What's the matter with America? Book

Thomas Frank makes a good deal of sense if one can listen long enough to hear his thesis. But he is his own worst enemy, providing story after statistic to describe Kansas voting for conservatives against their own best interests. His arguments are extreme and unsettling. You'd think Kansas was the most unholy place on earth with pollution, unemployment, and immigrant slave labor, but actually conservatives have only slowly been crushing the lifeblood out of the state. This last election voted 60%-40% for Trump.

20% is a lot of votes, but there are still reasonable people in the state. After all, Kathryn Sibelius, Obama's Secretary of Health and Human Services, was elected governor of Kansas in the year just before this book came out. I am reading this now because I was lately introduced to a YouTube clip of Frank talking about his new book Listen, Liberal. I had the same reaction to him in person as I did in print. This book could have been an excellent essay without all the pyrotechnics.

I note Frank said then "Ask a liberal pundit what ails the red states, what has induced them to work so strenuously against their own economic interests, to vote Republican...and he will probably tell you it's all because of racism.

There are undeniably a great number of places where this...[is] true, but Kansas is not one of them."Interesting. Where did that come from, more than halfway through his book-length argument, the first mention of race. Why raise it at all? I wonder what he would say now, knowing what we all do about Kansas and their not-race problem.