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

by Thomas Frank

  There is no level of scrutiny permissive enough to let these absurdities get by.* After reviewing such a list, a certain variety of liberal likes to apply the word “liar” to the leaders of the Right. But that’s not the whole story. Yes, there have been attempts to deceive in some quarters, and even deliberate misrepresentation of the facts from time to time. But more disturbingly, there is a certain remoteness from reality, a kind of politicized groupthink that seems to get worse each year as the Right withdraws ever farther into a world of its own.

  That Americans are increasingly separated from social reality is not some secret that I alone have deciphered; it is the logical result of decades of increasingly specialized market segmentation. It goes back at least to the days of sociological worries about the “mass society” and the things that TV was doing to our perceptions. Ironically, one of the most memorable expressions of this fear comes in the Tea Party’s favorite movie, Network, where the Howard Beale character—the one Rick Santelli and Glenn Beck were so widely compared to—rails on about TV’s fraudulence and the gullibility of his audience: “We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true. But you people sit there day after day.… We’re all you know.”

  These days Americans are ever more busily “self-segregating” into enclaves filled with people who think and vote just as they do—little Galt’s Gulches scattered all across the fifty states. The Internet, of course, has provided a gigantic playground for self-segregation—that’s the reason it exists; those who don’t follow the rule are “trolls.” There are separate sites for conservative social networking and conservative dating. Like-minded bloggers often link only to one another—it is considered a political sin to reference the other side2—so that their readers’ minds won’t be contaminated by exposure to contrary views.

  Conservatives inhabit a “very separate world,” declared the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg in 2009; a place of intense group identity where Fox News is the medium of record and the president is believed to follow a “secret agenda” that is invisible to the rest of the nation. This culture of closure also gives us the phrase “Don’t Believe the Liberal Media”—the slogan of the Media Research Center, an important player in winger Washington. When you consider that, by the standards of the MRC, virtually all traditional media is liberal media, you begin to understand that the center is calling for a deliberate cognitive withdrawal from the shared world.

  Although recent developments in mass communication have contributed to the malady I am describing, it is also true that times of economic catastrophe induce people to wall themselves off with airtight philosophical structures. When the credibility of tradition is shredded, it should not surprise us to see people retreat into pure utopianism, to cling to the ought-to-be when the actually-is really sucks. Despite the smug banker quoted in the Guardian Weekly story, ideology hasn’t ended in the Great Recession; ideology has triumphed.

  Intransigent Idealism

  “I don’t read books,” a Tea Party activist once told the historian Jill Lepore. “I read blogs.”3

  The line struck a chord with me. It brought to mind a book that I had been reading of late, Part of Our Time, Murray Kempton’s classic study of “the committed and the dedicated” during the thirties—Communists and fellow travelers, mainly—whose mind-set seemed identical to the one I saw among the blog-reading rebels of the contemporary Right.4

  Kempton brought the matter into sharpest focus in a biographical sketch of J. B. Matthews, a onetime radical who turned red hunter in the fifties, performing both roles with the same evangelical zeal, the same intolerance for ambiguity, the same “singular quality always to know in a flash without ever having learned.”5

  “Matthews saw what he wished to see, and he had no need of books for knowledge,” Kempton writes. Matthews was one of many who made pilgrimages to the USSR in those days, and Kempton tells us that on one of his visits a colleague was brought face-to-face with the spectacular catastrophe taking place in the Ukraine: the man-made famine of 1932. Here is how Matthews dealt with this embarrassing situation: he “insisted that there was no such thing, and anyway, look at India. He knew how to protect himself against shocks of recognition.”6

  As did many of his comrades. So many, in fact, that the persistent blindness of the Americans who visited the Soviet Union in the Depression would eventually become one of the great set pieces of thirties historiography. Lefty after lefty made the trek, and even the keenest critics among them managed to overlook what was actually happening to the Soviet people. Reviewing the blithe reports of these clueless tourists many years later, the novelist Harvey Swados marveled at how “the will to believe often triumphed over the evidence of the senses.”7

  What made this possible, Swados continued, was that the thirties were a time of “intransigent idealism.” No reports from the outside world could budge the certainty of the believers (until the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, that is). Malcolm Cowley, a star literary critic of the era, put it slightly differently: it was an “age of faith.” With social traditions shattered, people thought they had to sign up for one side or another in a coming showdown of ideological systems. It was, they thought, “either light or darkness, but nothing between.”8

  And so a generation of thinkers put themselves under the discipline of a clique of political con men. They convinced themselves that the laws of history were symmetrical, mathematical, predictable, and fully at the command of some distant Soviet generalissimo. They “set out to be redeemers,” mourned Murray Kempton, and they wound up as “policemen.” They excommunicated one another from their tiny Marxist conclaves over completely theoretical bits of trivia, they fully expected the world to someday come marching their way, and they deliberately taught themselves to produce awful, cartoonish art.9

  It was not really a malady limited to the ideological Left. There was a corporate version as well: the doctrine of positive thinking, and it was just as vehemently idealistic and as closed to the evidence of the senses as was the communist “will to believe.” The “age of faith” was in effect whether one was writing proletarian fiction or making the sale by adopting a positive mental attitude: both endeavors involved controlling one’s mind in order to filter transmissions between oneself and the outside world.

