In 2004, Thomas Frank published an insightful book titled What’s the Matter With Kansas? that documented how the working class abandoned its class interests to wage culture war. The proletarians embraced what Herbert Marcuse and others once called “false consciousness.” Frank didn’t use that term specifically to describe the working-class Kansans of his book, and indeed Karl Marx, who’s often credited with coining the phrase, never used it either. But false consciousness was the essence of