The Working Life of a Professional Cynic
Thomas Frank, master of sarcasm and chief polemicist for Harper’s Magazine, is a treasure of the anxious, aggravated left. He recently made a demonstration of happy defiance in the face of accelerating social disaster in an interview with The Financial Times.
Thomas Frank, master of sarcasm and chief polemicist for Harper’s Magazine, is a treasure of the anxious, aggravated left. He recently made a demonstration of happy defiance in the face of accelerating social disaster in an interview with The Financial Times.
Frank is the author most recently of “Pity the Billionaire,” a consideration of the right’s glorious return during the fallout of the 2008 crash from an ignominy earned during eight years of George W. Bush. His essays can be read monthly in Harper’s and in The Baffler, a triannual journal of art and criticism.
— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
Your support matters…The Financial Times:
What drives you on?
A fascination with paradox and irony. It’s definitely not a faith that my political views will one day triumph; the experience of the past few years has ended any hopes in that regard. Irony and paradox are what’s left to us.
What has been your greatest disappointment?
How to choose? I signed up for a life of disappointments: organised labour, Liberal Democrats, academia, print journalism – every one of them either a failure or near collapse.
If you lost everything tomorrow, what would you do?
I would probably change sides. The right needs a few able polemicists – the bunch they’ve got now are so dreadful – and everyone knows they pay much better than the liberals.
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“Every problem that the editorialists fret about today will get worse,” Harper’s Magazine columnist and author Thomas Frank told an audience in November. “Inequality, global warming, financial bubbles, one after another. But it won’t matter. On America will go, chasing the only ideology that our country has left, down into the seething Arcadia of all against all.”
It’s all Obama’s fault that the public appears at times to be waking up from a stupor generated by 30 years of class warfare, says the confused rich guy in a high-rise in the neighborhood you can’t afford to spit in.
Thomas Frank, one of the country’s leading elegists of American representative democracy and a columnist for Harper’s Magazine, has spent his career chronicling the nation’s descent into plutocracy. This week he sang against the forces of free-market dominion on Bill Moyers’ television show.
Dear Tea Party Movement: You should get behind Mitt Romney, the charging Massachusetts RINO, because—in a certain paradoxical way—he may turn out to be the truest of all the candidates to the spirit of your movement.
“Pity the Billionaire,” the new book by Harper’s Magazine columnist Thomas Frank, surveys the politics of the last three years to determine why the American right survived and thrived after an economic crash caused by a 30-year love affair with the so-called free-market that it procured. Salon speaks to Frank by phone.
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