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Book Review - What's the Matter With Kansas?, by Thomas Frank

2004 – online click here for related stories: democracy matters

Thomas Frank’s What the Matter With Kansas? is a book with a local focus on an allegedly non-battleground state, featuring a cast of characters few readers outside the Sunflower State will recognize, and offering an analysis that should be read and considered by every progressive, left or working-class activist from Maine to San Diego, and from Seattle to the Florida Keys. With a political analysis that would do any of the classical Marxist writers proud, Frank examines the real reasons for the current right-wing domination of "middle America," using a firmly class-based approach that is grounded in considerable research and statistics as well as personal and anecdotal evidence. His use of humor and storytelling lightens up what could otherwise be a heavy sociological tome, yet the political punch of his writing almost never lets up throughout the book.

Frank’s point of origin in his analysis is the decline in the fortunes of both rural and urban working-class Kansans since the Reagan years, a situation echoed in nearly every state of the union but particularly acute in Kansas. Here, rural areas the size of several East Coast states are already economically dead and demographically dying thanks to what Frank calls "Reagan-Clinton era" agricultural policies. Numberless small towns like Emporia or Olathe are either well on the way to "ghost town" status, or else, like Garden City or Liberal, have been transformed into low-wage meat-processing centers, usually based on super-exploitation of low-skilled minority or foreign-born workers. Urban workers’ salaries in Wichita and Kansas City, Kansas head downwards as unions are broken, manufacturing leaves for greener pastures overseas, and well-paying industrial jobs are replaced (if at all) by service work or precarious temporary employment. Entire neighborhoods, communities and commercial districts across the state languish or lie abandoned and crumbling. The state budget is in full-blown crisis mode, with no plan for recovery except "to wait for an economic upturn." Rural and urban workers watch their material situation worsen day by day, community tax bases evaporate, and whole counties become open-air senior citizens’ centers as working families, the unemployed and recent graduates flee for their economic lives.

And, as Frank emphasizes in a constant drumbeat throughout his book, working-class Kansans have responded to this disaster by voting more and more strongly Republican each election, and by moving further and further to the right, with areas hit the hardest often turning into the hardest right wing bastions. In Frank’s analysis, white working-class Kansas has reacted to the crisis by standing up as one, besieging the bastions of power, screaming to their exploiters, "Please kick me again! And, while you’re at it, please vote yourself another tax cut at our expense!" The irony would be delicious if it were not so tragic.

This situation is certainly not unique. Progressives in the American South have confronted this dilemma for decades, if not a century or more. Throughout the Midwest and West, liberal, progressive and left activists find their states "written off" by Democrats and taken for granted by Republicans, while contenders for local and state office use candidate debates as little more than convenient platforms to vie for the title of "most conservative." In vast areas of this country’s heartland, anyone with a mildly progressive bumper sticker or tee shirt can sooner or later expect to hear the shouted or whispered taunt of "Liberal!" which has come to take the place of the "pinko commie" type epithets of decades past.

Marxists have long known and emphasized that class-consciousness and political awareness do not fall from the sky, and that simple economic, social or political adversity (or even gross oppression) may indeed radicalize, but do not a progressive movement make. This is the point made by Frank throughout the book, though his methodology is more observational than theoretical. He shows in graphic terms how in the effective absence of popular left or pro-working-class ideas and movements, the right wing has effectively harnessed public discontent in Kansas (and, by extension, throughout the American "heartland") for their own purposes, very much against the material interests of that same public.

However, Frank does not leave his analysis at the level of theoretical musings about the nature of "false consciousness." His book examines the specific nature of the deception that has been perpetrated upon working-class Americans of the "heartland," some of the implications that this entails for America, and (most importantly), the weaknesses and internal contradictions of the conservative movement which could lead to possible opportunities for rescuing the country from the grip of the Republican right wing.

According to Frank, the mythology proffered by the right wing is actually profoundly class-based. Kansans (like the rest of the nation) see the yawning gulf between rich and poor, between workers and the privileged growing every day. However, the ultra-right has managed to identify the true exploiting classes, the true villains responsible for the declining prospects of the working class as…the Hollywood elite! These, plus the despised "intellectuals" (bow-tied, overeducated cap-and-gowned idiots who fill our college kids’ minds with liberal nonsense), the "cultural elite" (news anchors, fashion designers, sitcom writers, eaters of sushi and drinkers of latte), and Democrats in general are "the Liberals," the real culprits behind the story of America’s decline.

Frank suggests that in order to make this conclusion at least minimally credible, the political right first needed to make economic and material questions vanish. This has been successfully accomplished, he writes, by convincing working people (without a murmur to the contrary from Clinton Democrats) that business cycles, the monopolization of agriculture, the decline of rural life, the flight of manufacturing overseas, the eclipse of labor unions and the ongoing impoverishment of the working class are simply forces of nature, no more subject to mere human control than are droughts, thunderstorms or Kansas tornadoes. And, once economic questions are off the table, the only logical reason one can propose as to why our lives are undeniably getting worse and worse must be because all those rich, famous, libertine film and music stars (the only ruling class one ever reads about in People magazine or the supermarket tabloids!) are imposing their evil, atheist culture on "decent Americans," with the eager connivance of the TV networks, stuck-up double-dome professors, and the nose-in-the-air Starbucks crowd, all of whom scorn ordinary workers and farmers as "hayseeds" and "hicks." Hence the "culture wars" and the continuing domination of the right wing over immense swaths of the Midwest, West and south.

