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Book Review

Elections often lead to predictions, and electoral success often leads to introspection by the losing side seeking explanations for failures and pointing to greater and lesser sins within the fold. For the most part, this is a normal and largely healthy part of politics. After two consecutive disastrous electoral cycles, Democrats appear at present to be the party in the wilderness, and most of the soul-searching and advice has been aimed at Democrats. Such counsel ranges, as it often does, from carping Republican poison-pills^[1] to calls for a purge of any and all who appear insufficiently committed to the war on terror.^[2] Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? argues that beyond any electoral tactics or secular events like the war on terrorism, Republicans have won recent elections because they have been successful by persuading middle-class Americans that conservatism is a more appealing political viewpoint. As a polemical work, Frank has given Democrats a great deal to think about, and makes a fairly persuasive case that the blueprint for the Republican Party’s success lies on the plains of the Midwest. Whether this books transcends polemics to a broader appeal that is the choir of the Democratic Party and its ideological environs remains to be seen.

Summary

Frank’s bold initial assertion is that “People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about” (p. 1). The overarching hypothesis is that Republicans have succeeded by trumpeting social issues that frame liberals generally and Democrats in particular as elitist and hostile to religious viewpoints, and by keeping socially conservative middle-income voters in a state of rage over social issues while pursuing a governing agenda that is relentlessly congenial to corporate interests.

Frank is at his satirical best in pointing out the numerous ways in which Republicans campaign one way and govern another, which he calls the ‘Great Backlash.’ “The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ,” Frank writes, “but they walk corporate” (p. 6):

Their grandstanding leaders never deliver, they fury mounts and mounts, and nevertheless they turn out every two years to return their right-wing heroes to office for a second, a third, and twentieth try. The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors, receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEO’s are rewarded in manner beyond imagining (p. 7).

In addition to backlash appeals, Republicans also engage in what Frank calls latte libel, which again frames political discourse by implying that liberals ‘coastal elitists’ who have no values and look down their noses at hard-working, productive, religious and socially conservative ‘red-staters’. Within this narrative of cultural decline and backlash fury, “What divides Americans is authenticity, not something hard and ugly like economics” (p. 27).

Why has Kansas proven to be such fertile ground of backlash politics? Frank’s answer is that Kansas has a long acquaintance with the politics of anger. Frank observes of his home state, “Kansas may be the land of averageness, but it is a freaky, militant, outraged averageness” (p. 34). Kansas has evolved from a state in which religious zealotry fed anti-slavery abolitionism to socialism and now feeds a religious fundamentalism that conservative politicians invoke to impose economic policies that are actually hostile to most middle-income and working Kansans. From the Westar scandal^[3] to Sprint’s revelations of the financial excesses of its CEO William Esrey to the stories of exploited illegal immigrants in the meat-packing plants in and around Garden City, Frank contends that there is ample evidence that the policies advanced by the GOP in the state are leaving Kansans less prosperous, less healthy, and its middle-income families less secure.

Frank argues that unregulated free-market capitalism delivers empty storefronts in the small towns that dot Kansas while materially enriching the wealthy denizens of Mission Hills, a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas.

Viewed from Mission Hills, this is a social order that delivers quaint slate roofs, copper gutters, and gurgling foundations in elegant traffic islands; viewed from Garden City, it is an order that brings injury and infection and death by a hundred forms of degradation; rusting playgrounds for the kids, shabby decaying schools, a lifetime of productiveness gone in a few decades, and depleted groundwater, too. The anthropologists caution us in the sober way about a recipe for “growth” that blandly accepts a permanent impoverished class, but the people of Mission Hills, are unfazed. They may be too polite to say it aloud, but they know that poverty rocks. Poverty is profitable. Poverty makes stocks go up and labor come down (p. 55).

Frank contends that the results of the policies created by this one-party domination are evident to anyone who cares to travel to the small towns of Kansas to see it, where more than two-thirds of the counties in Kansas have lost populations over the past twenty years (p. 60). The only shops that survive on the Main Streets of these small towns are junk stores, where people attempt to “sell old stuff that in a more prosperous era would have gone to the Salvation Army or the trash” (pp. 59-60).

