Quotes from Thomas Frank

What were we saying to the country, to our young people, when we lowered capital gains taxes and raised taxes on those who earned their living by working?," asked Joseph Stiglitz: "That it is far better to make your living by speculation than by any other means."39

Before we begin on that story, let me make clear that I strongly approve of studying racist, right-wing demagogues and figuring out what can be done to defeat them. I have spent my adult life engaged in exactly this project. Calling such figures "populists," however, is a mistake if defeating them is really our purpose. Opponents of the Right should be claiming the high ground of populism, not ceding it to guys like Donald Trump.

It is my argument that reversing the meaning of "populist" tells us something important about the people who reversed it: denunciations of populism like the ones we hear so frequently nowadays arise from a long tradition of pessimism about popular sovereignty and democratic participation. And it is that pessimism—that tradition of quasi-aristocratic scorn—that has allowed the paranoid right to flower so abundantly.

And although they like to fancy themselves rugged individualists (better yet, the last of the rugged individualists), what they really are is a personality type that our society generates so predictably and in such great numbers that they almost constitute a viable market segment all on their own. One more thing about the backlash personality type: every single one of the bitter self-made men of my youth was a believer in the power of positive thinking.

This is due partially, I think, to the Democratic Party's more or-less official response to its waning fortunes. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues.

In that heyday of American inequality, that golden age of Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, the Populists alone saw things clearly: The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.

the word yuppie, remember, was coined in 1984 to describe followers of the presidential candidate Gary Hart.

The world's failure to live up to the impossible promises of the positive-thinking credo did not convince these men of the credo's impracticality, but rather that the world was in a sad state of decline, that it had forsaken the true and correct path.2

The idea that average people are helpless pawns caught in a machine run by the elite comes straight from the vulgar-Marxist copybook, which taught generations of party members that they inhabited a deterministic world where agency was reserved for capitalists—or, more precisely, for capital itself.

If a young man is interested in a young woman, he starts by praying about the relationship. With a go-ahead from the Lord and his parents, he then approaches the girl's parents. The parents pray and, if the young woman has a reciprocal interest in the young man, her father talks through courtship and its expectations with the fellow.5

Talk to just about any farmer in Kansas, and you will find him extremely pessimistic about his livelihood. Except for the owners of the very largest spreads, farmers simply cannot make a profit. Kansas has only about half as many farms as it did in 1950; those that remain continue to grow. A few are getting big; most are getting out.

the citizens of Ulysses cut the town's buildings into pieces and dragged them across the prairie to a new location, "leaving the bond-holders," as the 1939 WPA guide to the state puts it, "40 acres of bare ground on which to foreclose."9 The only social actor capable of that kind of defiance today is the corporation. Corporations are mobile; cities are not.

An even more telling side of that blindness was the way White spent his leisure time in those days. When not writing his editorials, designed either to puff Kansas business or elect the Republican ticket, he would pass the time composing "dialect verse

Nothing has been venerable or revered merely because it exists or has endured.

the power of higher ed

absentee rates

I'd like to fuck Andrea Laiacona and see her tits, but I can't get hard and I prefer Big Pharma, anyway! (Color me 'bitch' — I ain't shit !)

Such Democrats look at a situation like present-day Kansas and rub their hands with anticipation: Just look at how Ronald Reagan's "social issues" have come back to bite his party in the ass! If only the crazy Cons push a little bit more, these Democrats think, the Republican Party will alienate the wealthy suburban Mods for good, and we will be able to step in and carry places like Mission Hills

Impoverished inhabitants of the state's most scenic area fight with fanatical determination to prevent a national park from opening up in their neighborhood, while the rails-to-trails program, regarded everywhere else in the union as a harmless scheme for family fun, is reviled in Kansas as an infernal design on the rights of property owners.

Consider our own social welfare apparatus, the system of taxes, regulations, and social insurance that is under sustained attack. Social Security, the FDA, and all the rest of it didn't spring out of the ground fully formed in response to the obvious excesses of a laissez-faire system; they were the result of decades of movement building, of bloody fights between strikers and state militias, of agitating, educating, and thankless organizing.

Every free-trade agreement we have signed in recent years has been designed to make cities vulnerable in precisely this way. If you're a medium-sized city like Wichita, hosting some giant multinational's plant is less of an achievement today than it is a gun pointed at your head, a constant reminder that some executive has the power to turn your town into an instant Flint

nearby Crawford County the town of Girard was home to the Appeal to Reason, a socialist newspaper whose circulation was in the hundreds of thousands.

The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who is fond of the phrase, has gone so far as to claim that free-trade treaties are so good that supporting them doesn't require knowledge of their actual contents. "I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade Initiative," he told Tim Russert in 2006. "I didn't even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade."11

While leftists sit around congratulating themselves on their personal virtue, the right understands the central significance of movement-building, and they have taken to the task with admirable diligence. Cast your eyes over the vast and complex structure of conservative "movement culture," a phenomenon that has little left-wing counterpart anymore.