Wish You Hadn't, Tom Frank

Sometimes really smart people do awfully dumb things. Twenty years ago, a really smart guy, journalist and historian Thomas Frank, wrote a bestselling book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? We’d be better off if he hadn’t.

The book was full of data and insight and wit, however misguided. It made the case that Republicans were forging a “dominant political coalition” by capitalizing on “class animus” and “cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion” to peel white working-class voters away from the Democrats. Putting Johnson County, Kansas under his microscope led him to conclude that “culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concern” among working-class white voters.

That wasn’t true then and it’s not true now. Many rural communities used to vote for Democrats but stopped, even though they’re becoming less socially conservative with each passing generation (for evidence of that, look no further than voters in “red states” passing referendums protecting abortion rights among other…