What's the Matter with Liberals is a response to Thomas Frank's 2004 book What's the Matter with Kansas. I ask the same question he asked about the right, but about the left: Why is the media obsessed with racism, even though it's getting objectively better by every measure we have? I argue that the liberal media is mainstreaming a woke culture war based on ideas that were relegated to the academic fringe as recently as a decade ago because it's in their economic interests to do so.

As American journalism has gone from a working-class trade to an elite caste, it has abandoned the economic fight of the little guy in favor of a culture war that protects its own financial interests while masquerading as social justice. On the business side, digital media pressures and social media rewards combined to make a woke culture war the perfect displacement exercise. This is how you end up with the New York Times putting Angela Davis on the cover and a Cartier ad on the back; these are two sides of the same coin, a culture war that benefits elites packaged as moral truth and journalistic ethics.

The book begins by delving into the golden age of American journalism in the 19th century, when people like Joseph Pulitzer created a press that was by and for the working class. It then explores the status revolution in American journalism that took place over the 21st century, when journalism went from being a blue-collar trade to an elite caste. It explores how digital media and social media supplied journalists, now part of the American elite, with an alternative way to feel like heroes while further consolidating power and wealth in the hands of the few rather than the many. The book then explores the larger context of the great American class divide, and how journalism has been both a product and accelerator of inequality.