What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America is Thomas Frank’s 2004 political book about how Kansas, once a hotbed of radical farmer-labor Populism, became a symbol of modern conservative “values” politics. Frank uses Kansas as a little weather station for America’s bigger political climate: if you can understand the storm over Kansas, you can understand much of the red-state/blue-state crackle of early 21st-century America. The book was published by Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt in 2004 and runs about 306 pages in its original edition.

Its central question is: Why do many working- and middle-class Americans support politicians whose economic policies often favor corporations, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, and weakened labor protections?

Frank’s answer: because conservatives successfully shifted political identity away from class economics and toward cultural resentment.

About Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank, born in 1965, is an American journalist, historian, political analyst, and cultural critic. He grew up in Kansas, which matters because this book is not written from a distant ivory tower. It is part reportage, part political history, part hometown autopsy. He is also known for co-founding the magazine The Baffler, a sharp anti-corporate, anti-consumer-culture journal that became influential in the 1990s. His other major books include The Conquest of Cool, Listen, Liberal, and The People, No. The Kansas book is probably his most famous because it gave liberals and left-populists a sticky phrase for a huge political puzzle. Macmillan describes him as examining Kansas, “a place once famous for its radicalism,” to explain the “thirty-year backlash” that turned conservatism into a mass creed among ordinary Americans.

Frank’s style is not dry academic porridge. He writes with sarcasm, historical sweep, local color, and a kind of Midwestern fury wearing a thrift-store suit. He can be funny, savage, sentimental, and over-the-top, sometimes on the same page.

The main argument

Frank argues that American conservatism pulled off a political magic trick.

The old class enemy, in Populist politics, was the banker, the railroad monopolist, the corporation, the boss, the money power. In modern conservative rhetoric, Frank says, the enemy became the “liberal elite”: professors, Hollywood, feminists, secularists, journalists, judges, bureaucrats, environmentalists, artists, and Democrats from the coasts.

So the working-class voter’s anger is still alive, but it gets redirected. Instead of asking, “Who destroyed my union?” or “Why did the town lose its factory?” the voter is encouraged to ask, “Who mocked my faith?” “Who insulted my values?” “Who thinks I’m backward?” “Who wants to take my guns?” “Who sneers at my town?”

That redirection is the book’s engine.

Frank argues that cultural issues such as abortion, guns, religion, sexuality, school prayer, evolution, patriotism, and media “decadence” became symbolic battlefields. Meanwhile, the economic agenda of the Republican Party remained pro-business and often harmful to the very voters mobilized by cultural grievance. A University of Nebraska review summarizes Frank’s thesis this way: conservatives made cultural issues central by removing economics from debate and redefining the elite not as capitalists, but as coastal liberals, media figures, bureaucrats, and educated professionals.

Kansas as the great political flip

Frank starts from a historical irony: Kansas was not always conservative in the way we now imagine.

In the late 19th century, Kansas was central to the Populist movement. Farmers fought railroad monopolies, banks, deflationary monetary policy, and the power of concentrated wealth. Kansas produced radicals, reformers, and anti-corporate firebrands. Frank wants readers to feel the weirdness of the transformation: the land of angry anti-monopoly farmers became a showcase for anti-liberal, pro-business conservatism. History News Network describes the book as explaining the transformation of Kansas from a center of left-wing Populism in the 1890s to a state shaped by conservative, pro-business, evangelical politics in the 1990s.

Frank’s Kansas is not just a state. It is a political parable wearing a seed-company cap.

The “backlash” machine

A key concept in the book is the backlash.

For Frank, backlash politics works like this:

1. Conservative leaders tell ordinary voters that America has been stolen from them by liberal elites.
2. They focus anger on symbolic cultural enemies.
3. They promise moral restoration.
4. Once elected, they mainly deliver economic policies that benefit corporations and the wealthy.
5. The cultural battles remain unresolved, so the anger renews itself.
6. The cycle repeats.

The trick is that cultural issues are often used in ways that are emotionally powerful but politically unsatisfying. For example, Republican politicians may campaign on abortion, religion, or Hollywood decadence, but the major policy victories often happen in tax law, labor law, deregulation, privatization, and corporate power.

Frank’s darker joke is: the voters get outrage, the donors get policy.

The New Yorker summarized this as Frank’s argument that economic class gets erased and replaced by authenticity, where cultural solidarity can cover over economic harm.

Two kinds of conservatives in the book

Frank distinguishes, roughly, between two conservative groups:

The Cons are the economic conservatives: business interests, lobbyists, anti-tax activists, deregulators, free-market ideologues, corporate donors.

The Cons’ voters are often culturally conservative working- or middle-class people who feel alienated by liberal culture and drawn to moral traditionalism.

Frank’s claim is not simply that voters are stupid. That is the cartoon version of the book, and it is too crude. His real claim is that voters are being offered a political identity that speaks to their dignity, anger, religion, region, and sense of insult, while economic liberalism has been abandoned or hidden by Democrats.

That last part matters. Frank does not only blame Republicans. He also blames Democrats.

Frank’s critique of Democrats

Frank argues that Democrats helped create the problem by moving away from New Deal-style economic populism.

He criticizes the “New Democrat” strategy associated with Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council: court affluent suburban moderates, become friendly to business, downplay labor, embrace technocratic centrism, and avoid class conflict. In Frank’s view, this left many working-class voters with no strong economic alternative. If both parties seem pro-corporate, then politics becomes a battlefield of identity and values.

