What's the Matter with Kansas? (book)
Based on Wikipedia: What's the Matter with Kansas? (book)
The Great American Paradox
Here's a puzzle that haunted American politics for decades: Why would people consistently vote against their own economic interests? Why would workers whose jobs were being shipped overseas, whose wages were stagnating, whose healthcare costs were skyrocketing—why would they keep electing the very politicians making these problems worse?
Thomas Frank thought he had the answer. And he found it in his home state.
In 2004, the journalist and historian published "What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America," a book that became a cultural phenomenon. It spent eighteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and gave a name to something millions of Americans had been struggling to articulate. The book was so provocative that when it was published in Britain and Australia, the publishers changed the title to "What's the Matter with America?"—apparently figuring that international readers wouldn't care about Kansas specifically but would very much want to understand the strange political creature America had become.
A State Turned Inside Out
To understand Frank's argument, you need to know something about Kansas history. This isn't just any state. In the late nineteenth century, Kansas was a cauldron of left-wing populism—farmers organizing against railroad monopolies, workers demanding fair wages, citizens raging against the concentrated power of Eastern banks and corporations.
The state entered the Union as a free state after violent conflict over slavery. It would later become the setting for Brown versus Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case that outlawed racial segregation in public schools. Kansas had, in other words, a radical progressive streak running through its political DNA.
Then something changed.
By the time Frank was writing, Kansas had become one of the most reliably conservative states in America. The same communities that once demanded government break up monopolies were now demanding government get out of the way entirely. The descendants of populist firebrands were attending anti-abortion rallies and joining organizations like the John Birch Society, a far-right advocacy group founded in 1958 that promoted limited government and opposed what it saw as communist influence in American life.
Frank put it bluntly: strip today's Kansans of their job security, and they register as Republicans. Push them off their land, and they show up to protest at abortion clinics. Let a chief executive officer squander their life savings on personal extravagances, and they might just decide the problem is too much government regulation.
Ask these same people about the solutions their great-grandparents proposed—labor unions, antitrust enforcement, public ownership of utilities—and you might as well be speaking a foreign language.
The Bait and Switch
Frank's central thesis is elegant and damning. He argues that the modern conservative coalition is built on a kind of political shell game.
The coalition has two distinct factions. Economic conservatives—think Wall Street executives, corporate lobbyists, and wealthy donors—want lower business taxes and fewer regulations. Social conservatives—think evangelical Christians, traditional values voters, and cultural warriors—care about issues like abortion, gay marriage, school prayer, and what they see as moral decline in American culture.
These two groups have almost nothing in common economically. In fact, their economic interests often directly conflict. But starting in the late 1960s, Republican strategists figured out how to yoke them together into an unstoppable political machine.
Here's how it works, according to Frank. During election season, Republican politicians fire up social conservatives with passionate rhetoric about cultural issues. Abortion is murder. Gay marriage threatens the family. Hollywood elites are corrupting your children. Liberal professors are indoctrinating students. The message is clear: vote for us, and we'll fight for your values.
Then the election ends. The winners take office.
And what happens? The politicians turn their attention to the economic agenda: cutting taxes for corporations, deregulating industries, weakening labor protections. The culture war rhetoric gets filed away until the next campaign.
Frank is ruthless in pointing out the results. "Abortion is never outlawed," he writes. "School prayer never returns. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act." The social conservatives keep voting, keep organizing, keep believing that victory is just one more election away. Meanwhile, the economic conservatives keep winning policy battles that make working-class voters objectively worse off.
The Straw Man Elite
But why don't social conservatives catch on? Why don't they notice that their votes produce tax cuts for billionaires rather than restored prayer in schools?
Frank argues that the conservative movement has constructed an elaborate explanation: the liberal elite.
This is a straw man, a rhetorical device where you create a caricature of your opponent that's easier to attack than the real thing. The "liberal elite" in conservative discourse isn't really about policy positions or economic interests. It's about cultural identity. These supposed elites are portrayed as people who hate America, who look down on regular folks, who want to impose their decadent values on decent hardworking families.
When social conservatives ask why they haven't achieved their goals despite decades of Republican dominance, the answer is always the same: the liberal elite is blocking progress. Those judges. Those professors. Those media executives. Those Washington bureaucrats. The enemy is always just powerful enough to thwart conservative aims but never so powerful that voting Republican seems pointless.
Frank finds this explanation absurd. At the time he was writing, conservatives controlled all three branches of the federal government. They had an entire media ecosystem—talk radio, cable news networks, newspapers, publishers—devoted exclusively to promoting conservative ideology. They had won six of the previous nine presidential elections. To claim victimhood under these circumstances struck Frank as either delusional or cynically manipulative.
The Democrats' Complicity
Frank doesn't let Democrats off the hook. In fact, he argues they bear significant responsibility for the situation.
He points his finger specifically at the Democratic Leadership Council, commonly known as the DLC. This organization, which rose to prominence in the 1980s and produced figures like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Joe Lieberman, pushed the Democratic Party to abandon its traditional working-class base.
The DLC's strategy was straightforward: stop chasing blue-collar voters and start courting affluent white-collar professionals. These educated suburbanites might be liberal on social issues like abortion rights, but they were quite comfortable with corporate-friendly economic policies. More importantly, corporations could generate campaign contributions that dwarfed anything organized labor could offer.
The result, Frank argues, was a Democratic Party that stood "rock-solid" on abortion rights while making "endless concessions" on economics—welfare reform, the North American Free Trade Agreement (a controversial trade deal that critics blamed for shipping manufacturing jobs to Mexico), Social Security privatization schemes, weakened labor laws, deregulation.
