Thomas Frank

Friday 29th of March 2024

2008 financial crisis The bailouts, the stimulus, the health-care debate: with each of these issues, the path of expertise led the Obama administration toward compromise with the power of wealth. And by the thinking of Washington, that is entirely as it should have been. Thomas Frank, Pity the Billionaire  © 2019 Kwiple.com
Democratic Party Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to turn its back on these people's concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened pro- fessional class, a “creative class” that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps. The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn't need to listen to them any longer. Thomas Frank, Rendezvous with Oblivion © 2018 Kwiple.com
Democrats The Democrats came to think of themselves not as the voice of working class people at all but as a sort of coming together of the learned and the virtuous. Thomas Frank, The People, No © 2020 Kwiple.com
Government For decades we have attacked it, redirected it, outsourced it, and filled it with incompetents and cronies. Yes, it still works well enough when we need it to blow up some small country, but those branches of it designed to help out Americans of “lower socioeconomic status,” as the scientists would put it, are now bare. Thomas Frank, Rendezvous with Oblivion © 2018 Kwiple.com
Great Recession Although Democrats apparently didn't know it, the Great Recession had repolarized the compass points. Nothing worked the way it used to in the nineties. It was no longer about “left” versus “right”; it was about special interests versus common interests. This was a time for a second FDR, not Clinton II. Thomas Frank, Pity the Billionaire  © 2019 Kwiple.com
Great Recession From its silver-tongued leader on down, Democrats simply could not tell us why our system had run aground and why our we had a stake in doing things differently. They could not summon an ideology of their own. … And so Democratic leaders tried to assuage public anger over the bailouts while barely mentioning Wall Street's power over Washington — that subject they left to the resurgent Right. Thomas Frank, Pity the Billionaire  © 2019 Kwiple.com
Higher education The purpose of higher ed, after all, is the exact opposite of solidarity: it is to define hierarchy and prestige. To separate the talented from the ordinary. To accept only the kids with good SAT scores and reject the others. It is not by coincidence that the towns that host universities and colleges have prospered so enormously in this age of inequality: they are playgrounds for the elite – and everyone knows it. Thomas Frank, The Guardian, September 9, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Housing These are assets, not homes. Thomas Frank, on suburban McMansions © 2018 Kwiple.com
Ideas Certain ideas, when voiced by certain people, are not merely debatable or incorrect: they are inadmissible. The ideas themselves might seem healthy. They might even be orthodix in other hands. Nevertheless, when voiced by the individuals in question, they become unacceptable. Thomas Frank, Rendezvous with Oblivion © 2018 Kwiple.com
Republican kiss-asses A map of his support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery that thirty years of Washington's free-market consensus have brought to the rest of America. Thomas Frank, Rendezvous with Oblivion © 2018 Kwiple.com
Republican kiss-asses They were living in the world dominated by the self-serving professionals who screwed things up and survived to screw things up again. Despite what the Beltway types assured them, they knew that the wars were corrupt and the trade deals were bad. And what others saw as Trump's false- hoods they saw as a form of honesty, a plain-speaking directness that was refreshing in all its vulgarity. They looked not to be saved by experts but rescued from them, and Trump's achievement was to make himself the vehicle of their hopes. Thomas Frank, Rendezvous with Oblivion © 2018 Kwiple.com
Socio-economic mobility The First Shall Be First Title of the Introduction to Thomas Frank's Rendezvous with Oblivion © 2018 Kwiple.com
State of the union  Like pumpkin pie and the bald eagle, the con game is so utterly American that it probably deserves its own series of postage stamps. But something is different today. The quacks and the mountebanks own the place, and everyone knows it. The con game is our national pastime. Everyone either is in on it or has a plan for getting in on it soon. Thomas Frank, Rendezvous with Oblivion © 2018 Kwiple.com
Taxes Tax havens on some tropical island aren't some sideshow to Western capitalism; they are a central reality. Thomas Frank, The Guardian, November 9, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com