Thomas Frank, best known for his "WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS?", is one of our best social and economic commentators, and well qualified to tackle the bewildering question of how the legitimate grievances of Americans wounded by the 2008 financial meltdown (and the accompanying Great Recession) have led to quasi-populist anger directed, not against the actual culprits or the political ideology that precipitated the crisis, but against Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, and the simple notion that government can and must help us through the current hard times.
Frank's bewilderment is evident from the outset. On the first page alone, he uses "miraculous," "incredible," and "astonishing" to describe the "recovery of the conservative movement from the gloomy depths of defeat". On page two, he adds "amazing," "unlikely," and "preposterous," trying to come to terms with "a people's uprising demanding that we bow down before the altar of the free market...only a short while after the high priests of [the free market] led the world into the greatest economic catastrophe in memory." It's a conundrum, to be sure, but by page 11, Frank has pulled himself together to summarize his book's task: "to explain hard-times conservatism, to understand the enthusiasm for an anything-goes economic arrangement that persists in spite of all the failures and bank-breaking catastrophes that our previous efforts...have inflicted upon us." In other words (and these are mine, not Frank's), to explain how it is that Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich can be the GOP's leading candidates while representing and advocating everything that went wrong in our economy and in our politics over the past thirty years.
I don't want to spoil Frank's narrative for you--as always, he writes (and thinks) with clarity and wit--but allow me to give you the gist of his argument. In the course of "PITY THE BILLIONAIRE," Franks credits (if that's the word) conservatives with a talent for political "mimesis," an ability to cloak themselves in a pseudo-populist outrage while advocating policies that protect the rich and powerful. American conservatism learned a thing or two from the 1930's and the 1960's; it learned "to understand itself not as a defender of 'the status quo,' in the famous formulation of the conservative organizer Paul Weyrich, but as a group of 'radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of the country.'" In the process, explains Frank, "aspects of the conservative tradition that were haughty or aristocratic were attributed to liberals. Symbols that seemed noble or democratic or populist, even if they were the tradtional property of the other side, were snapped up and claimed by the Right for itself." You need look no further than Glenn Beck's posturing as the true inheritor of Martin Luther King's legacy to understand how this works.
Frank notes conservatives' constant claims of victimhood and what he calls their "political economy of self-pity". "Their movement," he says, "has got such a beautiful heroic-outlaw thing going that it seems almost a deliberate buzzkill to point out...the river of tears that new conservatives cry for their own sufferings, bawling that they, not liberal darlings like minorities or the poor,* are society's true victims." "Self-pity," Frank continues, "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." Thus it is that a sympathetic biography of Sarah Palin is titled "THE PERSECUTION OF SARAH PALIN"; thus it is that Palin herself accuses opponents of trying to "crucify" Newt Gingrich. Thus it is that legislation designed to protect women's health becomes a "war on religion," because the Right must be always under attack so that decent Americans, ever inclined toward an underdog, will rally to its defense.
Frank also takes time to lacerate the cult of Ayn Rand and her gargantuan "ATLAS SHRUGGED," a libertarian cult novel which Franks associates with the propagandistic proletarian literature of the 1930's, only inverted ideologically. He references Rand's "wit-free writing" and her cardboard caricatures that take the place of real human characters, her tendentious misuse of history (a 1910 disaster on the Great Northern Railway in Washington State), and her "total contempt for humanity" (which he finds to be "her most repugnant" characteristic). Frank reproduces a bit of John Galt's manifesto (he's the hero of ATLAS SHRUGGED), and its resemblance to today's right-wing rhetoric is uncanny: "We have seen a proud, strong country fall to her knees," asserts the Promethean Galt. "Her people have become slovenly, inept, and irresponsible. We do not see any morality in working hard for the benefit of those who choose not to. We do not see any moral value in contributing to a society that seeks to rule, rather than govern, and steal from the Producers to give to them who are Looters and Moochers." Just substitute "job creators" for Galt's "Producers," and "takers" for "Looters and Moochers," and you're listening to Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, or Herman Cain.
Overall, marvels Frank, the American Right has lost its collective mind. "There is a certain remoteness from reality [about American conservatism]," he writes, "a kind of politicized groupthink that seems to get worse each year as the Right withdraws ever further into a world of its own." Frank notes the role of "niche media" (cable TV, internet blogs) in promoting what has been called "epistemic closure"--people tuning out and closing their minds to opposing views while consuming ever larger portions of their own ideologically friendly media (be it Fox News on the Right or MSNBC on the Left). He also acknowledges that "times of economic catastrophe induce people to wall themselves off with airtight philosophical structures," citing novelist Harvey Swados, writing about the 1930's, on how "the will to believe often triumphed over the evidence of the senses." The reality-based community, it would seem, is ever on the defensive, and particularly in hard times.
