Since Mitt Romney's resounding defeat last November, much has been made of the supposed battle for the soul of the Republican party taking place at the national level, where pragmatic establishment types are attempting to win over minorities, women and young people by tamping down the most extreme elements of the Tea Party fringe and moderating stances on issues like gay marriage and immigration. The problem is, in places like Kansas (and Louisiana, and South Carolina, and North Dakota), that fringe has become the political mainstream. In fact, while strategists like Karl Rove urge moderation for the GOP, in Kansas, they've been taking the opposite tack. Last fall, Brownback and his allies – including the Koch brothers, the right-wing libertarian billionaires whose company Koch Industries is based in Wichita – staged a primary putsch, lavishing funds on hard-right candidates and effectively purging the state Senate of all but a handful of its remaining moderate Republicans. "The Senate was really the bulwark of moderation last term," says Tom Holland, a Senate Democrat (there are only eight of them left) who ran against Brownback for governor. "With the moderate Republican leadership gone, that just got blown away."

It's been nearly 10 years since Thomas Frank wrote about the conservative takeover of his home state in What's the Matter With Kansas? Back then, Kansas still had a Democratic governor in Kathleen Sebelius. But after last fall's civil war, Kansas has emerged a more intense shade of red than even Frank imagined. The state legislature is the most conservative in the United States, and now there is absolutely nothing stopping the Brownback revolution – one which happens to be entirely at odds with any notion of the GOP adapting to the broader social and demographic changes in the country. If anything, these purists argue, Republicans lost in 2012 because the party wasn't conservative enough.

No one can say that about Sam Brownback, who is rumored to be mulling his own presidential run in 2016 – and using Kansas as a sort of laboratory, in which ideas cooked up by Koch-funded libertarian think tanks can be released like viruses on live subjects. At a national level, the GOP remains stuck in a reactive position, pursuing executive branch "scandals" and blocking Obama's policies with no real power to effect changes of their own, and so states like Kansas have become very important to the future of the party's far-right wing. Consider it a test, a case study – proof, finally, that an unfettered hybrid of Randian free-market dogma and theocratic intolerance can create, in the bitter words of outgoing Senate President Steve Morris, one of the ousted moderates, an "ultraconservative utopia." Of course, Morris ruefully added, "It depends on your definition of utopia."

Back in April, Brownback was chosen to deliver the Republican response to the President's weekly radio address. He invited listeners everywhere to "join us as we remake our country, not into a place that looks more and more like Europe. We don't need to do that. We just need to become America again. And that is the rebirth we are doing." In other words, the Koch brothers may have lost the big battle last fall, but in states like Kansas, they're winning.