A quick political quiz.  Which Kansas governor—the most conservative governor our state has had in at least the last fifty years—said the following things?

●  “Government does not have all the answers nor can it address but a small portion of the challenges we face.”

●  “We shall not achieve the ideals for which this state was founded as long as Kansas turns its back on the unborn.  To ignore injustice is simply not the Kansas way of doing things. … When we come right down to it, it is the character and the courage of our state which is at risk.”

●  “Historically, in Kansas, when rural Kansas prospered the state as a whole enjoyed prosperity … as [citizens] carried with them from the farms and rural communities strong moral and ethical values, a work ethic and a commitment to family and community that constantly invigorated business.”

● “The game is up for the insiders … who have closeted themselves under the domes too long.”

● “We need to make America aware that families preserving a farm from one generation to the next are better stewards of our water and soil than some faceless corporation in Chicago or Dallas.”

● “Our tax rates threaten the vitality of Kansas’ small businesses and farm operations.  … Even more intolerable, the property tax—coupled with higher corporate income tax—results in a tax burden that places Kansas as the highest taxing state in this region.”

● “The people of this state want meaningful property tax relief … they want an end to unchecked growth in government and taxes.  They want their government to be open and their public servants to be responsive.”

If you guessed... Joan Finney, you win today’s silver star.

Yes, it is Finney—a Democrat—who takes home the laurels as Kansas’s most conservative governor in living memory.  It’s true, the competition has not been fierce, but still, consider the evidence.

Finney fundamentally viewed government as the problem, not the solution.  She used her bully pulpit to preach the rough egalitarianism of a boot-strap gospel, repeatedly telling people not to look to government but rather to themselves, their families, and their communities for solutions.

Finney abhorred waste in government and the burden of taxation.  She vetoed tax increases and used her line-item to strike bloated deficit spending.  She balanced the budget and forced an “existing resources” budget through a recalcitrant state legislature which increased general fund spending by only one-half of one percent.  (Pause and let that sink in, especially in light of our current GOP-controlled legislature which treats the mere mention of holding to 3% budget increases with the tantrums of a spoiled child.) 

Finney held the traditional view that power corrupts, and therefore power ought to be as decentralized as possible, ideally making each family unit and community as self-sufficient as feasible.  To that end, her biggest policy reform—which ended in failure—was to introduce to Kansas the direct democracy of the initiative and referendum.

Finney was unapologetically and fiercely pro-life, and as the above makes clear, she viewed the ongoing abortion nightmare as a deep stain on the legacy of Kansas’ founding as the “free state” and the primary threat to our state’s character.  She signed abortion restrictions into law while complaining bitterly that the measures were not stringent enough.

Finney actually abolished state agencies and her approach to markets was something at least approaching laissez faire.  She regularly quoted and traced her political lineage to Theodore Roosevelt and was the self-described heir of the Kansas Populist Party of the 1890s. 

In this, Finney was an early example of a new kind of politician emerging out of the left right split that had dominated American politics during the Cold War.  In the 80s, social critic Christopher Lasch noted that those conventional political categories were dead and useless: “The idea of a ‘left’ has outlived its historical time and needs to be decently buried, along with the false conservatism that merely clothes an older liberal tradition in conservative rhetoric.”

Finney was what Norman Mailer described as a “left conservative”—someone who “thinks in the style of Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Burke.”  That is, a left conservative accepts Marx’s insight that Western liberalism (subjective individualism and centralized corporate-state control) is incompatible with the maintenance of “family, home, faith, hard work, duty, allegiance.”

Mailer also knew that Western liberalism has too often gone under the auspices of “flag conservatism” in American political history.  People who want “family” and “loyalty” and “duty” to be pious puffs of smoke.  Good for a few votes in flyover country and then quick! hoist up the no-social-judgment zone around “private” consumptive choice.

But Finney and the left conservative tradition were not really something new in American history (though the Ministry of Consensus Enforcement has effectively chiseled the alternative tradition from American monuments and has cast its heroes down the memory hole).  Finney directly associated herself with the prairie populists of the Nineteenth century, who in turn were direct political descendants of the Anti-Federalists and the Spirit of ’76.

While the Anti-Federalists lost the constitutional debate to the centralizers, their principles endured in the emergence of the old Republican Party under Thomas Jefferson (not to be confused with Lincoln’s Republicans). The Jeffersonians advocated for the popular, decentralized, and rural rights of yeoman over and against the aristocratic, citified and industrializing prerogatives of the Federalists.

But populism and left conservatism has always had its own progressive temptation—the urge to combat abuses of state power by giving the government even more power.  The populists tried this in the early Twentieth century when they gave the federal government the power to tax income and Finney also illustrates this danger.

After balancing the state budget and holding the line on general fund spending, Finney urged other elements of government to do the same.  She was furious when school districts ignored her and kept right on spending.  In what she called “unconscionable,” the school districts went on what she called a “spending spree” which “made a mockery of efforts to cut spending and live within our means.” 

Finney railed that “this irresponsible action by Kansas school districts is nothing more than a concentrated attempt to blackmail the State of Kansas into raising state taxes to pour more aid into schools.  … This is an outrage!”  (GOP legislators, are you taking notes?)

But after reaming public schools, this left conservative Democrat gave in to the fateful temptation: “It is time to take a hard look at the suggestion of a Shawnee County District Judge that school district monies are state resources and perhaps warrant more vigorous state oversight or control.” Oops.

Finney’s statement amounts, when viewed in light of the recent Kansas Supreme Court mandated school finance debacle, to a blackly ironic monument to the law of unintended consequences.  The lesson remains that power corrupts, and distributing that power as widely as possible is the only remotely satisfying response.  How conservatives today wish for Finney’s initiative and referendum to overthrow the growth of state power in our courts, at Cedar Crest, and in the statehouse!

The question ripe for asking, then, is where are Kansas’ left conservatives today?  I would take a slew of left conservatives with “Ds” after their names over today’s rotten stew of putative “conservatives” who spend like there is no tomorrow; cow-tow to courts and other power elites; have become distracted from their duty by the lame preferments of the dome; and don’t have a fraction of the belly-fire displayed by Dame Finney. 

Of course the left liberalism of Sebelius and her ilk are as far from Finney’s left conservatism as can be.  Pox on both their houses.