There’s a reason you probably haven’t heard much about this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can’t be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn’t the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives’ beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its most unrestrained, has little use for smalltown merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place....

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“Backlash culture abounds with tall tales of liberal out control hippies spitting on [Vietnam War] veterans with Jane Fonda narking on POWs to their Vietnamese captors…”
“Whereas liberals are thought to erupt self-righteously whenever they feel like it conservatives believe that they themselves are never permitted to say what they really think. What's the Matter with Kansas? (film) 2009 documentary movie based on Thomas Frank's best-selling book of the same name. Politics
Frank started his political journey as a College Republican but has come to be highly critical of conservatism especially the presidency of George W.

Frank is a historian of culture and ideas and analyzes trends in American electoral politics and propaganda advertising popular culture mainstream journalism and economics. Thomas Frank (born March 21 1965) is an American author journalist and columnist for Harper's Magazine. With his writing he explores the rhetoric and impact of the 'Culture Wars' in American political life and the relationship between politics and culture in the United States.