What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

In his book 1984, George Orwell described the state of perpetual war in his fictional future society by saying that the war wasn't meant to be won, it was only meant to be continuous. In WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS?, Thomas Frank illustrates how, and how effectively, the neoconservative right has implemented Orwell's concepts via a neverending war over culture and values.

Using his home state of Kansas as the model and focal point, Frank asks rhetorically why it is that Kansans so willingly espouse right-wing social issues (creationism, defunding public schools, prayer in schools, pro-life) while simultaneously allowing their state to become economically devastated by Republican free market policies of unfettered, unregulated capitalism. In other words, why do Kansans (and many other Red Staters) vote consistently against their pocketbooks, against their own economic self-interest?

With great specificity, Frank illustrates these behaviors and their devastating economic consequences by describing individuals and communities in Kansas. These are some of the strongest parts of his book, since they demonstrate through real people and real towns how life has changed, and continues to change, under Republican conservative rule. If anything, Frank could use more of these examples, particularly more description of some of the small towns and communities in his state that are dying a slow and tortured economic death. Regardless, the examples given convey the sense that Kansans are voting Red even as they vote themselves economically dead.

Frank correctly ascribes this seemingly self-contradictory behavior to the idea that Conservatives have discovered a means to incite permanent "backlash" among the Red Staters through culture wars. Whatever the issue, whether it's Janet Jackson's right breast or gay marriage in Massachusetts, Conservative politicians whip up fierce indignation and activism by threatening the loss of American moral values to the eastern, intellectual elite who support the denigration of those values and the denial of moral absolutes. And, as Frank points out, despite years of bitter denunciation, almost nothing has changed. The war rages on, but the Conservatives rarely win even a skirmish.

By focusing attention on culture issues, the Conservatives not only distract their followers from economic concerns, they remove capitalism itself as an issue. For Red Staters, capitalism is a natural force, and free markets are an absolute good. Concerns about environment, globalization, estate taxes, Wal-Martization, health and welfare all disappear, since laissez-faire is an inviolable principle. Capitalism cannot and must not be regulated in this worldview, and any restrictions and regulations designed to "thwart" it are necessarily wrong if not evil. The fact that culture itself -- MTV, Hollywood, Howard Stern, Fear Factor -- is a capitalist product that follows the same profit motivations goes unnoticed. In Kansas, as in most places, there is no connection in people's minds between culture and capitalism.

Frank has put his thumb directly on the source of America's current problems, the so-called Red State, Blue State divide. As I write this review on July 9, 2004, the United States remains embroiled in Iraq and Afghanistan, our standing in the world is at an all-time low, Tom Ridge is warning against another imminent Al-Qaeda attack, the country is hemorrhaging jobs, young kids can less and less afford to go to college, gas and milk prices have soared to all-time highs, working men and women can't make ends meet even with two or more jobs, millions are without health insurance, the President claims the power to arrest and detain anyone he chooses without legal representation, and our education system is becoming enslaved to meaningless standardized tests. What solutions does our Republican President and Republican legislative branch offer? The Senate is too busy preparing for an all-out legislative war over a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to worry about real problems. The newspaper every day tells us just how correct Thomas Frank is in his analysis. Kansas isn't just Kansas, Kansis is us!

Anyone who truly wants to understand today's upside-down political world, who wants to understand how middle class people can enthusiastically support tax cuts that give them nothing and the rich more money and power, should read WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? Mr. Frank offers clear and straightforward explanation of this bizarre phenomenon, and his insights and implications should send chills down the spines of those who espouse a free, fair, and open society. To quote Frank's closing line: that the "fever-dream of martyrdom that Kansas follows today...invites us all to join in, to lay down our lives so others might cash out at the top; to renounce forever our middle-American prosperity in pursuit of a crimson fantasy of middle-American righteousness." How much better can it be said?

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.

This is by far the best of the countless books written on the Culture Wars in recent years, explaining as it does the paradox that poor people vote overwhelmingly, in many parts of the USA, for the party of big business and against their own economic interests. Being from Britain, where there are many pro-life Labour MPs and many pro-choice Conservative/Thatcherite MPs, I am always puzzled by the way in which culture so dominates the voting patterns of Americans, in a way that is simply not the case in the United Kingdom. This book explains why, and while its author is clearly a Democrat, this is a work sufficiently lacking in vitriol (at last!) that Republicans might enjoy it as well. Read it and understand what is going on in the Culture Wars in the USA and why formerly Socialist Kansas might be voting Republican this fall. Christopher Catherwood (author of CHURCHILL'S FOLLY: HOW WINSTON CHURCHILL CREATED MODERN IRAQ: Carroll and Graf 2004)