In 1965, the year I was born, my family still lived in the blue-collar Kansas City suburb of Shawnee , a modest settlement on the westernmost perimeter of town, out beyond the tracks of the Santa Fe railroad. It was a place where the city faded slowly into country, and the subdivisions were checkerboarded with soybean fields, and there were no trees tall enough yet to obscure the vast blue sweep of the Kansas sky. It was a “workers' paradise,” my dad remembers now, a place where the ranch homes and split levels housed the families of appliance salesmen, auto mechanics, and junior engineers at the giant Bendix plant just across the state line: upbeat people, guys with GI-bill educations and color TVs in massive fake-mahogany cabinets. The world had not gone sour for them yet; had you told them then that they would one day be devoted to something like Fox News, a network that offers its viewers nothing but torture—endless images of a depraved world that, it tells them, they are powerless to correct—they would have questioned your sanity.

Shawnee today has the feel of a place whose energy has been spent, whose time has come and gone, like one of those dead towns built in the western half of the state in some burst of inexplicable optimism in the 1880s. When I visit the old neighborhood now I am the only pedestrian on the streets, a spectacle so odd that people slow their cars down in order to get a better look at me. The elementary school my brother attended in the crew-cut days—B-47s roaring overhead as he capered on the Jungle Gym—is in the process of closing for good. There is not a trace of the armies of kids that used to chase one another up and down the blocks. Nor would those armies of kids be welcome in this new Shawnee , with its occasional heaps of rusting junk and its snarling rottweilers and its testy “No Trespassing” signs. The Lutheran church down the street that impressed five-year-old me with its daring Sixties modernism looks today like a home-built A-frame, laughably shoddy, forlorn in a treeless lawn of knee-high weeds, its paint peeling. The shopping mall they were constructing the summer my family moved to Mission Hills has now passed through all the stages of retail life and is sinking irreversibly into blight, its storefronts empty except for a pool hall, a karate studio, and the obligatory “antique” store.

The implacable ideological bitterness that one finds throughout the state has here achieved a sort of saturation. The eastern part of Shawnee is still a blue-collar suburb, but after three decades of deunionization and stagnant wage growth, blue-collar suburbs like this one look and act very differently than before. Shawnee today burns hotter than nearly any place in the state to defund public education, to stamp out stem-cell research, to roll back taxes, and to abase itself before the throne of big business. The suburb is famous for having sent the most determined of the anti-evolutionists to the State Board of Education and for having chosen the most conservative of all Kansas state legislators, a woman who uses her hard-knock life story to dress up her constant demands that the state do whatever is necessary to lessen burdens on corporate enterprise. The offices of Kansans for Life, Tim Golba's old group, occupy a storefront in that dying mall, and the headquarters of the Phill Kline campaign are here too, in a glorified Quonset hut squatting on a weed-covered lot three blocks from the former Frank residence.