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

I agree with the reviewer who said that the key to this problem is that many of these voters have been convinced that social issues are more important than economic ones. Contrary to what others have insinuated, it's not that these individuals disagree with progressives on economic issues, but that they are goaded into thinking that whether they are able to own an AK-47 is more important than whether they will be able to afford a life-saving operation for their sick child. A healthy, well-educated child will grow up empowered and less likely to want or need that AK-47, and that's the connection that is critical, but difficult, to make.

Frank implies the answer to this problem while not tackling it explicitly. It is combatting the anti-intellectual, anti- "elitist" rhetoric, repeated again and again and drummed into the brain, that soon overshadows everything else. We can see it aped right here in this forum, by people who think that living in the Northeast or buying a hybrid car automatically makes you an elite, while the true elites undermine others' ability to make it on a level playing field and then laugh all the way to the bank. It is not about big vs. small government, it is about government (of whatever size) privileging the haves at the expense of the have nots.

Excellent, thoughtful, insightful book.


An excellent job by Frank...   July 24, 2004
medstudent25 (the South)
467 out of 581 found this review helpful

I have lived in the south all my life - states that are similar in many respects to Frank's Kansas. Throughout the last 30 years, these states are notoriously conservative and, as Howard Dean said, continuously vote Republican (on a city, state, & national level) - and look what it's done for us? Each year, the south & the Heartland continue to have cuts, layoffs, education shortfalls, and otherwise substandard performance from our local and national government with respect to these regions.

Regardless of this fact, people here continue to buy into the rhetoric that the right wing is in touch with the blue collar worker and his/her family.. that the Republican party is the Party of Values.. that the Left is merely a bunch of stuffy elitist college professors who "just don't get it." As this country drifts further and further to the right, states like Kansas, as Frank says, will continue voting against their own interests. Jobs will continue to fly out of these areas, standards of living will continue to fall, and the blue collar worker, by the love of his country and his otherwise stoic nature, will find solace in the fact that he is a person who represents true America. This being true, the Republican party will cater to this emotion by pumping up family values, bashing anyone who disagrees with their in-your-face foreign policy as "unpatriotic" (just like former Senator & triple amputee Max Cleland, right?), and pretending to be looking out for the average Joe.. when in reality, Bush said it himself at a black-tie, $800/plate fundraiser with millionaire attendees, "This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base."

Frank does a service to us with this book, which is very well-written and thoughtful. I'd recommend this to any Republican who is fed up with his or her struggles that never seem to get better. You will definitely not find this type of discourse on Fox News.


An Absolutely Wonderful Book   June 12, 2004
Mark K. Mcdonough (Reston, VA USA)
133 out of 156 found this review helpful

Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas" is the best book I've ever read about modern American politics . First, Frank is an excellent writer with a sharp eye and a sense of humor, so the book is a real pleasure to read. But that's just a bonus. The real value of the book is Frank's way of looking at politics and culture in the era of the right wing backlash.

Kansas, where he grew up (in comfort, but not affluence), is his case study, a place where all the contradictions of post 1980 politics are even more contradictory than usual. He shifts back and forth between his microscopic examination of Kansas to a "what does it all mean?" 30,000-foot perspective in a way that takes full advantage of a "case study" approach. The shifts between real-life vignettes and philosophizing are handled very deftly. You never feel oppressed by too much detail, nor lost in abstract thought.

He avoids jargon and insiderism (in this book, as in Kansas, Washington DC is a rather far-off place where weird things happen), but comments quite astutely on the national political scene and the two major parties. You also get some great factoids. Who knew that the libertarian Cato Institute and the Democratic Leadership Council were funded in part(in large part in the case of Cato) by the same secretive ultra-right Kansas business dynasty? I didn't.

Frank's basic thesis is not a novel one -- the culture wars of the post-1980 era have led voters to largely ignore their economic self-interest and support politicians who primarily serve the interest of large corporations and the very rich. What's important about the book is the way it brings the details to life and explains the inter-connections between the parts. This book would be a real education to most Europeans, who must ponder the politics of the U.S. in utter bafflement, and will offer many insights to Americans who wonder how working-class people can so consistently support "the party of the rich."

