What's the Matter with Kansas?

When this book first appeared in 2004, "What's the Matter with Kansas?" was hailed as a powerful explanation of the political divide present in the early twenty-first century United States. Journalist Thomas Frank, who grew up in the upper-middle class suburbs of Kansas City, explores how a state renowned for agrarian radicalism in the latter nineteenth century, to say nothing of socialist ideals in the early twentieth, became a bastion of conservatism by the turn of the twenty-first. His answer, cultural and values politics rather than economic politics have dominated the current political scene. Written in a breezy style, it will not satisfy scholars but it nonetheless presents a compelling introduction to the current political divisions of the United States.Frank begins by asking a simple question, why do people vote against their economic interests? The Republican Party, he notes, has a penchant for big business, lessening regulations, and a diminution of the social programs that defined politics from the New Deal to the Great Society. The genius of the conservative movement, and the reason for its success, required a draining of the quest for economic justice that had dominated that earlier effort from the political agenda. Conservatives replaced it with values and cultural issues that attracted working class voters. The centerpiece of this was the anti-abortion issue, but it also included symbols of patriotism such as flag burning and the Pledge of Allegiance, the sanctity of marriage and whether it should be extended to gays, the stories told of American history, religious conceptions and their legitimacy in the public sphere, and the science behind evolution and other issues that some find uncomfortable.At its core, the values agenda advanced by the Republicans allowed the party to capture beginning in the 1980s all three branches of U.S. government and to rule with virtually no coordinated and effective opposition as the twenty-first century began. To be successful, they had to divorce all of these issues from the economic ones with which Republicans are so often identified and to motivate voters to support their values agenda despite the economic measures also a part of the Republican political effort.Ironically, while making considerable noise about cultural values and hot-button issues, the Republican majorities have done almost nothing to reverse the policies that motivated voters to send majorities of Republicans to Washington in the first place. This may well be, one of the great mysteries of current American politics. At the time this book was published, the Republicans had controlled the House of Representatives for ten years, and all three branches of government since January 2003. Even so, no major legislation had been passed to reverse the situation that values voters abhorred. Most importantly, nothing had been done to reverse a woman's right to chose whether or not to have a baby. This was the most volatile social issue and the one which Thomas Frank and others believe should have been on the top of the Republican agenda. The fact nothing substantive has changed is because of a series of rifts within the Republican Party as it fights internally over agenda-setting. At some level, co-opting the values voters, according to Frank, was a Machiavellian ploy to gain the votes necessary to take control of the U.S. government. Thereafter, the party ruled in the interest of its big business constituency, and in the process stabbed at least twice the constituency of values voters by not enacting the measures they advocated even as they harmed them with their economic policies.This is an important book that deserves consideration. It is, of course, a journalistic account of the current political divisions of the United States. It is overwhelmingly anecdotal, and far from a systematic analytical work, but it is also suggestive and provocative. There is every reason to believe it will be referenced in the on-going political analyses of the twenty-first century.

