Thomas Carr Frank (born March 21, 1965) is an American political analyst, historian, and journalist. He co-founded and edited The Baffler magazine. Frank is the author of the books What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004) and Listen, Liberal (2016), among others. From 2008 to 2010 he wrote "The Tilting Yard", a column in The Wall Street Journal.
A historian of culture and ideas, Frank analyzes trends in American electoral politics and propaganda, advertising, popular culture, mainstream journalism, and economics. His topics include the rhetoric and impact of culture wars in American political life and the relationship between politics, economics, and culture in the United States.
Early life
Frank was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in Mission Hills, Kansas. He graduated from Shawnee Mission East High School, and in 1988 from the University of Virginia with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history after transferring from the University of Kansas in his freshman year. Frank received a Master of Arts degree in history in 1990 and a doctorate in history in 1994 from the University of Chicago. His doctoral thesis on advertising in the 1960s, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, was later published by the University of Chicago Press.[1]
Politics
Frank was a College Republican, attending campus meetings at the University of Kansas, but became highly critical of conservatism. He summarized the thesis of his 2008 book The Wrecking Crew (book) as "[b]ad government is the natural product of rule by those who believe government is bad."[2]
Frank's research into U.S. populism was published as the book The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism (2020). In it, he examines the origin of the term in the United States and discusses historical examples of populism and its adherents and detractors.[7]
Personal life
Frank lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Wendy Edelberg, and their children.
^"Listen, Liberal". Listen, Liberal book website. Macmillan Publishers. Retrieved 8 November 2020.
^"Thomas Frank's 'Rendezvous with Oblivion' Calls for New History". Santa Barbara Independent. Aug 30, 2018. Retrieved 18 August 2020. To regain legitimacy with Roosevelt's great majority, Democrats have no choice but to dump the ideology of the nineties and end their decades-long love affair with high tech, big banks, and globalization.