In plains sight: what liberals get wrong about Midwestern conservatives.

• Author: Bjerga, Alan
• Position: Book Review

To most outsiders, especially those who lean left, Kansas might seem like an odd place. In recent years, you may have come across stories about the town of Geuda Springs, Kan., which last year passed an ordinance requiring its 210 residents to own a firearm. Or about Republican state senator Kay O'Connor, who a couple of years ago told members of a local League of Women Voters chapter that granting women the right to vote had fostered moral decline. Perhaps most famously, the state Board of Education ruled in 1999 that teaching evolution would be optional in Kansas schools.

But according to Thomas Frank, if you want to know where America's political culture is heading, look closely at the Sunflower State. Frank, editor of the political and literary journal The Baffler and author of One Market, Under God, grew up in Kansas, though he now lives in Washington, D.C. In his new book, What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank returns to his roots and finds "implacable bitterness" in the land of Toto and tornadoes. Kansas is among the reddest red states we've been hearing about since the 2000 elections, and Dank wonders why--as Wichita's aircraft manufacturers bleed jobs and western Kansas farms struggle to compete in the global market--the state's voters turn increasingly to the party, of George W. Bush for answers.

A century ago, the Great Plains spawned the Populist Party, "Appeal to Reason," a famous socialist newspaper printed in Kansas, and William Jennings Bryan. Big, as Frank tells it, beginning with the cultural backlash of the 1960s, conservative leaders learned to appropriate traditional populist language (people v. the powerful) and to transfer heartland voters' outrage over economic disparities to moral and cultural anti-elitism. This let the party of big business recast itself as friend of the little guy, with the educated "elite" classes as the new enemies of God and goodness. That would be fine, Frank argues, if the GOP has proven a good friend to the little guy. In Kansas, he contends, that's far from the case. Wichita, the state's largest city, is reeling from outsourced jobs and layoffs that could be stemmed, Frank believes, were it not for the slavish acceptance of GOP-backed free trade policies. Meanwhile, rural areas wither without farm support, and the few small towns that do thrive do so as low-tax, low-regulation corporate fiefdoms. Yet, Kansans routinely return to office Republicans...