Polling voters by telephone, the old Literary Digest predicted that Kansas Gov. Alf Landon would defeat President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1936 election.

	"WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS?: HOW CONSERVATIVES WON THE HEART OF AMERICA" By Thomas Frank Metropolitan Books ($24)

Landon lost by 21 million votes, failing to win even his home state.

Understandably, the magazine decided to re-examine its methodology. It discovered that millions of FDR supporters didn't have phones in 1936, but the better-off Landonites did in those days when the Republican Party was the home of the privileged.

It was the economy, Alf. Led by Roosevelt's New Deal programs, the Democrats swept the nation and proceeded to campaign successfully for years on FDR's economic policies aimed at the working classes and the less fortunate.

Times have changed. The neo-conservative GOP now controls the U.S. government's three branches as well as many state Houses. It's unlikely that the moderate Landon would even be accepted in the party today.

And the irony of the Republican supremacy can be found in its strong support among the same working classes who used to vote Democratic.

In his provocative new book, Kansas native Thomas Frank goes back home to figure out why. He finds a landscape as desolate as the Kansas that L. Frank Baum describes in the opening pages of "The Wizard of Oz":

"When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. ... Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else."

In present-day Kansas, it's the economy rather than the climate that has sucked the vitality and spirit out of the place, leaving a collection of surly, dispossessed folks itching to blame somebody.

But do they blame Republicans, whose economic policies have "generally facilitated the country's return to a 19th-century pattern of wealth distribution?" as Frank believes.

No, instead they rage at the liberal Democrats in a cultural backlash orchestrated and exploited by the right wing and its attack-dog mouthpieces, observes Frank, editor of the Chicago-based magazine, The Baffler.

From the shabby empty storefronts of small towns to the million-dollar enclaves outside Kansas City, Frank taps into the disaffected, the alienated and the angry.

The source of the unhappiness is not a lousy paycheck, but a cultural divide. The issues aren't health care, pensions, job security or unions, but abortion, gun control, gays, religion, evolution and, yes, NASCAR.

Observes Frank:

"Strip today's Kansans of their job security and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land, and the next thing you know, they're protesting in front of abortion clinics. ...

"But ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed [unions, antitrust, public ownership] and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower."

Frank recalls the days of the Populist movement in 19th-century Kansas, led by William Jennings Bryan, "a leftist and a fundamentalist Christian, an almost unimaginable combination today."

Its demands to reign in capitalism's abuses and provide economic security for workers and farmers eventually became public policy under both parties. Many of those policies have now either been rolled back or are under strong assault.

Today, populism means grass-roots support for candidates based on right-wing cultural messages that pit the "real people" against a controlling liberal elite made up of the entertainment industry, intellectuals, feminists, gays, atheists, latte sippers, Volvo-drivers, unions, teachers and Jews.

It doesn't matter, says Frank, that liberals hold no political power, that Hollywood's true god is the bottom line (sex always sells) and that separation of church and state is a long-standing American principle.

And I spotted a Bush sticker on a Volvo the other day.

The backlash ignores such contradictions. Its angry simplistic message of us vs. them, conveniently ignoring the widening gap between the rich and the rest, continues to blare.

Frank doesn't spare the Democratic Party in his investigation. He accuses it of taking its working-class base for granted while courting corporations and the rich by making concessions on trade and government regulation issues in a departure from its left-wing positions.

The Democrats' blunder, says Frank, is "that by dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans, they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues." And those are the issues that are seen as the difference between the two parties.

Frank cares more about abandoned neighborhoods, vanished jobs and poor public services than he does about abortion, school prayer and gay marriage.

He longs, as many of us do, for the vibrant, clean prosperous communities of industrial America when pocketbook issues mattered more than cultural ones.

But that day is gone. Frank fears the future can only get worse if this right-wing blacklist goes unchecked.

He predicts that the nation will "renounce our Middle American prosperity in pursuit of a crimson fantasy of Middle American righteousness."

It's a bleak picture worthy of an L. Frank Baum. And, while Thomas Frank believes he has exposed the wizard of the right-wing as a phony, he holds out little hope that this modern-day sorcerer has the wisdom of the man from Oz.