for our work. But, in any case, we were turned down flat, with the just-mentioned words ringing in my ears.

Conclusion

Obviously, I need more essays. Suffice it to say, however, that I felt a curiously unresolved tension deep within as these things happened to me. On the one hand, I still believed the liberal rhetoric of inclusion and diversity. But, on the other hand, I couldn't believe what was happening to me. It seemed that someone had appointed themselves to be in charge of indoctrination and that I simply wasn't learning very well. I sank deep(er?) into confusion....

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