What's the Matter with Kansas?

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What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004) is a book written by American journalist and historian Thomas Frank, which explores the rise of conservative populism in the United States through the lens of his native state of Kansas, which was once a hotbed of the left-wing Populist movement of the late nineteenth century, but has become overwhelmingly conservative in recent decades. It was published in the United Kingdom as "What's The Matter With America?".

As of January 2005, What's the Matter with Kansas? had been on The New York Times Best Seller List for more than four months.

1 Overview
2 Title
3 History of the idea that Democrats are defecting to conservatives
4 Criticisms
5 External links
6 Notes

[edit] Overview

In the book, Frank examines what he calls "The Great Backlash", which he describes as a reactionary movement against the cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s. According to his analysis, the political discourse of recent decades has dramatically shifted from the class animus of traditional leftism to one in which "explosive" cultural issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, are used to redirect anger towards "liberal elites".

Against this backdrop, Frank describes the rise of conservatism and the so-called "far right" in the social and political landscape of Kansas. He finds extraordinary irony in working-class Kansans' overwhelming support for Republican politicians, despite the fact that, in his view, the laissez faire economic policies of the Republican party are wreaking havoc on their communities and livelihoods for the benefit of the "extremely wealthy". Meanwhile, he says, the party fails to deliver on the "moral" issues (such as abortion and gay rights) which brought the support of cultural conservatives in the first place -- deepening a cycle of frustration aimed at cultural liberalism.

Frank also sees the bitter divide between moderate and conservative Kansas Republicans (what he labels "Mods" and "Cons") as an archetype for the future of politics in America, in which fiscal conservatism becomes the universal norm and political war is waged over a handful of hotbutton cultural issues.

Not long ago, Kansas would have responded to the current situation by making the bastards pay. This would have been a political certainty, as predictable as what happens when you touch a match to a puddle of gasoline. When business screwed the farmers and the workers - when it implemented monopoly strategies invasive beyond the Populists' furthest imaginings -- when it ripped off shareholders and casually tossed thousands out of work -- you could be damned sure about what would follow.

Not these days. Out here the gravity of discontent pulls in only one direction: to the right, to the right, further to the right. Strip today's Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land, and next thing you know they're protesting in front of abortion clinics. Squander their life savings on manicures for the CEO, and there's a good chance they'll join the John Birch Society. But ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed (unions, antitrust, public ownership), and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower.

The book also details how Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, a liberal Democrat, was able to win in conservative Kansas. By emphasizing issues like health care, school funding, and avoiding the hot-button social issues, Sebelius successfully fractured the Kansas GOP and won a clear majority.

Franks' basic theory of the book is simple. He says that the conservative coalition is the dominant coalition in American politics. According to Frank, this coalition is composed of two halves, the social and the economic conservatives. His theory is that while the two halves may not dislike each other, they have fundamentally different interests. The economic conservatives want business tax cuts and deregulation. The social conservatives want bans on gay marriage and abortion. Frank says that since the coalition formed in the late 1960s, the coalition has been "fantastically rewarding" for the economic conservatives. The policies of the republicans in power have been exclusively economic, but the coalition has caused the social conservatives to be worse off, due to these very economic policies. That, plus the fact that the social issues that this faction pushes never go anywhere after the election. According to Frank, "abortion is never outlawed, school prayer never returns, the culture industry is never forced to clean up its act." He attributes this partly to conservatives "waging cultural battles where victory is impossible," such as a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. He also argues that the very capitalist system the economic conservatives strive to strengthen and deregulate promotes and commercially markets the perceived assault on traditional values.

So the central idea of the book answers the question as to why these social conservatives continue voting with the Republican Party, even after their social issues never go anywhere and the economic policies which result, "end their way of life." He says that this coalition is held together because of the belief of the social conservatives in a "liberal elite" which does not actually exist. This elite, according to Frank, does not respect the social conservatives or their "culture," disrespects family values and is responsible for just about everything that they see wrong in the world. Frank describes what he calls the "Plenty Plaint." He says that this is the device the social conservatives use to outrage their voters. The Plenty Plaint catalogues "ridiculous examples of liberal intolerance, such as discrimination against Christians or silly mascot issues." He says Bill O'Reilly uses this in his television show where he "gets indignant one day about the Insane Clown Posse and indignant the next about the man-boy love association." By using "explosive" social issues like gay marriage to blame the "liberal elite," the social conservatives remain in the Republican coalition, even against their own economic interest.

