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

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

Has anyone read this book? I read the below book review and was intrigued.

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http://www.frontlist.com/detail/0805073396

What's the Matter with Kansas?
How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
by Thomas Frank
Henry Holt and Co.
Due/Published June 2004, 320 pages, cloth
ISBN 0805073396

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.

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.

Review

Frank’s latest piece of scathing cultural criticism, What’s the Matter With Kansas, also illuminates how “liberalism” has evolved from a conscientious watchword for the downtrodden masses to a generic dirty name. Specifically, Frank shows how his home state of Kansas went from being a hotbed of Populism to a place where even (in fact, especially) the poorest of the poor are Right as can be. Conservatives have won the hearts of working-class people fed up with what they see as the degradation of their way of life by focusing constituents’ attention on cultural issues like abortion, the teaching of evolution, and prayer in schools, even as they champion an economic policy that erodes small town community. As incentive for keeping production of its new 7E7 at its Wichita plant, Boeing demands a raft of bonds and tax breaks from the city in a year when the budget can barely sustain teachers’ salaries. When it gets them, Boeing sends half the jobs to Puget Sound anyway, and then announces plans to sell the plant. Though vehement, Frank is also infinitely sympathetic. As he, a former Republican himself, recounts neighbors having to poll at country clubs where they are excluded from membership, and witnesses the poverty of his South Side Chicago neighborhood paling next to the desolation of the “heartland”, Frank describes his own gravitation to the left. To understand the paradoxes, though, he interviews people from all walks of life — from a regular factory line worker to respected politicians and Pope Michael I of Kansas — who have made the opposite move. A fascinating study not only of shifts in the political spectrum, but of the practice of politics, the book shows the fallacies built into the “red state/blue state” myth, how the Freedom to Farm Act has destroyed family farms, how conservatives co-opt the liberal rhetoric of victimization and anti-abortionists lay claim to the righteous abolitionist mantle, and why conservative Republicans so loathe their moderate party-mates, the “RINOs,” or “Republicans in Name Only”. The latest from the author of One Market Under God and The Conquest of Cool, is a bold and invaluable work in today’s capricious political climate.

 

I think that the book makes this point.

 

Arrogant more than naive. The Democrats controlled Congress far so long, that when they lost control in the 90s they were in serious denial about the sea change that happened. The Dems still are pretending that small changes here or there will get them back on top.