Frank has a good command of history, but never tries to dazzle the reader with scholarship or bury the reader in quotes. I particularly enjoy the way he demolishes sloppy thinking -- you'll never look at the "Blue America vs. Red America" cliche the same way again after reading this book.

He also thinks the Democratic Party committed a huge blunder when it took traditional economic issues off the table and became, as he calls it "the *other* pro-business party." Once you take economic issues off the table, it's all about culture, and whether it's a true story or a false one, conservatives simply have a much more compelling story to tell about cultural issues, as Frank lays out in great detail.

If you're on the left, next time you feel compelled to buy an Al Franken style "angry liberal" book, or another book about the Bush family's shady past, buy this one instead and learn something new. And if you're part of the right-wing backlash, dare to read what Frank says and see if you agree with him.


Toto, We're Not in Kansas Anymore   October 25, 2004
L. Feld (Arlington, VA)
94 out of 113 found this review helpful

In "The Wizard of Oz," Dorothy and Toto are startled to find that they are no longer in Kansas anymore. In "What's the Matter with Kansas?", Thomas Frank reaches a similar conclusion. And just as Dorothy and Toto left Kansas on many levels -- physical, cultural, philosophical, spiritual -- so has Thomas Frank. In fact, after reading just a few pages of "What's the Matter with Kansas," it's apparent that, although Mr. Frank may have been born in Kansas, at this point in his life he has gone well "over the rainbow," far far away from the Kansas of his youth.

At the same time, of course, Kansas has moved far far away from Thomas Frank as well. The result is that, today, a veritable Great Plains of distance lies between all the Thomas Franks of the world (liberal, intellectual, highly educated, secular, "fact-based," liberal, mainly Democratic) and all those who, either literally or figuratively, see themselves more as "Kansans" (socially and culturally conservative, anti-intellectual, religious, "faith-based," conservative, mainly Republican).

It is obvious that Mr. Frank feels honestly and deeply saddened, puzzled, betrayed, and angered by what he believes has happened to Kansas, and also to "Kansas" -- the Republican Party and the United States as a whole -- over the past few decades. Perhaps most frustrating to Frank is his belief that the people of Kansas/"Kansas" are harming their own self interest by their behavior, and even more so by their stubborn refusal (as Frank sees it) to wake up and realize the error of their ways. Therein lies the major flaw of "What's The Matter With Kansas," and also the answer to the subtitle's implied question -- how DID Conservatives manage to "win the heart of America?"

As to the first question, "What's the Matter with Kansas," Frank's answer is that people are not voting their own interests. However, this is a purely economic analysis, and even there Frank's book falls short in explanatory value. The problem with Frank's analysis, aside from its overly anecdotal and non-empirical nature, is that human beings are not just economic beings ("Homo economicus"), but instead are a highly complicated species driven by a wide range of "rational" and "irrational" motivations, urges, desires, beliefs, and drives. Generally speaking, that's what the conservative movement understood many years ago, and that's what the liberal movement -- or what's left of it -- failed to understand on a true, gut level.

No doubt, at first glance it appears wildly paradoxical, even irrational, for people to vote against their own economic self interest. What if, however, other more subjective interests -- faith, nationalism, traditionalism -- outweigh the more objective economic ones? What if, in other words, Marx was completely wrong -- as he was in so many other ways -- in believing that economic class interests trumped all others?
Perhaps Marx might have asked himself, "what's wrong with my theory" instead of "what's wrong with the people who won't follow my theory?" And perhaps Thomas Frank and the Democratic Party should ask themselves the same question.

In other words, instead of waiting for the (supposed) fatal flaws and inherent contractions of the Republican coalition -- Wall Street bankers, poor working folks, fundamentalists and libertarians -- to self destruct of its own accord, perhaps the Democratic Party and progressive movement in general should ask themselves what THEY can do to "Win the Heart of America." If not, my guess is that conservative Republicans will keep on winning that heart, while liberal/progressive Democrats will keep losing it.

