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With a New Afterword by the Author The New York Timesbestseller, praised as "hilariously funny . . . the only way to understand why so many Americans have decided to vote against their own economic and political interests" (Molly Ivins) Hailed as "dazzlingly insightful and wonderfully sardonic" (Chicago Tribune), "very funny and very painful" (San Francisco Chronicle), and "in a different league from most political books" (The New York Observer),What's the Matter with Kansas?unravels the great political mystery of our day: Why do so many Americans vote against their economic and social interests? With his acclaimed wit and acuity, Thomas Frank answers the riddle by examining his home state, Kansas-a place once famous for its radicalism that now ranks among the nation's most eager participants in the culture wars. Charting what he calls the "thirty-year backlash"-the popular revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment-Frank reveals how conservatism, once a marker of class privilege, became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans. A brilliant analysis-and funny to boot-What's the Matter with Kansas?is a vivid portrait of an upside-down world where blue-collar patriots recite the Pledge while they strangle their life chances; where small farmers cast their votes for a Wall Street order that will eventually push them off their land; and where a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs has managed to convince the country that it speaks on behalf of the People. Thomas Frank, the founding editor ofThe Baffler, is the author ofOne Market Under GodandThe Conquest of Cool. He writes frequently forHarper's Magazine,The Nation, andLe Monde diplomatique. Winner of the Midwest Booksellers' Choice Award A veteran author and journalist, and a native Kansan and former conservative, Thomas Frank here explores such fundamental American riddles as: Why do so many Americans vote against their economic and social interests? Where's the outrage over all the recent corporate thievery? Why do illusionary slights to the Ten Commandments trouble some people more than do the prospects of falling wages, or monopoly power, or the destruction of their very way of life? This timely, well-written, and widely acclaimed bookequal parts brilliant political analysis and wry, readable memoir, and already deemed by some a contemporary classicfully investigates these questions by examining the conservative revolution in the author's home state over the last several decades. Kansas, which has lately drawn the astonished attention of the world for its unlikely skirmishes over abortion and homosexuality, is in step with much of mid-America, Frank explains, in that its economic losers are even more committed to the Republican agenda than are its winners. Indeed, the Sunflower State's low-wage slaughterhouse workers and struggling farm-town citizens today far outdo its real-estate millionaires and prosperous telecom executives in their dedication to a political program that can only wind up harming them. How, and why, did this happenin Kansas and elsewhere throughout the United States? What's the Matter with Kansas?is a vivid, refreshingly witty portrait of an upside-down country where blue-collar patriots recite the Pledge while they strangle their life chances; where farmers cast votes for an economic order that will eventually push them off the land; and where a group of right-wing frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs has managed to convince the world that it speaks on behalf of America's common people. Winner of the Midwest Booksellers' Choice Award "This fresh and engaging book stands out in the torrent of political screeds now pouring of

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Founding editor of The Baffler, Thomas Frank is the author of One Market Under God and The Conquest of Cool. He writes frequently for Harper's, The Nation, and Le Monde Diplomatique. He lives in Washington, D.C.

INTRODUCTION What's the Matter with America?

1

(12)

PART I Mysteries of the Great Plains

One The Two Nations

13

(15)

Two Deep in the Heart of Redness

28

(39)

Three God, Meet Mammon

67

(11)

Four Verns Then and Now

78

(11)

Five Con Men and Mod Squad

89

(24)

PART II The Fury Which Passeth All Understanding

Six Persecuted, Powerless, and Blind

113

(25)

Seven Russia Iran Disco Suck

138

(19)

Eight Happy Captives

157

(22)

Nine Kansas Bleeds for Your Sins

179

(12)

Ten Inherit the Whirlwind

191

(24)

Eleven Antipopes Among Us

215

(10)

Twelve Performing Indignation

225

(12)

EPILOGUE In the Garden of the World

237

(16)

AFTERWORD Culture War Armageddon

253

(12)

NOTES

265

(46)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

311

(2)

INDEX

313

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Introduction

What's the Matter with America?

