What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

Fascinating but depressing.

Thomas Frank, born and raised in Kansas, goes home and takes a long hard look at the self-destructive wholesale adoption of hard-right, fundamentalist-christian, conservative politics by the plain ol’ folks of the state.

He fills in Kansas’s historical background of Populism and anti-slavery (Republican in the Lincolnesque sense), and shows how today’s politics represent a complete about-face. Through interviews and anecdotes, he vividly illustrates how the “culture war” works, and how in their eagerness to sign up and fight in that war, farmers and working-class people destroy their own way of life.

Frank also takes the Democratic party to task for creating the vacuum conservative Republicans rushed show more to fill when they completely abandoned their traditional supporters in pursuit of wealthy business owners whose politics were somewhat liberal, thereby taking economic issues off the table and making themselves over into a “Republican-lite” party where moderate Republicans may feel more comfortable as their party continues to become more and more radicalized.

Well worth reading if you want a clear, well-written description how American politics has moved dramatically rightwards. Frank offers no solution, but for most people not high up in the political party hierarchies, there may be no solution save waiting until the parties burn themselves out or wreck the country to the point that revolution becomes a viable and desirable option. show less

In 2004, Thomas Frank wrote about how the Democratic party lost Kansas. What he described was the blueprint for a political realignment that traded economic self-interest for cultural identity.

I could summarize it in two sentences: Twenty years ago, the Democrats dropped the ball by focusing on issues not important to working-class Americans. In return, the Republicans built a culture war that targeted those disenfranchised workers and remade American politics.

But Frank’s book deserves more than summary. It explains how the politics of grievance overtook the politics of policy, and how the left failed to understand the rules of the new game. Two decades later, the framework he laid out still holds.

It has given us Trump. Twice.

Unless show more things change, Democrats will continue to lose elections. More importantly, the duped working class will continue to decline, never realizing their masters have manipulated them to their own ends.

Key Takeaways

There are four key takeaways from this book:

• If you want to win voters, offer meaning.
  Cultural identity beats economic logic when it gives people a sense of purpose. The right understood this. It built an emotional narrative around faith, resentment, and belonging. The left, by contrast, offered plans. Plans don’t motivate people, but stories do.
• Moral clarity (real or imagined) wins over procedural competence.
  In politics, emotional appeals beat expertise. The right gave voters a worldview with clear villains and simple answers. The left offered process and policy. Voters chose the side that made them feel something.
• Rebellion sells.
  The illusion of revolt keeps people aligned with the very power structures that exploit them. Outrage becomes performance designed to provoke an emotional response, and performance becomes loyalty.
• People will trade results for recognition.
  Voters don’t just want better outcomes, they want to feel seen. Cultural populism gives them identity and relevance. Until the left offers something equally potent, it will continue to lose ground—even if they have better arguments.

Frank’s Prescription: Rebuild Class Politics

Frank offers a remedy: return the Democratic Party to its working-class roots.

• Recenter class as the defining political fault line, not race, religion, or culture
• Rebuild union power to create solidarity and institutional alignment with the left
• Confront corporate elites rather than defer to them
• Abandon technocracy, which alienates non-college-educated voters
• Refuse to fight on the right’s cultural turf, and redirect the conversation to stuff that is important (wages, healthcare)

In short: Frank suggests Democrats reassemble the old economic coalition, put class back at the center, and stop pretending that cultural neutrality is a winning posture.

But that won't be enough.

Lessons for Today

Frank was right about the disease. But twenty years later, his prescription is more likely to kill the patient.

The culture war he described hasn’t just intensified—it has crystallized into identity. What began as political theater is now a governing worldview: moral, coherent, and emotionally understandable. It dominates the right and shapes how tens of millions of Americans see themselves.

The left can't displace that with programs, no matter how generous.

Frank’s plan—to rebuild class politics—relies on conditions that no longer exist. Union power isn’t coming back at scale. Class itself has fractured into tribes defined by culture, geography, and grievance. And voters aren’t waiting for policy; they’re looking for meaning.

That’s what Frank missed. He assumed better messaging and material outcomes would win people back. But what drew them away wasn’t just manipulation. It was meaning. The right gave them a role in a moral story.

To compete, the left needs a better story.

What Comes Next

That story isn’t about restoring old coalitions. It’s about building a new foundation.

