What's Still the Matter with Kansas?

In 2004, as his home-state politics were swinging between the moderate and conservative wings of the Republican Party, Thomas Frank wrote the book, What's the Matter with Kansas? Now, in Harper's magazine, he says former US Senator Sam Brownback "has treated his governorship as a chance to enact the entire conservative wish list all at once." Frank, who remembers Kansas as a place where "the machinery of the state" was used "to support small towns and small farmers and build a system if interstate highways," now says there's a "collective hallucination" that's turned the political climate "toxic."