What’s The Matter With Thomas Frank’s Book?
The following was a short essay written as part of a mid-term exam for an Electoral Politics course at UC Davis (POL 162 under Benjamin Highton) I took last year, assessing the book What’s the Matter With Kansas? by Thomas Frank. The following is the essay in its entirety, save a few format corrections, and subsequent notation to flesh out the text. It was cranked out of an MU caffeine addled mind on a cold February afternoon.1.
Thomas Frank asks “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” or more specifically, why would many blue-collar Kansans willfully vote in a manner and associate with a political party (the GOP) whose platform and resultant policies he sees as antithetical to that demographics’ interests. He sees a change in recent decades to a more strident, dogmatic form of conservatism which he refers to as the backlash. The backlash ignores economics and focuses on cultural (or so-called wedge) issues to galvanize voters, who then would appear to self-sacrifice for issues that never actually get resolved (a condition that normally would help insure re-election losses, but instead appears to be working in reverse).
By the epilogue of the book he seems to voice a particular frustration at an electorate that punishes itself by voting Democratic (liberal) or moderate GOP candiates out of offices, replacing them with Christian conservative cultural privateers, who campaign on and leave the electorate with expectations of “big changes”. When those changes do not occur -because once in office there really is minimal attention given to such initiatives and more attention to economic interests- they repeat the process next election cycle in what Frank sees as a rather blind fashion.
Frank views this as a bit of brainwashing, although he never refers to it quite so blatantly. In his mind, much of the backlash movement and its belief system appears contrarian at best or bordering on illogical parody, providing examples such as a female office holder who questions the idea of women’s suffrage or the “authenticity” (a word bandied about as a delimiter of quality, detailed further in the next paragraph) of “latte liberals” by conservatives who themselves most likely are in the same class, professional, educational and taste brackets of their adversaries.
These working class voters identify this way because, according to Frank, the backlash movement has mastered a form of identity politics that allows them to unite various subgroups into one large block of self-styled martyrs/victims of liberalism,to the point where they vote against their own self-interest economically (chapter four opens with a quote from Vern Parrington encapsulating this and also showing that this maybe is not the newest phenomenon either).2. The tendency is something that has been observed for some time across the nation, but to Frank, it takes on a particularly aberrant tone with his subjects.
I am personally not sure how much of the arguments proposed by Frank I support, since much of it appears as anecdotal evidence, and highly personalized for maximum emotional impact, but not very compelling in the veracity or validity of its presentation.3. I find it disingenuous to save any real critique of the opposition (most critically the Democratic party) until almost the very end of the book, as if their involvement in their lack of success is purely an externality, and not integral to the situation at hand. I also find he could have provided a better argument (or at least given a less blatantly biased one) by building a more complete, credible scenario of what forces are at work and how they interact; more research and documentation of sources, less introspective editorialization.
I do find it quite possible that voters can be fooled into voting agains their interests 4., and his witing in that regard could be seen as persuasive (if only to his target audience, which in my opinion would be the group heretofore known as the choir), which like the groups he castigates, would appear to enjoy keeping the cognitive load low, and simply reinforce the views they already have. This is the kind of book that grows popular when the party the writer is focusing on is in power, and gievn a change in administration will likely be forgotten or mentioned in dated tones. It is not however, a serious work, and lacks both the satire or analytical rigor to make it either entertaining or otherwise useful.
1. This is not so much an excuse for the essay (which received a 28 points out of a possible 30), but that it is the kind of essay written under a time constraint and without the benefit of the text on hand, so it is based on memory and coffee load alone.
2. The quote opens Chapter Four, Verns Then and Now, in reference to farmer issues of the 1890s, and the rises of populism and class-based conflict in the midwest:
It was his own fault of course…Due to his own political slackness the farmer had allowed himself to become the common drudge of society….While capitalism had been perfecting its machinery of exploitation he had remained indifferent to the fact that he himself was the fattest goose that capitalism was about to pluck. he had helped indeed to provide the rope for his won hanging. he had voted away the public domain to railways that were now fleecing him; he took pride in the country-seat towns that lived off his earnings; he sent city lawyers to represent him in legislatures and in Congress; he read middle-class newsapers and listened to bankers and politicans and cast his votes for the policy of Whiggery that could have no other outcome than his own despoiling.
The preceding is from Parrington’s three volume Main Currents in American Thought, of which the entire contents are available free online here. His was a very Jeffersonian perspective by and large.
3. By validity I refer to the research design aspects of internal and external validity. Or even at a qualitative level, he lacks any real thoroughness that I would expect of a case study or analysis. Realizing that the case can often be a dry read, but given the subject, a intelligent writer should be able to go on at length with more complete information.
4. At its most broad, every election campaign is predicated on one candidate selling his or herself as presiding over the true best interests of the voters, and the opposition being a dishonest broker trying to sell the voters a false bill of goods, so the premise Frank presents is far from novel.
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