DO YA WANNA BUILD A SNOWFLAKE:

In early 2018, Niall Ferguson moderated a conversation with Francis Fukuyama and Charles Murray at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. The subject was "inequality and populism," and Murray made one of his favorite arguments: "Along with not understanding the lives of ordinary Americans, the cognitive elite increasingly despises, has contempt for ... ordinary Americans. I think that is at the heart of Donald Trump's election."

To illustrate his point, Murray happened to mention a place I know well. After observing that members of the cognitive elite often have an "intense interest in the most oppressed, deprived segments of American society," he went on to explain that "what they don't understand is the life of a pharmacist and a plumber and an insurance agent in Topeka, Kansas." And he had a dark message for his fellow members of the cognitive elite: "To those of you who have not spent a lot of time in Topeka and places like that ... the unanimity with which we are viewed with anger is really astonishing."

I was the opinion page editor at The Topeka Capital-Journal for almost two years.

If Murray has done more than spend a few minutes at a Topeka gas station, he should know that the picture of the city he presented at Stanford was a grossly inaccurate caricature -- just the sort of thing a disconnected coastal elitist would imagine about the American Midwest.

Topeka is one of the state's largest and most politically diverse cities. Had he been talking about my hometown of Salina, Kansas, he might have had a point. But he instead assumed that everywhere is like everywhere else in Kansas.

While Trump carried Kansas by more than 20 points in 2016, his margin of victory in Topeka was a mere two points. In nearby Douglas and Wyandotte Counties, Clinton won by 30 points. Topeka is also the capital of a state that elected Laura Kelly governor in 2018. Kelly is a Democrat who defeated Kris Kobach -- one of Trump's most rabid acolytes, who received the president's endorsement in 2018 -- by five points. Kobach ran on Trumpian campaign slogans like "drain the swamp" and "Kansans first," humiliated the state by defending Trump's ludicrous claim that "millions" of people had voted illegally in 2016 (one of the reasons the president awarded him the dubious role of vice chair of his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity), and waged a long campaign of voter suppression as Kansas secretary of state. When Kobach announced his run for U.S. Senate, he did so in front of a banner that read, "Build the wall."

On Murray's analysis, Kobach is just the sort of politician that indignant plumbers and insurance agents in Topeka would predictably support -- his whole shtick is inflaming anti-elite resentment by ignoring the actual issues Kansas faces and focusing instead on conservative cultural grievances. During his gubernatorial campaign, the city of Shawnee apologized after he appeared at a parade in a Jeep with a fake .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the back. So how did he perform in the Kansas capital, where anti-elite sentiment is so powerful that it would "astonish" Murray's audience at Stanford? Kelly crushed him by 24 points.

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