Michael Workman

For Thomas Frank, this time it's personal. "How is it that Kansas conservative rebels profess to hate elites but somehow excuse from their fury the corporate world, even when it has so manifestly screwed them?" he asks in a chapter titled "Persecuted, Powerless and Blind." His newest salvo in the culture wars grapples with the delusions that archconservative politics have held up as a carrot for the working class.

Frank's case study, of course, is Kansas City, Missouri and the "Cupcake Land" of corporatized conservative political landscape. In his analysis of his own hometown, classified in the marketing parlance as an "early adopter" of everything from free love to the ideals of the John Birch Society, Frank carefully tracks the progress of the "Great Backlash." It's a term that refers to a comeuppance finally wrought, paraphrasing Frank here, against the "gay-advocating, left-leaning East-coast liberals" that the right has plotted against in their cultural variants on class war. And it's been a successful conservative tactic, from Frank's account of things, for the goal of training those "red-staters" how to exempt from their sense of right and wrong the occasional to-the-hilt "screwing" delivered by corporate America.

His depictions of growing up in the Mission Hills neighborhood of Kansas City early in the book gnaw at an ugly truth. One wherein the "smaller-scale thieves, embezzlers, tax evaders, real estate frauds and check-forgers" who are most rich kids' dads are members at the country club that doubles as the county's polling place, "despite the fact that many people in the neighborhood would never be permitted to join." As with all of Frank's efforts, this book presents scathing, well-researched material delivered in confident, elemental prose. Unlike many of his past books, though, and in a turn for the better for his critical-polemical style, "What's the Matter With Kansas" often presents its case from the embodied point of view of its author.

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

By Thomas Frank

Metropolitan Books, $24, 320 pages

(2004-07-13)

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