Thomas Frank - Whats the matter with Kansas?: how conservatives won the heart of America

Praise for Whats the Matter with Kansas?

Brilliant.

Barbara Ehrenreich, The New York Times

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

Corey Robin, The Washington Post

Smart, convincing... Frank writes with the biting edge of a world-class polemicist.

Chris Suellentrop, Los Angeles Times

The political book of 2004.

The Village Voice

This is the true story of how conservatives punkd a nation. Tom Frank has stripped the right-wing hustle to its core: it is bread and circusesonly without the bread. Written like a poem, every line in its perfect place, Whats the Matter with Kansas? is the best new book Ive read in years, on any subject.

Rick Perlstein, author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

Scathing and high-spirited.

The New Yorker

A wonderfully readable book, beautifully conceived, engaging throughout.

Davie Denison, The Texas Observer

A funny, rousing, fascinating cry from Americas heartland.

Max Grossman, New York Post

A thoughtful analysis of Kansas by a native son, peppered with personal remembrances and an acerbic wit.

Shashank Bengali, The Kansas City Star

A wise reporter and a splendid wit, Tom Frank understands the grassroots Right as well as anyone in America. He is the second coming of H. L. Menckenbut with much better politics.

Michael Kazin, author of The Populist Persuasion: An American History

A brilliant book, one of the best so far this decade on American politics.

George Scialabba, The Nation

Shrewd and pointed... irresistibly entertaining.

LA Weekly

Frank is one of the wittiest, most insightful observers of culture and politics writing today.

Jim Miller, The San Diego Union-Tribune

Hilarious, angry... riveting... a serious, daring, and largely convincing exploration of a question most commentators approach with facile generalities.

Andrew OHehir, Salon.com

Frank... is the most incisive writer on contemporary America.

Nick Cohen, The Guardian (England)

Lively, heartfelt.

Jason Epstein, The New York Review of Books

Bracing reading... animated, angry, and without guile.

Daniel McCarthy, The American Conservative

A tour de force... witty, precise.

Matt Love, The Oregonian

Franks willingness to scold his own side; his irreverence and his facility with language; his ability to make the connections that other writers fail to makeall of this puts Whats the Matter with Kansas? in a different league from most of the political books that have come out in recent years.

Kevin Canfield, The New York Observer

Opinionated, defiant, thought-provoking... a wonderful telling of political change in Kansas on both a personal and social level.

Paul Johnson, Lawrence Journal-World

Mr. Frank re-injects economic-class issues into the debate with sardonic vehemence.

Jerome Weeks, The Dallas Morning News

Fresh and engaging.

Foreign Affairs

Hilariously funny... I promise yall, this is the only way to understand why so many Americans have decided to vote against their own economic and political interests. And Frank explores the subject with scholarship, understanding, passion andthank you, Mark Twainsuch tart humor.

Molly Ivins

ALSO BY THOMAS FRANK

One Market Under God
The Conquest of Cool
Commodify Your Dissent (coeditor)

How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

THOMAS FRANK

Owl Books
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Publishers since 1866
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10010
www.henryholt.com

An Owl Book and are registered trademarks of
Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Copyright 2004 by Thomas Frank
Afterword copyright 2005 by Thomas Frank
Lyrics from Sex Drive by Giessmann, Goffrier, Klaus, and Nichols Copyright 1979 by The Embarrassment / Embarrassment Songs BMI
All rights reserved.
Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frank, Thomas, 1965

Whats the matter with Kansas? : how conservatives won the heart of America / Thomas Frank1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7774-2

ISBN-10: 0-8050-7774-X

1. ConservatismKansas. 2. KansasPolitics and

government1951- I. Title.

F686.2.F73 2004

978.1033dc22

2004044824

Henry Holt books are available for special
promotions and premiums. For details contact:
Director, Special Markets.

First published in hardcover in 2004 by Metropolitan Books

First Owl Books Edition 2005

Designed by Paula Russell Szafranski

Map by Patrick W. Welch

Printed in the United States of America

5 7 9 10 8 6

Oh, Kansas fools! Poor Kansas fools!
The banker makes of you a tool.

Populist song, 1892

Whats the Matter with
KANSAS?

The poorest county in America isnt in Appalachia or the Deep South. It is on the Great Plains, a region of struggling ranchers and dying farm towns, and in the election of 2000 the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush, carried it by a majority of greater than 80 percent.

This puzzled me when I first read about it, as it puzzles many of the people I know. For us it is the Democrats that are the party of workers, of the poor, of the weak and the victimized. Understanding this, we think, is basic; it is part of the ABCs of adulthood. When I told a friend of mine about that impoverished High Plains county so enamored of President Bush, she was perplexed. How can anyone who has ever worked for someone else vote Republican? she asked. How could so many people get it so wrong?

Her question is apt; it is, in many ways, the preeminent question of our times. People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about. This species of derangement is the bedrock of our civic order; it is the foundation on which all else rests. This derangement has put the Republicans in charge of all three branches of government; it has elected presidents, senators, governors; it shifts the Democrats to the right and then impeaches Bill Clinton just for fun.

If you earn over $300,000 a year, you owe a great deal to this derangement. Raise a glass sometime to those indigent High Plains Republicans as you contemplate your good fortune: It is thanks to their self-denying votes that you are no longer burdened by the estate tax, or troublesome labor unions, or meddling banking regulators. Thanks to the allegiance of these sons and daughters of toil, you have escaped what your affluent forebears used to call confiscatory income tax levels. It is thanks to them that you were able to buy two Rolexes this year instead of one and get that Segway with the special gold trim.

Or perhaps you are one of those many, many millions of average-income Americans who see nothing deranged about this at all. For you this picture of hard-times conservatism makes perfect sense, and it is the opposite phenomenonworking-class people who insist on voting for liberalsthat strikes you as an indecipherable puzzlement. Maybe you see it the way the bumper sticker I spotted at a Kansas City gun show puts it: A working person that