Davis Merritt: Brownback’s new campaign dividing Kansas

If some of the Kansans you talk with about current affairs seem more angry and fearful these days and your attempts to connect across political differences are more discouraging, there’s a reason.

Sam Brownback’s inexplicable and mean-spirited campaign to divide the state and its people rather than lead is at full throttle. To see it at work, try to get on his limited e-mail list of supporters, gov-grassroots. But if you’re not a firm tea party loyalist, prepare to be disgusted by what you find.

Governor of a state historically known for its conservative-flavored moderation and acceptance of differences of opinion, Brownback feeds his supporters a package of political red meat wrapped in the language of extremism.

In Brownback’s e-mail world:

▪  The state’s education system, including local school boards and all the state’s teachers and teacher unions, are an “ever-litigating” enemy to be mocked and demeaned.

▪  John Robb, attorney for Schools for Fair Funding, which is part of the long-standing lawsuit over state support for public schools, is “quite ironically ... taking money out of Kansas classrooms to fund his war on taxpayers. He is robbing Peter to pay Robb” – i.e., in it for himself.

▪  One of the “central missions of the left in America is to increase the number of Americans who are dependent on the government ... to justify the big government and high tax policies they support.” In other words, some Americans, mindlessly driven to collect and spend tax money, are deliberately creating dependency to support some sort of imagined socio-government complex; finding ways to resolve the country’s real problems of hunger, poverty and ignorance is not their objective.

▪  “Those who say Medicaid expansion would save Independence hospital are lying.” Medicare expansion “would primarily benefit a small number of big city hospitals, not smaller rural hospitals.... (It) funnels money to big city hospitals (and) creates a new entitlement class.”

The tired, heavy rhetoric plods on, decrying “activist, unelected judges” and, of course, “usual-suspect editorial writers.” Every Kansan is paying the salaries and other expenses of the people who run the Listserv. As with all government propaganda, the messages rely upon demonizing opponents and creating unrealistic fears in the target audience.

The e-mail program began after Brownback was re-elected in 2014. When voters bestow the gift of office they do, indeed, confer subsidiary privileges upon the winner, and it would be naive to believe that no political use would be made of that earned status. But elections also impose obligations, including one to serve all of the people, not just those – a minority in Brownback’s case – who voted for the winner.

More important for the long term, leadership involves healing, not deliberately creating division and calculatingly exacerbating tensions.

Brownback’s leadership, however, seems aimed at changing Kansas into a one-party, immoderate fortress in perpetuity. To do so, he must convince his followers that compromise is never an option and that the tone of political discussion today must be unrelenting animosity and ridicule.

That strategy produces a conversational void, an imposed civic silence that precludes useful discussion. It divides communities, professions, congregations and even families along absolutist lines, with only barren sand between them. If you’re not on the far right, in this strategy, you are, by definition, far left.

As a result, nagging problems both inside and outside the political realm cannot be addressed effectively.

All Kansans, even the supporters Brownback so assiduously propagandizes, deserve better.

This story was originally published October 12, 2015 at 7:05 PM with the headline "Davis Merritt: Brownback’s new campaign dividing Kansas."