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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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Thomas Frank
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: March 21
Historian
Journalist
Kansas City
Missouri
Thomas Carr Frank
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Principles
Way
Society
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Left
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Keep
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More quotes by Thomas Frank

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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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People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about.
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It is always a disappointment to turn from forthright consideration of some subject - whether from the Left or the Right, a poet or a plumber - to the Beltway version, in which the only aspects of the issue that matter are the effects it will have on the fortunes of the two parties and the various men in power.
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These days, of course, the focus of talk about popular liberation through products is mostly associated with the Internet. I've been collecting computer ads and ads dealing with Internet industries.
Thomas Frank
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For-profit higher education is today a booming industry, feeding on the student loans handed out to the desperate.
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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.
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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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Surrogate motherhood has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the years.
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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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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.
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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.
Thomas Frank
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As you watch the world crumble, try taking your Armageddon with this sprinkling of irony: Over the last three decades, business has got virtually everything it wanted, and its doomsday scenario from the 1970s has come true because of it.
Thomas Frank
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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.
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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.
Thomas Frank
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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.
Thomas Frank
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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.
Thomas Frank
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Governing was always difficult for conservatives, but as they return to the opposition, they are rediscovering their skill at blame evasion.
Thomas Frank
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Money never seems to be interested in strengthening regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives trading and in deep-sea oil wells.
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Public borrowing is costly these days, true, but interest rates on municipal bonds are still considerably lower than those borne by corporate debt.
Thomas Frank