This is a long essay, but it's very good and deserves a thorough read. A sample:
...the backlash itself has been a political trap so devastating to the interests of Middle America that even the most diabolical of string-pullers would have had trouble dreaming it up. Here, after all, is a rebellion against "the establishment" that has wound up abolishing the tax on inherited estates. Here is a movement whose response to the power structure is to make the rich even richer; whose answer to the undeniable degradation of working-class life is to lash out angrily at labor unions and liberal workplace-safety programs; whose solution to the rise of ignorance in America is to pull the rug out from under public education.
Like a French Revolution in reverse - one in which the sans-culottes pour down the streets demanding more power to the aristocracy - the backlash pushes the spectrum of the acceptable to the right, to the right, further to the right...
...Let us pause for a moment and gaze across this landscape of dysfunction. A state is spectacularly ill served by the Reagan-Bush stampede of deregulation, privatization, and laissez-faire. It sees its countryside depopulated, its towns disintegrate, its cities stagnate - and its wealthy enclaves sparkle, behind their remote-controlled security gates. The state erupts in revolt, making headlines around the world with its bold defiance of convention. But what do its revolutionaries demand? More of the very measures that have brought ruination on them and their neighbors in the first place.
This is not just the mystery of Kansas; this is the mystery of America, the historical shift that has made it all possible.
The simpler version can be summarized in a sentence: the most meaningful political alliance in this country is between the rich and the chronically stupid.