Saturday, July 30, 2005

What's the Matter with Kansas?

The liberal assault on Kansas has had a very contradictory offshoot- once the center of American Left- wing politics, Kansas has now become a 'red' state in the sense of being a Republican state. Thomas Frank in his book "What's The Matter With Kansas: How the Conservatives Won the Heart of America?" explains the dramatic, and worrying shift.

At the heart of Frank's exploration is a chilling paradox: Kansas is falling apart economically under the impact of corporate globalization. Agribusiness has largely destroyed small farms, outsourcing has eliminated thousands of industrial jobs and the gap between the rich on the one side and the middle class and poor on the other has widened nearly to a breaking point. Yet, the victims of such trends spawned largely by corporate greed have turned their radical anger not upon the perpetrators, but upon the "liberals" who, however vaguely defined, have virtually no role in Kansas ' trouble.

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