The People, No Quotes

“The backlash against populism typically comes down to us from the citadels of higher learning—from think tanks, university presses, and academic conferences—but it is not a disinterested literature of social science. Although they don’t like to acknowledge it, the anti-populists are combatants in this war, defending themselves against a perceived assault on their authority. Which is to say that anti-populism is an adversary proceeding. Our thought leaders relate to populism not so much as scholars but as a privileged class putting down a challenge to itself.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“Anti-populism is all about despair. Its attitude toward ordinary humans is bitter. Its hope for human redemption is nil. Its vision of the common good is bleak. Its dark mood gives us books with titles like In Defense of Elitism and Against Democracy.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“After turning their backs on working-class issues, traditionally one of the core concerns of left parties, Democrats stood by while right-wing demagoguery took root and thrived. Then, after the people absorbed a fifty-year blizzard of fake populist propaganda, Democrats turned against the idea of “the people” altogether.17 America was founded with the phrase “We the People,” but William Galston, co-inventor of the concept of the Learning Class, urges us to get over our obsession with popular sovereignty. As he writes in Anti-Pluralism, his 2018 attack on populism, “We should set aside this narrow and complacent conviction; there are viable alternatives to the people as sources of legitimacy.”18 There certainly are. In the pages of this book, we have seen anti-populists explain that they deserve to rule because they are better educated, or wealthier, or more rational, or harder working. The contemporary culture of constant moral scolding is in perfect accordance with this way of thinking; it is a new iteration of the old elitist fantasy. The liberal establishment I am describing in this chapter is anti-populist not merely because it dislikes Donald Trump—who is in no way a genuine populist—but because it is populism’s opposite in nearly every particular. Its political ambition for the people is not to bring them together in a reform movement but to scold them, to shame them, and to teach them to defer to their superiors. It doesn’t seek to punish Wall Street or Silicon Valley; indeed, the same bunch that now rebukes and cancels and blacklists could not find a way to punish elite bankers after the global financial crisis back in 2009. This liberalism desires to merge with these institutions of private privilege, to enlist their power for what it imagines to be “good.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“At Pittsburg State University in Kansas, a mandatory stop on the itinerary of anyone writing about the Little Blue Books, Steve Cox and Randy Roberts were especially helpful. The one who is most responsible for my fascination with this subject, however, is Bridget Cain, who picked up some Blue Books for me at a junk shop in Lawrence way back when. Wesley Hogan helped me find my way through the civil rights journalism of Lawrence Goodwyn. Joe Vaccaro instructed me in the history of Minnesota radicalism. Matt Stoller furnished me with one of the best anecdotes in this entire enterprise. Liz and Matt Bruenig steered me toward probably a dozen more. Barry Lynn, who is as close to a populist as Washington, D.C., will allow, encouraged me throughout.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“For this project I interviewed the Reverend William Barber, Fred Harris, and Jim Hightower, three men who were enormously helpful in explaining the reform tradition and the power of mass movements. There are moments with all of them that I will never forget, but the one I am truly sorry I could not work into the text was when Hightower showed me a framed Texas poll tax receipt from 1964, a memento of a thankfully bygone era.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“What I mean to show is that the message of anti-populism is the same as ever: the lower orders, it insists, are driven by irrationality, bigotry, authoritarianism, and hate; democracy is a problem because it gives such people a voice. The difference today is that enlightened liberals are the ones mouthing this age-old anti-populist catechism.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“It takes a kind of hallucinatory bravado to call yourself a populist while cracking down on workers and ignoring antitrust laws, which the Reagan administration and its successors did. It’s like a banker calling himself a freedom fighter because he likes Basque cuisine. It’s like a slumlord signing his eviction notices, “Yours in solidarity.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“Fred Harris”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“WHAT THESE EXAMPLES show us is a generation of centrist liberals collectively despairing over democracy itself. After turning their backs on working-class issues, traditionally one of the core concerns of left parties, Democrats stood by while right-wing demagoguery took root and thrived. Then, after the people absorbed a fifty-year blizzard of fake populist propaganda, Democrats turned against the idea of “the people” altogether.17”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“What is certain is that the liberalism of scolding will never give rise to the kind of mass movement that this country needs.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“Urging a boss to punish a worker for an overheard remark is the kind of officiousness that people sometimes resent.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“opioids or unemployment or deindustrialization.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“red-shirted teachers in Arizona.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“ONE STORY OF the Trump years that sticks with me was related to me by a high school student who went to a discussion of political issues with a group of progressive teenagers in an affluent part of the Washington, D.C., metro area. The group’s leader went around the room asking the students what issues they considered significant and then getting a show of hands on the importance of each one. Racism was mentioned, and sexism, and LGBTQ issues, and gun control, and the environment. The student raised her hand and said, “Labor.” It was, she told me, the only suggestion that drew no support at all.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“Its characteristic goal is not to get banks and monopolies under control, as populism typically does, but to set up a nonprofit, attract funding from banks and monopolies, and then … to scold the world for its sins.