Alec Whitmore

“Hot dogs are the kind of American that you know there is something deeply wrong with but still find endearing.”
― Jamie Loftus, Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs

“I’ve seen all the signs: the neon signs; the distressed wooden signs; the all-lowercase, chic-font signs that tell you a quirky girl just got her trust fund and you’ll never believe what business she’s trying; the irrationally angry sign saying you’ll have to fucking wait a little longer because it would appear that the workers don’t feel like coming to work anymore.”
― Jamie Loftus, Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs

“Now, all political parties are alliances of groups with disparate interests, but the contradictions in the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats posture as the “party of the people” even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on. Yet it will go on, because the most direct solutions to the problem are off the table for the moment. The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way. There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor, the one social movement that is committed by its nature to pushing back against the inequality trend. What we can do is strip away the Democrats’ precious sense of their own moral probity—to make liberals live without the comforting knowledge that righteousness is always on their side. It is that sensibility, after all, that prevents so many good-hearted rank-and-file Democrats from understanding how starkly and how deliberately their political leaders contradict their values. Once that contradiction has been made manifest—once that smooth, seamless sense of liberal virtue has been cracked, anything becomes possible. The course of the party and the course of the country can both be changed, but only after we understand that the problem is us.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

“Sanders was a living symbol of what the Democrats used to stand for, and party leaders didn’t seem to appreciate being reminded of how far they had strayed.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?