Starting with the Carter administration this is a look at how the Democratic party pulled away from its working class base and turned toward the people with money. It gives a history of the change and the affect it had on the middle class and politics up through today. I got mad as I read it and h...
good book great tips I want more !
It was an interesting book about how the Right used the traditional populist rhetoric of the Left to get people energized and turn their anger toward things like stopping health care reform rather than focusing on the bailouts. But as with What's the Matter with Kansas, I found myself wishing that F...
I'd give it 3.5 stars if I could, but I'll round down. The author makes some very interesting points about how poor conservatives who traditionally would have been democrats have taken up the battle cry of the republicans to the tune of an anti-abortion culture war despite the fact that their econo...
Three and a half stars.Frank makes some good points, but I wish it were a little bit more well-documented and a bit less sardonic.I've not yet read [b:What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America|54666|What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of A...
Books of political outrage have a short shelf life because whatever outrage the author is enraged about is quickly eclipsed by the next outrage. Thomas Frank was outraged by the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004. What saves this book from being another here-and-gone current events polemic is t...
I don't often read current-affairs books, even when I already know I'll agree with them, because what I see in the daily headlines makes me mad enough. I picked up this one because an article in our local paper pointed out that Thomas Frank wrote much of it in the very Port Townsend Public Library w...
Outrage apparently doesn't lead to reason. At least according to this author there was no reasoned response to the outrage that followed the 2008 economic meltdown. This book reviews the political reactions to the sub-prime mortgage crisis from a liberal's point of view and finds plenty to critici...
I know, this was published in 2004, so why am I only getting to it now? Well...I am getting to it...The basic question behind What’s the Matter with Kansas, that frames the introduction, is this liberal astonishment: how can anyone who’s ever worked for someone else vote Republican? But the proble...
Frank looks at Kansas as a prime example of how the Republican Party has convinced working people to vote against their own economic self-interest by using so-called wedge issues. It is compelling analysis.
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