The 57 Varieties of Moderation

by Jack Cashill

“Moderates just don’t much like democracy, do they?”

Asking me this question last week was a serious East Coast writer. He was on contract with a major publisher to do still another book on the red state-blue state divide with the inevitable focus on Kansas. He is literally the fifth different writer or producer to interview me on this exact same preposterous subject in the last year.

Moderates will be happy to know that I disagreed with this writer’s proposition and defended their honor.

What prompted this writer and the others was the surprise success of Thomas Frank’s best-seller, What’s The Matter With Kansas. What made me unique among those profiled by Frank is that I neither live nor work in Kansas. What made Frank unique among his fellow cultural slummers is that he did not interview me. Why bother? Except for my address, he knew all the answers in advance.

To his credit, this latest writer did not presume to know it all and admitted it. To his good fortune, he got to witness the whole Kansas school-funding brouhaha, and it provided an instant education. For sure, his publishers back in New York are licking their chops for some more right-wing, Kansas-bred red meat, but what this writer found most juicy was the filet au moderate.

“Moderates don’t like representative democracy,” the writer repeated, sounding like one of those guys in the movies stunned into repetition after having had a laparoscopy performed on them by a space alien. “The further away moderates are from decision-making the happier they are,” he added in disbelief.

What prompted this observation was the transparent joy moderates of either party were taking in their capitulation to the Kansas Supreme Court on the school-funding issue. The Kansas lawmakers had just agreed to cough up $148.4 million of other people’s money to satisfy the whims of their unelected masters. And they did so without even asking for a constitutional check on future judicial mischief, which means that the judges will be back in the future asking for more.

“The Senate should be very proud of this session,” argued Senate Majority Leader Derek Schmidt, an Independence Republican. The world had not seen pride this mystifying since Marshall Petain happily agreed with Hitler that the French really didn’t need the top half of their country. Senator Schmidt justified his pride by adding that lawmakers “have tried to do what we should have done on the constitutional amendment issues,” as though failure on so critical an issue were as satisfying to him and his constituents as success.

No wonder the writer’s head was spinning. Thomas Frank had assured his audience in the very subtitle of his book that “conservatives won the heart of America.” But here on the ground, this new writer was learning that conservatives had not even won the heart of Kansas, not even gotten close.

Varieties of Moderates

As I informed the writer, his first mistake was to think of moderates in Kansas as a monolith. They are anything but. Kansas, in fact, has as many varieties of moderates as Eskimos have of snow. On the school-funding issue, they just happened to coalesce into an undifferentiated blizzard of political passive aggressiveness.

There are the crypto-moderates, who are actually liberal Democrats savvy enough to know that the word “liberal” is poison in Kansas, even in Liberal, Kan. They just like to tax and spend, and if they can do so only because the judge says they have to, all the better.

There are the deep cover moderate Republicans. These are the liberal Democrats who burrow so deeply into the state’s Republican establishment that even Karl Rove couldn’t blow their cover. They have to make Republican noises every now and then about constitutional government and other frivolities, but they like to tax and spend too.

There are the cocktail party moderates. These are the moderates whose overriding goal is to avoid embarrassment at cocktail parties, especially those in presumably smarter states. The CP moderates are for or against everything their social superiors expect them to be for or against. The evolution debate, in particular, has inspired them to new heights of moderation. They rolled over on this one too.

There are the public education moderates, who could give a flying fudgesicle about any issue other than the fully subsidized education of their above-average children. Those who chided Missouri governor Matt Blunt for sparing education at the expense of Medicaid do not understand, as Blunt obviously does, the wrath of a PE moderate scorned. On this issue anyhow, they could have cared less about “no taxation without representation” and other clichés from the days before civics classes yielded to “Textile Design & Fibers” or “Interpersonal Relations.”

There are the “I vote the candidate” (IVTC) moderates. They choose which candidate is best by watching 30-second TV commercials, which explains the state of 30-second TV commercials. Although not a Kansan, my mother was a classic IVTC moderate in that she confused incoherence with independence. She voted for George Wallace and George McGovern in successive Presidential elections and did not sense a continuity problem.

When she voted for George Bush, I realized that the common thread was their George-ness. Although her last vote was for Bill Clinton, had she lived longer she might have voted for W just to secure her place in history as a four-George voter. Despite her eighth-grade education, my mother was plenty smart. She just didn’t care about day-to-day politics. Her spiritual kin in Kansas, and they are close to the majority, don’t even know there was a school-funding controversy.

The moderates that count

For all the garden varieties of moderates, the ones that matter probably can be numbered in the hundreds in both Kansas and Missouri. These are the power moderates. And no, as a rule, they are not averse to representative democracy. On city councils and zoning boards, where they proliferate, power moderates champion democracy.

They reject democratic government only when it gets in the way of their goal. That goal in either state, in either party, is the same and constant everywhere: to get things built. In Kansas, the payoff comes in the form of back-scratching, usually legal. In New Jersey, it comes in paper bags.

Unlike their more liberal colleagues, however, moderates know that high taxes in the long run will discourage people from building things. In this regards, they are authentic in their moderation. In their urge to build, however, creativity sometimes trumps authenticity, and creativity requires power.

Rep. Ed O’Malley, a Roeland Park Republican, seems to have mastered the rhetoric of power moderation. According to The Kansas City Star, he was “ecstatic” that millions more dollars will be pumped into schools. If funding schools is a source of such ecstasy why, one wonders, did O’Malley and other moderates not do so earlier of their own accord?

That, of course, would have meant raising taxes. But with the scary judges threatening to close schools, O’Malley and his moderate colleagues collaborated to raise moderation to heroic standards. “Level-headed lawmakers came together to pass a bipartisan solution that keeps the schools open without raising taxes,” he declared, “and allows us now to focus on solving next year’s problems.”

In the face of rhetoric this creative, old-fashioned argument that the elected representatives of the people should set the policy for the state simply did not stand a chance.

Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has affiliated with the magazine for 25 years.

He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.