What’s the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
One probably shouldn’t read political analysis 16 years after publication, but here I am. Frank’s account of Kansas’s slide into conservatism tells the story of how Kansas voters allowed themselves to be conned into voting for politicians who gladly take votes from salt-of-the-earth voters and then hand out tax breaks to corporate pillagers. It’s the progressive view on why people vote against their self-interests. Most of the fault lies with hypocritical politicians who gladly ride to power on Moral Majority messages while never intending to enact those promises. Another good chunk of fault lies with the Democratic Party, which happily sold its working-class soul in exchange for the possibility of big fundraising checks from corporate America.
But it seems that the biggest portion of fault needs to be the voters who’ve chosen ever-more conservative politicians year over year. That angle is strangely missing from this often funny, somewhat insightful book. Of course, I have the benefit of seeing the Obama years (or, 8 years of Republican backlash), and now Trump, who seems like a Frankenstein’s monster made from the worst parts of the Kansan conservatives that Frank profiles.
Frank seems to end this book with the thought that Kansas will continue to push more conservative, but that the men and women they send (or sent) to Washington were powerless to bring out the kinds of change their constituents clamored for. Fourteen years later, it looks like the conservative movement was working tirelessly to achieve exactly the Trump administration (which helps explain why so many conservative Christians are reluctant to speak against him). I think Frank (and many progressive pundits of his day) imagined a check in the system that would have never let a president do what Trump has done. But that check never materialized, which begs the question of what the ultimate goal of such a conservative movement could be. As we stand on the precipice of an election that feels more monumental than ever, I fear the ultimate goal of the conservative movement is complete domination, in essence a complete refutation of our core democratic principles.
It’s easy to chuckle at the crazy Kansan politicians voters were sending to Washington in the early 2000s. It’s a little harder to laugh about it now.
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