What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America Quotes

“For decades, Americans have experienced a populist uprising that only benefits the people it is supposed to be targeting.... The angry workers, mighty in their numbers, are marching irresistibly against the arrogant. They are shaking their fists at the sons of privilege. They are laughing at the dainty affectations of the Leawoof toffs. They are massing at the gates of Mission Hills, hoisting the black flag, and while the millionaires tremble in their mansions, they are bellowing out their terrifying demands. 'We are here,' they scream, 'to cut your taxes.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“...the people at the top know what they have to do to stay there, and in a pinch they can easily overlook the sweaty piety of the new Republican masses, the social conservatives who raise their voices in praise of Jesus but cast their votes for Caesar.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“There’s a reason you probably haven’t heard much about this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can’t be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn’t the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives’ beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its most unrestrained, has little use for smalltown merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place....”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“The backlash is a theory of how the political world works, but it also provides a ready-made identity in which the glamor of authenticity, combined with the narcissism of victimhood, is available to almost anyone.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“In 1991, though, began an uprising that would propel those reptilian Republicans from a tiny splinter group into the state’s dominant political faction, that would reduce Kansas Democrats to third-party status, and that would wreck what remained of the state’s progressive legacy. We are accustomed to thinking of the backlash as a phenomenon of the seventies (the busing riots, the tax revolt) or the eighties (the Reagan revolution); in Kansas the great move to the right was a story of the nineties, a story of the present.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“he saw in Populism the first glimmerings of some of the great intellectual upheavals of the twentieth century—naturalism, muckraking, and hard-hitting social satire—which would eventually topple the genteel tradition of the nineteenth century. In a peculiar way, Parrington seemed to think, Kansas was one of the birthplaces of literary modernism.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“We’re all free agents in this noncoercive class system, and Brooks eventually concludes that worrying about the problems faced by workers is yet another deluded affectation of the blue-state rich.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“Growing up here teaches the indelible lesson that wealth has some secret bond with crime—also with drug use, bullying, lying, adultery, and thundering, world-class megalomania.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“Blue-collar workers, meanwhile, were the ones who “didn’t get it,” fast-fading relics of an outmoded and all-too-material past. Certain celebrated capitalist thinkers even declared, at the height of the boom, that blue collars and white collars had swapped moral positions, with workers now the “parasites” freeloading on the Olympian labors of management.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“to cast the Democrats as the party of a wealthy, pampered, arrogant elite that lives as far as it can from real Americans;”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“American conservatism depends for its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making certain mental connections about the world, connections that where until recently treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet. For example, the connection between mass culture, most of which conservatives hate, and laissez-faire capitalism, which they adore without reservation. Or between the small towns they profess to love and the market forces that are slowly grinding those small towns back into red-state dust-which forces they praise in the most exalted terms.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate. Values may “matter most” to voters, but they always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won. (Page 6)”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“Leftist organizations are aggressively seeking to redefine America in their own Godless image,” wrote Jerry Falwell. “They hate the idea of Christmas with a deep abiding hate,” declared Pat Buchanan.16”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“Later on that same day, the reelected President Bush set out his legislative objectives for his second term. Making America a more moral country was not a priority. Instead, his goals were mainly economic: he would privatize Social Security once and for all and “reform” the federal tax code. “Another Winner Is Big Business,” declared a headline in the Wall Street Journal on November 4, as businessmen everywhere celebrated the election results as a thumbs-up on outsourcing and continued deregulation. The stock market soared nearly 8 percent in the year’s remaining weeks in giddy anticipation of the profitable things Republicans would do with their fresh political capital.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“Swearing off economic liberalism also prevented Democrats from capitalizing on the great, glaring contradiction of their rivals’ campaign, namely, the GOP’s tendency to demote “values” issues once elections are over.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“In his speech before the assembled delegates and the eyes of the world, the godly Kansan came off as a thoughtful, caring Republican who wanted only to heal the sick and halt religious persecution overseas; when he spoke at a private meeting of evangelical Christians, however, he took on the usual backlash tone of affronted middle-American victimhood, complaining to a roomful of Christian conservatives that “the press beats up on you like there’s something wrong with faith, family, and freedom” and exhorting them to “win this culture war.”2For the conservative rank and file, this election was the culture-war Armageddon, and they were battling for the Lord.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“The hallmark of backlash conservatism is that it approaches politics not as a defender of the existing order or as a genteel aristocrat but as an average working person offended by the arrogant impositions of the (liberal) upper class. The sensibility was perfectly summarized during the campaign by onetime Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who explained it to the New York Times like this: “Joe Six-Pack doesn’t understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn’t have a say in it.”1 These are powerful words, the sort of phrase that could once have been a slogan of the fighting, egalitarian left. Backlash conservatism, Bauer’s comment reminds us, deals in outrage, not satisfaction; it claims to speak for the voiceless, not the powerful. And in this election cycle it reached its fullest, angriest articulation. The”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“Labor unions are on the wane today, as everyone knows, down to 9 percent of the private-sector workforce from a high water mark of 38 percent in the fifties.