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

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " Back in the eighties, the journalist Richard Rhodes nailed the place with just two words: Cupcake Land. To the irritation of local leaders, the nickname has stuck. Cupcake Land is a metropolis built entirely according to the developer's plan, without the interference of angry proles or ethnic pols as in nearby Kansas City. Cupcake Land encourages no culture but that which increases property values; supports no learning but that which burnishes the brand; hears no opinions but those that will further fatten the cupcake elite; tolerates no rebellion but that expressed in haircuts and piercings and alternative rock. You know what it's like even though you haven't been there. Smooth jazz. Hallmark cards. Applebees. Corporate Woods. (49) "

― Thomas Frank , What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

6 " In destroying its own agency, as well as in many other ways, the backlash is a precise mirror image of the pseudo-leftist academic discipline known as cultural studies. According to this theoretical tendency, the most banal and routine culture-products are intensely political and subversive; the left is constantly but silently winning the war over everyday life; and even the lowliest of consumers are endowed with massive quantities of agency, with a stupendous power to exert their radical will in the world. For the backlash, on the other hand, nobody has agency except for people on the left. We, the Middle Americans, are utterly powerless to change our culture -- to ban abortion or outlaw sodomy or build Ten Commandments monuments -- or to prevent the left from wrecking daily life. And yes, the backlash agrees, everything is politicized -- the way you mow your lawn, the color you paint your house, whether or not you ride a bicycle -- but politicized negatively. Everything offends; everything is calculated to advance liberalism's plot to make the culture more to its liking. Backlashers are, in fact, just about the only people in the world who would agree with the professors who find all sorts of subversiveness in Madonna and Britney and Christina Aguilera. A final, telling commonality: neither movement bothers seriously to consider the role of business in American life of culture. "

― Thomas Frank , What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

7 " 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

8 " ...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

9 " 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

10 " If basic economic issues are removed from the table, Gietzen has written, only the social issues remain to distinguish the parties. And in such a climate, Democratic appeals to people of ordinary means can be easily neutralized. “Years ago, it was assumed that the Republican Party was ’the party of the rich,’ and that the Democrats stood for working people,” Gietzen writes. Not anymore! "

― Thomas Frank , What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

11 " Conservatives have been forced into this position partially by their own success. Clinton is out of the picture, as are labor unions and other troublesome grassroots movements. Right-wingers can hardly blame things on Communists anymore. Business is back in the saddle, taxes are falling, regulations are crumbling, and the very wealthy are enjoying the best years for being very wealthy since the twenties. But the right can’t simply declare victory and get out. It must have a haughty and despicable adversary so that its battle on behalf of the humble and victimized can continue. And culture—that infinitely malleable malefactor, "

― Thomas Frank , What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

12 " The Great Backlash began with the coming together of two very different political factions: traditional business Republicans like the Kansas Mods, with their faith in the free market; and working-class “Middle Americans” like the Kansas Cons, who signed on to preserve family values. "

― Thomas Frank , What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

13 " When [Glickman] voted for NAFTA, I couldn’t any longer vote for him. I know a lot of union members were really mad at Glickman when he voted for NAFTA.” With Democrats and Republicans having merged on free trade, the issues that remained were abortion and guns. And, of course, government itself. "

― Thomas Frank , What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

14 " But for the latter group, the aggrieved “Middle Americans,” the experience has been a bummer all around. All they have to show for their Republican loyalty are lower wages, more dangerous jobs, dirtier air, a new overlord class that comports itself like King Farouk—and, of course, a crap culture whose moral free fall continues without significant interference from the grandstanding Christers whom they send triumphantly back to Washington every couple of years. "

― Thomas Frank , What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

15 " The angry men that I knew personally were not aggrieved blue-collar folks, by any means. They were all fairly successful people, self-made men who had done quite well in their fields of accounting or construction or sales—the sort of folks who are supposed to regard American life with a certain satisfaction, not infinite bitterness. And yet something had gone so wildly wrong for them in the sixties—and had stayed so steadfastly wrong ever since—that life had permanently lost its luster. "

― Thomas Frank , What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

16 " 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.13 "

― Thomas Frank , What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

17 " To be a populist conservative is to be a fatalist; to believe in a world where your side will never win; indeed, where your side almost by definition cannot win. Where even the most shattering electoral victories turn out to be hollow, and the liberal stranglehold on life can never be broken.12 "

― Thomas Frank , What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

18 " How can you reconcile the two clashing halves of the conservative mind? By believing in bias, that’s how. Alone among the many, many businesses of the world, the backlash thinkers insist, the culture industry does not respond to market forces. It does the ugly things that it does because it is honeycombed with robotic, alien liberals, trying to drip their corrosive liberalism into our ears. Liberal bias exists because it must exist in order for the rest of contemporary conservatism to be true. As in Saint Anselm’s proof of the existence of God, which flummoxed generations of our ancestors, it simply cannot be any other way. Bias has to be; therefore it is. "

― Thomas Frank , What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

19 " But backlash readers don’t mind; theirs is an intensely personal politics, concerned far more with the frustrations and indignities of everyday life than with scholarly rigor or objective material interests. Backlash thinkers understand this, and they have developed an elaborate theoretical system for generating the politicized anger that is so much in evidence these days and for diverting this resentment from its natural course. By separating class from economics, they have built a Republican-friendly alternative for the disgruntled blue-collar American. "

― Thomas Frank , What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

20 " A while back the Wall Street Journal ran an essay about a place “where hatred trumps bread,” where a manipulative ruling class has for decades exploited an impoverished people while simultaneously fostering in them a culture of victimization that steers this people’s fury back persistently toward a shadowy, cosmopolitan Other. In this tragic land unassuageable cultural grievances are elevated inexplicably over solid material ones, and basic economic self-interest is eclipsed by juicy myths of national authenticity and righteousness wronged. "

― Thomas Frank , What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America