Frank also discusses the ideological fissures within the Republican Party: between the affluent “Mods” whose politics was socially more Eisenhower moderate than Goldwater libertarian, and the economically more modest but religiously and ideologically more extreme “Cons,” many of whom were radicalized by the Operation Rescue movement in Wichita in 1991. The conflict that ensued was a class war in the most basic sense, and pro-choice, live-and-let-live, moderate Republicans were swept from the state legislatures and federal offices, and replaced by politicians skilled in the nuances of backlash rhetoric. Democrats were marginalized to third party status in state and local politics, with rival GOP party organizations fighting a bitterly partisan feud in which neither side could win decisively nor inflict sufficient damage on the other to raise the Democrats to the level of tolerable alternative. Ironically, Frank notes that the Cons have only succeeded in one area: cutting taxes.

The situation may be paradoxical, but it is also universal. For decades Americans have experienced a populist uprising that only benefits the people it is supposed to be targeting. In Kansas we merely see an extreme version of this mysterious situation. The angry workers, mighty in their numbers, are marching irresistibly against the arrogant. They are shaking their fists at the sons of privilege. They are laughing at the dainty affectations of the Leawood toffs. They are massing at the gates of Mission Hills, hoisting the black flag, and while the millionaires tremble in their mansions, they are bellowing out their terrifying demands. “We are here,” they scream, “to cut your taxes” (p. 109).

The animus driving this evangelical politics is the frustration born in the belief that they are the majority yet liberals denies them a voice. That frustration is stoked by an industry of pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter, who blame academia, the news media, and Hollywood for a systematic bias against the ‘Real Americans.’

In addition to this sociological account of the movement leading to the GOP’s domination of this plains state, Frank also makes a genuine journalistic contribution by interviewing many of the middle-class people leading the conservative insurgency within the Kansas Republican Party. Among the people he interviewed include Tim Golba, a line worker at the Pepsi bottling plant in Olathe, KS, whose voter registration efforts led to the conservative domination of the local Republican Party; Kay O’Connor, a conservative state senator who “famously identified women’s suffrage as a symptom of America’s moral decline” (p. 170); and Mark Gietzen, the director of a Wichita Christian singles network, and who tirelessly organized voter registration efforts that resulted in Wichita transition from one of the few bastions of the Democratic Party in Kansas to solidly Republican, turning out one of the few Democrats in federal office, Dan Glickman, in 1994. Ironically, it was Glickman’s vote on NAFTA that spelled his doom; by effectively melding with Republicans economically, Bill Clinton’s politics of ‘triangulation’ resulted in a trumping of pocketbook issues with social issues on which Democrats were opposed by most Kansas voters. Frank is generally fair in his reportage of these figures while also conveying to the reader the sense of ideological derangement (at least to his mind) that drives much of their politics.

What accounts for the appeal of this self-immolating reactionary politics? The visions that lead Kansans to vote for a party that consistently impoverishes them is not informed by racism; according to Frank, “Kansas does not have Trent Lott’s disease” (p. 179). Kansas’s conservatives are racially tolerant, and generally pivot the argument of racism to accuse liberals of bigotry against religious conservatives. They use the radical imagery of Kansas’s past to link to their current movement against abortion and gay marriage. The backlash’s anti-intellectualism is similarly born of the conviction that liberal intellectuals are hostile both to capitalism and to America.^[4] Buying the claim by conservatives that liberals exclusively populate academia and public education, the Cons denounce public schools as “government indoctrination centers,” claiming that “Christian children in public schools are deliberately subjected nearly daily to the leftist pro-homosexual pro-evolution pro-abortion propaganda of the leftist socialist NEA” (p. 205). Indeed, the conservatives Frank interviews and observes are quite adept at appropriating the language of rebellion and persecution in their political campaigns, conflating criticism of their campaign to banish evolutionary theory from public schools as a kind of modern-day persecution.

Frank does not limit his criticism to Kansas Republicans, however. He takes Democrats to task for its obsession with making itself acceptable to corporate America, especially the ‘DLC’ (e.g. Democratic Leadership Council) faction of the Democratic Party. “Like the conservatives, they have taken economic issues off the table. As for the working-class voters who were until recently the party’s very backbone, the DLC figures will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides”, Frank caustically notes, “what politician in this success-worshiping country really wants to be the voice of poor people? Where’s the soft money in that?” (p. 243). In essence, Democrats have trended left on social issues while trending rightward on economic issues, fatally weakening the party in the perceptions of middle-income and working-class voters of the Midwest. The failure on the part of Democrats to make the moral case for its economic policies – that unregulated capitalism is not particularly good for middle-income families – “have left them vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far outshadowed by material concerns” (p. 245). More damning still, Frank argues that while Democrats and liberals have focused on electoral tactics and appeals, conservatives have simply outworked them in grass roots organizing.

