In his incisive 2004 best seller, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” Thomas Frank argued that red-state America is made up of two groups — business and blue-collar interests, which “should be at each other’s throats” — but that conservative leaders, dedicated to their own big-business agenda, consistently persuade “citizens who would once have been reliable partisans of the New Deal” to vote against their economic interests by rallying them around explosive values issues like abortion, flag burning and affirmative action. This, he contended, is “how conservatives won the heart of America.”