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Conservatism is not a doctrine of contentment. Not a doctrine for the satisfied and the smug. It's a politics that's at war with the world.

Thomas Frank

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Thomas Frank
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: March 21
Historian
Journalist
Kansas City
Missouri
Thomas Carr Frank
Contentment
Doctrine
Satisfied
Politics
War
World
Smug
Conservatism

More quotes by 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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If your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta.
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.
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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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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Yes, Democrats can prove that America pays more for health care than other countries yes, they have won the dispute that private health insurance is needlessly expensive. But what they've lost is the argument that we are a society.
Thomas Frank
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I was in a bad mood when I wrote that.
Thomas Frank
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People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about.
Thomas Frank
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Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn't successful - isn't even a city, really - unless it can lay claim to being 'vibrant.'
Thomas Frank
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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
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Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practitioners' persecution.
Thomas Frank
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Most of Roosevelt's innovations have been the law of the land for 70 years now, and yet we are still a free society free enough, that is, to allow tens of thousands of protesters to gather on the National Mall and to broadcast their slogans and speeches to the world via C-SPAN.
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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Conservatives may believe that impoverished borrowers destroyed Wall Street. But we liberals will not fool ourselves that stupid bankers sank conservatism for good.
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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Surrogate motherhood has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the years.
Thomas Frank
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I was never a fan of Barack Obama's bipartisanship routine.
Thomas Frank
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The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace.
Thomas Frank
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People are born in a certain place, and in a certain society. I don't mean to sound like a determinist, but to think we're entirely free to do whatever we want betrays a certain class perspective. For most people who have to work for a living, and work at jobs under conditions they may not like, it's just not simple when it comes to freedom.
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