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“a geyser of moral rebuke, erupting against teenagers who have committed some act of cultural appropriation, against the hiring of an actor for an inappropriate role, against a public speech by someone with unpopular views,”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“If you’re not interested in democratizing the country’s economic structure, however, individual righteousness might be just the thing for you. This model deals with ordinary citizens by judging and purging; by canceling and scolding. It’s not about building; it’s about purity,”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“Goodwyn also warned against a politics of “individual righteousness,” a tendency toward “celebrating the purity” of one’s so-called radicalism. If you wish to democratize the country’s economic structure, he argued, you must practice “ideological patience,” a suspension of moral judgment of ordinary Americans.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“LAWRENCE GOODWYN, THE great historian of mass democratic uprisings, once wrote that to build a movement like the People’s Party of the 1890s or the labor movement of the 1930s, one must “connect with people as they are in society, that is to say, in a state that sophisticated modern observers are inclined to regard as one of ‘inadequate consciousness.’ ”5”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“the power of higher ed”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“And then … the working-class hero in the Oval Office delivered a landmark tax cut for the rich. Trump deregulated Wall Street banks, too. With his attacks on Obamacare, the president did his part to make our capitalist system just a little more brutal and Darwinian for ordinary people. He turned over the judiciary to the elites of the Federalist Society. He turned over the economy to the Chamber of Commerce. He turned the EPA over to polluters. He ran the U.S. government in a way designed to enrich and empower himself. The one leadership task to which Trump took with enthusiasm—rolling back the regulatory state—is essentially an attack on one of the few institutions in Washington designed to help working-class Americans. If this is populism, the word has truly come to mean nothing.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“inaugural address, which Trump took as another occasion to denounce “the establishment” in characteristically Bannonesque tones. An assemblage of one-line clichés, it saw the billionaire declaring that his rise to the presidency represented no mere trade-off between parties but rather a transfer of power “from Washington, D.C.” to “you, the American people.” He also declared, in a shout-out to the 1930s, that “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer” and described the landscape of deindustrialization as “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“A bland technocrat straight out of the consensus playbook, Jimmy Carter represented a new kind of Democrat—a post–New Deal centrist who campaigned with vague populist niceness but whose true affection was reserved for ultra-competent policy experts. This understanding of liberal leadership would far outlast Carter’s political career: we would see it again in the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, two more true believers in meritocracy who also thought to present themselves as kindly reformers on the side of ordinary people.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“Carter’s victory was the great opportunity for Democrats to show what they could do for the vast majority of the population. Instead they did next to nothing. Oh, they were able to get a big capital-gains tax cut passed, all right—and if you’re looking for the roots of today’s extreme inequality, it’s a good place to start. Carter’s Democrats deregulated airlines and trucking. They embraced austerity as inflation mounted higher and higher. They stood by indifferently as an employer counterattack squashed the decade’s militant unionism. When it came to New Deal programs like a proposed full-employment scheme, they proved to be worse than useless.19 What the Carter team really cared about was fighting inflation and balancing the budget, anti-populist causes for which they were willing to accept spiraling unemployment. When his handpicked Fed chairman, Paul Volcker, chose to tackle inflation by jacking interest rates up to a now unthinkable 20 percent, he sent the economy into a sharp recession that, in turn, scorched Carter’s hopes for a second term. As for the ordinary Americans who were hard hit by the shutting down of prosperity, Volcker had this winning admonition: “The standard of living of the average American has to decline.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“Fifty years later, as the commission’s last surviving member, Harris often commented on its legacy. See, for example, the op-ed that he co-authored for the New York Times, “The Unmet Promise of Equality,” February 28, 2018.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“Oklahoma senator Fred Harris, who ran for president as a Democrat in 1976.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“Bayard Rustin wrote one of the most perceptive takes on this situation back in 1971—so perceptive that it might have been written in 1980, or 2000, or yesterday: The potential for a Republican majority depends upon Nixon’s success in attracting into the conservative fold lower-middle-class whites, the same group that the [liberal] New Politics has written off. The question is not whether this group is conservative or liberal; for it is both, and how it acts will depend upon the way the issues are defined. If they are defined as race and dissent, then Nixon will win. But if, on the other hand, they are defined so as to appeal to the progressive economic interests of the lower middle class, then it becomes possible to build an alliance on the basis of common interest between this group and the black community.4”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“Social class was a persistent stumbling block for the New Left. One anecdote Miller relates in his history of SDS is how the group’s organizers, trying to bring together the unemployed in several northern cities, eventually lost interest in the poor folks they were trying to help—because those poor folks often turned out to think America needed to fight communism in Vietnam.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“SDS’s wildly optimistic first principle: that all humans were “infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy