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The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.

Thomas Frank

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Thomas Frank
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: March 21
Historian
Journalist
Kansas City
Missouri
Thomas Carr Frank
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Watergate
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More quotes by Thomas Frank

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Joe Klein is the flower of American political journalism, a sharp raconteur who shows traces of the gonzo style that was in vogue when he was honing his craft at Rolling Stone back in the day.
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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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When done right - or wrong, depending on how you look at it - deficits remove liberal options from the table. Suddenly there's no money for building bridges or inspecting meat. Not surprisingly, running up a deficit is a strategy favored by the wrecking crew for its liberal-killing properties.
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Privatizing bits of the prison industry was a step in the right direction, but what we didn't have - until recently - were proper instruments for incentivizing the judiciary. That's what the 'kids for cash' judges were apparently experimenting with.
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Whereas 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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Acknowledging class was always difficult for 'New Democrats' - it was second-wave, it was divisive - but 2008 made retro politics cool again.
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Apparently, there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer.
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Back in the days when the market was a kind of secular god and all the world thrilled to behold the amazing powers of private capital, the idea of privatizing highways and airports and other bits of our transportation infrastructure made a certain kind of sense.
Thomas Frank
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When the entertainers of the right aren’t declaring their disgust with President Obama for groveling before foreign potentates, they’re pretending to fear him as a left-wing thug, an exemplar of what they call “the Chicago way.”
Thomas Frank
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In small towns, bored teenagers turn their eyes longingly to the exciting doings in the big cities, pining for urban amenities like hipster bars and farmers' markets and indie-rock festivals. Like everyone else, they want the vibrant and they will not be denied.
Thomas Frank
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Republicans run the machine when it's their turn, and then hand the wheel over to Democrats when the public has had enough.
Thomas Frank
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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
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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.
Thomas Frank
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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
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Above all else stands the burning question of bipartisanship. Whatever else the politicians might say they're about, our news analysts know that this is the true object of the nation's desire, the topic to which those slippery presidential spokesmen need always to be dragged back.
Thomas Frank
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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.
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The Obama administration's plan is to have the Federal Reserve regulate banks that might pose a 'systemic risk' if they were to fail.
Thomas Frank
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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
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Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders offer is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation.
Thomas Frank
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The pursuit of the vibrant seems to be the universal job description of the nation's city planners nowadays. It is also part of the Obama administration's economic recovery strategy for the nation.
Thomas Frank