The poorest county in America isn't in Appalachia or the Deep South. It is on the Great Plains, a region of struggling ranchers and dying farm towns, and in the election of 2000 the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush, carried it by a majority of greater than 80 percent.1

This puzzled me when I first read about it, as it puzzles many of the people I know. For us it is the Democrats that are the party of workers, of the poor, of the weak and the victimized. Understanding this, we think, is basic; it is part of the ABCs of adulthood. When I told a friend of mine about that impoverished High Plains county so enamored of President Bush, she was perplexed. "How can anyone who has ever worked for someone else vote Republican?" she asked. How could so many people get it so wrong?

Her question is apt; it is, in many ways, the preeminent question of our times. People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about. This species of derangement is the bedrock of our civic order; it is the foundation on which all else rests. This derangement has put the Republicans in charge of all three branches of government; it has elected presidents, senators, governors; it shifts the Democrats to the right and then impeaches Bill Clinton just for fun.

If you earn over $300,000 a year, you owe a great deal to this derangement. Raise a glass sometime to those indigent High Plains Republicans as you contemplate your good fortune: It is thanks to their self-denying votes that you are no longer burdened by the estate tax, or troublesome labor unions, or meddling banking regulators. Thanks to the allegiance of these sons and daughters of toil, you have escaped what your affluent forebears used to call "confiscatory" income tax levels. It is thanks to them that you were able to buy two Rolexes this year instead of one and get that Segway with the special gold trim.

Or perhaps you are one of those many, many millions of average-income Americans who see nothing deranged about this at all. For you this picture of hard-times conservatism makes perfect sense, and it is the opposite phenomenon—working-class people who insist on voting for liberals—that strikes you as an indecipherable puzzlement. Maybe you see it the way the bumper sticker I spotted at a Kansas City gun show puts it: "A working person thatsupportsDemocrats is like a chicken thatsupportsCol. Sanders!"

Maybe you were one of those who stood up for America way back in 1968, sick of hearing those rich kids in beads bad-mouth the country every night on TV. Maybe you knew exactly what Richard Nixon meant when he talked about the "silent majority," the people whose hard work was rewarded with constant insults from the network news, the Hollywood movies, and the know-it-all college professors, none of them interested in anything you had to say. Or maybe it was the liberal judges who got you mad as hell, casually rewriting the laws of your state according to some daft idea they had picked up at a cocktail party, or ordering your town to shoulder some billion-dollar desegregation scheme that they had dreamed up on their own, or turning criminals loose to prey on the hardworking and the industrious. Or perhaps it was the drive for gun control, which was obviously directed toward the same end of disarming and ultimately disempowering people like you.

Maybe Ronald Reagan pulled you into the conservative swirl, the way he talked about that sunshiny, Glenn Miller America you remembered from the time before the world went to hell. Or maybe Rush Limbaugh won you over, with his daily beatdown of the arrogant and the self-important. Or maybe you were pushed; maybe Bill Clinton made a Republican out of you with his patently phony "compassion" and his obvious contempt for average, non-Ivy Americans, the ones he had the nerve to order into combat even though he himself took the coward's way out when his turn came.

Nearly everyone has a conversion story they can tell: how their dad had been a union steelworker and a stalwart Democrat, but how all their brothers and sisters started voting Republican; or how their cousin gave up on Methodism and started going to the Pentecostal church out on the edge of town; or how they themselves just got so sick of being scolded for eating meat or for wearing clothes emblazoned with the State U's Indian mascot that one day Fox News started to seem "fair and balanced" to them after all.

Take the family of a friend of mine, a guy who came from one of those midwestern cities that sociologists used to descend upon periodically because it was supposed to be so "typical." It was a middling-sized industrial burg where they made machine tools, auto parts, and so forth. When Reagan took office in 1981, more than half the working population of the city was employed in factories, and most of them were union members. The ethos of the place was working-class, and the city was prosperous, tidy, and liberal, in the old sense of the word.

My friend's dad was a teacher in the local public schools, a loyal member of the teachers' union, and a more dedicated liberal than most: not only had he been a staunch supporter of George McGovern, but in the 1980 Democratic primary he had voted for Barbara Jordan, the black U.S. Representative from Texas. My friend, meanwhile, was in those days a high school Republican, a Reagan youth who fancied Adam Smith ties and savored the writing of William F. Buckley. The dad would listen to the son spout off about Milton Friedman and the godliness of free-market capitalism, and he would just shake his head.Someday, kid, you'll know what a jerk you are.