When did the Republican Party become the Party of the Left?

Thomas Frank, not Frank Rich, is the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?" I've never read the book, but as I understand his thesis, it's that the American economic elite uses phony right-wing "populism"--wedge "issues" like prayer in school and anti-gay nonsense--to put themselves in office and keep themselves there, where they proceed to do things like deindustrialize the country and drive down wages, harming the very people they pretend to represent. That's not a particularly controversial thesis, if I've correctly represented it. No savvy political observer could have missed it for decades. I've written a lot about it myself recently.

We are, at present, in the middle of a major astroturf campaign aimed at things like defeating health-care reform. The teabagger "movement" is 100% created, funded, organized, and fed by huge money interests who have built it and maintained it as a vehicle for pursuing policies that narrowly benefit only themselves. Their foot-soldiers are the usual useful idiots, who have been organized around nonsense like Obama being a sercret Muslim, not a U.S. citzien, a socialist, a fascist, one who pushes health care reform that covers illegal aliens and abortion and includes "death panels" to kill granny, and--the latest--one for whom ACORN stole the last presidential election. While this nonsense is what has been used to organize the phony "movement," none of it has any basis in reality. Without some understanding of the dynamic outlined above, the events of this year are literally inexplicable.