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


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



Book Description
With a New Afterword by the Author

The New York Times bestseller, praised as "hilariously funny . . . the only way to understand why so many Americans have decided to vote against their own economic and political interests" (Molly Ivins)

Hailed as "dazzlingly insightful and wonderfully sardonic" (Chicago Tribune), "very funny and very painful" (San Francisco Chronicle), and "in a different league from most political books" (The New York Observer), What's the Matter with Kansas? unravels the great political mystery of our day: Why do so many Americans vote against their economic and social interests? With his acclaimed wit and acuity, Thomas Frank answers the riddle by examining his home state, Kansas-a place once famous for its radicalism that now ranks among the nation's most eager participants in the culture wars. Charting what he calls the "thirty-year backlash"-the popular revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment-Frank reveals how conservatism, once a marker of class privilege, became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans.

A brilliant analysis-and funny to boot-What's the Matter with Kansas? is a vivid portrait of an upside-down world where blue-collar patriots recite the Pledge while they strangle their life chances; where small farmers cast their votes for a Wall Street order that will eventually push them off their land; and where a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs has managed to convince the country that it speaks on behalf of the People.



About the Author
Founding editor of The Baffler, Thomas Frank is the author of One Market Under God and The Conquest of Cool. He writes frequently for Harper's, The Nation, and Le Monde Diplomatique. He lives in Washington, D.C.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Thomas Frank turns his eye on what he calls "the Great Backlash" - the popular revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment. Marshaling public outrage over everything from improper flag display to un-Christian art, the backlash has achieved the most unnatural of alliances, bringing together 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 came to rank among the nation's most eager audiences for backlash bunkum - Frank, a native Kansan and onetime conservative, seeks to answer some fundamental American riddles: Why do so many Americans vote against their economic and social interests? Where's the outrage at corporate thievery? Why do illusory slights to the Ten Commandments trouble some people more than do the prospects of falling wages or monopoly power or the destruction of their very way of life?" "Frank answers these questions by examining the conservative revolution in his home state, a place that has lately drawn the astonished attention of the world for its unlikely skirmishes over abortion and homosexuality. In Kansas, as in so much of mid-America, Frank finds, society's losers are even more committed to the Republican agenda than are society's winners. The state's low-wage slaughterhouse workers and its struggling farm towns today far outdo the state's real-estate millionaires and its prosperous telecom execs in dedication to a political program that can only wind up hurting them." What's the Matter with Kansas? is a portrait of an upside-down country where blue-collar patriots recite the Pledge while they strangle their life chances; where small farmers cast votes for an economic order that will eventually push them off the land; and where a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs has managed to convince the world that it speaks on behalf of the common People.

FROM THE CRITICS

Corey Robin - The Washington Post

Frank is witty and shrewd, a genial, informative political tour guide of the sort we desperately need today.

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.

Library Journal

Native Kansan Frank asks why his state, once famously radical, went the way of the entire country and turned Right. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews