“Whatever happened to the moderate Republicans of Kansas?” That’s a question I was asked this past week, and it’s not a new one. Similar questions have been asked all across America, as we have seen supporters of both parties — but especially on the Republican side over the course of Donald Trump’s presidency — become unified and defiant in a way they haven’t been in many decades. Here in Kansas, that shift away from moderation poses special complications.

Most students of politics in Kansas have long seen the parties as fairly crude instruments — organizations that roughly reflected the preferences of diverse voters but that could also be carefully managed. The primary managers, in strongly Republican Kansas, were those moderate voters who faithfully supported the GOP but also often rewarded those who dissented from any strict ideological line, thus keeping Kansas’s majority party somewhat flexible.

Ed Flentje, a longtime Wichita State University professor who wrote columns like this one for years, regularly presented this as the great virtue of Kansas politics: that the state’s Republican majority was divided enough that many of its representatives could move either left or right as the times warranted, thus allowing the party to adapt, innovate and pursue good government policies, even progressive ones on occasion, without threatening its political stability.

In the introduction to a recent collection of his newspaper writings, Flentje remains confident that the patterns he often defended still hold. Though the “Brownback Revolution” took the Kansas Republican party, and thus the state, in an immoderately right-ward direction for a time, he sees that as a historical aberration and believes the moderate Republican faction — who were essential to Gov. Laura Kelly’s election in 2018 — will continue to provide balance.

He may be right. But given that the 2020 election delivered a Republican majority to the Kansas House pretty much the same as the one that existed when Sam Brownback was first elected governor a decade ago, and that similarly defiant, nonmoderate, Trump-centric campaigns led to Republican wins in Congress and state legislatures across the nation, perhaps it is the election of Kelly that will someday be seen as an aberration from the new, 21st-century style of party politics.

What is that style? It is, most of all, a nationalized one. Regional variations that once characterized American politics are dying out. Flentje and others long presumed that state parties were capable of local adaptation, but that is becoming difficult. Instead, in a centralizing world of instantaneous communication, party leaders and funders are quick to rally around ideological slights and crusades, whether real or perceived — and apparently many voters, fearful of being represented by their ideological opponents (or so their news feeds depict them), follow along.

Of course, 2020 was just one election. Who knows how the Republican Party will evolve once Trump, whose constant Twitter declarations overwhelmed potential intra-party factions, is out of the White House? Still, we may need to start assuming that nationalized, polarized, and deeply divided parties are all we have for turning voter preferences into successful public policies.

That isn’t necessarily impossible; parliamentary democracies, with their “loyal opposition” and “shadow governments,” do it all the time. But in Republican-heavy Kansas, where deal-making moderates were so central to the whole idea of good government, nothing may be more important than figuring out how to legislate when moderate voters no longer elect to send a sufficient number of dissenters and adapters to Topeka to enable it to work as it once did.

— Russell Arben Fox runs the history and politics major and the honors program at Friends University in Wichita.