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

Take a trip to the political section of a US bookstore and you throw yourself into the middle of the battle raging between left and right. Who is a big fat idiot? Who is destroying America? Who buys Ann Coulter? Like all things polemics are not created equal. Some books simply exist to affirm the prejudice of the reader, and thus the liberal will chuckle along to Michael Moore and Al Franklin, and the conservative will nod solemnly to Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. Some seem to be more reasoned, such as Molly Ivins. This is where Thomas Frank's new books comes in.

What's The Matter With Kansas is clearly hollering from the left side of the fence. The title alone betrays the fact that the author thinks there is something 'wrong' with the state of Kansas continually voting Republican. What is novel and refreshing is that he tries to explain why a state that is overwhelmingly blue collar or rural would vote for the party that seems to betray those interests.

It comes down to an interesting contrast. Social and economics issues have somewhat gone out of the window in an increasingly prosperous and financially secure USA. Instead the moral agenda has seized the upper hand, and this has gripped the hearts of the voters of what was once a radical state. Instead of worker protection, minimum wages and New Deal farm reforms the voters support evangelical churches, anti-abortion and shudder at the prospect of gay marriage. All of this is fertile ground for an increasingly conservative Republican party.

Thomas Frank portrays his home state with a degree of empathy that would be lacking in the tomes written by those 'east cost, latte sipping liberals'. Like Ivins's love for her home state of Texas, Frank does not necessarily suggest that the voters in Kansas are stupid or ignorant. He does, however, suggest that they are strongly voting against their own interests in support of the rabidly conservative aims of the moral wing.

His platform would suggest that today's Republican party has formed a quid pro quo arrangement with the christian coalition, support for the big business and low taxes goes hand in hand with policies to affirm the moral basis of America. It is ironic that the two form such easy bed fellows. The rapacious excesses of WorldCom, Enron and other corporate scandals are evidenced by Frank, and sit uneasily with Christian principles.

But then again I am even worse than an east coast, latte sipping liberal. I'm practically a pinko Commie from Europe!

...one in which the sans-culottes pour down the streets demanding more power for the aristocracy.....". As we survey the shambles of the American economy, bracing for the inevitable hard times, in which we just might have more time to read books, few are more essential in providing an explanation as to how it all happened than Thomas Frank's excellent analysis. Frank starts his book with a stunning fact: the poorest county in the United States is not in Appalachia or the Deep South; it is in the High Plains of Western Nebraska- McPherson County, and 80% of the electorate there voted for George Bush in 2000. Frank focuses on his home state of Kansas, a literal metaphor for the heart of America. He describes how the many voted against their economic self-interest, distracted by "social issues" such as gay marriage, abortion, guns, et al. In doing so, as Frank says in the subject quote, it was like turning the French revolution on its head, permitting a vast increase in the share of the national wealth by the top 1%, while the rest, the 99%, contented themselves with the crumbs, the "trickle down" that fell from the table. As he succinctly puts it in the first chapter: "Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends." And the result: "Over the last three decades they (the backlash leaders) have smashed the welfare state, reduced the tax burden on corporations and the wealthy, and generally facilitated the country's return to a nineteenth-century pattern of wealth distribution."

Frank's work is a polemic, in the best sense of the word. His style is "punchy", hard-hitting, with numerous memorable statements. Much of his animus is directed towards the "aristocracy's" propaganda machine, whether it be the "fair and balanced" Fox News channel, or the only slightly more genteel rationalizations of David Brooks in the New York Times. As Frank says about these propaganda efforts which obscure the reality of this enormous transfer of wealth to the few: "The erasure of the economic is a necessary precondition for most of the basic backlash ideas. It is only possible to think that the news is slanted to the left, for example, if you don't take into account who owns the news organizations..."(p128). And later, "One source of conservatism's considerable power, as noted, is its airtight explanation of reality, its ability to make sense of the average person's disgruntlement while exempting laissez-faire capitalism from any culpability." (p162). There is no question that the few have reaped enormous returns by funding this most effective propaganda machine, and Frank correctly identifies its star practitioners: Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, David Brooks. Frank does focus on his native Kansas, knows his history, and shows how the Right killed much of the Populist tradition of the state that at one time would not have been fooled by these snake-oil salesmen.

So where are we now, in the era of "the God that Failed," as the "markets" have clearly done so, in which the "get government off our backs" crowd are the first ones in line for a government handout? Will America's "Pravda" be successful in disconnecting the current economic catastrophe from the laissez-faire policies and the people who advocated them? Can they portray it as a natural event, like a hurricane or an earthquake? Will the harsh reality of trillions of dollars of additional debt, and the possible collapse of our currency, lead to a revival of the true populist tradition, and some of the money aggrandized by the few reclaimed? Frank's latest book, "The Wrecking Crew," is in the tradition of "Kansas." Hopefully he is collecting material now for another book, to be published in a year or two which will describe how successful, or not, America's Lords and Ladies were in playing the shell game of distracting the attention of the masses from their economic theft. Clearly Round One went to the L&L, as a trillion dollars went to the banks and Wall Street while the media focused on the "chump change" provided the auto makers.

Frank is the consummate political analyst of our day, "Kansas" is an essential read for those desiring to know how the few pulled it off.

(Note: Review first published at Amazon, USA, on January 02, 2009)

Very well-written account of how Kansas used to be a hotbed of left-wing radicalism that has been seduced into the Republican fold through the use of accusations of 'cultural elitism' against 'liberals' and 'Democrats'. He goes onto advocate the use of economic populism to take on this cultural populism of the Right, and makes 'liberal' use of the example of William Jennings Bryan.

Overall, a very good read and highly recommended although he does a poor job of saying whether this economic populism would be desirable in and of itself rather than as a political ploy: rather than having a go at NAFTA, would it not be more sensible to help poor people adapt to the creative destruction of open markets, as suggested in The Pro-growth Progressive by Gene Sperling? Does Economic nationalism induce a broader less tasteful nativism? There is also the small matter that most Democrats who have run on an economically populist ticket have lost: Bob Shrum ran Al Gore's 'People Against the Powerful' campaign, and several similarly-themed previously, and none have won.

However, regardless of the book's shortcomings in terms of prescription, it's description of political life in Kansas is as necessary as it is compelling: what the Republicans are doing is working, but we need to find a cure that is not as bad as the illness.