Review of What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America By Thomas Frank

Authors

Donald Haider-Markel, University of Kansas

Date of this Version

Winter 2005

Document Type

Article

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 25, No. 4, Winter 2005, pp. 57-58.

Comments

Copyright 2005 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

In his latest book, Thomas Frank takes a sweeping look at the current state of American politics by using the conservative revolution in Kansas as a microcosm of what conservative Republicans have done nationally. Frank directs our attention to the highly effective myths, language, and tactics developed by conservatives over the past forty years that have convinced many citizens apparently to vote against their own economic interests.

Frank's central thesis is that conservatives have remade the American political landscape and captured the hearts and minds of middle America by focusing their rhetoric and (mostly unattainable) policy goals on culture war issues, such as abortion, media violence, homosexuality, and religion in public life, while also co-opting the traditional victimization language of the left. Frank argues that conservatives have made cultural issues central to American political debate by removing economic issues, pulling off this slight of hand by defining the elitist class not as the capitalists of old, but as coastal liberals, who include the educated elite, government bureaucrats, and the media. Complicit in this sweeping political maneuver are New Democrats who became pro-business in order to court wealthy but socially moderate Republicans.

Most of Frank's examples of how this process played out focus on Kansas. In particular he hones in on the takeover of the state's Republican party by conservatives beginning in the early 1990s. Historically, the Kansas Republican Party was dominated by what Frank calls mods, or the traditional Country Club Republican types. In the 1990s grassroots conservatives, whom he calls cons, began a movement to take over leadership positions in local Republican precincts. As they flexed their political muscle, with a strong focus on abortion and bringing religion back into public life, the mods took notice. Some mods tried to take the party back from the cons, but there were many, such as Senator Sam Brownback, who rode the wave the cons created and declared themselves part of what Frank deems the "Backlash."