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What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Thomas Frank
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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 CEOs came to convince a nation that they spoke on behalf of the People.
*Los Angeles Times
- Sales Rank: #241150 in Books
- Brand: Metropolitan Books
- Published on: 2004-06-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.10" h x 1.16" w x 5.10" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
- Great product!
Amazon.com Review
The largely blue collar citizens of Kansas can be counted upon to be a "red" state in any election, voting solidly Republican and possessing a deep animosity toward the left. This, according to author Thomas Frank, is a pretty self-defeating phenomenon, given that the policies of the Republican Party benefit the wealthy and powerful at the great expense of the average worker. According to Frank, the conservative establishment has tricked Kansans, playing up the emotional touchstones of conservatism and perpetuating a sense of a vast liberal empire out to crush traditional values while barely ever discussing the Republicans' actual economic policies and what they mean to the working class. Thus the pro-life Kansas factory worker who listens to Rush Limbaugh will repeatedly vote for the party that is less likely to protect his safety, less likely to protect his job, and less likely to benefit him economically. To much of America, Kansas is an abstract, "where Dorothy wants to return. Where Superman grew up." But Frank, a native Kansan, separates reality from myth in What's the Matter with Kansas and tells the state's socio-political history from its early days as a hotbed of leftist activism to a state so entrenched in conservatism that the only political division remaining is between the moderate and more-extreme right wings of the same party. Frank, the founding editor of The Baffler and a contributor to Harper's and The Nation, knows the state and its people. He even includes his own history as a young conservative idealist turned disenchanted college Republican, and his first-hand experience, combined with a sharp wit and thorough reasoning, makes his book more credible than the elites of either the left and right who claim to understand Kansas. --John Moe
From 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.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
Review
"Drunk on tax cuts, favors for corporations and above all else, their undying lust for the culture wars most of us lost interest in years ago, conservatives have driven Middle America into a ditch, Mr. Frank argues in this brilliant book. His examination of how the right has prolonged the battles over pop culture, abortion and religion (and meanwhile accrued great power and financial gain) will not single-handedly eject President Bush from the White House—but it does contain the kind of nuanced ideas that should be talking points for the Kerry campaign . . . Mr. Frank's willingness to scold his own side; his irreverence and his facility with language; his ability to make the connections that other writers fail to make—all of this puts What's the Matter with Kansas? in a different league from most of the political books that have come out in recent years. Even better, its understanding of the methodology that has given Republicans the Presidency and control of both houses of Congress makes it a road map for upending the G.O.P. Here's hoping somebody slips a copy to John Kerry."—Kevin Canfield, The New York Observer
"When I read Thomas Frank, I hear a faint bugle in the background. It's the cavalry-to-the-rescue call: There you are, surrounded by Republicans—outmanned, outgunned, and damn near out of both ammunition and humor—when up shows Thomas Frank. A heartland populist, Frank is hilariously funny on what makes us red-staters different from blue-staters (not), and he actually knows evangelical Christians, antiabortion activists, gun-nuts, and Bubbas. I promise y'all, this is the only way to understand why so many Americans have decided to vote against their own economic and political interests. And Frank explores the subject with scholarship, understanding, passion, and—thank you, Mark Twain—such tart humor."—Molly Ivins
"This is the true story of how conservatives punk'd a nation. Tom Frank has stripped the right-wing hustle to its core: It is bread and circuses—only without bread. Written like poem, every line in its perfect place, What's the Matter with Kansas? is the best new book I've read in years, on any subject."—Rick Perlstein, author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of American Consensus
"A wise reporter and a splendid wit; Tom Frank understands the grassroots Right as well as anyone in America. He is the second coming of H. L. Mencken—but with much better politics."—Michael Kazin, author of The Populist Persuasion: An American History
"What's the Matter with Kansas? is the most insightful analysis of American right-wing pseudopopulism to come along in the last decade. As for Kansas: However far it's drifted into delusion, you've got to love a state that could produce someone as wickedly funny, compassionate, and non-stop brilliant as Tom Frank."—Barbara Enhrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed
"Frank combines top-flight journalism with first-person reflections to dig deep into the Kansas psyche. Both exhilarating and a little scary, What's the Matter with Kansas? should help flat-landers and coastal types alike understand how traditional Republicanism gave way to the politics of the Christian Right in the heart of the heart of the country."—Burdett Loomis, professor and chair, Department of Political Science at the University of Kansas
"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, '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 . . . 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."—Kirkus Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Some of the folks that Frank describes I see as ...
By William Magnus
Some of the folks that Frank describes I see as our own potential Taliban. Giving their lives for abortion rights. How brainwashed do you have to be to think that issue, which has nothing to do with you personally is more important than the general well being of the American people and how they are treated and governed. These people are only a step away from strapping on the C-4 and heading to an abortion clinic, with no concern for our education system, equality, taxes, corruption, our out of control banks, and on and on. Our country was founded on principles that have been discarded and these people could care less. Pulling the rug out from under the programs that would/could make the common person trouble makers for the government and the rich has been a very successful program indeed. We go to football games and races as if they were the only thing that mattered in life. Trouble ahead... Thank you Mr. Frank for pointing it out and how it started. I can see the end.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Polemical but useful.
By James W. Terman
Over a decade old but the author's thesis still applies to how and why so many people vote against their own long term best interests. A little rambling at times.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Defines the problem well; offers no solutions
By A Customer
First off, "A Reader from Missouri" who rated the book 1 star on July 4 didn't read the book because he speaks of "a north-eastern snob writes a book telling Kansans..." Only one problem: Tom Frank, the author, is from KANSAS, and he describes his upbringing there in detail. Now he lives in Chicago, but that's hardly the Northeast, and he spent an incredible amount of time in Kansas the last three years researching the book and interviewing people. Watch out for "reviewers" who haven't read the book their reviewing.
Although Frank is clearly a (dreaded, evil) liberal, he writes well and the book seems well researched. The gist of the book is describing how it happened that the state of Kansas turned from moderate Republican (Dole, Kassebaum) to far-right Rebublican (Ryun, Brownback) in less than a decade. Yes, Kansas was ALWAYS Republican, but now it's much, much, much farther to the right than it has ever been in its history. This in spite of its proud heritage as a battleground against slavery and the birth of 1890's farm-based Populism.
Frank details how working class Christian "social" conservative Republicans took over Kansas (and other states) from the moderate "economic" Republicans, in spite of the fact that the policies they support tend to benefit the wealthy, moderate, "economic" Republicans the most.
The major line of thought I got from the book is that ECONOMICS DON'T MATTER to the social conservatives. All they care about is abortion, decline of the family, reducing the size of government, and stopping government from telling them what to do, with abortion being the "real" issue.
What Frank doesn't answer is, "So what?" and "What are we to do with this info?" I would have enjoyed seeing some ideas on how moderate mainstream Republicans and Democrats, who constitute the true majority of Americans, can take their country back from extremists, be they left or right.
One thing the Democratic party should do is stop worrying about social conservatives. They are NEVER going to vote for a pro-choice candidate. Ever. IGNORE THEM. Concentrate on how you will get moderates to vote the Demo ticket, by making govt. more efficient, making health care affordable, ending corporate tax breaks and subsidies, advancing entrepreneurship, improving social security, reforming the military to fight terrorism instead of Cold War enemies, and making post-secondary education more affordable. In the end, it is the latter, creating more college-educated people, which will most benefit our country (in a time of outsourcing manufacturing) and the Democratic Party. Repeat after me: EDUCATION IS EVERYTHING.
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