Odd: I finished the book less than 15 minutes ago, and found when I booted up the Amazon site, that I'd bought a hard-cover book. I hadn't noticed at all. But while reading KANSAS I didn't notice much of anything else outside the experience. It was a good reading experience. This is a writer who entertains as he informs, but doesn't condescend. His descriptions of his home city and his memories of it from childhood to the present, are colorful and fairly easy. Not a happy group of pictures mostly; the area has suffered, shriveled. If he has ferocious angers, acid envies and hatreds within him, we don't really see or hear them. His coming of age was deftly told; that is, when he first understood that he would never be one of the elite, and accepted it.Lingering, the realization that this book was published five years ago, and now its as though I'm looking at its conclusions through the near-derelect strip-mall spaces of one of the suburbs and small towns he shows us. And Frank shows us with clarity the effects that the business failures of big corporations have had, through the people he describes and interviews; the Backlash Republican Radicals. Their willful disregard of the effects of the forces that move them is tragic. It is as though they, the underclass, know they will always be scorned by those of the upper class, the Limousine Republicans, and so they firmly grasp that contempt and turn it inward in an act of Sepuku as if to say, Your contempt for us is our self-destruction, but our glory as well! And, Frank describes it all without sentiment, so that even in their folly, their hippocracy or their delusion, they have dignity.Still, I'm haunted by the final chapter of the book in which he appears to propose that perhaps a preponderant share of the destructive collapse of Kansas' civic pride is due to the fatal neglect by the Democratic Party, of its principal support and client, Organized Labor. Isn't it obvious? Completely nuts. Here, they're designated Liberals. It is true that for a time the cocuntry got sucked into the Thatcher-Reagan vortex of Liberal vs. Conservative spin, forgetting that all we ever were was Republican and Democrat, caught up in one national economy, and that toxic foreign conceit led to a growing self-delusion that blinded us to our self-interest, as we deafened ourselves with rancor that grew in foolishness as it grew in volume. Worse we allowed our civic dialogue to be poisoned by the Occult; that is, the propaganda of those who have faith without knowledge.Yes, we are in a time of rabid Anti-intelectualism. But then what? Greed, no matter how you rationalize it is not an ideology, and morbid selfishness is no way to run a participatory democracy. Or, maybe that's the point. Democracy = the tyrany of the masses. Plutocracy = the tyrany of the rich. Slavery is easiest; you have your mind made up for you and you eat scraps.Frank appears to the reader as a self-identified Liberal, and a man of sincere, balanced conviction. My feeling is that he resisted the temptation to speak out with strength. His temperament, probably. I don't feel his hot breath on my cheek, and in a way that's a pity. Certainly propagandists and pamphleteers can be and often are boring. People who cannot empathize with others are. Probably he chose wisely to self-censor in order that many, or at least more, might read and think where others would curse and turn away. I don't know. He's revealed a lot of the economic vs. cultural mechanism of so-called conservatism, and his book has been a great success. He has nothing to complain of.MORAL: The USA is a commercial (bait-and-switch) enterprise and strip-mall faith is a bi-product. Get used to it because its going to get worse.

Have not been able to put it down

conforme à la demande

Muy interesante para entender 2016. Describe la reacción (backlash) contra el progresismo y la corrección política que desde los 70 ha ido creciendo en EEUU. Y la traición de los políticos supuestamente conservadores a sus votantes de clase media, con una política económica que favorece a los muy ricos y asumiendo en lo social el ideario de la izquierda. Lo mismo que en España. Y entonces llega Trump y recoge todo ese descontento y gana contra todo pronóstico. Para leer otra vez dentro de 4 años, a ver si también Trump ha traicionado a los 'backlashers' como el resto de políticos republicanos.

...nicht nur für den an amerikanischer Politik interessierten.Ist das Buch zwangsläufig auch an speziellen amerikanischen Gegebenheiten orientiert, dem lahmarschigen Zwei-Parteien-System, so ist es doch interessant, die Parallelen zu der bei uns gerade entstehenden Tea-Party und ihrer vermuteten Wählerschaftherauszusuchen.Drüben die Koch Brüder, hier "elitäre" vom Steuerzahler durchgefütterte Professoren und Industrielle.Hüben wie drüben entfesselte Wutbürger, vom Leben betrogen und stets auf Konfrontation bedacht gegen alles was anders ist - in den Staatendie Feindbilder "Progressives", "Liberals", hierzulande die "68er" und "Gutmenschen".Hoffentlich gibt es baldigst ein deutsches Pendant, welches mit vergleichbarer Tiefe auslotet, was die Deutschen verleitet konstant gegen ihre Interessen zu wählen (falls es das schon geben sollte, wäre ich dankbar für einen Link per Kommentar).

brilliant classic which is also instructive to how Cameron's Tories try to manipulate the public in the uk.

Good book about politics, interesting reading about how kansas evolved through the year as far as politics. Quite interteining book.