Currently Reading: What's the Matter With Kansas? by Thomas Frank.

"A fire-and-brimstone essay on false consciousness on the Great Plains. 'The poorest county in America . . . is on the Great Plains, a region of struggling ranchers and dying farm towns,' writes native Kansan and Baffler founding editor Frank, 'and in the election of 2000 the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush, carried it by a majority greater than 80 percent.' How, Frank wonders, can it be that such a polity -- honest toilers descended from free-soil, abolitionist progressives and prairie socialists -- could back such a man who showed little concern then and has showed little concern since for the plight of the working class? And how can it be that such a place would forget its origins as a hotbed of what the historian Walter Prescott Webb called 'persistent radicalism,' as the seedbed of Social Security and of agrarian reform, to side with the bosses, to back an ideology that promises the destruction of the liberal state's social-welfare safety net? Whatever the root causes, many of which seem to have something to do with fear and loathing of big-city types and ethnic minorities, Kansas voters -- and even the Vietnam vets among them -- seem to have picked up on the mantra that the 'snobs on the coasts' are the enemy, and that Bush ('a man so ham-handed in his invocations of the Lord that he occasionally slips into blasphemy') and company are friends and deliverers . . . Even so, he sees the tiniest ray of hope for modern progressives: after all, he notes, the one Kansas county that sports a NASCAR track went for Al Gore in 2000. A bracing, unabashedly partisan, and very smart work of red-state trendspotting." --Kirkus Reviews

While the book's focus is on Kansas it identifies a nation of working poor and middle class who have been fooled into voting against their own interests. Uninformed or misinformed Americans have allowed corporations to set the economic clock back to the nineteen-twenties and dismantle the safe guards that once helped create and protect their farms and jobs. I was not surprised by the hostility of impoverished Kansas towards intellectualism and reason but it is painful to see hatred manifested in their own folk art. Check out the misogynous and paranoid artwork of M. T. Liggett. His work decorates an area of Kansas that has 22% unemployment, but non of his welded anger is directed at the laissez-faire capitalism that is a root cause. Instead he choses to demonize Democrats as Nazis. How very original.
It is a compelling read, and I look forward to reading more of Thomas Frank.