What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America made me feel dumb. Not dumb like some of you familiar with the premise of the book might be thinking. But for years and years I have been trying to articulate the theme of author Thomas Frank's impressively well-written call to arms; wealthy, cruel Republicans play off the fear and ignorance of the poor and uneducated in order to get themselves (the moneyed elite) lower taxes, deregulation, lax environmental regulations and increased corporate welfare. I've been too busy jacking off--or whatever the hell it is I do--to even spend a few hours trying to cess out a more well-formed and articulate argument. It all just makes me more and more aware of my morality and rapidly approaching demise, and my lack of a significant legacy. Luckily for us, instead of having to think about my pathetic existential crisis, you can purchase/check out Frank's Kansas book and learn for yourself just how fucked up America is.
Here's the basic premise of Frank's book: In Kansas (and really the rest of the country) religious conservatives have overtaken the Republican Party at the grassroots level. Having been abandoned by the Democratic Party during the sixties in favor of Rainbow Coalition, urban cultural politics, these rep-Cons (Frank's term for conservative, working-class, bible-loving former Democrats that now vote Republican) stewed in their own religious fervor--which apparently is especially feverous in Kansas and has been since the state's radical founding--until they became a massive Jesus-infused political force and began chucking rep-Mods (Moderate, socially liberal, old school Republicans) out of office. And here's the rub. The rep-Cons, for a variety of reasons, fully support the rep-Mods economic ideas (ideals), even though that way of thinking, economically speaking, is analogous to a slave supporting slavery................
