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
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The public is becoming more engaged with this project as each new phase starts. We hope to address the very real concerns people have.
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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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We the people say it loud and clear every Election Day, in high-crime periods as well as peaceful stretches - More of our population needs to be behind bars.
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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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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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I actually don't express contempt for the rank-and-file conservative voters in Kansas. The conservative reviews of the book claim that I do, but by and large I am very respectful of these people. I certainly don't try to make these people sound crazy. In a lot of ways I really respect them.
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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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During the financial crisis and bailouts of 2008, it probably occurred to very few average people that we were entering a period of hardship for billionaires.
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In the last James Bond movie, the villain was a culture captain, a tycoon of culture, a Murdoch figure. It's not as if people don't know what is going on.
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Markets are interested in profits and profits only; service, quality, and general affluence are different functions altogether. The universal, democratic prosperity that Americans now look back to with such nostalgia was achieved only by a colossal reigning in of markets, by the gargantuan effort of mass, popular organizations like labor unions and of the people themselves, working through a series of democratically elected governments not daunted by the myths of the market.
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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.
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People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about.
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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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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.