A viable politics now must begin with first principles—not demographics, not slogans, and not targeted benefits. It has to speak to the individual as a moral agent—the key player responsible not just for their own life, but for the survival of democracy itself.

This isn’t new. It’s the same challenge the framers confronted in 1787: how to build a republic not around tribes or factions, but around individuals capable of self-government. They knew the experiment would only work if citizens believed in something larger than themselves—and were willing to act on it.

That’s what we need now: a higher purpose to break the back of cultural tribalism.

Frank’s takeaways offer more than diagnosis. They reveal what any winning politics must provide: meaning, clarity, defiance, and recognition. The right delivered those things, wrapped in grievance. The task now is to offer the same architecture—built not on resentment, but on responsibility.

It means building a politics around values. What values? Reason over resentment. Agency over victimhood. Responsibility over dependence. These aren’t slogans—they’re commitments to a free society. And if articulated clearly, they can reframe the entire political conversation.

Why would this work? Because most people don’t want chaos. They want to live in a world that makes sense. The culture war works because it offers coherence. A values-driven politics can do the same—without the authoritarian cost.

But it has to be more than critique. It must be confident. Moral. Structured. Serious.

Frank explained how the left lost the working class. He warned that culture would displace economics—and that resentment would replace solidarity. He was right.

But rebuilding class politics is no longer enough. The work now is to build meaning.

Frank had the right ideas.

The problem is that no one has stepped forward to lead with them. show less

Nothing. They’re just being used. That’s the conclusion Frank reaches when he investigates why the status quo-busting citizens of his home state – once the nation’s pioneering progressive populists – now are the epicenter of right-wing Republican reactionaries. Frank writes of how groups of Kansans in their quest for moral values are basically being used to advance the cause of corporate power. There’s a lot in this book I’m uncomfortable with in it’s stereotypical depictions and not well justified conclusions, but for the most part Frank does solid investigation and puts a lot of compassion into the story of Kansas.

“Cupcake Land is a metropolis built entirely according to the developer’s plan, without the show more interference of angry proles or ethnic pols as in nearby Kansas City. Cupcake Land encourages no culture but that which increases property values; supports no learning but that which burnishes the brand; hears no opinions but those that will fatten the cupcake elite; tolerates no rebellion but that expressed in haircuts and piercings and alternative rock. You know what it’s like even though you haven’t been there. Smooth jazz. Hallmark cards. Applebees. Corporate Woods. “ – p. 49

“Ironically, the farm is where Americans learned their first lessons in the pitfalls of laissez-faire economics a hundred years ago. Farming is a field uniquely unsuited to the freewheeling whirl of the open market. There are millions of farmers, and they are naturally disorganized; they can’t coordinate their plans with one another. Not only are they easily victimized by powerful middlemen (as they were by the railroads in the Populists’ day), but when they find themselves in a tough situation – when, say, the price they are getting for wheat is low – farmers do not have an option of cutting back production, as every other industry does. Instead, each of those millions of farmers works harder, competes better, becomes more efficient, cranks out more of the commodity in question … and thus makes the glut even worse and pushes the prices still lower. This is called an ‘overproduction trap,’ and it can only be overcome by a suspension of competition through government intervention. Such intervention is what the Populists and the farmers’ unions fought for decades to secure; it finally came with the New Deal, which brought price supports and acreage set-asides and loan guarantees. For agribusiness, however, farm overproduction is the ideal situation. From their perspective, lower farm prices means higher profits and even greater power in the marketplace. Overproduction and all-out competition between farmers are thus to be encouraged by all available political means.” – 64

“…to believe that liberalism is all-powerful gets conservative lawmakers off the hook for their flagrant failure to make headway in the culture wars, but it also makes for a singularly negative and depressing movement culture. To be a populist conservative is to be a fatalist; to believe in a world where your side will never win; indeed, where your side almost by definition cannot win. Where even the most shattering electoral victories turn out to be hollow, and the liberal stranglehold on life can never be broken.” – 125

“Understanding themselves as victims besieged by a hateful world absolves conservatives of responsibility for what goes on around them. It excuses them for their failures; it justifies the most irresponsible rages; and it allows them, both in politics and in private life, to resolve disputes by pointing their fingers at the outside world and blaming it all on depraved liberal elite.” -159

