Quotes from Thomas Frank

A cartoon in the New Yorker captured the absurdity with a scene of airline passengers in a populist mutiny of their own: "These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us," bellows one of them. "Who thinks I should fly the plane?

If you're not interested in democratizing the country's economic structure, however, individual righteousness might be just the thing for you. This model deals with ordinary citizens by judging and purging; by canceling and scolding. It's not about building; it's about purity

Labor unions are on the wane today, as everyone knows, down to 9 percent of the private-sector workforce from a high water mark of 38 percent in the fifties.

a geyser of moral rebuke, erupting against teenagers who have committed some act of cultural appropriation, against the hiring of an actor for an inappropriate role, against a public speech by someone with unpopular views

His superaverage midwestern town, meanwhile, has followed the same trajectory. Even as Republican economic policy laid waste to the city's industries, unions, and neighborhoods, the townsfolk responded by lashing out on cultural issues, eventually winding up with a hard-right Republican congressman

Its characteristic goal is not to get banks and monopolies under control, as populism typically does, but to set up a nonprofit, attract funding from banks and monopolies, and then Ã¢â'¬Â¦ to scold the world for its sins.

In the years before then, he recalls, a very different breed filled the party's precinct positions; the sort of folks who "would donate a thousand-dollar check to the Republican Party, and do not a darn thing.

In 1979 the bitter self-made men were hoarding gold and reading How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years, a personal-finance best seller as recklessly gloomy as the best sellers of the nineties were senselessly optimistic.

If you have somebody willing to . . . meet the voter face-to-face and one-on-one, not only does it not cost any money in terms of postage, . . . you can hand them the material and you can give them that personal touch.

I don't blame the tour guide for this mistake. That a regular guy like J. P. Dinsmoor would have opposed U.S. imperialism, well, that's simply unthinkable out here; everyone knows that such views are the affectations of latte-drinking rich kids at fancy colleges, while the average

backlash leaders systematically downplay the politics of economics. The movement's basic premise is that culture outweighs economics

The people can't find Syria on a map, they think God created humans one day in their existing form, and if you give them half a chance, they will go out and vote for a charlatan like Donald Trump.

No, it is intellectuals who call the shots, people with graduate degrees and careers in government, academia, law, and the professions.

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. If you just had a sunny disposish and kept everlastingly at it, they thought, you were bound to succeed. The contradiction between their professed positiveness and their actual negativity about nearly everything never seemed to occur to them.

Like everything else I believed in those days, this fantasy of working-classness was strictly theoretical. I had arrived at it by deduction. Businessmen were the working class, I reasoned, because they worked to earn their living.

Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

The swaggering personal habits of the bitter self-made men only confirmed my adolescent understanding of the social order. Riding a BMW motorcycle without a helmet, taking no shit from the police, drinking Wild Turkey at all hours of the day, carrying a .45 automatic tucked into their waistband—if that wasn't working class, what was?

growing up in one of the perfect regional arcadias of American capitalism, a place more like the grounds of Versailles than the average postwar suburb, and what I had managed to do was invent a romantic justification for precisely the system of social arrangements that had made Mission Hills possible.

In every social issue Republicans perceive the same pattern: a conflict of the authentic and the natural and the democratic with the arrogant and the meddling and the foolish.

raise less corn and more hell.

A humble mid-American yeomanry, pure of heart and free of class resentment, giving the existing social order their plebeian imprimatur; it is an endlessly recurring dream of the ruling class.

The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate. Values may "matter most" to voters, but they always take a backseat to the needs of money

and presto: you've got the latte libel. The Bobos. The establishment. The blue-state elite. The difference, of course, is that Gold attributed these characteristics to the lazy, denatured rich. Aldrich, Brooks, Coulter, Limbaugh, and the rest simply turn the stereotype on liberals.

restoration as a high priority," wrote Christopher Lasch, one of the most astute analysts of the backlash sensibility. "What he really cared about was the revival of the unregulated capitalism of the twenties: the repeal of the New Deal."3