The fever swamps of Kansas: a leftist tries to make sense of grassroots conservatism.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America - Book Review

What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Thomas Frank, New York: Metropolitan Books, 306 pages, $24

A specter once haunted the Great Plains of America: the specter of populism. The agrarian radicals of the People's Party carried Kansas in the election of 1892--the national victor, Grover Cleveland, didn't even place--and throughout that decade the Kansas Populists elected governors, legislators, and judges; the laws they passed ranged from a ban on Pinkerton strikebreakers to a pay cut for county officials.

The state establishment regarded the newcomers with all the horror of a dowager discovering her daughter in bed with a hobo. In 1896, in an essay called "What's the Matter With Kansas?," the Emporia pundit William Allen White attacked the upstarts with withering sarcasm. "We have an old mossback Jacksonian who snorts and howls because there is a bathtub in the state house; we are running that old jay for Governor," he wrote. "We have another shabby, wild-eyed, rattle-brained fanatic who has said openly in a dozen speeches that 'the rights of the user are paramount to the rights of the owner'; we are running him for Chief Justice, so that capital will come tumbling over itself to get into the state. We have raked the old ash heap of failure in the state and found an old human hoop-skirt who has failed as a businessman, who has failed as an editor, who has failed as a preacher, and we are going to run him for Congressman-at-Large."

A century later, Kansas remains a hotbed of disreputable causes: It is headquarters for creationists, survivalists, militant anti-abortionists. But while the old populists, to the extent that they fit on the conventional spectrum, were a tribe of the radical left, their contemporary analogs are firmly rooted in the right. Like their 19th-century predecessors, they are a formidable force in state politics.

This puzzles Thomas Frank, a leftist pundit who has gradually moved from the world of self-published magazines to the op-ed page of The New York Times. His most recent book is What's the Matter with Kansas?, a jeremiad whose title is a deliberate, ironic echo of White's ancient rant. Across Middle America, but especially in the Sunflower State, Frank sees a "Great Backlash," a social-political trend that he doesn't define very precisely. Indeed, he never adequately answers the obvious question, "A backlash against what?" Frank says it began as a reaction to the ferment of the late '60s, but he also cites John Stormer's None Dare Call It Treason as "an early backlash text," even though it was published in 1964 and is much closer in spirit to the McCarthy movement of the '50s. (Of course, the McCarthyists themselves were a backlash of sorts.)

But it's not hard to see what Frank is getting at. Whatever precursors you might find in the McCarthy era and elsewhere, his Great Backlash begins with George Wallace's crusade against the "pointy-headed intellectuals" and Spiro Agnew's war on the "effete corps of impudent snobs." It encompasses the labor Democrats who supported Reagan in the '80s, and it now includes any Republican whose rhetoric evokes resentment of...