  In his towering 1937 bestseller, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill urged a kind of self-hypnosis on readers: they were to deliberately plunge themselves into a “faith” in their own success, visualizing money, imagining their future prosperity—and one day success, money, prosperity would actually materialize. Wishing would make it so. In his towering 1936 bestseller, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie urged readers to adopt a system of feigned regard for others, a sort of propaganda of the smile. The catch was that the regard had to be genuinely felt, and therefore had to be deliberately cultivated: another act of faith.

  The Consolation of Dogmatism

  Intransigent idealism like this has continued to thrive in the dark corners of American life, and during our own experience with economic decline it has flourished as never before. No, there has been no Marxist revival, but in their mania for Ayn Rand, the disgruntled ones have chosen the next best thing. Inflexible dogmatism is, after sociopathic shrillness and fast trains, one of the great selling points of Atlas Shrugged; the absolute, airtight correctness of Rand’s views on all things is always played fortissimo in the novel, always spoken with maximum emphasis. And Rand’s followers have traditionally brought the dogmatism to life with their zealous regard for the author’s views. Among the Rand cult, “‘objective reality’ was what Rand said it was,” remembers the libertarian writer Jerome Tuccille.

  “Morality” was conformity to the ethic of Ayn Rand.

  “Rationality” was synonymous with the thinking of Ayn Rand.

  To be in disagreement with the ideas of Ayn Rand was to be, by definition, irrational and immoral. There was no allowable deviation under the tenets of [her philosophy] Objectivism—which … quickly became a
kind of New Marxism of the Right.10

  When they weren’t banishing one another from the inner circle of the Rand cult, the novelist and her followers were determining, by dint of pure deductive reasoning, that cigarette smoking was life-affirming. Or that monopolies could not exist absent federal regulation. Rand warred on environmentalists, whom she had rationally determined to be enemies of progress; and against American Indians, whose expropriation was deserved because their culture transgressed her philosophical system in some way.

  Another place where thinking of this sort crops up constantly is in professional economics; indeed, the housing bubble itself could probably not have happened without the resolute determination of economists to blot out reality in favor of comforting myths of an all-seeing, superefficient market.

  The list of heavy economic thinkers who denied that there was a bubble in the real-estate market, for example, is long and shiny with glittering names, every prestigious one of them convinced that prices were being driven upward by fundamentals, as theory says such prices almost always are.11 More disastrous by far, though, was the economists’ push to roll back regulations against fraud in financial markets, on the smug belief that financiers were so keenly rational and so zealous to protect shareholder value that they simply would not allow fraud to happen. That fraud, in fact, happened in all sorts of catastrophic ways and at many different levels made no difference; theory canceled it all out.12

  Abstract reasoning like this is not solely the province of advanced thinkers; another place where you find it is, of course, the Glenn Beck empire. Parsing a recent performance by his former fave British rock band Muse on his radio show in February 2011, the host declared that he had changed his mind about the group, that for all their rebel lyrics they didn’t get what the conservative revival was about after all. Why didn’t they get it? Because they were Europeans. And Europeans, as everyone knew,

  have had very few glimpses of real freedom. Even when England won the Second World War, they didn’t go into freedom. That’s where the Road to Serfdom came from. Because Winston Churchill and many others all said, wait, what are you doing? We’re going the wrong direction. And it didn’t go to freedom, it went to the Road to Serfdom.

  Beck is correct that The Road to Serfdom, the famous 1944 book by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, was written as a critique of British politics, a warning that Labour Party socialism might lead eventually to totalitarianism. The book’s weakest point, as critics have observed over the years, is that Hayek’s main prediction never came true. Although Britain did go enthusiastically socialist after the war, it never abridged its traditional freedoms of speech, assembly, the press, and so on. The country even reversed itself in the seventies and swung energetically back in the direction of the market.

  But here is Glenn Beck, deleting all that because a favorite work of political conjecture published in 1944 predicted something else. Markets have to be free, or else other freedoms will disappear, Hayek had reasoned. Extending this logic was simple: markets weren’t free after the war; therefore freedom must have vanished from the scepter’d isle—and from Europe generally, leaving the whole continent sadly ignorant of “real freedom.”

  I quote the blundering Mr. Beck this one last time because his casual bit of historical cleansing reminded me of those thirties leftists on their trips to Russia. They saw freedom in the Soviet Union because they wanted to; Beck sees unfreedom in England because that’s what he believes ought to be there. That old “will to believe” still blithely overrules the “evidence of the senses.”

