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

From the Publisher

One of “our most insightful social observers”* cracks the great political mystery of our time: how conservatism, once a marker of class privilege, became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans

With his acclaimed wit and acuity, Thomas Frank turns his eye on what he calls the “thirty-year backlash”—the populist revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment. The high point of that backlash is the Republican Party’s success in building the most unnatural of alliances: between blue-collar Midwesterners and Wall Street business interests, workers and bosses, populists and right-wingers.

In asking “what ’s the matter with Kansas?”—how a place famous for its radicalism became one of the most conservative states in the union—Frank, a native Kansan and onetime Republican, seeks to answer some broader American riddles: Why do so many of us vote against our economic interests? Where’s the outrage at corporate manipulators? And whatever happened to middle-American progressivism? The questions are urgent as well as provocative. Frank answers them by examining pop conservatism—the bestsellers, the radio talk shows, the vicious political combat—and showing how our long culture wars have left us with an electorate far more concerned with their leaders’ “values” and down-home qualities than with their stands on hard questions of policy.

A brilliant analysis—and funny to boot—What’s the Matter with Kansas? presents a critical assessment of who we are, while telling a remarkable story of how a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOscame to convince a nation that they spoke on behalf of the People.

*Los Angeles Times

The Washington Post - Corey Robin

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

The New Yorker

Kansas, once home to farmers who marched against “money power,” is now solidly Republican. In Frank’s scathing and high-spirited polemic, this fact is not just “the mystery of Kansas” but “the mystery of America.” Dismissing much of the received punditry about the red-blue divide, Frank argues that the problem is the “systematic erasure of the economic” from discussions of class and its replacement with a notion of “authenticity,” whereby “there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer.” The leaders of this backlash, by focussing on cultural issues in which victory is probably impossible (abortion, “filth” on TV), feed their base’s sense of grievance, abetted, Frank believes, by a “criminally stupid” Democratic strategy of triangulation. Liberals do not need to know more about nascar; they need to talk more about money and class.

Foreign Affairs

This fresh and engaging book stands out in the torrent of political screeds now pouring off the presses. Written by a man of the left, What's the Matter with Kansas? examines the rise of ultraconservative politics in the state that was once known for agrarian populism. The new activists, Frank says, are lower-middle-and working-class people-in past decades, the backbone of social democratic politics in Kansas. Why, Frank asks, do working-class Kansans labor to support a right-wing agenda that will strip them of social benefits, lower their wages, and provide enormous tax windfalls to the rich? Frank's eye is keen, and his pen is nimble; his answers are sadly conventional. He sees the contemporary Democratic Party as an odious mix of economic conservatism (the Democratic Leadership Council) and decadent social liberalism (Hollywood), and with the two parties united on antiworker economics, Kansas voters act rationally when they choose the party that at least pretends to respect their social values. A sharp turn to the economic left, Frank believes, will ultimately revive Democratic fortunes and stop the New Right in its tracks. Many thoughtful and spirited people have reached this conclusion in the past; none ever managed to build the powerful socialist party of their dreams. Perhaps Frank will succeed where others have failed.

Library Journal

Native Kansan Frank asks why his state, once famously radical, went the way of the entire country and turned Right. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A fire-and-brimstone essay on false consciousness on the Great Plains. "The poorest county in America . . . is on the Great Plains, a region of struggling ranchers and dying farm towns," writes native Kansan and Baffler founding editor Frank (ed., Boob Jubilee, 2003, etc.), "and in the election of 2000 the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush, carried it by a majority greater than 80 percent." How, Frank wonders, can it be that such a polity-honest toilers descended from free-soil, abolitionist progressives and prairie socialists-could back such a man who showed little concern then and has showed little concern since for the plight of the working class? And how can it be that such a place would forget its origins as a hotbed of what the historian Walter Prescott Webb called "persistent radicalism," as the seedbed of Social Security and of agrarian reform, to side with the bosses, to back an ideology that promises the destruction of the liberal state's social-welfare safety net? Whatever the root causes, many of which seem to have something to do with fear and loathing of big-city types and ethnic minorities, Kansas voters-and even the Vietnam vets among them-seem to have picked up on the mantra that the "snobs on the coasts" are the enemy, and that Bush ("a man so ham-handed in his invocations of the Lord that he occasionally slips into blasphemy") and company are friends and deliverers. Frank ventures several convincing, if sometimes contradictory, reasons for what he clearly considers to be a tragedy; as he writes, "Kansas is ready to lead us singing into the apocalypse." Even so, he sees the tiniest ray of hope for modern progressives: after all, he notes, the one Kansas county that sports a NASCAR track went for Al Gore in 2000. A bracing, unabashedly partisan, and very smart work of red-state trendspotting.

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