In addition to three of the state’s four congressional seats Republicans hold majorities in both

In addition to three of the state’s four congressional seats, Republicans hold majorities in both houses of the state legislature.The incubator of radicalism has turned into an incubator of cultural conservatism. It has not sent a Democratic senator since the New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson, in his 1964 landslide, is the only Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state in 60 years Kansas gave George Bush 62 per cent of its vote in the 2004. A dramatic mural adorns the east wing of the state house, showing a Brown rampant, a bible in his left hand and a rifle in his right, standing on the plain with a tornado approaching behind him.This was the Kansas whose farmers were soon being urged to “raise less corn and more hell”, and where in 1919, in the then socialist south-east corner of the state, a small-town newspaper publisher called Emanuel Haldeman-Julius launched the “Little Blue Books” – stapled 3in by 5in paperbacks designed to fit into a worker’s back pocket, bringing him great literature, practical knowledge and honest discussion of economic, religious and social topics, even socialism, atheism and homosexuality – that became famous around the world.But that was then Gradually, Kansan populism has shifted from left to right. The then Kansas Territory was where John Brown, martyr or terrorist depending on your point of view, went on his murderous anti-slavery rampages. And if America is well known for its culture wars, nowhere have they reached the internecine fury of Kansas, pitting Republican against Republican, and Kansas against a disbelieving, often mocking, world beyond.Over the last hundred years, the place has undergone an extraordinary change Once it was a breeding ground for radical populism. So divided is the state’s dominant Republican party that politics operate under a de facto three-party system.

To which one can reply that the unfortunate soul cannot have been following state politics of late.These days Kansas is an extraordinary laboratory whose experiments could hold lessons for the entire country. Recently, a novelty greeting card caused a stir locally when it depicted a corpse lying in a Topeka street A passer by asks what was the cause of death “Boredom,” comes the answer. This is a strange place, where moral and cultural issues outrank those of the pocketbook. Carried to extremes, the habit has brought national and international ridicule on the state. But it also provides an intriguing explanation of how Republicans have come to dominate national politics – and where those national politics may be heading now.A hour or so’s drive east of Abilene lies the Kansas state capital, Topeka, with its handsome honeyed stone statehouse, modelled, like its peers across the country, on the Capitol in Washington, DC Outwardly, Topeka’s distinction ends there The streets are wide and depressingly empty On every corner seems to be a parking lot. If, like me, you fly into Kansas City on the Missouri side and then have to drive across 250 miles of the state to get to the geographic centre, the cost is anything but funny.Soaring oil prices, war in Iraq, worries over immigration and falling living standards – anywhere else these factors would be decisive in politics But not in Kansas politics Seen from here, 9/11 and the “war on terror” seem far away. But Kansas’s 2.7 million people are scattered across a territory as large as England.

Here, without private transport you are lost.Europeans may laugh at a local petrol price that works out at 40p a litre. The rail tracks that bisect Abilene link the town to Kansas City and beyond. But the 40 trains a day that pass through are all freight trains, carrying coal and wheat – not people. The vast Oglala aquifer, which stretches under seven plains states, is now being depleted so fast here that the irrigation on which farming in western Kansas depends may be impossible in a couple of decades.And then of course there’s the price of petrol, which powers cars, trucks and all the farm machinery that churns across the expanses of America’s wheat basket Outside the major cities, public transport does not exist.

Former settlements have become ghost towns, a majority of Kansas counties are seeing their populations fall And there are other, even more irreversible, trends. The myth is of a kingdom of doughty independent farmers; the reality is an ever-mightier agri-industrial complex of fewer and larger farms, and a steady decline in the rural population. The worries here mirror those everywhere else: about wage rates being driven through the floor, about the strain immigrants place on stretched hospitals and schools, about a creeping erosion of national identity.Kansas cherishes its help-thy-neighbour ethic But it is not a place to be poor. Without immigrant workers, the giant meat-packing plants at Garden City in the south-west of the state, where almost half the population is Hispanic, simply couldn’t function.

Kansas by definition is as far from America’s borders as you can get, but it, too, is affected by the issue of immigration that currently consumes the country. And even now, I’m not all that disappointed in our President, who I think was trying to do what was best for our country.” Disappointments will continue, Bergmeier predicted, but sooner or later the troops will be home.But there’s more than Iraq on the minds of the crowd in Bankes. It sums up the mood in this corner of the US heartland as well as anything. Iraq, he wrote, “is a four-letter word…I haven’t been a harsh critic of the war and probably won’t start now; like many Americans I believed in the weapons of mass destruction theories… “We were right to go in,” counters Bill Sunde, “the trouble is we don’t have enough troops.” Lynn Peterson agrees: “The miscalculation was, we should have brought in more forces, sooner.”But this is hardly a ringing endorsement, given that this is Abilene, one of the most Republican parts of a Republican state, where unaffiliated voters outnumber Democrats, and Republicans far outnumber both.