Thomas Frank Quotes
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The thing now is to seem concerned in a vaguely social-democratic way.
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Whereas liberals are thought to erupt self-righteously whenever they feel like it, conservatives believe that they themselves are never permitted to say what they really think.
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Financial regulation is the next item on the political horizon, and it doesn't have to be the deathly dull wonk-battle that it sounds like. In fact, if the Democrats do their job, it can just as easily become a platform for addressing the greatest issues of them all.
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Maybe that first, gigantic deficit the Reaganites piled up was an accident, just a combination of deluded 'supply side' tax cuts and a huge bag of good stuff for the Pentagon. But pretty quickly conservatives discovered that deficits, when done correctly, did something really cool: deficits defunded the Left.
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One of the things I keep coming back to in my writing is that society doesn't work on this mirror principle - you don't have an exact replica on the left of what you have on the right. It just doesn't work that way.
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Money never seems to be interested in strengthening regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives trading and in deep-sea oil wells.
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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.
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Conservatism is not a doctrine of contentment. Not a doctrine for the satisfied and the smug. It's a politics that's at war with the world.
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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.
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Americans have known about mounting inequality and king-sized Wall Street bonuses for years. But we also had an entire genre of journalism dedicated to brushing the problem off.
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People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about.
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As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a 'Near Great' even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then.
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The Obama administration's plan is to have the Federal Reserve regulate banks that might pose a 'systemic risk' if they were to fail.
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Surrogate motherhood has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the years.
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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.
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People are born in a certain place, and in a certain society. I don't mean to sound like a determinist, but to think we're entirely free to do whatever we want betrays a certain class perspective. For most people who have to work for a living, and work at jobs under conditions they may not like, it's just not simple when it comes to freedom.
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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.
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Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties; the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains.
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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.
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Markets are interested in profits and profits only; service, quality, and general affluence are different functions altogether. The universal, democratic prosperity that Americans now look back to with such nostalgia was achieved only by a colossal reigning in of markets, by the gargantuan effort of mass, popular organizations like labor unions and of the people themselves, working through a series of democratically elected governments not daunted by the myths of the market.
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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.
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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.
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Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn't successful - isn't even a city, really - unless it can lay claim to being 'vibrant.'
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Bad government is the natural product of rule by those who believe government is bad.
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Presidential legacies are valuable things, too valuable to be left up to historians.
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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.
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Joe Klein is the flower of American political journalism, a sharp raconteur who shows traces of the gonzo style that was in vogue when he was honing his craft at Rolling Stone back in the day.
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I think there's great potential for autonomy, but we have to remember that we live in a world where people may have free will but have not invented their circumstances.
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Republicans run the machine when it's their turn, and then hand the wheel over to Democrats when the public has had enough.
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Apparently, there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer.
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