What's the Matter With Kansas? by Thomas Frank

"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."--BOOK JACKET.

I learned early on that reading the opinion pages of the newspaper was just spitting into the wind. You get so fed up to the point that you have to do something about it, and then you end up making it worse. Much of “What's the Matter with Kansas” was a play-by-play rehashing of the news stories that have helped make Kansas the laughing stock of the nation. While I find Frank's concept of “cultural backlash” interesting, it still doesn't answer the question of “why do rural people continue to elect politicians who don't act in their best interest.” Contrary to popular opinion, Kansans aren't so stupid as to have the wool continuously pulled over our eyes as this book alludes. I believe the answer to that question is much more complicated than “cultural backlash” alone. While I find the rural-urban dichotomy and the rampant fundamentalism in the heartland fascinating, after I finished this book all I felt like I had done was spit into the wind.

*Disclaimer: I'm one of the many college-educated Kansans who left the state in pursuit of a job, and I am not a fundamentalist in any way, shape, or form.

I read this book because it hopes to answer a question that is stereotypical of liberal thinking: why are the poor or middle class conservatives actually helping Big Business continue to destroy the poor or middle class? And the answer is easy: because enforcing morality upon this country is more important than anything else to the religious right.

The other reason I read it is because I went to college in Lawrence, KS, which is a bastion of liberalism in a dark red sea (well, I guess there's Wyandotte county too). I was taken in by the liberal educators and left Lawrence a staunch liberal myself (having actually arrived a conservative in the economic sense).

The beginning of the book talks about Kansas as a fighter for workers' rights since it's inception, talks about the history of Bleeding Kansas. The city of Wichita is a good example, and the actions of Boeing are appalling. And of course, Wichita being a generally conservative city has actually voted to keep lawmakers in office who write laws that protect and encourage actions like those of Boeing.

There's a chapter on the agricultural business in Kansas that reinforces my reasons to be a vegetarian. The author writes of his own history, his own viewpoint changing from conservative to liberal at some point in his life. And the book has a lot of discussion about how the moderate and extreme conservatives work off each other to prosper.

And there's criticism of the left - not criticism of the philosophies, but criticism in the left's inability to stop the joining of a capitalistic economic views with conservative Christian views. They are intertwined as a party when what do they really have to do with each other?

It's a funny book, and I'll be reading more of the author's work. If you're liberal, you'll probably like it, if not, then you probably won't. I'm not going to read any Ann Coulter or Bill O'Reilly until I feel I haven't given enough 1 star reviews lately either.