Thomas Frank
Thomas Frank
Thomas Carr Frankis an American political analyst, historian, journalist, and columnist for Harper's Magazine. He wrote "The Tilting Yard" column in the Wall Street Journal from 2008 to 2010, and he co-founded and edited The Baffler. He has written several books, most notably What's the Matter with Kansas?...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
believe permitted whenever whereas
Whereas all liberals are thought to erupt self-righteously whenever they feel like it, conservatives believe that they themselves are never permitted to say what they really think.
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These sensibilities are old, 19th century, republican ideals. That attitude has pretty much gone away. I've been reading muckraking books from the 1930s, when there was still this intense hatred and fear of monopolies - especially newspaper chains.
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Can policy be both wise and aggressively partisan? Ask any Republican worth his salt and the answer will be an unequivocal yes. Ask a Democrat of the respectable Beltway variety and he will twist himself into a pretzel denying it.
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Iraqis are being targeted at an unprecedented rate. Wary of the ability of police and soldiers to provide protection, civilians are attempting to provide their own security, relying on neighbors and family or hiring armed guards.
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It's curious how this parallels what goes on in academia. In academic fields like cultural studies, there's a lot of emphasis placed on finding and celebrating instances of audience "counter-hegemony" or audience "agency" instances of people not acting in the way that TV or the culture industry tells them to - the idea being that people really do have free will.
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As we all know, Nike is a terrible exploiter of labor in other countries while advertising themselves here as being the bearer of "authenticity," with products that will put you back in touch with "real life." They even had a series of commercials several years ago about "the revolution," which was basketball when played from the heart and not for love of money.
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Allowing a private rather than a public entity to take over your toll road merely means that your tolls will have to be that much higher to cover their more expensive debt.
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For decades Republicans have made policy with a higher purpose in mind: to solidify the GOP base or to damage the institutions and movements aligned with the other side.
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American conservatism depends on its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making connections about the world, connections that until recent were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet.
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People understand how, with the concentration of ownership, the things that make up their lives are increasingly under the control of fewer and fewer hands. We see a great, popular demonology of corporate villains that especially tends to focus on the leaders of the culture industry, such as Rupert Murdoch, who is a very widely hated figure.
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Our current way of regulating the financial system is dysfunctional. Oversight is dispersed among numerous confusing bodies that at times have seemed to be racing each other to the bottom. Setting up One Big Regulator would end that problem.
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An appeal to reason in a dark time.
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A lot of populists after populism died just became socialists. At the beginning of the 20th century, socialism looked like it was going to take off. It didn't, of course, but a lot of people thought it was going to.
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Vibrancy is so universally desirable, so totemic in its powers, that even though we aren't sure what the word means, we know the quality it designates must be cultivated. The vibrant, we believe, is what makes certain cities flourish.