What's the Matter with Kansas?

"Kansas is ready to lead us singing into the apocalypse. It invites us all to join in, to lay down our lives so that others might cash out at the top; to renounce forever our middle-American prosperity in pursuit of a crimson fantasy of middle-American righteousness."
Thomas Frank

I just finished reading What's the Matter with Kansas? and from the start thought that I was reading a pseudo-Marxist critique of American politics. By the end of the book, I was sure that was what I had read.


The premise of Frank's book is that somehow, Americans all over the country, in particular his native Kansas, have forsaken their economic self-interest to elect and reelect polticians who could give a shit about them. How?

Conservative Republicans have been waging an unwinnable war, a battle against abortion, against gay marriage, against evolution, against Godless, latte drinking, Volvo driving liberals. It is a war they can't win and they know this. But the point of this struggle is not to win, ever, but to raise the bloody shirt of abortion to drive voters to the polls election after election. And while they continue to fight, supposedly, against the steady destruction of American morality, they're going to push a pro-business agenda in the meantime. Tax cuts, corporate welfare, subsidies to big business, benefit cuts to the working class. The only moral compass the Republicans know is that provided by the market. So while you elect someone to bring prayer back to the schools, what you get is an energy bill packed with billions of dollars of subsidies to oil and gas industries that are already reaping tremendous profits.

This is not to give all the credit to the Republicans for this brilliant bait and switch. The Democrats have gone along with the scam, willing to believe that the market knows best and saying so. The fundamental problem is that the topic of economics has disappeared from American political discourse. What we have in this country are two pro-business, free-market, capitalist parties, one that believes two men should be able to get married, one that doesn't, but both that have forgotten American working class economic interests. And presented with the choice between the two, the party that is more closely aligned with a voter's morality gets the lever pulled in November.

The party that best represents the average American is no longer the Democrats, fighting for higher wages and better benefits, but the Republicans, fighting to stem the tide of moral erosion. The Republicans, and their Democratic co-conspirators, have managed to separate class from economics. The lower class in America today is not defined by poverty as has historically been the case. The downtrodden in America today are the working class red-staters who like to drink beer instead of nutty Cabernet-Shiraz blends that leave a hint of smoke and plums on the pallet. The lower class is defined by their refusal to pay $40 for a hamburger and their backwards belief that 16 year-olds shouldn't engage in drug fueled sex orgies. And they are told they are lower class by a condescending, liberal controlled media and an avalanche of disparaging jokes that mock these backwoods hicks.

The fundmental flaw with this argument is that the media is not liberal. I repeat, THE MEDIA IS NOT LIBERAL! It is capitalist. The media is not out to push some liberal agenda, but to make a profit. Capitalism and the profit-motive drive American popular culture, not a shady, liberal cabal. But because economics have been removed from the public forum, its no longer the shady, backroom dealings of morally bankrupt business leaders conspiring against the average American, pushing America into an immoral abyss. Today it is the all-knowing, all-powerful liberal elite, behind the scenes everywhere, destroying America.