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

This dual formulation became congenital in the public's mind in particular due to the vivid representations of the results of the 2000 election, with its vast stretches of in reduce red denoting the republican states and its small coastal blue regions denoting the Democratic states. The electoral map led many another(prenominal) observers and commentators to draw the conclusion that there was "a baleful pagan cleavage, a looming crisis over identity and values" (14). heel argues that this electoral map, to many Republicans, represented the triumph of more than seventy years of planning: "the wide dream of conservatives ever since the thirties has been a working-class effect that for once takes their side of the issues [and] votes Republican" (14). The great working class expanses of the South and cracking 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 westward coast were Democratic.

vocal argues that this is a simp inclination of an orbitic 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 fulfilment that much of the Midwest regards "the welf atomic number 18 state as an noncitizen imposition...[this] has to s

This formulation, according to Frank, is absolutely false. He explores this falseness by taking a rhetorical saunter through Kansas, noting that "as long as America loves authenticity, my domicil state of Kansas is going to be symbolically preeminent" (28). In Frank's words, Kansas is "deepest Reagan country, the heart of the heartland, the roots of the grass, the reddest of red states" (28). This idea of Kansas being a stand-in for all that is great in America, Frank notes, is a longstanding trope over the past fifty years. However, Frank points out that "a century ago Kansas was not the land of normality but the freak state...a violent and a basal and maybe even a crazy place" (31).

It was the al-Qa'ida of John Brown, the murderous abolitionist, and Eugene Debbs, the famous Socialist. During the Progressive era, it was in Kansas that the root leftists always came out on top. Today, Frank declares, "the two myths are one. Kansas may be the land of averageness, but it is a freaky, militant, revolt averageness" (34). He runs through an impressive list of oddities that chip in occurred recently in Kansas, highlighting his assertion that Kansas may rattling well be average, but that average really depends on the eye of the beholder.

Frank, Thomas. What's the Matter with Kansas. Metropolitan Books. New York, NY. 2004.

This is the point in the book in which Frank begins to expound on his substitution thesis: that the Republican Party has consciously sought to turn attention from its ruinous economic policies by focusing on cultural wars. In Kansas, "the state's lawmakers combine this flamboyant public holiness with a political agenda that only makes the state's material problems worsened" (71). This juxtaposition of propounding a very public Christian worship while taking corporate interests at heart is something that Frank traces to every major political figure in the state. The state's Republican Party platform in 1998, Frank notes, proposed "a list of demand
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