Nor, according to Frank, is the contemporary right-wing movement primarily driven by racism. The conservative movement is, of course, an overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, and its leadership (the real ruling class in this country) is never reluctant to play the race card when required. But, Frank contends that at least as far as the Midwest is concerned, the day is gone when Republican-majority states could be dismissed as hotbeds of racism to be left to stew in their own vicious odium. The ultra-right ideology has achieved a life of its own, he warns, independent of the old racist code words and dreams of resegregation that once sustained it.

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Frank goes out of his way to point out that "culture war" critiques are not alien to the Left either, as evidenced by Stalin-era American Marxist polemics against "cosmopolitan" ruling class manners and morals. According to this theory, contemporary Bush-bashing efforts such as the book The Bush Dyslexicon, far from convincing the unconvinced that the nation’s current leader is an incompetent fool, serve mainly to "preach to the choir" (convince the already convinced) and to further infuriate and alienate those who see Bush as "one of ours."

Although What’s the Matter with Kansas, though not explicitly Marxist, is at least Marxist-friendly, the book does have some significant shortcomings. Probably the most notable is the virtual absence of any mention of African Americans or Latinos in the book. Kansas in the twenty-first century fully reflects the diversity of the American population, but one might get the impression from the book that Kansas is as lily-white as Denmark. Of course, in America, ultra-rightism is mainly a white problem, but ignoring the crucial past, present and future role of minorities in overcoming that problem is a serious error.

Frank goes to great lengths to explore the connection between white evangelical religious movements, the so-called "pro-life" movement, and the dominance of the extreme right in Kansas politics. He links the rise of the ultra-right in Kansas directly to Wichita’s militant anti-abortion protests during the summer of 1993, when white evangelicals heeded a "call to arms" to "save the unborn," and discovered for the first time the world-shaking power of mass political action. However, the author carefully avoids any examination of the contradictory role of the Catholic Church in the pro-life movement and its possible complicity in the rise of the ultra-right, preferring to spend pages telling the story of a bizarre Kansan who got together with five of his buddies and had himself elected Pope! Frank addresses the schismatic ultra-conservative Society of St. Pius X, but he spares not a word for either the right-wing Catholic bishops and priests who push the "pro-life" movement (and, necessarily, its associated ultra-right agenda), or the relatively progressive Catholic leaders (such as those of the Diocese of Dodge City) who have firmly spoken out in recent years for the rights of farmworkers, minorities and family farmers, and against war and racism, and even against pro-life extremists..

Although What’s the Matter With Kansas? was published in 2004, it seems to have been penned before the events of September 11, 2001. "Nine-eleven" receives only three brief mentions in the book, and Iraq none at all, even though these issues have evolved over the last few years into some of the main points of the right-wing agenda. Also, a large part of the book deals with recent and contemporary Kansas political figures who will be of interest only to those who are very well informed about Sunflower State politics and government. This same factor will also give the book a rather short "shelf life," since it is unlikely that any of the figures mentioned will be of interest a decade from now to anyone but specialized scholars.

If one is not from a rural background, dislikes drawl or country music, or does not regard latte as the devil’s own brew, it is easy to succumb to the temptation to make fun of such a belief system as Frank describes or even to doubt the sanity, intellectual capacity or good faith of those who hold it. However, Frank repeatedly reminds readers that those who uphold such beliefs (the citizens who vote in election after election to put overwhelmingly distressed states like Kansas into the Republican column) are, in their great majority, solid working-class people who in some aspects may well be more class-conscious than the average American worker, and who (within the limits of the "facts" dished out to them) think they are voting in their own best interests. The task at hand would seem to be not so much to "defeat" them (though the Bush administration and the ultra-right must certainly be defeated at the ballot-box!) but to reach these fellow workers and convince them that their gut-level suspicions of being exploited and oppressed are absolutely on the money—only the identity of their exploiters is different from what they have been told.

But agitation and persuasion are difficult tasks and it is always tempting to return to the old comfortable pitfalls of the Left and liberalism, including (to paraphrase a favorite saying of former CPUSA Chair Gus Hall) waiting for ready-made leftists to walk in and recruit themselves into the movement. Hardships like those now being inflicted on Kansas’ working class almost always produce discontent and anger, but not necessarily progressive thought or action. As clearly shown by contemporary history, discontent and anger can go right as easily as left, and the right wing aims to make sure they go rightward. For the Left, waiting patiently for demographics (the growth of minorities into majorities, the passing of generations) to eventually hand us the victory, or dismissing right-wing triumphs as the products of lingering racism are also tactics of little value. And, it seems equally crucial to avoid a leftist "silent majority" analysis, where (without serious objective evidence) one simply shrugs off right-wing electoral victories with blithe comments about how only a small minority of the total electorate voted Republican, while the disaffected progressive majority must have stayed home out of sheer disgust.

Frank’s analysis of the right wing’s takeover of "heartland" politics suggests that this disastrous trend was not due to chance or luck, but must be blamed on specific, tangible weaknesses on the left as much as on right-wing deceptions that are crying out to be unmasked. It would seem to be our task to unmask these deceptions, and this is why Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? should be required reading for every American progressive.

What's the Matter With Kansas?
By Thomas Frank
New York, Henry Holt & Co., 2004

--Owen Williamson is a contributor to Political Affairs.

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