Insightful commentary on Black Presidents and Flat-earthery

Got to re-post from Brad DeLong:

There appear, from this vantage point eight blocks over the Missouri border, to be three Kansases, politically:

• There is the Blue Kansas City Social-Democratic Triangle--Atchison-Topeka, Topeka-Louisberg, and then the Missouri state line from Louisberg up to Atchison. This is normal white American suburbia--doctors and lawyers and teachers and nurses and other professionals and the people who work for and with them in the offices and the malls--with a few unusual features.
• There is the Wichita Petropolis--with the unequal income distribution and the money-talks political dysfunction common to resource-rich polities.
• There is the Prairie--where people condemn global warming as a Socialist United Nations Plot while they pray for rain because the Ogallala aquifer does not yield what it used to, and demand that the government leave them alone with the guns and the Medicare and the farm subsidies they have earned by the sweat of their brow.

As best as I can see it, the majority political coalitions in these three different Kansas are as follows:

• In the Petropolis right now, the majority coalition votes for lower taxes because the petrocrats have convinced the voters (correctly) that state taxes transfer money out of Greater Wichita to the Prairie and to the Blue Triangle, and (incorrectly) that the citizens of Greater Wichita as a group benefit from more money in the hands of the petrocrats.
• On the Prairie right now, the majority coalition votes for lower taxes because the voters believe (incorrectly) that their state tax money goes to keep the African-American poor of Kansas City in idleness, and (correctly) that their tax money goes to support state colleges, universities, and high schools that teach evolution and "liberalism".
• In the Blue Kansas City Social-Democratic Triangle right now, the majority coalition votes for lower taxes because the voters believe (correctly) that their state tax money goes to support the Prairie, and (correctly) that they could get better value if they kept their state tax money at home, redirected it to lower levels of government to support their schools, roads, and parks, and so had social democracy in seven counties.
• Underpinning everything in all three areas, the majority coalition suffers from Fear of a Black President: Lots of people in Kansas's three regional majority coalitions appear to be thinking: "For 500 years we kept the Black Man down. Now somehow one of them is in charge. What would we do if the Black Man had kept us down for 500 years, and now one of us was in charge? That's right--we would try to disadvantage them, and so he is trying to disadvantage us, and we must oppose everything he wants to do, for if we cannot figure out how it is intended to disadvantage us that only shows that he is clever, and we must oppose everything he plans even more strongly."

I really wish I were joking. But that really appears to be how it is right now--really appears to be What Is the Matter with Kansas