Best of Book History Online

Product Details

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
What op-ed writers across the political spectrum have said about Thomas Frank and
What's the Matter with Kansas?:

"The best political book of the year."
-Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, November 3, 2004

"Frank is a formidable controversialist-imagine Michael Moore with a trained brain and an intellectual conscience."
-George F. Will, The Washington Post, July 8, 2004

"Brilliant."
-Barbara Ehrenreich, The New York Times, July 1, 2004

"Mr. Frank re-injects economic-class issues into the debate with sardonic vehemence."
-Jerome Weeks, The Dallas Morning News, June 27, 2004

"A searing piece of work . . . one of the most important political writings in years."
-The Boston Globe

"Dazzlingly insightful and wonderfully sardonic . . . Frank has made much sense of the world in this book."
-Chicago Tribune

"Impassioned, compelling . . . Frank's books mark him as one of the most insightful thinkers of the twenty-first century, four years into it."
-Houston Chronicle

"Very funny and very painful . . . Add another literary gold star after Thomas Frank's name."
-San Francisco Chronicle

Customer Reviews

What's the matter with every Red State
I have lived in Arizona since 1985, and have very few memories of my life before then. Hence I have grown up in a Red state, and have been surrounded mainly by Republicans most of my life. Many of their opinions and beliefs puzzled me as they seemed contradictory, baseless, and often nonsensical. For example, I've met many white, male Republicans who, without any second thoughts, firmly believe that rich elitists use their wealth and power to elect Democrats who screw over America. Yet these same Republicans believe that rich people should not pay higher tax rates than poor people! Another example, I've met many white, male Republicans who absolutely hate other countries, especially poor Third World ones like China and India. Yet they will preferentially shop at places like Walmart that only stock items from poor Third World countries.

At first I thought all of this was due to Arizona having a crappy public school system; this state is annually among the low end in terms of SAT scores, high school graduation rates, college attendance rates, literacy rates, etc... But I have been disabused of my illusions by this wonderful book. Its not just Arizonans that are dumb by voting Republican and against their pocket book; its Kansas and a whole host of other states. I've met so many Arizonas who really don't know how their tax dollars are spent; but are happy as long as they can buy automatic firearms, gays can't marry, and their kids have to pray in school. The author of this book dissects and analyzes this stupidity wonderfully and concisely. Everything from class views, to views on taxes and government spending, to ideas about right and wrong; this author has put his finger onto the pulse of the Republican electorate. I've often wondered what book to recommend to my friends who are puzzled by American voting patterns. I believe this book is the one for them. Overall, a great read; it does for the late 20th/early 21st centuries what Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" did for the early 1800s.

"Like a French Revolution in reverse --..."
...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.

Either Way You're Screwed
How can anyone in America still believe that either party, Republican OR Democratic, is going to help Joe Average? Cultural issues will always trump economic issues in our national elections not because "ignorant" middle America is being duped by Republicans, but because middle America is smarter than the author thinks: they know that when it comes to economics, either party is sure to take them for a ride. The only differences between the two parties are the social and cultural perspectives of each. Otherwise - and especially regarding economic issues - there's not a dime's worth of difference between them.