e conclusion that there was "a baleful cultural cleavage, a looming crisis over identity and values" (14). Frank argues that this electoral map, to many Republicans, represented the triumph of more than seventy years of planning: "the great dream of conservatives ever since the thirties has been a working-class movement that for once takes their side of the issues [and] votes Republican" (14). The great working class expanses of the South and Great Plains, for centuries bastions of the working class movement and the Democratic Party were now firmly in Republican hands, while the blue-blood enclaves of the east coast and the hedonist escapists of the west coast were Democratic.
Frank argues that this is a simplistic formulation. He concedes that the Great Plains region, a place that once gave America the Progressive movement and its culminating triumph of Social Security, has seen its character altered to such an extent that much of the Midwest regards "the welfare state as an alien imposition...[this] has to stand as one of the great reversals in American history" (15). He notes that this story of two Americas was of obvious appeal to the Republican Party, particularly because "the red-state narrative brought majoritarian legitimacy to a president who had actually lost the popular vote" (16). It also allowed Republicans to engage in what Frank calls the "latte-libel," or "the suggestion that liberals are identifiable by their tastes and consumer preferences and that these...reveal the essential arrogance and foreignness of liberalism" (16-17). Frank argues passionately that this form of stereotyping has been allowed to proliferate without any serious contestation in large part because it suits the media. It presents a ready-made narrative that is appealing to many, and places emphasis on the idea that authenticity, something most Americans feel they are experts on, is what divides America (with the red-staters being authen...