Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right

by Thomas Frank

  Taking this tack allowed the renaissance Right to do a very remarkable thing: to pretend to be an enemy of big business.* Not because market actors misbehave, of course, but because big business is insufficiently capitalist. There is some truth to the accusation, naturally, since megacorporations do indeed lobby for subsidies, and bailouts, and government contracts, and even sometimes for regulation, which in a few well-known cases has been designed to protect existing players from new competition. But as ever, the particulars of the charge mattered less than the rhetorical thrust—the claim that the struggle for a purified free-market system was a revolt against big money as well as big government. This was the point of an amazing 2009 essay in Forbes magazine penned by soon-to-be-famous Congressman Paul Ryan and titled “Down with Big Business.” The giant corporation, Ryan wrote, could not be counted upon to defend capitalism in its hour of need: “It’s up to the American people—innovators and entrepreneurs, small business owners … to take a stand.”25

  False Flag

  It’s exciting to imagine a vigilant small-business everyman disciplining the giant corporation for its deviations from free-market orthodoxy, but that’s almost completely the reverse of what’s actually happening. The famous hedge fund manager Cliff Asness didn’t buy Paul Ryan $700 worth of wine at dinner one night in the summer of 2011 in order to placate a dangerous enemy and quell the possibility that an angry crowd of Wisconsin roofing contractors might soon come marching down Wall Street. He almost certainly did it because he approves of what Ryan and his fellow Republicans are doing. Small business is the face of the Right today because its pugnacious, anti-big-business message catches the bitter national mood; what the Right actually does is deliver the same favors to the same people as always.

  Which is to say that behind the mask stands the hated megacorporation itself, making all its usual demands for lower taxes, sedated regulators, and free-trade deals with countries where labor unions are unknown. It is a familiar phenomenon. In a famous 1951 study, the sociologist C. Wright Mills observed that the “fetish of the American entrepreneur” did not arise from small business’s actual economic accomplishments, but rather from “the usefulness of its image to the political interests of larger business.” Small business served big business, he observed, as a “front,” as a “concealing façade,” as a “shield,” as “shock troops in the battle against labor unions and government controls.” The entrepreneur

  has become the man through whom the ideology of utopian capitalism is still attractively presented to many of our contemporaries. Over the last hundred years, the United States has been transformed from a nation of small capitalists into a nation of hired employees; but the ideology suitable for the nation of small capitalists persists, as if that small-propertied world were still a going concern. It has become the grab-bag of defenders and apologists, and so little is it challenged that in the minds of many it seems the very latest model of reality.26

  Here in the twenty-first century, we don’t have to do a lot of sociological research to figure out that small business often acts as the populist front for the country’s most powerful actors; we need only turn on our TV and watch the obfuscations fly. The inheritance tax must go, we are told, not because it discomfits the rich but because it threatens family farmers. The Bush tax cuts must stay because small businesses will go under without them. Banking deregulation was done to help out small-town main streets. NAFTA was sold as a boon for entrepreneurial start-ups.27 Every now and then, someone will even come out and insist that there is no daylight between the interests of Wall Street and those of Main Street.28

  Let us take this moment to recall the loyalties of the remarkable Texas senator Phil Gramm, who delivered so many favors to the financial industry in the course of his career, like the repeal of the nation’s Depression-era bank laws and the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which made possible the energy-derivative trading business of Enron. Remember, though: Gramm did it all for the little guy. He fought to overturn those 1933 banking laws not to clear the way for lucrative and disastrous corporate mergers, but just to “make things simpler for anyone who has a checking account, car insurance or a share of stock.”29 Gramm even came up with his own salt-of-the-earth stock character to champion: one Dickey Flatt, a small businessman whose tax burden had to be weighed against the cost of any federal program before it could win the senator’s assent.