“When markets flex their muscles, it is productive, organic, democratic; when government know-it-alls take the wheel, power becomes destructive, top-down, arbitrary, and tyrannical.” - 165

“The deafness of the conservative rank and file to the patent insincerity of their leaders is one of the true cultural marvels of the Great Backlash. It extends from the local level to the highest heights, from clear-eyed city council aspirant to George W. Bush, a man so ham-handed in his invocations of the Lord that he occasionally slips into blasphemy. Indeed, even as conservatives routinely mock Democrats for faking their religious sentiment, they themselves plainly feel so exempt from such criticism that they wander blithely in and out of the land of hypocrisy, never pausing to wonder if their followers are paying attention.”

“American conservatism depends for its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making certain mental connections about the world, connections that until recently were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet. For example, the connection between mass culture, most of which conservatives hate, and laissez-faire capitalism, which they adore without reservation. Or between the small towns they profess to love and the market forces that are slowly grinding those small towns back into red-state dust – which forces they praise in the most exalted terms.” -248 show less

This was originally published in 2004, so it's definitely dated, but I'd say it's still relevant. Perhaps depressingly relevant.

Thomas Frank ponders the fact that, once upon a time, it was considered almost self-evident that the Democratic party was the party of the ordinary working stiff. But that's changed fairly dramatically, especially in places like Frank's former home state of Kansas, where there has been a great and passionate upsurge in right-wing sentiment among people whose economic self-interest would not seem to be in alignment with the Republican's policies of tax breaks for the rich and minimal support for the rest of us. What gives? Frank claims that it's largely down to the far right's politicians who, capitalizing on show more backlash against the social upheavals of the 1960s, have reframed the conservative vs. liberal dichotomy as a cultural one -- beer-drinking, NASCAR-loving, churchgoing salt-of-the-earth Plain Folks vs. latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, morally permissive, snootily superior elites -- while sidelining the economic issues almost entirely, deliberately focusing attention on such issues as abortion or the teaching of evolution in schools, and away from questions of material benefit.

I am weirdly torn, here, between finding this thesis oversimplistic and perhaps just a little too cynical (although we are talking about politicians, here, so maybe not all that overly cynical) and thinking it's obvious enough to almost not require spelling out. I do think some of his commentary and opinions are more lucid than others (not to mention more sensitively expressed), but overall, I'd say he does have some things to say about the origins of America's current Red vs. Blue conflict that are worth listening to. show less

This phenomenal book explores how Republican party leaders and big business have conspired to equate conservatism with stands on cultural, not fiscal, issues. Rich's writing is solid, yet surprisingly free of any sweeping value judgments: he lets the facts speak for themselves. He also shows how conservatism is a dead end road, and moreover, how it was intended to be such from the get-go--the best way to keep people energised and supportive is by working them up over issues on which they will never be able to definitively declare victory. "Kansas" is an interesting and thought-provoking read from start to finish, which is why I highly recommend that you read it, too.

I found this book to be one of the best explanations (or attempts at anyway) as to why people vote for candidates that will help them the least and hurt them the most. As with most politics today, the reasons are many but it almost always comes back to fear, spin and ignorance. People think they are voting for candidates that share their 'values' and beliefs, but inevitably are looking out for their own careers and wallets. The scariest part is they continue to follow the same paths and never seem to learn from the past. If you want to know why the TeaParty has so many sheep-like followers read this book.

When I first read What’s the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank, I heard myself saying over and over again, “Yes, yes, yes,” “that’s just the way things are,” “he’s nailed it again.” When I react that positively to an opinion piece or a book on current affairs, especially one as controversial as this one, I always check my enthusiasm by reading what are likely to be negative reviews. This time the one that gave me pause was the scholarly review by Larry Barbels of Princeton University, who subjected Frank's interpretation to a fastidious statistical analysis based on the National Election Study (NES) surveys.

Barbels attempts to reduce Frank to a mere “pundit.” He admits that he is a talented journalist, an show more interesting writer whose style and story-telling have earned attention, but claims that he is regrettably not a serious political scientist as the scholar Barbels sees himself to be. Here is his conclusion: “I focus on four specific questions inspired by Frank’s account: Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic party? Has the white working class become more conservative? Do working class ‘moral values’ trump economics? Are religious voters distracted from economic issues? My answer to each of these questions is ‘no.’”

