Actually, his "book" is more or less a straight-up plagiarism of Lenin's "What is to be Done?" (1902).
Communists always have the problem of explaining WHY the people whose interests they champion are never ready to take up arms to put them in power, why, in fact, the workers (those who actually produce anything) are mostly anti-communist.
Lenin's explanation is, more or less, the intellectual foundation for every leftist entity in this country, which is that Lenin (and of course Thomas Frank) knows better what the interests of a bunch of stupid farmers in Kansas are than they do themselves.
Yep, liberals love the Kansas book. It’s one of their touchstones. They think it has huge explanatory power. It was written 11 years ago yet you’ll see them citing it all the time and using it as a jumping off point like the writer of the posted article does. In general, you can count on educated, politically aware liberals having read two (and usually only two) books: What’s Wrong With Kansas? and Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.