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

My friends and I have been struggling in the last few weeks to understand Election 04. Yes, we are all East Coast sushi-eating, latte-drinking, post-graduate degree holding liberals, and many of us volunteered on the Kerry campaign, but we are also really trying to promote policies that help the greater good as we understand them. The election results, with that vast sea of red between the two coasts, were very difficult for me to accept as I couldn't understand why people were seemingly voting against their own economic self-interests. "What's the Matter with Kansas?" has been really helpful in explaining to me the forces that have changed much of America's heartland from its populist/progressive heyday to being a conservative stronghold. It was fascinating for me to learn about the internal struggles in the Republican Party between conservatives and moderates, and it's instructional to read about the powerful grassroots mobilization that conservatives have used to their benefit. I think the book is much stronger in its first half, discussing economic trends and reactive politics over the last few decades. When Frank veers more into the social/religious arena in later chapters, I think he comes off as more judgmental of the conservative viewpoint. Sure, I completely sympathize, but I think the real value of this book is for liberals and moderates who are trying to understand why so many people continue to support Bush and, at the same time, to spur conversation about what the Democratic Party needs to do in the next 2-4 years to reach out to these committed voters without compromising our own social and moral values. And the themes of this book are in no means particular to Kansas. I think almost every state has regions that fit the same mold. I grew up in Upstate New York, a Republican stronghold that resents NYC for turning the state blue every year. This book could've been written about my home state, too, and that's important to remember as we try to understand the current state of the nation.

This is one of the most insightful analyses of the contemporary political scene in the United States that I have read. I am writing this on the morning following a presidential election whose outcome is probably going to baffle a host of well informed, issue-oriented Americans for sometime. Thomas Frank, however, provides marvelous keys for understanding what has transpired, and also should provide some warnings to Democrats concerning how the political landscape has been transformed in recent decades. Frank wants to explain a dilemma. On the one hand, the Republican Party has embraced a set of policies and enacted a wide range of legislation that hurts most Americans economically and provides a benefit to only a very small segment of the American population. Statistics provided by the Fed and the IRS have documented over the past twenty-five years a sharp and dramatic concentration of wealth in the upper one percent of the population. For instance, in 1979 20% of the national wealth as defined by the Federal Reserve was concentrated in the top 1%, while in 1997 39% was, and with the three rounds of Bush tax cuts focused on primarily benefiting the wealth and our largest corporations, it is not hard to imagine that that figure might have climbed to 45% or higher. And yet Americans continue to vote for members of a party that seems to be dedicated to intensifying that trend (a large number in the GOP are now talking about a national sales tax and eliminating the income tax-as opposed to Europe, which has a value added tax but also a tax on the wealthy, which is not what is being suggested here-which would dramatically increase this shift of wealth away from the middle class). How is this possible? By examining the political scene in his home state of Kansas, Frank is able to show how Republicans have managed to attract a vast segment of the American population by fomenting culture wars, by fixating millions on issues that resonate deeply such as abortion, gun rights, gay rights, defense of marriage amendments, nonexistent religious persecution (as seen in the absurd GOP letters mailed in Arkansas, West Virginia, and elsewhere that if Kerry were elected the Bible would be banned), and similar issues. Despite the fact that the GOP actually passes no legislation related to any of these cultural concerns, and despite the fact that what the party actually does is pass a great deal of legislation that continues the concentration of the national wealth in the hands of a conservative economic elite, these cultural wedge issues have been deployed repeatedly to get people across America to vote against their own best interests. For me the most striking pages in the book come near the end when Frank talks about the problems that the Democrats have caused themselves by ascribing more and more to the policies set forth by the Democratic Leadership Council (the DLC). These Democrats have attempted to move the Democratic Party further and further f

