Quotes from Thomas Frank

Consider, for example, the stereotype of liberals that comes up so often in the backlash oeuvre: arrogant, rich, tasteful, fashionable, and all-powerful. In

Encouraging demographic self-recognition and self-expression through products is, similarly, the bread and butter not of leftist ideology but of consumerism. These things are part of the culture industry's very DNA.

What I mean to show is that the message of anti-populism is the same as ever: the lower orders, it insists, are driven by irrationality, bigotry, authoritarianism, and hate; democracy is a problem because it gives such people a voice. The difference today is that enlightened liberals are the ones mouthing this age-old anti-populist catechism.

opioids or unemployment or deindustrialization.

While Republicans trick out their poisonous stereotype of the liberal elite, Democrats seem determined to live up to the libel.

Indeed, over two-thirds of Kansas counties lost population between 1980 and 2000, some by as much as 25 percent. I am told that there are entire towns in the western part of the state getting by on Social Security; no one is left there but the aged. There are no doctors, no shoe stores. One town out here even sold its public school on eBay.

They took all three leadership positions in the Kansas house and introduced what they called a "Contract with Kansas," a solemn pledge to send more convicts to the chair while defending the fetus.

When King spoke to those men—trash collectors, remember, who came from society's lowliest ranks—he said, "So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs. But let me say to you tonight, that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity Ã¢â'¬Â¦ it has dignity, and it has worth.

Franklin Roosevelt stood very definitely outside the era's main academic currents. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's closest confidant, was a social worker from Iowa. Robert Jackson, the U.S. Attorney General whom Roosevelt appointed to the Supreme Court, was a lawyer who had no law degree. Jesse Jones, who ran

SDS's wildly optimistic first principle: that all humans were "infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.

And so the catastrophe of 1929–33 did to the certainties of laissez-faire economics what science did to nineteenth-century religion and what the slaughter of World War I did to old-fashioned patriotism: it knocked out the props. "Everything nailed down is coming loose," people used to say back then: The Depression made business leaders into laughingstocks and transformed economic orthodoxy into so many fairy tales.

Although the Cons vituperate against the high and the mighty, the policies they help enact—deregulating, privatizing—only serve to make the Mods higher and mightier still. And while it may hurt the Mods' feelings to overhear their secretaries referring to them as RINOs, the many rounds of tax cuts the Cons have accomplished have surely made the sting subside. The Mods win even when they lose.

Few of the writers I have described in this chapter are meticulous or systematic thinkers. Their theories don't hold water; their books are jam-packed with errors and omissions and preposterous interpretations. But backlash readers don't mind; theirs is an intensely personal politics

to square all these circles?

While its proponents might get the facts wrong, they get the subjective experience right.

And so I trust that it is not too petty to point out that it was George H. W. Bush, not Ronald Reagan, who was president when Boris Yeltsin ended the Cold War.

At the center of it all is a way of thinking about class that both encourages class hostility of the kind we see in Kansas and simultaneously denies the economic basis of the grievance. Class, conservatives insist, is not really about money or birth or even occupation. It is primarily a matter of authenticity, that most valuable cultural commodity.

Urging a boss to punish a worker for an overheard remark is the kind of officiousness that people sometimes resent.

Class is about what one drives and where one shops and how one prays, and only secondarily about the work one does or the income one makes. What makes one a member of the noble proletariat is not work per se, but unpretentiousness, humility, and the rest of the qualities that our punditry claims to spy in the red states that voted for George W. Bush.

What is certain is that the liberalism of scolding will never give rise to the kind of mass movement that this country needs.

But it is a class war in which, as David Brooks puts it, there is "no class resentment or class consciousness." The paradox—a class divide in which class doesn't matter—is repeated virtually without fail through the "two Americas" literature

WHAT THESE EXAMPLES show us is a generation of centrist liberals collectively despairing over democracy itself. After turning their backs on working-class issues, traditionally one of the core concerns of left parties, Democrats stood by while right-wing demagoguery took root and thrived. Then, after the people absorbed a fifty-year blizzard of fake populist propaganda, Democrats turned against the idea of "the people" altogether.17

like most conservatives, she believes that Clinton was in fact a man of the radical left. Rather, she is trying to construct an entire system of class relations on the observation that the haughty hedonists of Hollywood are largely Democrats.

Another thing this spokesman tells me is that more Kansans need to go to jail. In Kansas, he says, the "rate of incarceration went up forty-four percent in the nineties. In the rest of the nation, it went up 71.7 percent. So we are not putting people in jail" at the same rate as other states.