Review of "What's the matter with Kansas?" by Thomas Frank

Have been reading this on and off for the last month. Mostly off because the crap was getting quite thick. On politics, I will read all sides of the debate and make my own mind up. This book has received reviews that make it sound like a witty yet thoughtful expose of some grand conspiracy of Republicans against the "average man". Like this from the LA times:

“A brilliant analysis—and funny to boot—What’s the Matter with Kansas? presents a critical assessment of who we are, while telling a remarkable story of how a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs came to convince a nation that they spoke on behalf of the People.”

I wonder if that reviewer actually read the book or just cribbed the notes from the DNC. First of all, the book is not funny at all. It flirts with irony at times, but not funny. I guess it would be funny in a black comedy sort of way to someone who has hearts and minds of the heartland (like a Washington policy wonk). I can’t understand the left’s penchant for finding vast conspiracies under every rock. Iraq is somehow the personal war of the Bush family to preserve their oil interests. The Florida election was rigged by insiders. And now Kansas and the rest of the heartland has been duped into some sort of self destructive haze by the bastard love child of social conservatives and Wall Street CEOs. Frank calls this “the backlash”. Backlash against government intervention in life, against liberals, against “progressive” social policies, against the media and the Ivy League intellectual class. The real truth of the matter comes out in chapter seven. It is Frank who has the backlash. He is from Kansas but was left out of it’s prosperity and change so “I left.” Frank rails against the Kansas Republicans (the cons) like a shunned kid on a playground. He didn’t get invited to play the fun games so he turned sour. The families around him got rich and his didn’t. Must be a conspiracy. Obviously it has nothing to do with my own family’s abilities or choice of careers. Frank places most of the blame for the conversion to Republicans on the “bitter self-made men.” Back to the angry white male stereotype. Forget the fact that Howard Dean showed us what a REAL angry white man was all about.

Here is the reality. The Democrats were the party of the working class when the poor stayed poor and were kept that way by government subsidies. When workers started getting stock options, owning stocks themselves, paying less taxes, controlling their lives some more, starting their own businesses and becoming successful, they realized that what they really valued was freedom from government. The Great Society didn’t work. Years and years of government hand-outs didn’t improve any worker’s ability to make a life for him/herself. Lower taxes, smaller government did. The Democrats have stuck with policies that have failed and the people know better now. They know now that it is not the job of government to redistribute wealth, it is to allow it to be created by every man, woman and child.

I am glad I read the book, but wouldn’t recommend it as any kind of factual telling of what has gone on in heartland politics over the last 30 years. These are the rantings of a spoiled looser in a battle he doesn’t even understand.

Some choice quotes:

“…the social conservatives who raise their voices in praise of Jesus but cast their votes to exalt Ceasar.” Really?

“…he [the worker] labors night and day so that others might enjoy their capital gains and never have to work at all. Humility in the service of its exact opposite; is there not something Christlike about it all?” How many people live off capital gains alone? Over the last 30 years stock ownership has broadened across all social and economic classes. Even the lowest worker benefits from the capital gains in stocks through their retirement or 401K which is probably in a mutual fund.

“And culture - that infinitely malleable malefactor, upon which any evil design can be projected - is the only plausible oppressor left.” Frank claims that the right suddenly pulled liberal culture out of a hat as the bogey man since Clinton embraced capitalism and took it off the table as a partisan issue. Does this guy want to go back to the class warfare of the last century? Worker against management? Has liberal culture caused no damage at all? Frank must not be tracking the divorce rate, rise in single parents, growth of drug use, or any number of degenerative trendlines that have gone up in the last 30 years since “everything became relative.”

“Liberalism is not a product of social forces, blacklashers believe, it is a social force, a juggernaut moving according to a logic all its own, as rigid and mechanical as anything dreamed up by the Stalinists of yesterday.” If you believe Liberalism is NOT a social force itself, I have some swampland in Florida I want to sell you.