He says, delusionally, that conservatives have "smashed the welfare state." Actually, it was waxing even before George W. Bush's prescription drug entitlement. He says, falsely, that the inheritance tax has been "abolished." He includes the required -- by the left's current catechism -- blame of Wal-Mart for destroying the sweetness of Main Street shopping. "Capitalism" is his succinct, if uninformative, explanation of a worldwide phenomenon of the past century -- the declining portion of people in agricultural employment -- which he seems to regret.
If you believe, as Frank does, that opposing abortion is inexplicably silly, and if you make no more attempt than Frank does to empathize with people who care deeply about it, then of course you, like Frank, will consider scores of millions of your fellow citizens lunatics. Because conservatives have, as Frank says, achieved little cultural change in recent decades, he considers their persistence either absurd or part of a sinister plot to create "cultural turmoil" to continue "the erasure of the economic" from politics.
Frank regrets that Bill Clinton's "triangulation" strategy -- minimizing Democrats' economic differences with Republicans -- contributed to the erasure. Politics would indeed be simpler, and more to the liking of liberals, if each citizen were homo economicus, relentlessly calculating his or her economic advantage, and concluding that liberalism serves it. But politics has never been like that, and it is becoming even less so.
When the Cold War ended, Pat Moynihan warned, with characteristic prescience, that it would be, like all blessings, a mixed one, because passions -- ethnic and religious -- that were long frozen would come to a boil. There has been an analogous development in America's domestic politics.
The economic problem, as understood during two centuries of industrialization, has been solved. We can reliably produce economic growth and have moderated business cycles. Hence many people, emancipated from material concerns, can pour political passions into other -- some would say higher -- concerns. These include the condition of the culture, as measured by such indexes as the content of popular culture, the agendas of public education and the prevalence of abortion.
So, what's the matter with Kansas? Not much, other than it is has not measured up -- down, actually -- to the left's hope for a more materialistic politics.