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Thomas Frank is a Kansas expat who has taken the supreme risk of psychoanalyzing his native state's peculiar politics from a perch far to the left of acceptable Kansas opinion and drawing conclusions that have already delighted his more cosmopolitan readers, while probably making it harder for him to click his heels and go home.

Part economic and social analysis, part autobiography, and most of all a jeremiad, What's the Matter With Kansas? is wonderfully written, sloppily reasoned, and ultimately far off base. But as a lively portrayal of the mentality of middle-class social conservatism -- what Frank calls "the backlash" -- this book deserves a readership beyond those who share his political conclusions.

Most of Frank's book focuses on two political anomalies that are especially prevalent in Kansas: the attachment of working-class people to the most conservative variety of Republicanism, and the belief of conservative Republicans generally that they represent a besieged and even persecuted point of view.

Frank entertainingly documents both of these phenomena, and argues persuasively that the right's cult of victimhood is part of its appeal to middle-income voters unhappy with their fate in life.

In one of the few sections of the book that looks beyond Kansas, Frank ruthlessly skewers the right-wing pundits who continue to pose as brave heretics defying liberal hegemony, even as Republicans control the entire federal government and a sizable segment of the news media. He is most devastating in his treatment of jetsetter Ann Coulter's ridiculous pretensions of cultural solidarity with the sturdy values of red state proles, and the "intensely anal" Gary Aldrich, the former FBI agent who penned a right-wing bestseller in the 1990s based on his horrifying experience with the messy offices and insufficient muscle tone of Clinton White House staffers.

Frank's central contention, however, is that the rightward trend among downscale voters is nothing more than displaced class warfare cut adrift from its real -- i.e., economic -- sources by the absence of political voices challenging a capitalist system that's screwing them.

Thus, says Frank, working-class Kansans fretting about the cultural decay exhibited by "liberal elites" are being duped into a completely inverted populism: They support an ideology that serves the economic interests of the wealthy while exonerating corporate America from responsibility for the very cultural trends they deplore.

This argument takes Frank perilously close to paternalistic contempt for the working stiffs he claims to champion. In the most striking passage of the book, he imagines a horde of less-privileged Kansans marching on Mission Hills, the tony Kansas City, Mo., suburb where many of the state's most powerful citizens reside:

"The angry workers, mighty in their numbers, are marching irresistibly against the arrogant. They are shaking their fists at the sons of privilege. ... They are massing at the gates of Mission Hills, hoisting the black flag, and while the millionaires tremble in their mansions, they are bellowing out their terrifying demands. 'We are here,' they scream, 'to cut your taxes.'"

Frank's taste for hyperbole makes for amusing reading, but it also leads him into overgeneralizations and factual errors that undermine his whole thesis.

He treats the 1990s as one long unrelieved period of misery for working folks, as part of his claim that a bipartisan determination to pursue pro-business economic policies has disenfranchised the poor and the struggling middle class.

I'm no expert on the economy of Kansas, but nationally, the Clinton years produced the first sizable gains in working family income in three decades, record employment levels for minorities, record levels of homeownership, and the largest reduction in the poverty rate since the 1960s. In his obsessive reading of right-wing literature, Frank must have come across the fact that President Clinton raised rather than cut taxes on the rich. Moreover, Clinton did quite well nationally among the downscale voters who are the subject of this book. The big collapse came in 2000, when Al Gore, posing as the champion of the "people versus the powerful," largely refused to campaign on Clinton's economic record, while perversely exaggerating his liberalism on cultural issues.

Another of Frank's dubious planted axioms is that economic class, not cultural orientation, is the normal determinant of partisan identifica- tion. This is the basis for his claim that the power of cultural issues in shaping the electorate must represent a hoax and a betrayal of the legitimate interests of voters. But for most of American history, a host of non-economic factors -- religion, ethnicity, region, local rivalries, and group reactions to traumatic events such as wars -- have been far more important in determining political affiliation than household income. Despite modest Democratic gains among upscale voters and modest Republican gains among the non-college-educated middle class in recent years, today's partisan divide is much more class-based than it has been for most of our history.

Frank truly loses touch with reality in his brief but angry denunciation of New Democrats for "betraying the working class" and leaving downscale voters with no option other than impotent cultural warfare. His description of the Democratic Leadership Council, which he adapted into Los Angeles Times and New York Times op-ed articles, is an organization that "has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, whitecollar professionals who are liberal on social issues. ... Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table." Adding insult to ignorance, Frank suggests New Democrats are pursuing this strategy to "Hoover up" campaign funds from "business interests."

To borrow a simile from the Kansas baseball guru Bill James, Thomas Frank knows as much about the DLC as a meadowlark knows about the Feast of the Epiphany. The DLC was, in fact, formed to regain the Democratic Party's identification with "the economic aspirations and mainstream values of the middle class." The group has never, ever, suggested that Democrats "forget" blue-collar voters and has encouraged Democrats to pursue opportunities up the income scale to expand, not change, the party base, at a time when the base simply does not add up to a majority.

Far from "taking economic issues off the table," the DLC has treated Clinton's economic record as the proudest New Democrat accomplishment and, contrary to Frank's suggestion, the organization has relentlessly criticized George W. Bush's poor economic record, his reverse-Robin-Hood fiscal policies, and his corporate cronyism.

That's not all. Frank has it wrong when he tries to equate New Democrats with purely corporate interests. The DLC practically invented the epithet of "corporate welfare" for the spending and tax subsidies that disfigure our economic and fiscal policies. The corporate-concession, low-wage- based state economic development strategies that Frank excoriates in this book have long been a special object of scorn for the DLC's think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute.

As for cultural issues, far from encouraging Democrats to go left in pursuit of the latte vote, the DLC has argued for a "values centrism" aimed at detoxifying the culture wars, an approach that Frank himself would probably endorse if he knew about it. Anticipating another of Frank's proposals, the DLC has been very explicit about the responsibility of Hollywood's corporate moguls for the trash culture on display on television and movie screens across the nation.

Frank's final verdict on New Democrats is that they are pursuing a "criminally stupid" electoral strategy guaranteed to fail in the heartland. Interesting, then, that the two leading Democrats who have survived the "backlash" in Kansas, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and Rep. Dennis Moore, are loud-and-proud New Democrats. Neither merits any discussion in Frank's book.

The disconnect between the entertainment value of this book and the cranky, conspiracy-theory ideology that underlies it, inevitably raises comparisons of Frank with filmmaker and bestselling author Michael Moore. Like Moore, Frank is intensely personal in his political analysis. But, while the common thread in Moore's work is the nostalgic desire to restore the stable Industrial Age paradigm of the Flint, Mich., of his childhood, Frank's relationship with Kansas is much more ambiguous. Growing up in the 1970s in a modest middle-class family in Mission Hills, that great symbol of the Kansas plutocracy, Frank was an avid young conservative activist until he painfully discovered the class- and privilege-based nature of the social and economic elites in his state, and of the Republican Party structure.

So, while Moore longs for the social democratic paradise lost since his childhood, Frank, with the special disillusionment of shattered adolescent dreams, must look much further back for a Golden Age. He's looked all the way back to the Populist heritage of Kansas in the 1890s. And like so many self-styled progressives of the left, he's looked too far back to be relevant to the politics of the 21st century.

The bottom line is this: Ignore the political conclusions, and enjoy the book. It's ultimately a breezy read, but not a deep read, for Democrats.

Ed Kilgore is policy director of the Democratic Leadership Council.