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What's the Matter with Kansas?
Thomas Frank
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
How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
Metropolitan Books
June 2004
320 pages
ISBN: 0805073396
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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