So Frank’s argument is not:

Republicans fooled everyone.

It is closer to:

Republicans weaponized cultural resentment, while Democrats abandoned the economic language that once gave working people a reason to vote left.

That is the little goblin hinge of the book. The right wins culturally because the left stopped fighting economically.

The book’s structure and feel

The book mixes several modes:

Political history: Kansas Populism, the rise of modern conservatism, and the collapse of older class politics.

Local reportage: Frank visits Kansas communities, talks about conservative activists, churches, neighborhoods, suburbs, and symbolic places.

Cultural criticism: He analyzes how “authenticity” gets attached to conservatism, even when conservative policies are backed by wealthy interests.

Polemic: This is not a neutral textbook. It has a sharp point of view. It jabs, whistles, and throws elbows.

Frank especially focuses on places like Johnson County, Wichita, and Kansas City suburbs, where class, religion, suburban development, business politics, and cultural resentment braid together.

Key ideas to remember

1. “Values” can hide economics

Frank does not say values are fake. He says values can be politically exploited. When campaigns talk nonstop about morality, patriotism, religion, and authenticity, voters may stop asking who benefits materially from tax cuts, deregulation, weakened unions, or privatization.

2. The elite gets redefined

In older left-populism, the elite meant wealthy economic power: banks, trusts, monopolies, corporations.

In backlash conservatism, the elite becomes cultural: professors, artists, Hollywood, journalists, liberal judges, secular activists.

This is one of Frank’s most important insights. The target of anger moves from the boardroom to the faculty lounge.

3. Conservative politics offers emotional recognition

People who feel mocked or ignored by national culture may support politicians who appear to respect them, even when those politicians’ economic policies do not help them.

Respect is political fuel. Ignore it and the engine goes elsewhere.

4. Democrats lost the language of class

Frank believes Democrats weakened their own appeal by becoming too corporate, too cautious, too professional-managerial, and too eager to chase moderate affluent voters. This created an opening for Republicans to speak in a more emotionally charged language of belonging.

5. Kansas is America in miniature

The title is not really about Kansas alone. Kansas becomes Frank’s model for how working-class conservatism spread across the country.

Why the book mattered

When it came out in 2004, it helped explain the George W. Bush era, the rise of red-state/blue-state analysis, evangelical political power, rural and suburban resentment, and the sense among many liberals that voters were choosing identity over material interest.

The phrase “What’s the matter with Kansas?” became shorthand for a larger debate: Are working-class conservative voters voting against their own economic interests, or are liberals misunderstanding what those voters value?

That debate has only gotten louder since 2004, especially after the Tea Party, Donald Trump, populist nationalism, and the ongoing realignment of non-college white voters away from Democrats.

Major criticisms of the book

The most famous criticism came from political scientist Larry Bartels, whose paper “What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?” argued that Frank overstated or misread some voting patterns. Bartels found that white voters without college degrees had indeed become less Democratic, but he argued the details did not fully match Frank’s account of working-class voters being pulled right mainly by cultural wedge issues.

Common criticisms include:

Frank may overstate “false consciousness.” Critics say people do not simply vote their wallets. Religion, abortion, guns, community, patriotism, and identity may be genuine priorities, not distractions.

He focuses heavily on white working-class voters. The book is mostly about white Middle America, so it does not fully address race, immigration, or the broader multiethnic working class.

Economic interest is complicated. Some voters may believe conservative economic policies help them through small business, lower taxes, anti-regulation views, or distrust of government.

The tone can sound condescending. Even though Frank is from Kansas and writes with affection as well as anger, some readers feel the book treats conservative voters as duped.

Politics has changed since 2004. The Trump era made parts of Frank’s argument look prophetic, especially the fusion of resentment and anti-elite rhetoric. But it also complicated his argument, because Trump attacked free trade, corporate globalization, and establishment Republicans in ways that older pro-business conservatism did not.

What Frank got right

Frank was very sharp about the power of cultural resentment. He saw that politics was becoming less about policy papers and more about humiliation, belonging, symbolism, and identity. He also saw that Democrats were losing working-class voters not only because of Republican messaging, but because Democrats themselves had become too comfortable with corporate money and technocratic centrism.

That part still glows in the dark.

What he may have missed

Frank sometimes underplays how real cultural and religious commitments are for voters. A voter who opposes abortion because of religious conviction may not experience that as a “distraction” from economics. To them, it may be the central moral question. Likewise, guns, schools, patriotism, and religion are not just bait. They are part of people’s lived worlds.

He also does not fully account for race as a structuring force in American conservatism, though racial politics sits just under the floorboards of many issues he discusses.

The book’s lesson in one sentence

When economic politics disappears, cultural politics becomes the whole circus, and the people selling tickets may not be the ones sweeping up after the elephants. 🐘

Why it matters for your Pope of Love / belief-systems lens

This book is really about belief capture.

Frank is asking: how do people come to identify with a political story that may not materially serve them? How does a movement turn injury into loyalty? How does a party convert resentment into votes, votes into power, and power into policies that benefit a different class than the one chanting at the rally?

For a Pope of Love reading, the book is about the difference between solidarity and symbolic revenge.

Solidarity asks: “Who is hurting, and how do we help them?”

Symbolic revenge asks: “Who made us feel small, and how do we make them suffer?”

Frank’s warning is that a nation can become addicted to symbolic revenge while the factory closes, the hospital bills rise, the union hall empties, and the town square becomes a drive-thru of ghosts.