Frank’s conclusion suggests that much has been lost on the Kansas plains, where the heart of America beats but where American civilization has not yet sunk its roots deeply into its thin soil. He asks, “How much more of the ‘garden of the world’ will we abandon to sterility and decay?” His answer is “[q]uite a bit”: a bit”: a bit”: a bit”:

The fever-dream of martyrdom that Kansas follows today has every bit as much power as John Brown’s dream of justice and human fraternity… Kansas is ready to lead us singing into the apocalypse. Its invites us all to join in, to lay down our lives so that others might cash out at the top; to renounce forever our middle-American prosperity in pursuit of a crimson fantasy of middle-American righteousness.

Reactions

What’s the Matter With Kansas? became the book de jour for the chattering classes over the summer of 2004, but by and large, the critical response followed a fairly predictable track: liberals loved it and commented favorably upon it, conservatives hated it and looked with a cynical eye to the motives and character of the author, and academics largely ignored it. I did not encounter a review of the book in any of the mainstream academic journals in history, sociology, and political science. One academic who ventured a comment, Prof. Jonathan Rees, who noted Frank’s academic roots as an historian, and supports Frank’s contention that class continues to be an important analytical tool for understanding political such political transformations that turned Kansas from a hotbed of radicalism to a hotbed of conservatism. “Without an appreciation of class, left-wing economic populism and right-wing cultural populism would look the same. But systematically erasing the economic aspects of American history does make it easier to turn this discipline into patriotic cheerleading.”

Liberals reviewing the book were predictably enthusiastic in their praise. Steve Weinberg concluded that the book “helps me understand why so many people I know apparently will vote for George W. Bush instead of John Kerry, why they worry so little about what the Republican-dominated legislature in my state is doing to harm the quality of life for every resident.” Likewise, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof cites Frank’s book approvingly to write a November 3rd column suggesting that Democrats would not do well in the national election the following day, and that the key to their resurrection lay in taking Frank’s advice to reach out to middle-income voters who have been swayed by the Republican siren-song of cultural values.

Conservatives as predictably lined up in opposition to Frank’s argument. The New York Times gave the review assignment to Josh Chafetz, an Oxford graduate student and member of the conservative webblog Oxblog, who in both introduction and conclusion scoldingly links Frank with the right-wing pamphleteer Ann Coulter. Chafetz observes that “Frank's book is remarkable as an anthropological artifact. Although not terribly successful at explaining the cultural divide, it manages to exemplify it perfectly in its condescension toward people who don't vote as Frank thinks they should.” Jack Balkin in a more generous tone notes that as “a student of ideology, I tend to dislike arguments based on false consciousness. My sense is that the more you know about people’s values and their circumstances, the less you will jump to the conclusion that they are necessarily acting against their interests.” The editors of the National Review Online faulted Frank for focusing on economic self-interests to the exclusion of other priorities that may reasonably be viewed as an equally legitimate basis for casting a ballot. “People vote – or at least should vote – based upon the kind of country they want their kids to live in,” write the NRO editors, and proceed to argue that middle-income voters choose Republicans because they reflect their values.

George Will, while conceding that Frank is a “formidable controversialist,” accused Frank of conspiracy theories, intimating that such “fevered thinking is a staple of what historian Richard Hofstadter called ‘the paranoid style of American politics,’ a style practiced, even pioneered a century ago by prairie populists. You will hear its echo in John Edwards’ lament about the ‘two Americas’ – the few rich victimizing the powerless many.” To Frank’s (actually William Allen White’s) question, ‘What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” Will laconically concludes, “Not much, other than it has not measured up – down, actually – the left’s hope for a more materialistic politics.”

