Roger Marshall fights for the ‘Kansas way of life.’ Whose life is he talking about? | Opinion

Is there such a thing as the “Kansas way of life”?

Sen. Roger Marshall clearly thinks so. The Kansas Republican recently sent out a year-in-review press release recapping his work. The headline? “Sen. Marshall Fights to Defend Kansas Way of Life in Second Year.” That followed an earlier overview of his 2021 efforts: “Sen. Marshall Fights to Defend Kansas Way of Life in First Year.”

“These last two years, I’ve been hard at work fighting to defend our Kansas values and way of life,” he added on Twitter.

That phrase — “Kansas way of life” — caught me short.

The wording suggests there is a single way of living and thinking shared by all Sunflower State residents. What does that actually look like? Marshall doesn’t define the term, but we can probably guess what he means by the accomplishments he touts in its defense: Things like pushing back against COVID-19 vaccine mandates, arguing against proposed gun laws, and criticizing “pro-abortion lies.”

Which means the “Kansas way of life” looks a lot like Marshall’s own deeply conservative politics — at least in his telling.

But that doesn’t seem quite right, does it? It’s a big state, after all. Four hundred miles from end to end, with nearly 3 million people.

There’s one way of life in the flat, open western expanses of the High Plains and towns such as Dodge City and Garden City, where meatpacking plants have attracted the Latino and African immigrant workers who form the backbones of those communities.

That’s a bit different from the small central Kansas towns like the one where I grew up in the 1980s — an hour outside Wichita — among the descendants of German Mennonites who brought Turkey Red wheat to the state a century earlier, and who still spoke Low German in their churches as late as the 1950s.

Which is different from Wichita itself, the state’s manufacturing center where shift work and factory jobs form the foundation of a working class life and culture.

And that is something different from the lives lived in the urban-suburban Kansas City-Lawrence-Topeka corridor along Interstate 70, where convoys of Kansans rack up untold hours of daily windshield time commuting between the places they live and the places they work.

That’s not a way of life. It’s ways. Many are conservative, some are liberal, and more than a few aren’t so easily categorized.

And those ways of living are necessarily, constantly evolving. Kansas City’s rural suburb of DeSoto is going to be home to a Panasonic battery plant that will bring thousands of new workers to town — something that will inevitably alter the character of the community. And soon, giant new semiconductor plants might change the way other towns and cities across the state look and feel.

These changes aren’t just economic. They’re cultural. That small, conservative Mennonite town where I grew up? It voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in 2020. But also: The local newspaper recently printed an announcement for the forthcoming wedding of two women. That’s something new.

Kansas — and every community in it — contains multitudes.

So it’s tempting to dismiss Marshall’s “Kansas way of life” talk as vague political sloganeering. Maybe that would be easier to do if the senator’s language was less pugilistic: Variations of the word “fight” appear 17 times in that recent press release. Our way of life demands us-versus-them posturing, apparently.

There’s a better approach.

Marshall isn’t the only politician to talk about our state’s “way of life.” More than a decade ago, Sen. Jerry Moran used the phrase in an essay marking the beginning of his term. He didn’t talk so much about defending or fighting for the state, but about building on the qualities that make this a good place to live.

“In Kansas, we know our neighbors and look after them,” Marshall’s fellow Republican wrote in 2011. “We teach our children to be moral, responsible citizens. And we work hard to provide for our families and build a better future.”

A wise aspiration. There are many Kansas ways of living. Rather than fight, let’s celebrate and cultivate them — so we can all thrive.