Thomas Frank, "What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America," Metropolitan Books, 2004. Frank is the editor of "The Baffler." He lives in Chicago, but was born and raised in an upper middle class suburb in Kansas. He uses Kansas as a lens to examine the phenomena of people voting to strip away economic and social protections that their grandparents fought and sometimes shed blood for. The title itself is insider irony: it refers to a famous anti-Populist editorial of 1896.
Frank gives a bit too much ink (I think) to Brooks, Coulter, and O'Reilly, but otherwise the book is well-researched, thoughtful and engaging. Some really interesting background on historical politics in Kansas.
Main points:
- The culture war is a scam. In thirty years, it has achieved nothing but white noise. It is not intended to succeed. (See "gay marriage.")
- The culture war is being used to supply a counter-culture/victim identity to conservative Christians.
- The counter-cultural identity is then manipulated by Republicans to mobilize "movement" energy in support of elections where people actually vote against their own economic self-interest.
- As long as Democrats allow economic issues to remain off the table, they have little chance of regaining the lost portions of their traditional working class base.
You can read an excerpt at TomDispatch.com:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=1551