This left working-class voters with a choice between two parties that had essentially converged on economic policy. If both parties were going to support free trade and deregulation and weak unions, then cultural issues became the only meaningful way to distinguish between them. The Republicans were at least offering to fight for traditional values. What were the Democrats offering?
A Different Kind of Kansas Democrat
Frank does find one Democratic success story in Kansas: Kathleen Sebelius.
Sebelius won the governorship in this deeply conservative state by doing something counterintuitive. She emphasized bread-and-butter issues like healthcare and school funding while deliberately avoiding the hot-button social issues that typically defined Kansas politics. She didn't take the bait on abortion or gay marriage. She talked about things that affected people's daily lives.
The strategy worked. She fractured the Republican coalition and won a clear majority. Frank sees this as a template for how Democrats might compete in red states—not by abandoning progressive economics for corporate centrism, but by refusing to let cultural wedge issues dominate the conversation.
Where the Title Came From
The book's title has its own fascinating history. On August 15, 1896, a newspaper editor named William Allen White published an editorial in the Emporia Gazette with the headline "What's the Matter with Kansas?"
But here's the irony: White's original editorial argued the opposite of what Frank argues. White was attacking the Populist movement, blaming left-wing policies for chasing economic capital out of the state and causing Kansas to fall behind its neighbors economically. He was defending the business-friendly Republican establishment against agrarian radicals.
The editorial was such an effective piece of conservative propaganda that the Republican Party distributed hundreds of thousands of copies to support William McKinley's presidential campaign that year. It launched White's career in journalism. He became so influential that five Republican presidents—Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover—would sleep at his Kansas home.
Frank's choice to repurpose this title is deliberately provocative. He's taking a famous conservative argument and turning it on its head. The original "What's the Matter with Kansas?" blamed progressive politics for Kansas's problems. Frank's version blames conservative politics. Same question, opposite answer, more than a century apart.
The Critics Respond
Frank's thesis was influential, but it wasn't universally accepted. Several scholars pushed back on his core claims.
Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, published a detailed critique titled "What's the Matter with 'What's the Matter with Kansas?'" He tested Frank's claims against actual voting data and answered four key questions:
Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic Party? No.
Has the white working class become more conservative? No.
Do working-class "moral values" trump economic concerns? No.
Are religious voters distracted from economic issues? No.
Bartels argued that the whole premise was flawed. Working-class voters hadn't actually shifted dramatically to the right. The realignment Frank described was real, but it was happening primarily among affluent voters, not poor ones.
Two sociologists, Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout, offered another challenge in their book "The Truth about Conservative Christians." They found that class still mattered quite a bit among religious voters. Poorer Protestants were much less likely to vote Republican than wealthy ones. And conservative Protestants were actually more likely than mainline Protestants to support progressive taxation—hardly the economic false consciousness Frank described.
Conservative columnist John Leo attacked from a different angle. He argued that Frank was wrong to suggest cultural conservatives never achieved their goals. The problem, Leo claimed, was that "few of the issues that traditionalists care about ever seem to come up for democratic vote." Changes were being imposed by courts and bureaucrats rather than through elections. Conservatives weren't being fooled; they were being outmaneuvered by institutions that didn't answer to voters.
Frank wrote lengthy rebuttals to his critics, and the academic debate continued for years. The argument became politically charged again in 2008 when Barack Obama, during his presidential campaign, described working-class voters in economically struggling areas as "bitter" people who "cling to guns or religion." Critics saw this as Obama channeling Frank's thesis—and making exactly the kind of condescending generalization that alienated the voters Democrats needed to win.
The Deeper Question
Whatever you think of Frank's specific claims, his book forced Americans to grapple with uncomfortable questions about democracy itself.
Can voters be systematically misled about their own interests? If so, whose job is it to correct them—and is that correction itself a form of elitism? Are cultural concerns less legitimate than economic ones? Who gets to decide what's a "real" issue and what's a distraction?
Frank's Kansas is a state where something strange happened to the relationship between economics and politics. The farmers who once organized against railroad monopolies now defend corporate prerogatives. The workers who once demanded unions now see organized labor as the enemy. The citizens who once insisted government protect them from concentrated wealth now insist government is the problem.
Whether this represents a great awakening or a great deception depends on your politics. But the transformation is real, and it shaped American history. The coalition Frank described—economic elites and cultural conservatives bound together by shared enemies—dominated American politics for a generation.
Understanding how that coalition formed, how it maintained itself, and what tensions threatened to tear it apart remains essential for understanding where American politics has been and where it might be going.
The Capitalism Paradox
There's one more wrinkle in Frank's argument that deserves attention, because it reveals the deepest contradiction in the conservative coalition.
Social conservatives believe they're fighting against moral decay—against a culture that has become too permissive, too materialistic, too obsessed with gratification. They blame liberals for this decay. But Frank argues that the actual engine of moral transformation in American life isn't liberal professors or Hollywood executives. It's capitalism itself.
The market system that economic conservatives celebrate and protect is the same system that commercializes everything, including traditional values. It's advertisers who figured out that sex sells. It's corporations that market transgressive content to teenagers. It's the entertainment industry, driven by profit motives, that pushes boundaries in pursuit of audiences.
The very economic deregulation that conservatives champion empowers the cultural forces that conservatives despise. This is the snake eating its own tail at the heart of the conservative coalition. The economic wing keeps strengthening the system that undermines what the cultural wing holds sacred.
Frank doesn't think this contradiction can hold forever. Eventually, he suggests, someone will notice that the revolution keeps getting promised but never delivered. Eventually, working-class conservatives will realize that their wages keep falling while their values keep losing. Eventually, the bait-and-switch will stop working.
Whether that day has come, or is still coming, or will never come at all, remains the open question that Frank's book posed to American democracy.