  We notice this intransigent idealism everywhere on the resurgent Right once we start looking for it. Senator Jim DeMint, for example, makes a point closely related to Beck’s in his 2009 bestseller, Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America’s Slide into Socialism. The nations of western Europe, he tells us, capitulated to “the siren song of socialism” after World War II and soon thereafter “declined into economic stagnation.”13 As it happens, this is incorrect, and in a really monumental way. As a brief check with the annals of reality reminds us, it was during those very postwar years that France, Italy, Belgium, and Sweden—all of them called out by DeMint for choosing socialism after the war—embarked on their greatest boom periods in modern times. But according to Senator DeMint’s theoretical guidelines, this is impossible: socialism always brings stagnation, and therefore socialism brought stagnation.

  Throughout his bestselling book, in fact, the senator seems to advance on his quarry not by proofs and demonstrations in the conventional sense, but by a process of abstract moral reckoning. In an important passage describing the 2008 presidential debates, DeMint criticizes the then senator Barack Obama for referring to “markets running wild after deregulation.” DeMint does not counter this statement by demonstrating that markets did not run wild after deregulation; he simply points out that the future president made these arguments and is therefore a man of “socialist principles.”14 DeMint’s object here is not to refute; it is to unmask, to close down an unacceptable mental operation. There is only one way that believers in freedom can interpret the meltdown of 2008, and they must stick to it whether it fits the facts or not.

  A taste for moral reckoning might also explain Senator DeMint’s fondness for fairy tales. He introduces one chapter with a meditation on the Three Little Pigs and another with some thoughts on the story of the Gingerbread Man. We have noticed this infantilizing tendency elsewhere in the resurgent Right, and here, as well as in those other instances, its implication is obvious: that political economy can be understood as the battle of good and evil. Government is the wicked witch, while the market is the fairy godmother, magical bringer of freedom and prosperity.

  What’s going on here is not merely a withdrawal into simplicity. If simplicity is what you’re looking for, the answers are almost too easy these days: Our leaders have been chasing the free-market dream for thirty-some years now, and for every step closer they’ve brought us, the more inequality has grown, the more financial bubbles have blossomed and burst, the more political corruption has metastasized, the harsher the business cycle has become. One caused the other; that’s the “simple” answer.*

  But the latest Right doesn’t so much simplify reality as idealize it. They’re in a place where beliefs don’t really have consequences, where premises are not to be checked, only repeated in a louder voice. It is as though the frightening news of recent years has driven them into a defensiveness so extreme that they feel they must either deify the system that failed or lose it altogether.

  In Pursuit of True Capitalism

  Writing in 1936, the culture critic Gilbert Seldes marveled at the “morbid passion for absolutes” which then gripped the minds of his countrymen. Purists of all political stripes were in voice in those days, and none of them found the deeds of Franklin Roosevelt to their liking. To “the radical critic,” the New Deal obviously didn’t go far enough; it left the capitalist system intact. To “the reactionary,” the New Deal reforms were objectionable for the opposite reason: they meant “the capitalist system has been destroyed.”15

  It is this latter complaint that concerns us today, and Seldes provided a helpful gloss on its long history. People had moaned as far back as the 1840s that allowing labor unions to exist would destroy capitalism, the author recalled, and sure enough, the form of capitalism they had in those days died, to be replaced by “capitalism modified by the right of collective bargaining.” The end-time fears returned, according to Seldes, when the federal government threatened to begin regulating railroads in the 1880s, and again the end of the world came to pass. Capitalism died, to be replaced this time by “capitalism modified by collective bargaining and Federal regulation.”16 Life went on.

  Today, as in Gilbert Seldes’s time, the fear that true capitalism is about to perish is with us again. Now, as then, only absolutes seem to matter. The panicked ones ignore the American genius for pragmatism and the long, complicated history of political compromise that actu
ally built our economic system. Instead they yearn for some class-war Armageddon, some wretched rapture in which losers forever lose and the honorable are finally freed from any obligation to the inferior.

  That there is no such thing as pure capitalism is a subtlety that eludes them. What they pine for is a system that can never exist, that has never existed, and that will never exist. And with every inch they bring us toward that ugly utopia, our society’s deterioration accelerates. But still they keep on, blinking out the facts of the past as well as the disasters their bad medicine is sure to bring. Nothing matters but the dream, and in its pursuit they will risk our prosperity, our health, and yes, even our honor.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Silence of the Technocrats

  Well, reader, we’ve had a lot of fun poking holes in the things conservatives say, haven’t we? They blow off the facts when they feel like it; they swipe symbols from the other side; they illustrate arguments on economics with fairy tales. The reasoning you used to hear on the Glenn Beck show seems like something from a brainwashing session at Lubyanka prison. It is preposterous. It is contemptible.

  But you know what it’s better than?

  It’s better than nothing.

  Let us recall, one more time, the original cataclysms whose memories today poison our every political moment: the financial crisis and the bailouts.

  Remember, the culprits of those cataclysms—the ones who wrecked the economy—were not punished for what they did; they were rewarded. By this I don’t mean they got away with a slap on the wrist; I mean they were laden down with billions and our blessings. Today they are rich in a way that you and I will never be able to comprehend. All of which happened courtesy of our government, the officials of which have conducted themselves ever since as though nothing really untoward happened at all. The bailout money will be recouped, they tell us. The experts understand these things.