TBR: What’s the Matter with Kansas?
Today’s book review is of What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Thomas Frank. It came out this summer, to generally positive reviews, but not a whole lot of attention, then seemed to top every Democrat’s reading list after the election.
Frank explores how Kansas, once a center of Populist revolt against oppressive economic elites, has in recent years come to be dominated by a form of Republicanism defined by revolt against cultural elites. Democrats are almost entirely absent from Frank’s story — he argues that the battle in Kansas is between Conservative and Moderate Republicans. He discusses the ways in which those who are the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism describe themselves as "just folks" like the victims of modern capitalism, in contrast to liberals, atheists, intellectuals, feminists, etc. and harness outrage against those groups into a political movement.
It’s an interesting book and I enjoyed reading it. But ultimately, I felt like I was left hanging; Frank describes what has happened in Kansas — a story both funny and sad — but doesn’t really answer the why part of it. One chapter ends with the image of an angry mob, storming the statehouse, chanting "we are here — to cut your taxes." It’s a great line, but I still don’t have a clue why the pro-life anti-gay Christian movement is passionately opposed to taxes.
In the conclusion, Frank suggests that Democrats are — at least on economic issues — all but indistinguishable from Moderate Republicans. And with the all-but-disappearance of labor unions, there’s no one to keep economic issues on the table. Lower- and middle-income Americans therefore vote against their class interests on a regular basis.
It makes a lot of sense. And yet, a quick look at the exit polls from the last election indicates that there’s still a linear relationship between how much money you have and how likely you are to vote Republican. Kansas is a lot more Republican than the country as a whole, but the relationship holds true there, too. So, implicit behind Frank’s argument is a claim that there ought to be an even stronger correlation between income and voting patterns.
I’m not enough of a political historian to know if that’s ever been the case — I do know that for almost a hundred years, leftists have been lamenting the lack of class consciousness among American workers.
