Quotes from Thomas Frank

David Adkins, a state senator who was raised a fundamentalist Baptist in the plains city of Salina (today he is a moderate Republican), says, "I. . . can't recall a political issue—abortion, homosexuality, any of the issues of convenience that now dominate Republican dialogue—ever being mentioned in the course of my religious training, or in the course of my faith.

backlash is something very different: a crusade in which one's material interests are suspended in favor of vague cultural grievances that are all-important and yet incapable of ever being assuaged.

her one overarching cause during the campaign was opposing discrimination, the unfair "barriers" that kept the talented from rising.

Hillary Clinton was famous for her intimate friendship with Wall Street bankers. At one point she actually scolded Bernie Sanders for wanting to get tough with the financial industry because such a policy, by itself, would not also end racism and sexism—a new low in self-serving sophistry.

Conservatism, on the other hand, is the doctrine of the oppressed majority. Conservatism does not defend some established order of things: It accuses; it rants; it points out hypocrisies and gleefully pounces on contradictions.

But it is also true that things that begin in Kansas—the Civil War, Prohibition, Populism, Pizza Hut—have a historical tendency to go national. Maybe Kansas, instead of being a laughingstock, is actually in the vanguard. Maybe what has happened there points the way in which all our public policy debates are heading. Maybe someday soon the political choices of Americans everywhere will be whittled down to the two factions of the Republican Party.

Dion, "A Sicker Fall River Eases Its Pain By Getting High," Fall River Herald-News, October 4, 2015.

Even if Democrats do succeed, it won't save us. While there are many great Democrats and many exceptions to the trends I have described in this book, by and large the story has been a disappointing one. We have surveyed this party's thoughts and deeds from the Seventies to the present, we have watched them abandon whole classes and regions and industries, and we know now what the results have been. Their leadership faction has no intention of doing what the situation requires.

Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends. And it is these economic achievements—not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars—that are the movement's greatest monuments.

There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below.

one of the most regressive social programs promulgated by a democratic government in the twentieth century," in the words of the sociologist Loïc Wacquant, who has studied the subject in depth.

Christopher Lasch, who was Hofstadter's protégé at Columbia, believed Hofstadter's contempt for Populism in fact betrayed his cohort's "cultural prejudices" against the lower middle class.

Still, many commentators divined in the 2000 map a baleful cultural cleavage, a looming crisis over identity and values. "This nation has rarely appeared more divided than it does right now," moaned David Broder, the Washington Post's pundit-in-chief, in a story published a few days after the election. The two regions were more than mere voting blocs; they were complete sociological profiles, two different Americas at loggerheads with each other.

when two female rock stars exchange a lascivious kiss on national TV, Kansas goes haywire. Kansas screams for the heads of the liberal elite. Kansas comes running to the polling place. And Kansas cuts those rock stars' taxes.

attempts to maintain aristocratic entitlement through "mystification and concealment," as an 1835 newspaper put it.

Sanders was a living symbol of what the Democrats used to stand for, and party leaders didn't seem to appreciate being reminded of how far they had strayed.

LAWRENCE GOODWYN, THE great historian of mass democratic uprisings, once wrote that to build a movement like the People's Party of the 1890s or the labor movement of the 1930s, one must "connect with people as they are in society, that is to say, in a state that sophisticated modern observers are inclined to regard as one of 'inadequate consciousness.' "5

This arrangement should be the envy of every ruling class in the world. Not only can it be pushed much, much further, but it is fairly certain that it will be so pushed. All the incentives point that way, as do the never-examined cultural requirements of modern capitalism. Why shouldn't our culture just get worse and worse, if making it worse will only cause the people who worsen it to grow wealthier and wealthier?

gives the impression of intelligence, choosing and enunciating each word carefully, but she also seems oddly naive, like a person who has sat down and worked out the world's problems all on her own.

Today, seemingly every well-educated person in America and Europe knows that populism is the name we give to mass movements that are bigoted and irrational; that threaten democracy's norms with their anti-intellectual demagoguery.

Who shall speak for the people? Who knows the works from A to Z so he can say, "I know what the people want"? Who is this phenom? where did he come from? When have the people been half as rotten as what the panderers to the people dangle before crowds? —from "The People, Yes" by Carl Sandburg

Mark Lilla evokes the feeling well in a sympathetic 1998 summary of conservative thinking. It is not that anyone thinks that incivility, promiscuity, drug use, and irresponsibility are good things. But we have become embarrassed to criticize them unless we can couch our objections in the legalistic terms of rights, the therapeutic language of self-realization, or the economic jargon of efficiency.

Or is it the other way around—are they supposed to serve us? Let us resolve to ask that far-reaching question again: For whom does America exist? This time around, there can be only one possible answer.

Goodwyn also warned against a politics of "individual righteousness," a tendency toward "celebrating the purity" of one's so-called radicalism. If you wish to democratize the country's economic structure, he argued, you must practice "ideological patience," a suspension of moral judgment of ordinary Americans.