12 Quotes & Sayings By Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank is a US-born novelist, essayist and columnist. In 2006, he won the PEN/Hemingway Award for his first novel, Listen, Liberal. He has also won a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Magazine Awards and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His work has been widely anthologized and translated Read more

He is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, a former fellow at the Lannan Foundation and a current fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.

1
To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you’ll need in the society of the future. Thomas Frank
2
Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system's first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exist to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials. Thomas Frank
3
There’s a reason you probably haven’t heard much about this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can’t be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn’t the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives’ beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its most unrestrained, has little use for smalltown merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place.. . Thomas Frank
4
We’re all free agents in this noncoercive class system, and Brooks eventually concludes that worrying about the problems faced by workers is yet another deluded affectation of the blue-state rich. Thomas Frank
5
He saw in Populism the first glimmerings of some of the great intellectual upheavals of the twentieth century–naturalism, muckraking, and hard-hitting social satire–which would eventually topple the genteel tradition of the nineteenth century. In a peculiar way, Parrington seemed to think, Kansas was one of the birthplaces of literary modernism. Thomas Frank
6
In 1991, though, began an uprising that would propel those reptilian Republicans from a tiny splinter group into the state’s dominant political faction, that would reduce Kansas Democrats to third-party status, and that would wreck what remained of the state’s progressive legacy. We are accustomed to thinking of the backlash as a phenomenon of the seventies (the busing riots, the tax revolt) or the eighties (the Reagan revolution); in Kansas the great move to the right was a story of the nineties, a story of the present. Thomas Frank
7
I think there's great potential for autonomy, but we have to remember that we live in a world where people may have free will but have not invented their circumstances. Thomas Frank
8
We are watching industries crumble, Wall Street firms disappear, unemployment spike, and unprecedented government intervention. And our designated opinion leaders want to know: Is Obama up this week? Is he down? And is his leadership style more like Bill Clinton's, or Abraham Lincoln's? Thomas Frank
9
Money has transformed every watchdog, every independent authority. Medical doctors are increasingly gulled by the lobbying of pharmaceutical salesmen. Thomas Frank
10
Liberal that I am, I support health-care reform on its merits alone. My liberal blood boils, for example, when I read that half of the personal bankruptcies in this country are brought on, in part, by medical expenses. Thomas Frank
11
While Democrats fussed with the details of health care reforms, conservatives spent months telling the nation that the real issue is freedom, that what's on the line is American liberty itself. Thomas Frank