[edit] Title

The book's title refers to an 1896 essay, "What's the Matter with Kansas?", by William Allen White 1868-1944. The essay was a vicious attack on the Kansas Populists for betraying what Frank calls "free-market orthodoxy". The title was apparently chosen to highlight the irony in a state moving so far from the left to the right. Frank also relates the history of White in his moving from the viewpoint of the essay to the left in counterpoint to Frank's own personal history in a similar direction.

[edit] History of the idea that Democrats are defecting to conservatives

The notion that American politics has been transformed because of defection from the Democratic ranks of working-class social conservatives is not a new idea:

As far back as Richard Nixon's first year in the White House, Kevin Phillips published The Emerging Republican Majority (1969).

Everett Carll Ladd Jr., with Charles D. Hadley in Transformations of the American Party System: Political Coalitions from the New Deal to the 1970s. (1975) proclaimed "an inversion of the old class relationship in voting" due to "the transformations of conflict characteristic of post-industrialism."

Robert Huckfeldt and Carol Weitzel Kohfeld in Race and the Decline of Class in American Politics (1989) argued that "race served to splinter the Democratic coalition" because the policy commitments of the Civil Rights era provoked "[r]acial hostility, particularly on the part of lower-status whites."

Thomas Byrne and Mary D. Edsall in Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (1991) argued that "[w]orking-class whites and corporate CEOs, once adversaries at the bargaining table, found common ideological ground in their shared hostility to expanding government intervention."

All of these works, and many others, suggested that the class basis of New Deal voting patterns had given way to a new structure in which conservative ideology and cultural issues brought large numbers of working-class whites into the Republican camp.^[1]

[edit] Criticisms

In the study "The Truth about Conservative Christians", two sociologists, Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout show that class does matter, despite Frank's thesis. Poorer Protestants are much less likely to vote Republican than affluent ones. And conservative Protestants are actually more likely to support progressive taxation than “mainline” Protestants are.^[2]

Steven Malanga points out that while Frank portrays the electorate in Kansas as voting against its self interests, the state's economy has actually fared better than average since the conservative and Republican tilt of the state began. Kansas has had a consistently lower unemployment rate, higher employment growth, and has fared better in recessions. While income may be lower than in more urban areas, the lower cost of living in more rural areas of the United States means a higher overall standard of living, with housing, education, taxes, and other expenses being significantly lower. The city of Shawnee, Kansas, described as practically desolate by Frank, saw its population grow by 27% during the 1990s, with only 3.3% of its population living below the poverty level. ^[3]

Malanga, however makes at least one factual error in his article, stating that Frank is from Shawnee, whereas the author was raised in Mission Hills, Kansas.

In apparent contradiction to Malanga's thesis, Frank does not depict Johnson County as being in decline:

"Today, Johnson County is a vast suburban empire, a happy, humming confusion of freeways and malls and nonstop construction; of identical cul-de-sacs and pretentious European street names and overachieving school districts and oversized houses constructed to one of four designs. By all the standards of contemporary American business civilization, it is a great success story. It is the wealthiest county in Kansas by a considerable margin, and the free-market rapture of the New Economy nineties served it well, scandals notwithstanding. Telecom and corporate management were the right businesses to be in, and Johnson County's population grew by almost 100,000 over the course of the decade: an unflagging stream of middle-class humanity to fill its office parks and to absorb the manufactured bonhomie of its Applebee's and the gourmet pretensions of its Dean & DeLucas."

Malanga bases his economic picture of Kansas on the figures for Johnson County alone, which enjoys a median income that is nearly twice the median income of other counties in the state. Malanga also does not address Frank's argument that Johnson County has prospered at the expense of the rest of Kansas.

John Leo argues that despite Frank's belief that conservative politics is just a game of "bait-and-switch", rural conservative voters have made their voices heard on a vast array of social issues. Somewhat ironically, he says that Frank is an elitist who is out of touch with the individuals and issues that his book addresses. ^[4]

Larry Bartels, a professor in the department of politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, in "What's the Matter with What's the Matter with Kansas," tests "Frank's thesis by examining class-related patterns of issue preferences, partisanship, and voting over the past half-century." Specifically, Bartels focuses on four questions: (1) Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic party? (2) Has the white working class become more conservative? (3) Do working class "moral values" trump economics?" and (4) Are religious voters distracted from economic issues? Bartels's answer to each question is "no."^[1]