What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank

BUY THIS ITEM

  • Add To List uiAction=GetAllLists&page=List&pageType=list&ean=9780641768019&productCode=BK&maxCount=100&threshold=3

FIND & RESERVE AN IN-STORE COPY

Enter a zip code

(Paperback - Bargain)

Reader Rating: (21 ratings)

See All Detailed Ratings

  • Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated
  • Pub. Date: May 2005
  • ISBN-13: 9780641768019
  • 322pp
  • Edition Description: Bargain

Note: This is a bargain book and quantities are limited. Bargain books are new but may have slight markings from the publisher and/or stickers showing their discounted price. More about bargain books

 
  • Overview
  • Editorial Reviews
  • Customer Reviews
  • Features
  • Full Product Details

Synopsis

With a New Afterword by the AuthorThe New York Times bestseller, praised as "hilariously funny . . . the only way to understand why so many Americans have decided to vote against their own economic and political interests"
(Molly Ivins)Hailed as "dazzlingly insightful and wonderfully sardonic" (Chicago Tribune), "very funny and very painful" (San Francisco Chronicle), and "in a different league from most political books" (The New York Observer), What's the Matter with Kansas? unravels the great political mystery of our day: Why do so many Americans vote against their economic and social interests? With his acclaimed wit and acuity, Thomas Frank answers the riddle by examining his home state, Kansas-a place once famous for its radicalism that now ranks among the nation's most eager participants in the culture wars. Charting what he calls the "thirty-year backlash"-the popular revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment-Frank reveals how conservatism, once a marker of class privilege, became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans.A brilliant analysis-and funny to boot-What's the Matter with Kansas? is a vivid portrait of an upside-down world where blue-collar patriots recite the Pledge while they strangle their life chances; where small farmers cast their votes for a Wall Street order that will eventually push them off their land; and where a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs has managed to convince the country that it speaks on behalf of the People.

The Washington Post - Corey Robin

Frank is witty and shrewd, a genial, informative political tour guide of the sort we desperately need today.

More Reviews and Recommendations

Biography

Founding editor of The Baffler, Thomas Frank is the author of One Market Under God and The Conquest of Cool. He writes frequently for Harper's, The Nation, and Le Monde Diplomatique. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Customer Reviews

The Great Delusion: Republicans as the 'People's Party'by Anonymous

Reader Rating:
See Detailed Ratings

January 25, 2008: There?s a paradox abroad in land that has troubled many thoughtful people for many years. On the one hand, workers? wages, in real terms, have been stagnant for two decades, despite strong productivity growth throughout the economy we continue to hemorrhage manufacturing jobs (and now even white-collar jobs) to outsourcing--including the latest twist, offshoring, which consists of parking boats offshore filled with low-wage computer workers who replace Americans on the land income inequality has reached obscene levels and we still don?t have even a semblance of a national health-care safety net for the millions of people without insurance. On the other hand, we continue to elect conservative Republican politicians who, once in office, cut taxes for the rich, cut regulations on big business, and trumpet a mantra of laissez-faire, free-market capitalism that makes the rich richer and washes the losers out the bottom end. In this widely acclaimed book, Thomas Frank examines his home state of Kansas to see if he can unravel the problem (the book, published in 2004, predates the Democrats? regaining control of both the House and Senate in 2006--more on that later). What he finds is that through the ?erasure of economics? from public debate and the substitution of hot-button cultural issues, the Republicans (with little resistance from the Democrats) have achieved the astounding feat of convincing average Americans, even those hurt or displaced by pro-business government policies, that they are the party of the little guy, with liberals being tarred as pampered, over-educated, elitist snobs who have lost touch with ?real? Americans but who continue to pull the strings from on high while also being responsible for the cultural decay the conservatives see all around them. To further the irony, Frank points out that the issues emphasized by the far right conservatives--abortion, ?family values,? prayer in the schools and the teaching of alternatives to evolution, gay marriage, violence and sleaze in the mass media, etc.--are largely things about which little or nothing ever gets done or can be done. And that?s the way the conservatives like it. Helping us average Joes in any material way might blunt the sharp edge of the culture war, which is what keeps them in power and which thus needs to be unending. As one of Frank?s chapter headings states, we seem to be ?happy captives? in a medieval system in which everyone is supposed to know his or her place and not complain about such touchy subjects as income inequality or the rapacity of large corporations. ?Backlash conservatives,? Frank writes, ?deal in outrage, not satisfaction,? based on a worldview that is highly anti-intellectual and almost entirely emotional in its appeal. As an example of the ?real? real world, Frank studies Johnson County, Kansas, where he finds two types of conservatives, which he calls the Mods and the Cons (moderate and far-right or cultural conservatives, respectively). He traces how, over the past four decades the Cons have systematically elbowed out the Mods everywhere from county party chairs to the U.S. Senate. And, yet he finds two Johnson Counties in an economic sense as well: ?One Johnson county lives in landscaped cul-de-sac communities with statuary in the traffic islands and a swimming pool behind each house,? while ?the other Johnson County is a place of peeling paint and cheap plywood construction with knee-high crabgrass.? Strangely, it is the...

What's Up?by Anonymous

Reader Rating:
See Detailed Ratings

July 12, 2006: From Kansas's infamous age as the hotbed for Abolitioist fury, it seems strange that Kansas has become Conservative USA. However, as Thomas Frank shows, conservatives have been the best pugulists in the raging and unresolved culture wars. Gives excellent guide of the power and allure of populist conservatism of Limbaugh and Coulter and how that has transformed the once-radical state of Kansas.


More Customer Reviews