This is by far the best of the countless books written on the Culture Wars in recent years, explaining as it does the paradox that poor people vote overwhelmingly, in many parts of the USA, for the party of big business and against their own economic interests. Being from Britain, where there are many pro-life Labour MPs and many pro-choice Conservative/Thatcherite MPs, I am always puzzled by the way in which culture so dominates the voting patterns of Americans, in a way that is simply not the case in the United Kingdom. This book explains why, and while its author is clearly a Democrat, this is a work sufficiently lacking in vitriol (at last!) that Republicans might enjoy it as well. Read it and understand what is going on in the Culture Wars in the USA and why formerly Socialist Kansas might be voting Republican this fall. Christopher Catherwood (author of CHURCHILL'S FOLLY: HOW WINSTON CHURCHILL CREATED MODERN IRAQ: Carroll and Graf 2004)

It's very interesting to see the book's detractors on this forum, many of whom have clearly not read it, saying *exactly* the things Frank predicts they will, as if from a familiar, shopworn script.I agree with the reviewer who said that the key to this problem is that many of these voters have been convinced that social issues are more important than economic ones. Contrary to what others have insinuated, it's not that these individuals disagree with progressives on economic issues, but that they are goaded into thinking that whether they are able to own an AK-47 is more important than whether they will be able to afford a life-saving operation for their sick child. A healthy, well-educated child will grow up empowered and less likely to want or need that AK-47, and that's the connection that is critical, but difficult, to make.Frank implies the answer to this problem while not tackling it explicitly. It is combatting the anti-intellectual, anti- "elitist" rhetoric, repeated again and again and drummed into the brain, that soon overshadows everything else. We can see it aped right here in this forum, by people who think that living in the Northeast or buying a hybrid car automatically makes you an elite, while the true elites undermine others' ability to make it on a level playing field and then laugh all the way to the bank. It is not about big vs. small government, it is about government (of whatever size) privileging the haves at the expense of the have nots.Excellent, thoughtful, insightful book.

In his book 1984, George Orwell described the state of perpetual war in his fictional future society by saying that the war wasn't meant to be won, it was only meant to be continuous. In WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS?, Thomas Frank illustrates how, and how effectively, the neoconservative right has implemented Orwell's concepts via a neverending war over culture and values. Using his home state of Kansas as the model and focal point, Frank asks rhetorically why it is that Kansans so willingly espouse right-wing social issues (creationism, defunding public schools, prayer in schools, pro-life) while simultaneously allowing their state to become economically devastated by Republican free market policies of unfettered, unregulated capitalism. In other words, why do Kansans (and many other Red Staters) vote consistently against their pocketbooks, against their own economic self-interest? With great specificity, Frank illustrates these behaviors and their devastating economic consequences by describing individuals and communities in Kansas. These are some of the strongest parts of his book, since they demonstrate through real people and real towns how life has changed, and continues to change, under Republican conservative rule. If anything, Frank could use more of these examples, particularly more description of some of the small towns and communities in his state that are dying a slow and tortured economic death. Regardless, the examples given convey the sense that Kansans are voting Red even as they vote themselves economically dead. Frank correctly ascribes this seemingly self-contradictory behavior to the idea that Conservatives have discovered a means to incite permanent "backlash" among the Red Staters through culture wars. Whatever the issue, whether it's Janet Jackson's right breast or gay marriage in Massachusetts, Conservative politicians whip up fierce indignation and activism by threatening the loss of American moral values to the eastern, intellectual elite who support the denigration of those values and the denial of moral absolutes. And, as Frank points out, despite years of bitter denunciation, almost nothing has changed. The war rages on, but the Conservatives rarely win even a skirmish.By focusing attention on culture issues, the Conservatives not only distract their followers from economic concerns, they remove capitalism itself as an issue. For Red Staters, capitalism is a natural force, and free markets are an absolute good. Concerns about environment, globalization, estate taxes, Wal-Martization, health and welfare all disappear, since laissez-faire is an inviolable principle. Capitalism cannot and must not be regulated in this worldview, and any restrictions and regulations designed to "thwart" it are necessarily wrong if not evil. The fact that culture itself -- MTV, Hollywood, Howard Stern, Fear Factor -- is a capitalist product that follows the same profit motivations goes unnoticed. In Kansas, as in most plac