Well, I read Barbels' report carefully, and I can attest that he worked hard NOT to be an interesting writer whose style and story-telling might gain attention. As for the validity of his arguments, they all depend on statistical analysis of voters. Like many such research reports, it neither illustrates, clarifies, nor confirms its points by interviews, questionnaires, or personal observation. We have only numbers based on polls. If you have ever been subject to such polls, you know how unlikely they are to report the subtle truth. Often you want to say in response to a question, “Yes, but . . . .” “If you let me define your terms my own way, I would say . . . .” “Umm, maybe, I guess so.” They do not distinguish between those respondents who are relatively passive, who answer unthinkingly, who may change their minds tomorrow, and those who are enthusiastic about their positions, work hard to influence others, and are stable and thoughtful in their opinions. No matter what the category, it will lump people together who are not at all alike. "Low-income," as Frank points out in his rebuttal, will include welfare and working-class folk along with retirees, college students working their way through school, beginners in some jobs, even school teachers! "Non-college-educated" may include skilled craftsmen, high-powered sales representatives, truck drivers, self-employed business people, and the like—definitely not all low-income.

So, rereading Frank, I still find myself saying, “Yep, that’s the way things are; you got it!” It was Kevin Phillips who predicted and helped implement the “emerging Republican majority” as long ago as the 1968 Nixon campaign. Since then, he has pointed out the flaws in the two Bush regimes’ implementation of a so-called conservative agenda. See especially his book on the Bush clan, American Dynasty, and his more recent book on the current political scene, American Theocracy. Both these books are scholarly—and readable, citing statistics but not relying solely on them. For the most part, Phillips’ work corroborates Frank’s report.

Frank is a reporter. He researched his story with interviews of real people, observation of their actual behavior, examination of local news reports and party documents, analysis of legislation and of legislators' relationships with PACs, and his collection of data about voting, economic conditions, business growth and decline, and population shifts. He tells his story well. No matter what NES statistics may indicate, there is simply no way the working class in Kansas could have suffered such a downfall nor corporate giants have enjoyed so many perks except that the latter have the power and the former suffer the consequences. And there is no way candidates could receive the majorities they do, even in the poorest counties and those with the highest percentage of working-class citizens, unless candidates who represent affluent Kansans and corporate CEOs were capturing the votes of the working class.

Why? “For decades Americans have experienced a populist uprising that only benefits the people it is supposed to be targeting.” Spurred on by campaigns against abortion, same-sex marriage, the teaching of evolution, and the like, blue-collar voters elect candidates who then legislate corporate welfare and tax cuts, especially for the upper-income. “The angry workers, mighty in their numbers, are marching irresistibly against the arrogant. They are shaking their fists at the sons of privilege.” And turning right around and electing smooth-talking elitists with their PAC-supported agendas, whose legislation supports and enriches those very affluent, arrogant sons of privilege.

It is true, as Barbels says, that in Kansas issues of race are not as stressful as in the South and, there has not been the huge decline in white voters enraged by civil rights legislation, especially among very low-income whites. Nationally, this subtle racism accounts for the Democrats’ loss of influence among a significant number of working-class voters. Even so, Frank’s account of what happened in Kansas, for example in the formerly heavily Democratic vicinity around Wichita, is clear and persuasive. No matter what the numbers from the anonymous categories of voters surveyed by NES may say. Statistics don't tell the story.

So, if you read no other part of this book, you should at least pay attention to the stories in chapter 2, “Deep in the Heart of Redness,” and especially pp. 51-55, about Garden City and the meatpacking industry in that western part of the state. “The single most important element of [the meatpacking companies’] logic is, as always, the demand for cheap labor.” Therefore, conditions have deteriorated in the city: “One thing you do see these days are the trailer-park cities, dilapidated and unpaved and rubbish strewn, that house a large part of Garden City’s workforce.” Look closely and what you will also see is “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.”

But to see this kind of evidence of the new Republican majority, you may have to drive out beyond the well populated cities, beyond the media centers. You have to talk to real working-class people and smell their streets and investigate their work conditions and living conditions and income levels. You can’t do that just by studying NES statistical tables. Oh, you don’t have to go to a third-world country to see what happens in the third world. Just drive out to Garden City, Kansas, in the deep heart of redness. show less