Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?

In the book What's the Matter With Kansas? Thomas Frank sets out to answer a paradox: why the poorest county in America, which is located in the Great Plains "a region of struggling ranchers and dying farm towns," gave an overwhelming 80 percent of their votes for Republican candidate George W. Bush in the 2000 election (p. 1). How can economically depressed towns and counties vote for the Republican Party, which has a long and storied tradition of favoring the rich over the poor with their policies, rather than the Democratic Party which has historically supported the working class and the poor? Or, to put it more simply, "How could so many people get it so wrong?" (p. 1). According to Frank, the answer is that they have been manipulated by the Republican Party, whipped into an indignant moral frenzy in order to get them to vote against their economic interests. Frank's book presents a passionate analysis of his home state, but at times it veers into the very same marshy rhetorical grounds that he accuses the Republicans of living in. This paper will present Frank's central arguments and conclude with an analysis of his main points. What we will find is that Frank's book, while flawed, does put its finger on the root causes of the red state blue state divide.

Frank begins the book by exploring the Republican notion that there are two separate Americas. On the one side are "the unpretentious millions of authentic Americans; on the other stand the bookish all-powe

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there" (45). Indeed, the "fortunes of Mission Hills rise and fall in inverse relation to the fortunes of ordinary people" (45). When labor is expensive, taxes on the rich are high, and income inequality is lessened the houses built in this enclave are smaller, servants are rare, and people mow their own gardens. When labor is cheap, taxes are down, and workers are weak, Mission Hills becomes a boomtown. Today, in the middle of the boom, Mission Hills and its brethren are home to all the latte-libel accoutrements: Dean & Deluca gourmet grocery stores, Starbucks coffee shops, and luxury restaurants situated in shopping malls. These wealthy suburbs, according to Frank, are one of only two parts of Kansas that benefited from the boom of the late 1990s. The other beneficiaries have been the agricultural conglomerates that have dominated Garden City, producing up to 20 percent of the beef that the entire nation consumes. Frank paints a grim picture of the way these meatpacking companies have relentlessly driven down the wages of their workers, namely by mechanizing their operations from beginning to end. The end result of this is that instead of providing jobs for Kansans, these conglomerates "bring the workers here, employing

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