Politics & Power Quote by Frank Dane

Frank Dane’s line lands like a courtroom quip delivered with a raised eyebrow: it pretends to defend fairness while quietly indicting who gets to be counted as deserving of it. “Square deal” is the bait. In American political folklore it’s a virtuous, level-playing-field phrase, Teddy Roosevelt cleanliness in two words. Dane hijacks that moral glow and yokes it to “a rich man,” exposing how easily the language of equity can be repurposed into a velvet glove for power.

The intent is less to define conservatism than to puncture its self-image. By shrinking “a conservative” to “a fellow,” Dane makes the type sound ordinary, even folksy, and that’s the sting: the worldview isn’t framed as a grand philosophy but as a reflexive loyalty to wealth. The sentence structure does the work. It’s not “who thinks everyone should have a square deal,” which would be ideology; it’s who thinks a rich man should, suggesting that the moral imagination stops at the top of the ladder.

Subtext: the rich already have deals - lawyers, leverage, access, insulation - so insisting they deserve a “square” one implies they’re being unfairly persecuted when reforms, taxes, or labor demands threaten their advantage. Dane is catching a familiar maneuver: recasting privilege as vulnerability, and calling any redistribution “unfairness” to those most buffered from unfairness.

Contextually, the joke fits the long American argument over whether conservatism protects institutions or protects incumbents. Dane’s cynicism is compact: when “fairness” is invoked selectively, it’s not a principle; it’s a defense strategy.