Seeing Red

What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
by Thomas Frank
Metropolitan. 320 pp. $24.00
Reviewed by
Jonathan Kay

When people speak of the American heartland, Kansas is what they have in mind. It is the state that gave us Pizza Hut, prohibition, and the country’s first suburban shopping center. Bob Dole grew up there, as did Superman and Dorothy (not to mention Toto). Kansas is also the birthplace of the feisty class warrior Thomas Frank, a regular contributor to Harper’s and the Nation and the author, previously, of One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (2000).

In What’s the Matter with Kansas?, which has become something of a sensation among the literati of the Left, Frank journeys home to try to find out how the Republican party has managed to recruit so many of the state’s working-class voters—men and women who, as he sees it, owe their natural allegiance to the Democratic party. His conclusion: they have been brainwashed, and unless Democrats are willing to wage bare-knuckled class warfare to win them back, the party of FDR may disappear altogether. As goes Kansas, so goes America.

On the color-coded map made famous by the election of 2000, America is blue (Democratic) on its edges and red (Republican) in the middle. Kansas, which occupies the exact geographical center of the continental U.S., is about as “red” as they come. According to Frank, however, the state’s Republican machine is actually two parties in one: the “mods” and the “cons” (as he annoyingly labels them). The first group is composed of politicians with moderate views on social issues and strong ties to the urban business elite; the second, of poorer, angrier, more religious politicians whose careers spring from grassroots activism.

Frank sees the Republican moderates as uncomplicated political animals: wealthy corporate types protecting their own interests. It is the conservative rank-and-file that mystifies him—all the factory workers, meatpackers, and farmers who vote Republican despite the hard times brought upon them, he insists, by decades of GOP-supported union-busting and deregulation. As Frank writes, in a characteristically florid passage, Kansas and the other red states present “a panorama of madness and delusion worthy of Hieronymous Bosch: of sturdy blue-collar patriots reciting the Pledge while they strangle their own life chances, of small farmers proudly voting themselves off the land, [and] of devoted family men carefully seeing to it that their children will never be able to afford college or proper health care.”

Today’s electoral trends strike Frank not only as counterintuitive but as a strange anomaly in American history. As he wistfully notes, a very different brand of populism captured Kansas in the late 19th century, when struggling farmers embraced a radical platform to purge the “money power” and succeeded in sweeping career politicians from office. The state remained friendly to socialists for decades thereafter. Even into the postwar years, Kansans were eager supporters of the New Deal and regularly sent Democrats to Washington.

What changed? The answer, Frank believes, is that conservative demagogues have whipped the voters of the Great Plains into a condition of “derangement” over social and cultural issues. The Rush Limbaughs, Ann Coulters, and Bill O’Reillys of the world have mastered the art of the “Plen-T-plaint,” a clunky neologism defined by Frank as “a curious amassing of petty, unrelated [examples] of the many tiny ways the world around us assaults family values: . . . tales of foul-mouthed kids, crime in the streets, rabid feminists, out-of-control government agencies, crazy civil-rights leaders, obscene art, welfare cheats, foolish professors, and sitcom provocations.” And the enemy is always the same: Hollywood libertines, government social engineers, and Ivy League know-it-alls. At election time, outraged Middle Americans embrace the only people who dare to stand against this deluge: the standard-bearers of the Right.

That such conservative complaints are trivial and specious is something Frank takes for granted. But even if they were not, he argues, there would still be little sense in workers voting Republican. Red states have sent dozens of conservatives to Congress in recent years, but, according to Frank, they have accomplished little: abortion is still legal, the public schools still teach Darwin, and the Supreme Court has asserted a constitutional right to sodomy. Many high-profile conservative campaigns are in fact designed to fail, he speculates, so as to compound the sense of victimhood felt by the conservatives masses.

GOP politics, in short, is a giant game of bait-and-switch. Voters in Middle America send Republicans to Washington to fight the culture wars, and Republicans mollify them with empty gestures of protest—before getting down to the real business of cutting taxes, deregulating the economy, promoting free trade, and otherwise selling out the men and women who put them in office.

Harnessed appropriately, indignation can be a writer’s friend. But restraint is not one of Thomas Frank’s virtues. Most chapters of What’s the Matter with Kansas? follow the same repetitive pattern: he begins in a measured way, building his case with statistics, interviews, and media analysis; as the pages roll on, however, he slips into a stenciled rant. By the book’s end, a reader feels as if he has been through the same fiery essay again and again.

As for Frank’s line of argument, its most obvious shortcoming is the mistaken assumption that, absent Republican propaganda, voters’ choices would align exactly with their (supposed) class interests. But few Americans are the doctrinaire materialists Frank supposes them to be. Religion, crime, education, bioethics, race relations, and a host of other cultural issues all figure prominently in how Kansans—like most other Americans—assess the country’s health. By dismissing these concerns as mere opiates, Frank shows himself to be not just an ideological throwback but a crude one at that.

False, too, is Frank’s insistence that social conservatives never actually deliver the goods. Admittedly, there seems little chance of overturning Roe v. Wade any time soon. But the Republicans elected by Kansas and other red states have created real national debates on everything from school choice and gay marriage to affirmative action and stem-cell research. And then, of course, there is the war on terror, an issue guiding millions of voters in the presidential election but rating no mention here. As a writer with Marxist tendencies (he describes capitalism as “borderline criminal”), Frank is obsessed instead with inequality. His complaint boils down to the fact that others do not share his fixation.

But even on its own strictly materialistic terms, Frank’s argument does not stand up. It is true, as he writes, that the Republican party is a heterogeneous entity that brings together down-and-out factory workers and Park Avenue businessmen. And it is also true that, in the short run at least, the latter stand to benefit disproportionately from laissez-faire economics. Yet most ordinary Americans understand that, in the long run, the economy is hardly the zero-sum contest between owner and worker that Frank imagines it to be. They know that soaking the rich and over-regulating corporations will inevitably destroy jobs—perhaps their own—and also stymie small-business owners.

The Republican party is held together by a deeper ideological bond as well. The view that people are best categorized by their socioeconomic status has never been popular in the United States. Most Americans believe that even the poorest citizen can advance himself through entrepreneurship and hard work, or at least vault his children into a better life. And so they are inclined to embrace policies that permit those who do make good to enjoy the fruits of their success. It is ironic that a writer who purports to be taking the pulse of Middle America would mistake such a defining national trait as mere gullibility.

JONATHAN KAY is the comment-pages editor of Canada’s National Post.