As a proud progressive Democrat myself, I say that it's time to start winning for a change. Perhaps the first step is to stop talking about what's the matter with Kansas/"Kansas," about what an evil, nasty, cynical bunch the Republicans are, and about how deluded and stupid those "Kansans" are to vote the way they do. Instead, Democrats might want to start talking about how they can appeal to "Kansas," and about how they can win back "Kansans'" hearts and votes. If not, the Democratic Party risks being carried away by a political twister, never to return to Kansas - or "Kansas" - again.



An insightful analysis of contemporary American politics   November 3, 2004
Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA)
78 out of 86 found this review helpful

This is one of the most insightful analyses of the contemporary political scene in the United States that I have read. I am writing this on the morning following a presidential election whose outcome is probably going to baffle a host of well informed, issue-oriented Americans for sometime. Thomas Frank, however, provides marvelous keys for understanding what has transpired, and also should provide some warnings to Democrats concerning how the political landscape has been transformed in recent decades.

Frank wants to explain a dilemma. On the one hand, the Republican Party has embraced a set of policies and enacted a wide range of legislation that hurts most Americans economically and provides a benefit to only a very small segment of the American population. Statistics provided by the Fed and the IRS have documented over the past twenty-five years a sharp and dramatic concentration of wealth in the upper one percent of the population. For instance, in 1979 20% of the national wealth as defined by the Federal Reserve was concentrated in the top 1%, while in 1997 39% was, and with the three rounds of Bush tax cuts focused on primarily benefiting the wealth and our largest corporations, it is not hard to imagine that that figure might have climbed to 45% or higher. And yet Americans continue to vote for members of a party that seems to be dedicated to intensifying that trend (a large number in the GOP are now talking about a national sales tax and eliminating the income tax-as opposed to Europe, which has a value added tax but also a tax on the wealthy, which is not what is being suggested here-which would dramatically increase this shift of wealth away from the middle class). How is this possible?

By examining the political scene in his home state of Kansas, Frank is able to show how Republicans have managed to attract a vast segment of the American population by fomenting culture wars, by fixating millions on issues that resonate deeply such as abortion, gun rights, gay rights, defense of marriage amendments, nonexistent religious persecution (as seen in the absurd GOP letters mailed in Arkansas, West Virginia, and elsewhere that if Kerry were elected the Bible would be banned), and similar issues. Despite the fact that the GOP actually passes no legislation related to any of these cultural concerns, and despite the fact that what the party actually does is pass a great deal of legislation that continues the concentration of the national wealth in the hands of a conservative economic elite, these cultural wedge issues have been deployed repeatedly to get people across America to vote against their own best interests.

For me the most striking pages in the book come near the end when Frank talks about the problems that the Democrats have caused themselves by ascribing more and more to the policies set forth by the Democratic Leadership Council (the DLC). These Democrats have attempted to move the Democratic Party further and further from its base in ordinary workers, and more and more to a pro-business stance. The result has been that on economic matters, the Democrats look more and more like Republicans. As Michael Lind in his insightful book UP FROM CONSERVATIVISM has pointed out, Americans tend to be conservative on social and cultural issues, and liberal on economic matters. But Frank points out that by moving to a conservative position on economic issues, they have lost their one great point of contact with the American masses. Millions of Americans, faced with a Democratic party that no longer has anything unique to offer them on economic issues, have shifted sharply over to a Republican party that at least speaks to their cultural and social concerns. In short, the DLC is a recipe for disaster. As leading Democrats who espouse DLC principals like Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton continue to push an economic agenda built around the concerns of business rather than working class Americans, we can expect Republicans to continue to prosper in the future. Frank argues, and I think he is correct, that it will only be when the Democrats recover their populist economic roots that they will reverse the trend of the past two elections. I hope that Frank's next book is devoted entirely to this issue. The Democrats need a wake up call, and while this book partially achieves that by explaining the success of the Republican Party, I think we also need one that explains more explicitly the failures of the Democrats.

This is a must-read book for everyone interested in politics in America, whether from the left or right. Though Frank is a leftist, those on the right will gain additional insight into why their side has achieved much of their success, while those on the other side can start understanding why so much of America votes to further policies that are so detrimental to their own well being.