This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It’s authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader-types from consultant-directed puppet-boys. – Thomas Frank
When you take somebody’s quote out of context, which happens all the time, nobody’s ever going to go and do the research on their own and figure out that you got it wrong. – Thomas Frank
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. – Thomas Frank
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
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. – Thomas Frank
The only truly individualistic health-care choice – where you receive care that is unpolluted by anyone else’s funds – is to forgo insurance altogether, paying out-of-pocket for health services as you need them. – Thomas Frank
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. – Thomas Frank
As it happens, Chicago is the nation’s leader in municipal privatization efforts. That’s right: The city that conservatives portray as the citadel of the power-grabbing, government-growing left has been selling itself off in pieces for years. It signed a 99-year lease for the Chicago Skyway, a toll road in the city’s South Side, back in 2005. – Thomas Frank
Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties; the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains. – Thomas Frank
Our laws governing lobbying and campaign contributions have struck the right balance between the wishes of the people and those of private industry, so why are we so quick to doubt that the same great results can be achieved by putting the government’s justice-dealing branch on the same market-based course? – Thomas Frank
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. – Thomas Frank
What is at stake in the debate over health care is more than the mere crafting of policy. The issue is now the identity of the Democratic Party. – Thomas Frank
What becomes fascinating is the way the culture industry doesn’t deny it and doesn’t try to mitigate it, but tries to sell its products as a way of liberating oneself. – Thomas Frank
One of the things I keep coming back to in my writing is that society doesn’t work on this mirror principle, you don’t have an exact replica on the left of what you have on the right. It just doesn’t work that way. – Thomas Frank
We have become a society that can’t self-correct, that can’t address its obvious problems, that can’t pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that – for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati – we can’t wake up from. – Thomas Frank
Is Wall Street the rightful master of our economic fate? Or should we choose a broader form of sovereignty? – Thomas Frank
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. – Thomas Frank
