Quotes from Thomas Frank

drain economics out of the world, and you're left with few tools for explaining anything. Why is our culture the way it is? Why does TV get coarser with each passing year? What makes certain styles or words or ideas suddenly so visible while others disappear?

manufactured bonhomie

Here, after all, is a rebellion against "the establishment" that has wound up cutting the tax on inherited estates. Here is a movement whose response to the power structure is to make the rich even richer; whose answer to the inexorable degradation of working-class life is to lash out angrily at labor unions and liberal workplace-safety programs; whose solution to the rise of ignorance in America is to pull the rug out from under public education.

reaping the whirlwind:

In only one area have the Cons achieved a tangible, real-world victory. Their intractable hostility to taxes of all kinds has successfully brought disaster on the state government.

From Fox News and the Hoover Institute and every newspaper in the land they sing the praises of the working man's red-state virtues even while they pummel the working man's economic chances with outsourcing, new overtime rules, lousy health insurance, and coercive new management techniques.

Oklahoma senator Fred Harris, who ran for president as a Democrat in 1976.

Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson's estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt's antitrust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.4

In 1993 the Reverend Robert Meneilly blasted the Cons from the pulpit of Village Presbyterian, a fashionable church nestled on the Mission Hills border, warning that their efforts to baptize government would one day backfire, discrediting Christianity and setting back its larger spiritual mission.

This much is clear, though, from the elections of the last ten years: those parts of Johnson County with the lowest per capita income and lowest median housing values consistently generated the strongest support for the conservative faction. The areas with the highest income and highest real-estate values—Mission Hills and Leawood—were just as reliably loyal to the moderate machine.22 The more working-class an area is, the more likely it is to be conservative. This

he believed in the social arrangements of capitalism regardless of what capitalism did to him. Naturally, he was a positive thinker, and in his ability to overlook the world's cruelty and focus exclusively on reforming himself he embodied what the historian Donald Meyer has called the "social anesthetic" side of positive thinking.5

Anti-populism is always about the powerful lording it over the weak; the credentialed and the high-born reminding the world that the definitions of goodness and justice and truth are whatever they determine.

The truth is that the culture that surrounds us—and that persistently triggers new explosions of backlash outrage—is largely the product of business rationality. It is made by writers and actors, who answer to editors and directors and producers, who answer to senior vice presidents and chief executive officers, who answer to Wall Street bankers, who demand profits above all else.

The state of Vermont is a favorite target of the latte libel. In his best-selling Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks ridicules the city of Burlington in that state as the prototypical "latte town," a city where "Beverly Hills income levels" meet a Scandinavian-style social consciousness.

I honestly thought that Mission Hills, with its castellated palazzi, was normal and that other places were the aberration. I played with the tots of millionaires and convinced myself that America was a classless society, where all that mattered was ability and one's willingness to work.

Fifty years later, as the commission's last surviving member, Harris often commented on its legacy. See, for example, the op-ed that he co-authored for the New York Times, "The Unmet Promise of Equality," February 28, 2018.

red-shirted teachers in Arizona.

Swearing off economic liberalism also prevented Democrats from capitalizing on the great, glaring contradiction of their rivals' campaign, namely, the GOP's tendency to demote "values" issues once elections are over.

Indeed, counterculture is so commercial and so business-friendly today that a school of urban theorists thrives by instructing municipal authorities on the fine points of luring artists, hipsters, gays, and rock bands to their cities on the ground that where these groups go, corporate offices will follow.

Our culture and our schools and our government, backlashers insist, are controlled by an overeducated ruling class that is contemptuous of the beliefs and practices of the masses of ordinary people. Those who run America, the theory holds, are despicable, self-important show-offs. They are effete, to use a favorite backlash term. They are arrogant.2They are snobs. They are liberals.

For this project I interviewed the Reverend William Barber, Fred Harris, and Jim Hightower, three men who were enormously helpful in explaining the reform tradition and the power of mass movements. There are moments with all of them that I will never forget, but the one I am truly sorry I could not work into the text was when Hightower showed me a framed Texas poll tax receipt from 1964, a memento of a thankfully bygone era.

Leftist organizations are aggressively seeking to redefine America in their own Godless image," wrote Jerry Falwell. "They hate the idea of Christmas with a deep abiding hate," declared Pat Buchanan.16

conservatism's populist myth.

The Franks may have lived near them, but I could no more choose to join them at their well-appointed table (to return to David Brooks's cafeteria metaphor) than I could flap my arms and fly to the moon.