Thomas Frank Quotes

Quotes about:

• Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system's first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exist to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials.

  Thomas Frank

  School, Government, Democracy

  Thomas Frank (2008). “The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule”, p.3, Macmillan

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• For-profit higher education is today a booming industry, feeding on the student loans handed out to the desperate.

  Thomas Frank

  Today, Students, Desperate

  John Summers, Chris Lehmann, Thomas Frank (2014). “No Future for You: Salvos from the Baffler”, p.13, MIT Press

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• Massive inequality, we have learned, isn't the best way to run an economy after all. And when you think about it, it's also profoundly ugly.

  Thomas Frank

  Running, Thinking, Ugly

  "Rent-a-Womb Is Where Market Logic Leads" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 12, 2009.

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• Bad government is the natural product of rule by those who believe government is bad.

  Thomas Frank

  Believe, Government, Natural

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• In small towns, bored teenagers turn their eyes longingly to the exciting doings in the big cities, pining for urban amenities like hipster bars and farmers' markets and indie-rock festivals. Like everyone else, they want the vibrant and they will not be denied.

  Thomas Frank

  Hipster, Teenager, Eye

  John Summers, Chris Lehmann, Thomas Frank (2014). “No Future for You: Salvos from the Baffler”, p.113, MIT Press

  16 Copy quote

• Promises to get beyond partisanship are the most perfunctory sort of campaign rhetoric, almost as empty as the partisanship itself.

  Thomas Frank

  Promise, Campaigns, Empty

  "Bipartisanship Is a Silly Beltway Obsession" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 22, 2009.

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• As you watch the world crumble, try taking your Armageddon with this sprinkling of irony: Over the last three decades, business has got virtually everything it wanted, and its doomsday scenario from the 1970s has come true because of it.

  Thomas Frank

  Trying, Watches, Three

  "Wrecking, Wrecking, Wrecked" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 30, 2008.

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• Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders offer is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation.

  Thomas Frank

  Leader, Typical, Campaigns

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• When done right - or wrong, depending on how you look at it - deficits remove liberal options from the table. Suddenly there's no money for building bridges or inspecting meat. Not surprisingly, running up a deficit is a strategy favored by the wrecking crew for its liberal-killing properties.

  Thomas Frank

  Running, Bridges, Meat

  "No Future for You" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 27, 2008.

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• People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about.

  Thomas Frank

  People, Political, Fundamentals

  Thomas Frank (2007). “What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America”, p.1, Macmillan

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• [The right] may never bring prayer back to schools, but it has rescued all manner of rightwing economic nostrums from history's dustbins. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson's estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt's anti-trust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.

  Thomas Frank

  Prayer, War, School

  "What's the Matter with Kansas?". Book by Thomas Frank, 2004.

  13 Copy quote

• They, the conservatives, are the real outsides, they tell us, gazing with disgust upon the ludicrous manners of the high and mighty. Or, they tell us, they are rough-and-ready proles, laughing along with us at the efforts of our social "betters" to reform and improve us. That they are often, in fact, people of privilege doing their utmost to boost the fortunes of a political party that is the traditional tool of the privileged is a contradiction that does not trouble them.

  Thomas Frank

  Real, Party, Laughing

  "What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America". Book by Thomas Frank, June1, 2004.

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• The thing now is to seem concerned in a vaguely social-democratic way.

  Thomas Frank

  Way, Social, Democratic

  "Toll Roads Are Paved With Bad Intentions" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 3, 2009.

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• If your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta.

  Thomas Frank

  People, Email, Wikileaks

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It's authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader-types from consultant-directed puppet-boys.

  Thomas Frank

  Sunset, Boys, Men

  "Joe Klein’s Turnip Day" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 26, 2006.

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• When the entertainers of the right aren’t declaring their disgust with President Obama for groveling before foreign potentates, they’re pretending to fear him as a left-wing thug, an exemplar of what they call “the Chicago way.”

  Thomas Frank

  Thug, Wings, President

  "The Real Chicago Way" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 18, 2010.

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• We have become a society that can't self-correct, that can't address its obvious problems, that can't pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that - for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati - we can't wake up from.

  Thomas Frank

  Self, Age, Add

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• Liberal that I am, I support health-care reform on its merits alone. My liberal blood boils, for example, when I read that half of the personal bankruptcies in this country are brought on, in part, by medical expenses.

  Thomas Frank

  Country, Blood, Support

  "Health-Care Reform Could Kill the GOP" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 3, 2009.

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• When money is exchanged for pregnancy, some believe, surrogacy comes close to organ-selling, or even baby-selling.

  Thomas Frank

  Baby, Pregnancy, Believe

  "Rent-a-Womb Is Where Market Logic Leads" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 12, 2009.

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• While Democrats fussed with the details of health care reforms, conservatives spent months telling the nation that the real issue is freedom, that what's on the line is American liberty itself.

  Thomas Frank

  Real, Issues, Liberty

  "The Left Should Reclaim ‘Freedom’" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 16, 2009.

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• The great goal of the backlash is to nurture a cultural class war, and the first step in doing so, as we have seen, is to deny the economic basis of social class. After all, you can hardly deride liberals as society's "elite" or present the GOP as the party of the common man if you acknowledge the existence of the corporate world - the power that creates the nation's real elite, that dominates its real class system, and that wields the Republican Party as its personal political sidearm.

  Thomas Frank

  Real, War, Party

  "What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America". Book by Thomas Frank, April 1, 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• Under the administration of George W. Bush, you will recall, federal spending grew pretty significantly. At the same time, the number of people directly employed by the federal government shrank. One of the factors that explained the difference was contracting.

  Thomas Frank

  Government, Differences, Numbers

  "Obama Takes On Market-Based Government" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 11, 2009.

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• There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery’s version of the Barack Obama “Hope” poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama’s Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists’ Washington, the place we learned to despise during the last administration.

  Thomas Frank

  Depressing, Portraits, Lobbyists

  "Obama and the K Street Set" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 30, 2009.

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• There are few things in politics more annoying than the Right's utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word 'freedom' that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital gains to be untaxed, that it is actually and obviously standing up for human liberty, the noblest cause of them all.

  Thomas Frank

  Rights, Leader, Liberty

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• The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.

  Thomas Frank

  Hero, Islands, Would Be

  Thomas Frank (2012). “Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right”, p.11, Macmillan

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