Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Frank

Frank is diagnosing a power imbalance that feels less like a policy failure than a cultural default setting. His line about losing an "institutionalized, organized way" to call business to task isn’t nostalgia for some golden era of regulation; it’s an accusation that accountability has been quietly privatized, outsourced to consumer choice and occasional outrage, then declared sufficient. The phrase "taking them to account" has the cadence of civic life - courts, unions, watchdog media, regulatory agencies - but Frank’s real target is the way those mechanisms have been hollowed out or delegitimized, leaving critique to float as vibes.

The kicker is "especially true in the cultural realm". That’s where corporate power can claim innocence: it’s just entertainment, just branding, just what people want. Culture is the perfect laundering machine because its products arrive as pleasure and identity rather than coercion. When a platform tweaks an algorithm, a studio shapes representation, or a sponsor sets the limits of acceptable speech, the effect is political, but the framing is lifestyle.

Frank’s subtext is that we’ve been taught to confuse expression with agency. We can "speak" through purchases, through posts, through fandoms - gestures that feel participatory while leaving decision-making concentrated in boardrooms. It’s an argument rooted in his larger critique of how populist language gets repackaged to serve corporate ends: the market becomes the tribunal, and the verdict is always rendered in profits. In that environment, "accountability" becomes a marketing department’s crisis plan, not a democratic practice.