  Some on the revivified Right find it so easy to substitute small-business folklore for the complexities of the actual economy that it has apparently become a mental habit, a way of blocking out the unpleasant world we live in. Consider the example of Representative Nan Hayworth, whom we have already met flattering a group of small-business types for heroically creating jobs. In August 2011, Hayworth faced a group of constituents concerned about the opposite problem—the rampant offshoring of jobs by Verizon, one of the biggest companies in America. When those constituents asked Hayworth what she would do to solve the problem, the congresswoman launched instead into an elementary-school lecture on how small businesses operate—how people work hard, how they add value, and so on. “And that’s the way opportunity grows,” she summed up. This pleasant fable had nothing to do with the matter at hand, as Hayworth’s annoyed audience pointed out. For Hayworth, however, the political implication of her lesson was undoubtedly obvious: government must let the little guy do his thing—meaning entrepreneurs in their garages and global telecom conglomerates alike.30

  Nowhere is this kind of posturing more transparent than in the Tea Party movement, which understands itself as an expression of “the great American entrepreneurial spirit,” to use Representative Pompeo’s words again, but whose actual function has been to ensure that an economic collapse brought on by Wall Street does not result in any unpleasant consequences for Wall Street. Pompeo himself might serve as Exhibit A in this regard. During his run for Congress, he made much of his small-business experience and the number of jobs he had thereby created, as the expression goes. Upon closer inspection, however, Mike Pompeo’s organization seems like an extension of Wichita-based Koch Industries, the enormous oil-and-gas concern whose owners, as we have had occasion to note before, are generous funders of Tea Party institutions. Pompeo’s small business had been supported in its 1990s infancy by Koch venture capital; Pompeo’s bid for Congress in 2010 was underwritten by Koch employees; Pompeo spoke at Tea Party rallies organized by the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity; Pompeo’s chief of staff, once he was ensconced in Washington, turned out to have come from Koch, too. Even the issues on which Pompeo focused his efforts were also, according to the Washington Post, signature Koch concerns: zapping EPA regulations and defunding an online database where people can look up product recalls.31

  But what the sociologist Mills called “the ideology of utopian capitalism” blurs all this. The Tea Partiers aren’t the pawns of big business; because they believe in markets, they’re the sworn enemies of big business. Got that? And the way they’re going to take their revenge on the crony-capitalist behemoth is by attacking government.

  Recall, again, Paul Ryan’s famous Forbes essay, “Down with Big Business.” In it this conservative’s conservative painted a noxious picture of “crony capitalism,” telling us how lobbyists for the biggest firms cut deals with government and secured favors like the hated TARP, which Ryan called “an ad hoc, opaque slush fund for large institutions that are able to influence the Treasury Department’s investment decisions behind-the-scenes.” Which was accurate enough. What surprises is the direction Ryan’s animus takes us from this starting point: the problem, in his telling, was not lousy decisions by government; it was that government made any decisions at all. Thus his bizarre prescription for the situation: the way to bring big business “down” is to get government out of the game altogether. The problem with big business is big government.32

  The bald hypocrisy of this stuff should be obvious to anyone with an Internet connection. Once the GOP had reconquered th
e House of Representatives with talk like this, Paul Ryan became the instant crush of big-business donors, raking in massive sums from the banking industry (among others) within weeks of taking his place in the new majority.33 Money knew all along that his threat to bring it “down” was just another way of saying “I love you.”

  Paul Ryan wasn’t alone in trying to capitalize on the populist sentiment sweeping the land. One of the usual DC conservative outfits launched a website called “Big Business Watch”; the group’s director—another former colleague of Jack Abramoff’s, as it happens—insisted that “the tea party movement is as distrustful of big business as it is of politicians.” The only “big business” the group really cared to “watch,” however, was General Electric, which it accused in classic populist terms of being “an opportunistic parasite feeding on the expansion of government.” The company’s sin wasn’t offshoring or anything like that; it was that GE wasn’t capitalist enough: it subsisted on government contracts; it stood to profit from new, “green” energy rules; and most important of all, one suspects, it owned the liberal cable news channel MSNBC.34

