| PITY THE BILLIONAIRE The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right Thomas Frank New York: Metropolitan Books, January 2012 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-8050-9369-8 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-8050-9369-9 | 225pp. | HC | $25.00 | |
Thomas Frank specializes in chronicling the debasement of our political processes by the right wing of the Republican Party. He began by documenting how certain midwesterners voted against their own best interests in What's the Matter with Kansas?, continued with The Wrecking Crew, and turns here to the expansion of political derangement to a large faction of the American public.
"In 2008, the country's financial system suffered an epic breakdown, largely the result—as nearly every credible observer agrees—of the decades-long effort to roll back bank supervision and encourage financial experimentation. The banks' stumble quickly plunged the nation and the world into the worst recession since the thirties. This was no ordinary business-cycle downturn. Millions of Americans, and a large number of their banks, became insolvent in a matter of weeks. Sixteen trillion dollars in household wealth was incinerated on the pyre Wall Street had kindled. And yet, as I write this, the most effective political response to these events is a campaign to roll back regulation, to strip government employees of their right to collectively bargain, and to clamp down on federal spending." – Pages 2-3 |
"Nearly everyone in Congress believes they're helping to create jobs, whether they're voting for the giant stimulus package of 2009, writing up a tax loophole for a campaign contributor, or earmarking a 'bridge to nowhere'—heck, even supporters of the Obama administration's hated cap-and-trade proposal believe it will create jobs. "Ah, but according to the purified market populism of the conservative renaissance, those other members of Congress are simply mistaken. Government cannot create jobs; it's impossible by definition. The only entity endowed with this power is business, and the smaller that business is, the more potent its job-generating magic. Thus one of the great catch-phrases of the period: 'Government doesn't create jobs; you do,' as Republican freshman Nan Hayworth of New York put it in a speech to business leaders in her district. "One reason the Right fastened on the 'job creator' line so avidly is because it allowed them to flip the script of the hard-times scenario. When people were out of work, they insisted, the important thing was not stimulus packages or public works or social insurance; it was giving small-biz trade associations every last little item on their legislative wish list." – Page 96 |
The myth of fostering job creators is probably the Right's sharpest thorn. I can't improve on Frank's debunking.
Frank dissects the slogans the Right slings at us constantly: "Liberals hate business"; "regulations are stifling job creation by small businesses"; "tax-and-spend Democrats in government are out to wreck the economy and steal our freedoms;" "the Tea Party is a grass-roots movement standing up for the little guy."
In fact, slogans is all these are. As Frank reminds us, we should judge the right by what they do, not by what they say.
"Let me repeat, before we proceed, that what I am describing were the acts of conservatives: professional economists using crisis to impose whet they knew to be the correct social model—the market model—on nations that were not really interested in it. Also: that this really happened, that the economists talked about it openly. "To hear the resurgent Right tell it, however, the only place where you'll find such ruinous strategies in discussion are in the war rooms of the sneaky Left, as they plot to destroy the free market itself. In a curious inversion of Naomi Klein's argument, the rejuvenated Right fastened on a single flippant 2008 remark from then-incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel—'You never want a serious crisis to go to waste'—and convinced itself on the basis of this one clue that a cadre of left-wingers were planning all manner of offenses against democracy including, in some tellings, the overthrow of capitalism itself, with the financial crisis as a pretext." – Pages 118-119 |
Paradoxically, along with the Right's assertions that they alone understand how to cure the country's travails and restore prosperity to the middle class, they persistently paint themselves as unfairly impeded — by excessive taxes, by burdensome and unnecessary regulations, by "socialism" — from putting their superior competence into effect. Many claim to be oppressed by a tyrannical federal government, prevented by it from speaking their minds — even as they freely hold forth on Web sites, television channels, and in the opinion pages of newspapers like the Wall Street Journal.
"Self-pity has become central in the consciousness of the resurgent Right. Depicting themselves as victimized in any and every situation is not merely a fun game of upside down; it is essential to their self-understanding. They are the ones to whom things are done. This is the reason they have taken as their banner a flag that reads, 'Don't Tread on Me.' The slogan is a concise expression of the grand distortion that undergirds everything I have been describing: the belief that we are living in an age of rampant leftism; that progressivism is what brought the nation to its awful straits; that markets were born free but are everywhere in chains. "And so we have the works of Matthew Continetti, a journalist who specializes in profiles of victimhood: a catalog of every nasty thing anyone has ever said about Sarah Palin that he actually titled The Persecution of Sarah Palin; a cover story for the Weekly Standard about the persecution of the Koch brothers, two of the nation's richest men and most influential political donors, but who, it is Continetti's solemn duty to report, receive mean e-mails every day. They are in fact 'the latest victims of the left's lean, mean cyber-vilification machine.' Pity these billionaires, reader. *
* * "And weep for the Nation as the insolent words of the liberals fasten fast the chainy chains of Servitude around the neck of Liberty!" – Pages 124-125 |
Pity the Billionaire is noteworthy for the detailed analysis by which Frank demolishes any semblance of credibility on the part of this purportedly populist Tea Party movement. He has read many of the books produced by the Right, has attended their conferences and rallies; has researched their history of their major players. In short, he knows where the elephant sits, and he tells us in a most enjoyable way.
The book's most enjoyable features are the words of David Limbaugh's book Crimes against Liberty, quoted on page 125, to which the last line of the quotation above refers. Equally enjoyable, and more illuminating for me, is the dissection of Atlas Shrugged in the next chapter, with its revelation that its major character Hank Rearden was based on a Little Orphan Annie comic strip from 1935.
His next chapter, "He Whom a Dream Hath Possessed Knoweth No More of Doubting",1 explores the epistemology of the Right: how they are able to dismiss facts and keep ignoring what happens around them in the real world.2 He makes the valid point that when reality keeps throwing lemons at you, your tendency at some point is to duck and cover. He compares the free-market fundamentalism of the Right to the Left's blindness to Communism's faults when in the 1930s they visited the Soviet Union and saw (or perhaps refused to see) what was really going on there. But our twenty-first century regulated markets are hardly comparable to Soviet-style Communism under Stalin. In any case, acknowledging possible reasons for the problem of Republican intransigence takes us only part of the way to solving it.
At this point I must confess my problem with Thomas Frank's books: I find their extensive takedowns of right-wing delusion and duplicity tiresome. This is not an inherent flaw of Frank's writing; it springs from the fact that I have steeped myself in similar analyses. But that is why I was gratified to find his final two chapters of this book taking a different tack. There he takes the Democratic Party, and President Obama specifically, to task for essentially playing into the GOP's hands. The Great Recession called for another Franklin Roosevelt, but the president performed more like another Herbert Hoover. Democrats in general, during the health-care town meetings of summer 2009, refused to confront Republican attacks on their plan, instead delving into its minutiae as if that were the way to get the public on their side. Bill Clinton during his administration displayed many faults, but failing to meet his GOP antagonists head-on was not one of them.3
Frank's final chapter is a resonant warning of what will happen when the Right makes its logical next move, and the prospect is not a pleasant one.
So I judge this book a must-read for its well-researched inquiry into Right-wing "strategery", its cogent recommendations on Democratic response, and its prescient warnings about the future. (Indeed, less than two years after the book went to press we have seen, not just a threatened shutdown of government, but an actual one, brought on by Tea Party members in Congress.) And its extensive research, supplemented by thorough end-notes rich with print and online sources to consult, makes it a keeper.
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