What's the Matter with Kansas?

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What's the Matter with Kansas? How the Conservatives

Won the Heart of America. by Thomas Frank

 

BuzzFlash Recommendation

 

One of the nicest things about BuzzFlash, as compared

to book reviewers, is that we only have to write about

and offer books that we like. After all, why would we

want our readers to buy premiums that they wouldn't be

interested in?

 

But even as we have the good fortune to read so many

great books, we even have the more thrilling

experience of occasionally coming across a relatively

unpublicized book that dazzles us. (We are deluged

with books, DVDs, CDs, and novelty items to consider

as premiums.)

 

Such a book is " What's the Matter with Kansas? How the

Conservatives Won the Heart of America. "

 

First, you need to understand the basic premise of

" What's the Matter. " A young journalist, Thomas Frank,

returns to his home to state to ponder how Kansas --

once a hot bed of agrarian populism -- had evolved

into a red state that epitomizes how middle class

white America has been seduced by the lure of the

right wing. It is a Republican Party/Swindler

leadership that exploits the residents of fly-over

country into self-cannibalizing themselves by

supporting an ideology that dooms them to diminishing

job opportunities and lower wages.

 

Think of Ronald Reagan (although an Illinois native)

as Frank observes, " If Kansas is the concentrated

essence of normality, then this is where we can see

the deranged gradually become normal, where we can

look in that handsome, confident, reassuring,

all-American face -- class president, quarterback,

Rhodes scholar, bond trader, builder of industry --

and realize that we are staring into the eyes of a

lunatic. "

 

Kansas is a political land of Oz where looting

executives of a company called Westar practiced the

maxim, " socialize the risk, privatize the profits. "

 

Frank sees Kansans exploited by Republican hucksters

who then blame the woes of the underpaid and

overworked on Eastern liberals. It's a demagoguery

that can only continue spiraling downward until it

implodes.

 

But Frank doesn't spare the Democrats: " The problem is

not that Democrats are monolithically pro-choice or

anti-school prayer; it's that by dropping the class

language that once distinguished them sharply from

Republicans, they have left themselves vulnerable to

cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the

rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be

overshadowed by material concerns. We are in an

environment where Republicans talk constantly about

class -- in a coded way, to be sure -- but where

Democrats are afraid to bring it up. "

 

This guy is music to BuzzFlash's ears.

 

But don't expect a happy ending. As Frank concludes,

" Kansas is ready to lead us singing into the

apocalypse. It invites us all to join in, to lay down

our lives so that others might cash out at the top; to

renounce forever our middle-American prosperity in

pursuit of a crimson fantasy of middle-American

righteousness. "

 

A brilliantly written analysis of how the snake oil

salesmen of the Republican Party sold out their wares

in Kansas -- and in far too many states in America.

Because Frank is writing both about the State of

Kansas in specific -- and about its symbolic political

implications.

 

After describing how the 1998 Kansas State Republican

Party Platform turned into a document pledging the

party to fringe " cultural divide " goals and a series

of pro-plutocracy laws, Frank lays it out as clearly

as an Alpine stream.

 

" Let us pause for a moment to ponder this all-American

dysfunction, " surveying the fanatical flotsam and

jetsam of the document. " A state is spectacularly ill

served by the Reagan-Bush stampede of deregulation,

privatization, and laissez-faire. It sees is

countryside depopulated, its towns disintegrate, its

cities stagnate -- and it's wealthy enclaves sparkle,

behind their remote-controlled gates. The state erupts

in revolt, making headlines around the world with its

bold defiance of convention. But what do its rebels

demand? More of the very measures that brought

ruination on them and their neighbors in the first

place.

 

" This is not just the mystery of Kansas; this is the

mystery of America, the historical shift that has made

it all possible. "

 

" What's the Matter with Kansas " is a small masterpiece

of political-sociological analysis by a young,

masterful essayist who clearly, in this book, has

found his zone.

 

Book Description | " What's the Matter with Kansas " |

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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

 

Book Details | " What's the Matter with Kansas " | back

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Hardcover: 288 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.06 x

8.54 x 5.74

Publisher: Metropolitan Books; (June 1, 2004)

ISBN: 0805073396

 

About the Author | " What's the Matter with Kansas " |

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Founding editor of The Baffler, Thomas Frank is the

author of One Market Under God and The Conquest of

Cool. A contributor to Harper’s, The Nation, and The

New York Times op-ed page, he lives in Chicago.