  The muddle kept right on puddling. In 2010 there was even a proposal afoot for a “National Day of Strike” in which Tea Partiers were to take to the streets and confront big business—in order to stop it from backing liberal measures in Congress! On the surface, this too sounded like a full-blown uprising against capitalism. “Congress is controlled by powerful business interests,” one gung-ho strike supporter wrote. “Congress won’t listen to us, so it’s time to by-pass them and go above their heads on the totem pole of power.” A strike, the theory went, would force big business to restrain its lobbyists and stop the flow of “bribe money” to Washington; only then would liberalism finally cease. The plan, in other words, was to stage the biggest industrial showdown of all time on the basis of a colossal mix-up: the idea that big business was bankrolling liberalism; that liberalism existed because of corporate bribes; and that only through a general strike against corporate America could capitalism be saved. Over the last few years we have watched any number of lousy schemes win out, but here, for once, was an idea so breathtakingly bad that not even the Tea Party could make it work. Cars built with their wheels on the roof have trouble moving, and the great proletarian walkout on behalf of markets never came to pass.35

  CHAPTER 7

  Mimesis

  Mimicry is a familiar phenomenon in the animal kingdom, where moths have developed spots on their wings that look like the eyes of an owl, inoffensive bugs fly about in black and yellow stripes, and harmless snakes have learned, over the millennia, to frighten predators by shaking their tails in the dead leaves. They are mimic rattlesnakes, not the real deal. Don’t be afraid. Go ahead and tread on them.

  And in human affairs we have a conservative movement that has learned, over the decades, to mimic many of the characteristics of its enemies. The crushing experience of the thirties taught conservative leaders that it wasn’t a good idea to speak in the accent of aristocratic disdain, blasting the poor for not knowing their place. During times of economic collapse, no one loves a defender of orthodoxy or a self-appointed spokesman for society’s rightful rulers.

  And so, over the years, the movement came to affect a revolutionary posture toward the state that it might have borrowed from Karl Marx or Jean-Paul Sartre. It imitated the protest culture of the sixties, right down to a feigned reverence for anticommunist guerrilla fighters who were its version of Ho and Che. Conservative leaders studied the tactics of communists, applying them to their own struggles. And the movement 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.”1

  When the economic collapse of 2008 and 2009 came along, conservatism immediately positioned itself as a protest movement for hard times. 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 traditional property of the other side, were snapped up and claimed by the Right for itself.

  Bounces Off Me …

  There was, to begin with, a useful confusion in the early days of the economic debacle: was the Tea Party a phenomenon of the Left or of the Right? Its participants certainly didn’t accept the GOP label, which was still radioactive in 2009, thanks to the doings of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay. Maybe, certain commentators thought, this novel form of protest represented something altogether new.

  Glenn Beck, the emblematic figure in this mix-up, ritually claims to be a man beyond partisanship. He has deliberately imitated Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 march on Washington, and at one point in 2009 he suggested that he might have voted for Hillary Clinton had she won the Democratic nomination for the presidency.* In order to round out his right-wing conspiracy theories, Beck constantly pilfers left-wing imagery and arguments: his critique of the public relations industry, for example, seems to come straight from the pages of Noam Chomsky,2 while his famous charge of racism against President Obama was a clumsy attempt to use a weapon that conservatives feel is usually directed against themselves. The host has also hinted at the reason for his constant swiping from liberaldom. “America needs revolutionaries,” he says he once told Newt Gingrich. “Because what you are fighting are revolutionaries.”3

