Nuclear Country by Catherine McNicol Stock;

Author:Catherine McNicol Stock;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

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The people of North and South Dakota continued to care about the issues associated with new conservatism, redefining what it meant to have “common sense” and to be a “real” South Dakotan well into the twenty-first century. Like McGovern, other politicians learned what mattered most to voters the hard way: North Dakota governor George “Bud” Sinner, a devout Catholic who had introduced Billy Graham at his crusade in Fargo and shepherded the state through the 1980s Farm Crisis, vetoed a state law restricting access to abortion because he felt it was not the government’s role to do so. His obituary noted that this single controversial decision largely determined his legacy; some voters argued he should not be honored even in death.155 Larry Pressler lost his reelection bid in 1996 due to his extensive world travels—and carefully planted rumors of a secret male companion.156 Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader, narrowly lost to Jon Thune who accused him of being a “Washington insider” and embracing national liberal causes.157

The most revealing recent contest in the Dakotas, however, may be one that few Americans outside of the region noticed. In the 2016 Republican primary for a state senate seat in the Thirty-Third Legislative District, northwest of Rapid City, state representative Jackie Sly thought she had found the issue that could upend her opponent—ultraconservative Phil Jensen. She had found documents that proved that Jensen had been a registered conscientious objector at the end of the Vietnam War. A PAC that supported Sly sent postcard-sized flyers to mailboxes around the district that asked, “Would you vote for a politician who refused to wear our country’s uniform?”158 In his blog, “Way to Go,” Sly supporter and fundraiser Stan Adelstein suggested that Jensen’s “draft dodging” differentiated him from the vast majority of South Dakotans: “We welcome soldiers home. We take aging soldiers on honor flights. We gather to celebrate those who live and to mourn those who have passed.”159

As sure a bet as this seemed for Sly, she was wrong. Decades after the war ended, after the New Right had ascended to power in the state, after the world of George McGovern had been both lost and forgotten, no one really doubted that a man as conservative as Jensen supported the military. He was a man, after all, and in the post-Vietnam period Americans had successfully melded the image of the warrior with both masculinity and whiteness.160 As one commentator said, “Do pols really want to open this can of worms? Aren’t campaigns smutty enough without scrutinizing every decision your opponent ever made?”161 What mattered far more, as it turned out, than the Vietnam “can of worms” was Sly’s own “weak” record on pressing cultural issues. By 2016 Jensen, a founder of the South Dakota Conservatives or “Wingnuts”—their term—was considered among the most aggressively conservative lawmakers in the state. He supported the death penalty for abortion providers, assailed lawmakers who had “hesitated” before voting for the right of students and teachers to carry guns to school, and demanded that the state’s borders be closed to refugees.

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