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Book Review: What's the Matter with Kansas?
By Pearl Deans of DreamCatcher
During the euphoric period after the 2008 presidential election, I started to read What's the Matter with Kansas? This is a book that I should have read when it first came out, but for some reason I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Ever since it came out in 2004, I had been hearing references to Thomas Frank's book as I watched various political discussions on C-SPAN. But, as President Bush's second term devolved into greater depths of cronyism and malfeasance, I opted instead for escapism and fantasy, with graphic novels and Harry Potter. How Conservatives Won the Heart of America The subtitle of the book is "How Conservatives Won the Heart of America." Conservatives might have run away with America's heart, but they left her mind on the side of the road. How else to explain how George Bush managed to get re-elected after starting an unnecessary war in Iraq and delivering very little to the stalwart cultural conservatives who supported him so mindlessly. One of the best features of Frank's book is the lengths he goes to in documenting Kansas's transition from a "free soil" bastion of liberal abolitionists in the 1850s to a union activists' haven in the 1930s through the 1970s to the anti-evolution, anti-government culture warriors in the 1980s to the present day. The author analyzes the transition of Kansas (and many other states) from blue to red, as working class and middle class people turned away from progressive politics to form an uneasy alliance with the country club, culturally moderate, fiscal conservative Republicans. Backlash In What's the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank endeavors to explain how America wound up with two terms of, what many people believe is, the worst presidency in modern American history. All in all, Frank does a pretty good job. His prose is often poetic, his observations are personal (he grew up in Kansas), and his portraits of local and national politicians and activists are often keenly witty. Early on in the book, Frank discusses a concept that I have not seen or heard other political and social critics use in recent years—backlash. The backlash is what has made possible the international free-market consensus of recent years, with all the privatization, deregulation, and deunionization that are its components. Backlash ensures that Republicans will continue to be returned to office even when their free-market miracles fail and their libertarian schemes don't deliver and their "New Economy" collapses. It makes possible the policy pushers' fantasies of "globalization" and a free-trade empire that are foisted upon the rest of the world with such self-assurance. Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must make itself along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, U.S.A. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Hence the rebellion against the Vietnam war, sexism, and racism in the sixties and seventies gave way to creationism, a broken health care system, and the re-branding of torture as "enhanced interrogation techniques" in the 2000s. And in the year that America's first black President is inaugurated, labor unions make concessions to a dying car industry, right-wingers confuse César Chávez with Hugo Chávez, and the rate of foreclosures are the highest since the Great Depression. In his book, Thomas Frank leads the reader from the social upheavals and political progress of the 1960s to the culture war that started in the 1980s. I suspect that if you consider yourself an independent—one who is neither Republican nor Democrat, one who is often tempted to vote for a third party—you will be swayed to chose a side by the time you finish this book. What's the Matter with Kansas? is a must-read for everyone interested in politics in America, whether liberal or conservative. Though Frank is a former conservative turned liberal, those on the right will gain additional insight into why so many on their side are so angry, fearful, and confused. Democrats and liberals will understand why engaging in the culture war is a dangerous distraction.
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Very clever, her intellectual ability is obvious.
A brilliant review! It made me want to read the book.
 |  | Laraine Feb 9, 2011 07:03 |  appreciated |
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This intel was contributed by Pearl
Pearl
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