  The burning need to mimic the Left is also the theme of the National Review Online contributor Michael Walsh, who came up with a novel way to persuade conservatives to adopt the strategy. Walsh dreamed up a pseudonym, “David Kahane,” supposedly a rich, arrogant Hollywood radical, and proceeded to confess to his right-wing readers that liberalism was, in fact, an orchestrated, demonic assault on the responsible and productive, with every federal regulation and insulting TV show and crazy lawsuit part of liberalism’s grand plan for disaster. Rightists, “Kahane” insisted in his 2010 book, Rules for Radical Conservatives, were “in the fight of your life, up against an implacable foe that has loathed you and sought your destruction not for years or even centuries, but for millennia,” and they needed to understand how to fight back. The prescription for activist conservatives was obvious: Do exactly as those nefarious, successful liberals (are imagined to) do. “Pretend to be like us, so do what we do: lie. Adopt all of our manners and mores, right down to our mannerisms.”4

  Wingers needed to mimic the libs and “give no quarter.” They needed to act like ancient Visigoths turned loose on “the effete Romans.” Above all, they needed to reverse the age-old perceptions of which party represented the establishment and which the insurgent public. “We’re the Man now—fat, sassy, and socialist,” “Kahane” confessed on behalf of his fellow libs. “Which means we’re also ripe for a takedown.”5

  This is a pretty fair description of how the Right played things as conservatism signed up the nation’s unfortunates in what appeared to be a classic hard-times social uprising. On the surface, this uprising seemed to have all the necessary indicators: people with placards, people protesting banks and big corporations, people yelling through bullhorns, people organizing boycotts. There were marches on Washington and big talk about strikes.

  What’s more, it was cast as a people’s movement with no leaders. A movement that was so profoundly democratic, so virtuously rank-and-file, so punk rock, that it was actively against leaders. A movement that was downright obsessed with being “sold out” by traditional politicians, with betrayal, with guarding its independence and its precious authenticity.6

  At its most primitive, the crypto-leftism of the right-wing revival took the form of simple duplication, in which the signature images and catchphrases of liberals during the Bush years were swiped and echoed simply because it is perfectly legal to do so. Thus Michelle Malkin appears to have titled her 2009 Obama book Culture of Corruption for no other reason than that “culture of corruption” was a famous phrase applied to Republican officeho
lders in 2005 by Nancy Pelosi.* In 2010 Ben Quayle, son of Dan, announced his candidacy for Congress with TV commercials proclaiming, “Barack Obama is the worst president in history”—a description of George W. Bush that libs had been repeating constantly a short while before. (Quayle won, of course.) Conservative pundits learned to frighten their flock by describing Democratic plans to grab a permanent lock on the electoral system, a repurposed liberal fear from 2004 and 2005.7 Tea Partiers favored a variation on another famous Bush-era put-down—“Somewhere in Kenya a Village Is Missing Its Idiot”—while others on the Right sold clocks that would count down the days until Obama left office, just as their counterparts had done in the Bush years. Images of Constitutions being sucked into paper shredders, a popular motif during the early days of the Patriot Act, were picked up by an entirely new demographic. Meanwhile, opponents of the administration’s health-care reform also imagined—and boasted, with stickers and T-shirts—that they were on “Obama’s Enemy List,” thus shifting one of Richard Nixon’s most famous sins onto the shoulders of a man who was twelve when the enemies list was made public.

  Of course, all of this is much like writing a book called Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man as a response to a book called Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot—the I’m-rubber-you’re-glue school of disputation. It serves no purpose greater than sowing confusion.

  The mimicry becomes more interesting when it is taken to the next level, where an ideologue projects the sins of his own movement onto his adversary. Take, for example, that phrase of Barack Obama’s—that he would “fundamentally transform” America, a throwaway line Obama used once on the campaign trail but which was quickly magnified into a favorite Tea Party nightmare, sending a thousand would-be Paul Reveres through every cyber-age village and town. On the basis of that one ten-second video clip, the new Minutemen have determined that tyranny is on the way, courtesy of a would-be king who thinks he’s so smart that he can dispense with the work of God, the Founders, and all the accretions of the centuries.