What's the Matter with Kansas?

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Some of you may have heard of this book by Thomas Frank, which details how the red states, by voting Republican, actually vote against their own interests (e.g., they vote against tax hikes, but they receive a net influx of tax benefits, and the resulting deficits and interests harm them more than the upper classes). I like this passage:

"Like a French Revolution in reverse---one in which the sans-culottes pour down the streets demanding more power for the aristocracy---the backlash [against perceived liberalist elitism] pushes the spectrum of the acceptable to the right, to the right, farther to the right. It may never bring prayer back to the schools, but it has rescued all manner of right-wing economic nostrums from history's dustbin. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson's estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt's antitrust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century."
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