But--shouldn't reality prevail, regardless? Whatever the explanation for the delusory nature of today's right-wing politics, aren't most people able to see through such delusions? Why have the Democrats, why have liberals, why has President Obama failed to make a compelling, convincing case for the sorts of policies that are required by the present circumstances? In Frank's penultimate chapter, "The Silence of the Technocrats," he scathingly takes liberals to task for their failures (political failures and policy failures): from their handling of the Wall Street bailouts, to the stimulus package, to the Affordable Care Act,** Frank claims that iberals have repeatedly blundered, compromising away advantages, misunderstanding the mood of the nation, and being unable or unwilling to present a coherent world view in the face of determined opposition. Suggesting that liberals as a whole suffer from "terminal niceness," Frank accuses them of being unwittingly complicit in "nothing less than the decimation of their own grassroots movement [and] the silencing of their own ideology." Most damningly (and some would say, unfairly), Frank compares Washington Democrats to "the tragically incompetent British general staff of World War I, ordering assault after gigantic assault, only to see their armies annihilated one after another. But still they kept at it, ordering up another round of the exact same thing, playing by the gentlemanly rules of combat, never doing anything remotely clever, and always completely surprised when the other side introduced them to twentieth-century warfare in some brutal new way."
"It is that same blindness," Frank accuses, "that same fixed thinking, that we see in the strategizing of Washington Democrats," who will "no more acknowledge the possibilities of other tactics than they will abandon Georgetown and move en masse to some burned-out quarter of Baltimore." Democrats dismissed and disregarded the Tea Party opposition and the anger that fueled it, because after all "dismissing them is more attractive than engaging them" and because the all too evident "lunacy of the rejuvenated Right" made it easy to do so. But the Tea Party anger was real, if cynically misdirected, and it called for a corresponding populist response from the Left,*** which the Democrats' belief in expertise and in calm rational discourse left them unable to provide. In effect, says Frank, blind both to the nature of the opposition and to the exigencies of the moment, "Democrats pretty much left [angry voters] to take care of themselves. Instead, they built an enormous Maginot Line on the antilunatic frontier and sat there waiting while the attack came down an entirely different route."
You can take issue with some of this. The idea that liberals are just too "nice" to stand up to the bullying of conservatives is something of a stretch, as is the idea that liberals play by established rules while ruthless conservatives cheat. We can all come up with examples to validate such claims, of course, but we can all just as easily come up with counter-examples that invalidate them. Such generalizations are tenuous at best, and can't account for the actual political realities of our times: liberals, after all, win elections too, and even pass some legislation, sometimes using parliamentary chicanery to do so. I think Frank overstates the Democrats' supposed disarray and supposed helplessness in the face of right-wing obstructionism, but maybe I'm just an optimist.
Thomas Frank, on the other hand, is not in an opimistic mood, and "PITY THE BILLIONAIRE" is not an optimistic book, as the references to the Maginot Line and to "terminal niceness' make clear. Still, it's worth pointing out that, incompetence and blind intransigence aside, the British did end up on the winning side of World War I (I don't mean to overlook the tragic and unnecessary casualties). This "war," if we're going to call it that, between the enraged, irrational Right and the detached, defensive Left, isn't over; the Right's fevered excess may be its own undoing. Unable to find an attractive candidate who can turn seething resentment and widespread anger into acceptable mainstream rhetoric and sensible policy--unable, that is, to do more than pander to its fringe elements--the Republican Party may squander this opportunity yet, and our future may not be as dystopian as Frank's "Trample the Weak" scenario suggests. Or so we can hope.
Regardless, though, of how things turn out, "PITY THE BILLIONAIRE" is an excellent analysis of the unlikely rise of an unlikely conservatism, one that masks itself as populist radicalism while zealously guarding, at all costs, the fortunes and prerogatives of the guy on the Monopoly box and all his friends.
*Mitt Romney: "I'm not concerned about the very poor. They've got a safety net, and if it needs repair, I'll fix it."
**I always hesitate to disagree with my betters, but one caveat: Mr. Frank seems disinclined to acknowledge that the Affordable Care Act was an historic, if flawed, piece of legislation. Could it have been better? Most certainly, but it remains a huge step in the proper direction. Frank decries President Obama's strategic decision to "get the traditional opponents of health-care reform on board...and do the deal as an act of cold consensus. All the experts would be heeded. All the corporate and professional "stakeholders" would be taken care of." He compares this unfavorably to President Truman's pitting of the "everyday man" against "special privilege," and he sardonically notes how the Right expropriated such populist rhetoric against Obama. All of that is true enough. But still: Obama passed the Affordable Care Act, and Harry Truman, for all his "give 'em hell" fervor, never even submitted a health-care bill to Congress. Results, even imperfect ones, count for something, one would think.
***Enter, of course, "Occupy Wall Street"--but not in Frank's book, which was written before that phenomenom.
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