DO THEY MEAN A DIFFERENT KANSAS?:

Thomas Frank on the failure of liberalism (TomDispatch.com)

Oh Kansas fools! Poor Kansas fools!
The banker makes of you a tool.

These lines from a populist song of 1892 are the epigraph for Thomas Frank's new book, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. They are a small reminder that Kansas, Frank's "homeland," the state where he grew up, was once part of the great progressive heart of this country. Going home again, he observes a simple fact of the voting map: "The more working-class an area is, the more likely it is to be conservative." His observation: "This situation is the opposite of what it was thirty years ago. And it is the complete negation of the Kansas of one hundred years ago, when those in the hardest-hit areas were the most desperate -- and the most radical."

Strange, the hardly radical William McKinley carried Kansas in 1900 even running against the populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 20, 2004 7:09 AM