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“While Republicans trick out their poisonous stereotype of the liberal elite, Democrats seem determined to live up to the libel.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far outweighing anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and—more important—the money of these coveted constituencies, “New Democrats” think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as “class warfare” and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for the working-class voters who were until recently the party’s very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what politician in this success-worshiping country really wants to be the voice of poor people? Where’s the soft money in that?”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“And this is the critical point: in a media world where what people shout overshadows what they actually do, the backlash sometimes appears to be the only dissenter out there, the only movement that has a place for the uncool and the funny-looking and the pious, for all the stock buffoons that our mainstream culture glories in lampooning. In this sense the backlash is becoming a perpetual alter-ego to the culture industry, a feature of American life as permanent and as strange as Hollywood itself. Even as it rejects the broader commercial culture, though, the backlash also mimics it. Conservatism provides its followers with a parallel universe, furnished with all the same attractive pseudospiritual goods as the mainstream: authenticity, rebellion, the nobility of victimhood, even individuality. But the most important similarity between backlash and mainstream commercial culture is that both refuse to think about capitalism critically. Indeed, conservative populism’s total erasure of the economic could only happen in a culture like ours where material politics have already been muted and where the economic has largely been replaced by those aforementioned pseudospiritual fulfillments. This is the basic lie of the backlash, the manipulative strategy that makes the whole senseless parade possible. In all of its rejecting and nay-saying, it resolutely refuses to consider that the assaults on its values, the insults, and the Hollywood sneers are all products of capitalism as surely as are McDonald’s hamburgers and Boeing 737s.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“Encouraging demographic self-recognition and self-expression through products is, similarly, the bread and butter not of leftist ideology but of consumerism. These things are part of the culture industry’s very DNA.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“Consider, for example, the stereotype of liberals that comes up so often in the backlash oeuvre: arrogant, rich, tasteful, fashionable, and all-powerful. In”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“Yes, the Cons will acknowledge, things have gotten materially worse on the farms and in the small towns, but that’s just business, they tell us. That is just the forces of nature doing their thing. Politics is something different: Politics is about blasphemous art and crazy lawsuits filed by out-of-control trial lawyers and smart-talking pop stars running down America. Politics is when the people in the small towns look around at what Wal-Mart and ConAgra have wrought and decide to enlist in the crusade against Charles Darwin.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“conservatism’s populist myth.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“still a blue-collar suburb, but after three decades of deunionization and stagnant wage growth, blue-collar suburbs like this one look and act very differently than before. Shawnee today burns hotter than nearly any place in the state to defund public education, to stamp out stem-cell research, to roll back taxes, and to abase itself before the throne of big business. The suburb is famous for having sent the most determined of the anti-evolutionists to the State Board of Education and for having chosen the most conservative of all Kansas state legislators,”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“The deafness of the conservative rank and file to the patent insincerity of their leaders is one of the true cultural marvels of the Great Backlash. It extends from the local level to the highest heights, from clear-eyed city council aspirant to George W. Bush, a man so ham-handed in his invocations of the Lord that he occasionally slips into blasphemy.5 Indeed, even as conservatives routinely mock Democrats for faking their religious sentiment, they themselves plainly feel so exempt from such criticism that they wander blithely in and out of the land of hypocrisy, never pausing to wonder if their followers might be paying attention.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“The Kansas conservatives, it seems to me, can be divided into two basic groups. On one side are the true believers, the average folks who have been driven into right-wing politics by what they see as the tyranny of the lawyers, the America-haters at Harvard, the professional politicians in Washington, or the eviction of God from public space. These kinds of Con will throw themselves under the wheels of an abortion doctor’s car; they will go door-to-door and spend their life savings for their causes; they will agitate, educate, and organize with a conviction that anyone who believes in democracy has to admire. On the other side are the opportunists: professional politicians and lawyers and Harvard men who have discovered in the great right-wing groundswell an easy shortcut to realizing their ambitions. Many of them once aspired to join—maybe even did join—the state’s moderate Republican insider club. Rising up that way, however, would take years, maybe a lifetime, when by mouthing some easily memorized God-talk and changing their position on abortion—as Brownback2 and other leading Cons have done—they could instantly have a movement at their back, complete with superdedicated campaign workers they wouldn’t have to pay and a national network of pundits and think tanks and talk-show hosts ready to plug them in. Kansas’s bright young Republicans know which way”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“The Cons know, even as they make these claims, that this is one silver bullet they will never be allowed to fire. The real object of their anti-evolution gambit, I believe, was not getting Kansans right with God but getting themselves reelected. As we have seen, conservatives grandstand eloquently on cultural issues but almost never achieve real-world results. What they’re after is cultural turmoil, which serves mainly to solidify their base. By deliberately courting the wrath of the educated world with the evolution issue, the Cons aimed, it seems, to reinforce and to sharpen their followers’ peculiar understanding of social class. In a word, it was an exercise in anti-intellectualism.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America