Analysis

Objective analysis of a work as clearly polemical as this is a difficult task, which perhaps explains the relatively slight treatment from the academic community. One observation is that Frank’s book, while unabashedly polemical, is not the work of a partisan hack, although that was one of the conclusions reached by conservatives. By its definition, a hack is incapable of self-criticism, and would seek to explain away the most patently obvious criticisms of ‘their side.’ Frank is no Ann Coulter or Michael Moore (even Michael Moore does not descend to the depths of Ann Coulter). His language is at times blistering, but his arguments are generally supported by evidence, and he took the effort to spend time with people over whom he vociferously disagreed, and was respectful if at time critical in his treatment of those cultural conservatives. In short, Frank accurately captures the dominant kulture kampf of the Mid-West, and offers a plausible explanation for why conservatives are winning the battle for the hearts and minds of Kansans, even if he did so in a manner that was calculated to infuriate those same Backlash converts. In that sense, failing to persuade the unpersuadable hardly seems like a sin. 

In part, some of the criticisms of the book by conservatives have a point. Many people are less motivated by material concerns than by their sense of the direction the country should be headed, and by which political party is best able to lead in that direction. Part of the reason Democrats have lost their way in places like Kansas and Oklahoma is that they allowed the line to be blurred between material conditions and moral issues. Democrats won elections when they were able to successfully argue that economic justice justice justice justice justice justice is a moral issue, but have in recent years focused ever more attention on programs designed to appeal to middle-income voters, failing to recognize that the ‘vision thing’ (as described by George W. Bush’s father) is important to many Americans.

At the same time, many conservative criticisms fall short. Chafetz’s insinuation that Frank is just a male, liberal Ann Coulter betrays a sophomoric insouciance of high education in the service of small experience. Balkin’s claim that Frank relies on false consciousness as an explanation for Kansas voters’ behavior in my view fundamentally misunderstands the basic nature of Frank’s criticism of the Kansas Cons: he does not think that they are in the grip of false consciousness; he thinks that they have been thoroughly propagandized, a conceptually distinctive claim. Likewise, the overall contention that Frank is being condescending in claiming to know the interests of middle-income voter’s interests better than they know their own interests is an all-too-common rhetorical sleight-of-hand. If Thomas Frank is being arrogant to claim that he knows voters’ interests better than they themselves know then, then the condescension of conservatives to boldly assert that the answer to all economic problems is to cut taxes and rely on the ingenuity of the wealthy to ‘spend us all to prosperity’ adds the sin of folly to the elitism that threatens to infect both liberal and conservative ideological views. In one vital sense, Frank’s argument is superior to that of his conservative critics. Frank can point to the unavoidable realities of middle-income Americans and objectively claim that they are being squeezed, and can look at working-class Americans and objectively state that in an era when Corporate America is reporting record profits wages and salaries are stagnating. These are things that can be measured, have been measured by nonpartisan academic sources, and have confirmed much of Frank’s argument regarding the harm that is being done to plains states like Kansas at the hands of free market capitalism.

In sum, Frank’s conclusion that the people of Kansas will endure quite a bit more abuse at the hands of this backlash movement strikes as about right – for Kansas. For the rest of the country, the realities of politics will in all likelihood begin inexorably to exert themselves. Winning elections, for better or worse, requires governing, and governing requires making decisions that benefit some and harm others. Governing, in other words, involves the slow decomposition of electoral majorities, and the current leadership of the Republican Party appears no more capable of resisting this iron law of politics than the fragile electoral coalitions that have preceded them; indeed, they appear constitutionally determined to commit electoral ectoral ectoral ectoral hara kiri within the next electoral cycle. Kansas will almost certainly not be the epicenter of the Democratic wave is building in response to Republican hubris, and may stand on high ground when that wave is released. In that sense, Frank’s suggestion that all matters political can be reduced to Kansas may prove to be mistaken. In any case, What’s the Matter With Kansas?  offers valuable insights into our troubled times.

References

Balkin, Jack, “Franks Full of Beans?” TomPaine.com, December 9, 2004.

Chafetf, Josh, “Heartland Security,” The New York Times, Sunday June 13, 2004.

Kristof, Nicholas, “Living Poor, Voting Rich,” The New York Times, November 3, 2004.

Ranney, Dave, “What’s the Matter with Kansas? Corporate Conservatism has Consumed the State’s Proud Populist Past, Writer Argues,” Lawrence Journal-World, April 25, 2004.

Rees, Jonathan, “Review of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas?” History News Network, July 26, 2004.

Weinberg, Steve “The Puzzle of Have-Not Republicans,” Houston Chronicle online, June 11, 2004 posted 10:38 AM.

Will, George, “What’s the Matter with Kansas? Not Much,” Sacramento Bee, July 8, 2004.