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

by Thomas Frank

  6. Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen, Mad As Hell: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System (New York: Harper, 2010), p. 144.

  7. Forbes also says he is going to supply a “Real World Lesson,” but then immediately goes into one of those abstract fables economists love about what it would be like if government manufactured pencils, and then starts reminding us that things didn’t work well in communist countries. Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames, How Capitalism Will Save Us: Why Free People and Free Markets Are the Best Answer in Today’s Economy (New York: Crown Business, 2011), p. 14.

  8. C. Jesse Duke, Spread This Wealth (And Pass This Ammunition) (Amelia Island, FL: Encouraging Word Press, 2009), pp. 69–70. Emphasis added.

  9. This is a widely shared view of the newest Right. “Consumers in free markets uncorrupted by regulatory favoritism vote untold millions of times a day,” write Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe, “punishing irrational behavior, bad actors, and liar loans with equal and swift justice.” Give Us Liberty, p. 169, emphasis added.

  10. Sidney Lens, “The Moral Roots of the New Despair,” Christian Century, February 26, 1975.

  11. Glenn Beck, Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government (New York: Threshold Editions, 2009), pp. 4–5. Beck’s emphasis.

  12. “It was one of the more extraordinary events in the annals of American populism,” wrote Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, “the common man voluntarily giving money to make the rich richer.” “The Elite Behind the Tea Party,” Washington Post, October 20, 2010.

  Chapter 5. Making a Business of It

  1. See, for example, the op-ed Phil Kerpen published on April 13, 2009, in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

  2. Mike Pompeo in a debate found on YouTube, dated September 23, 2010, and available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXucbtDUl4M&feature=related.

  3. Will Bunch, The Backlash: Right-wing Radicals, High-def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama (New York: Harper, 2010), p. 209.

  4. See http://www.vmionline.com/secrets/slanding.html (accessed December 15, 2010).

  5. The first item in this list is described in Alan Crawford’s Thunder on the Right (New York: Pantheon, 1980); read up on the others in my book The Wrecking Crew (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008).

  6. According to Will Bunch, Judson Phillips denounced a group of disgruntled Tea Partiers thusly: “I want you to know that they’re socialists.” The Backlash, p. 212.

  7. Chuck Norris, foreword to Mark Karis, Don’t Tread on Us: Signs of a 21st Century Political Awakening (Los Angeles: WND Books, 2010), n.p.

  8. The consultancy is Russo Marsh + Rogers. For more, see Kenneth P. Vogel, “GOP Operatives Crash the Tea Party,” Politico, April 4, 2010, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/35785.html.

  9. “GOOOH stands for ‘Get Out of Our House’ and is pronounced like the word ‘go,’” reads a pamphlet for the group that I picked up at the Liberty XPO in September of 2010. The iCaucus “Big Stick” plan was also outlined in literature distributed there. iCaucus has numerous other plans for reforming Congress, which it outlines on its website. “The Answer We’ve All Been Waiting for Has Arrived!” is printed on business cards distributed by a group that seems to be called the ReFounders of America! (The exclamation point is part of the name.) In addition to the “Redeclaration of Independence,” its website offers a long list of proposed amendments to the Constitution, one of which would outlaw lobbying. We Read the Constitution can be found, obviously, at http://www.wereadtheconstitution.com/.

  10. See “Rocking the Town Halls—Best Practices,” a memo describing a conservative “action” at a town hall meeting in May 2009. It is available at http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/townhallactionmemo.pdf.

  11. See “Hedrick Urges Social Security Privatization,” Vancouver Columbian, August 13, 2010: “The Race Is on for a Wide Open U.S. House seat,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 24, 2010; and “Hedrick Throws His Support to Herrera,” Vancouver Columbian, August 19, 2010.

  Chapter 6. A Mask for Privilege

  1. C. Jesse Duke, Spread This Wealth (And Pass This Ammunition) (Amelia Island, FL: Encouraging Word Press, 2009), p. 19.

  2. See Rolling Stone’s profile of Don Blankenship, “The Dark Lord of Coal Country,” in the issue dated November 29, 2010.

  3. See the New York Times’ news story and editorial on the subject, June 29 and 30, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/opinion/01fri3.html.

  4. “Core competence” of the Tea Party: http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/14194. “Political entrepreneurs”: see Surface Tension: Tea Parties and the Political Establishment, a report by the Sam Adams Alliance on the Tea Party movement dated October 13, 2010. The term “early adopters” was applied to Tea Partiers in that same firm’s much-discussed “market research report” on the movement, The Next Wave: A Surf Report, dated August 1, 2010. Read “Surface Tension” at http://www.samadamsalliance.org/media/17350/surface%20tension.pdf and “The Next Wave” at http://www.samadamsalliance.org/media/13655/94813%20sam%20adams%20alliance%20-%20next%20wave%20report%20v4%20final.pdf.

  5. The work of management theory is The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (New York: Portfolio), a 2006 book by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. The list of favorite CEOs could be found here as of the summer of 2010: http://stlouisteaparty.com/brave-ceos/.

  6. Don Crist: What Can I Do?: After the Tea Party (NP: np, 2009), p. 145. Stephen D. Hanson: Transcending Time with Thomas Jefferson: Is the Constitution Still Applicable Today? (New York: iUniverse, 2010), p. 253. DeMint, Saving Freedom, pp. 15–17.

  7. On Herman Cain and Bill Clinton, see “The Lost Chance,” Newsweek, September 18, 1994. On Cain and “the real folk,” see the Washington Times interview with him, July 20, 2011.

  8. On Glenn Beck’s roots, see chapter 9 of The Real America: Messages from the Heart and Heartland (New York: Pocket, 2005). “Spirit of America”: according to the official transcript of Beck’s program for October 22, 2009.

  9. Small Business Bill of Rights: http://www.kirkforsenate.com/?page_id=1274. Canseco: http://www.cansecoforcongress.com/, accessed April 13, 2011.

  10. Robb Mandelbaum, “Meet the New Small Business Owners in Congress,” New York Times, November 16, 2010, http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/meet-the-new-small-business-owners-in-congress/?scp=1&sq=small%20business%20congress&st=cse.

  11. “The question is, ‘Are we going to be living by the same rules that apply to every family, every small business and 49 states, which is, that they cannot spend more money than they have?’” said Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming after the debate ended. See http://www.voanews.com/english/news/Obama-Signs-Debt-Bill-US-Avoids-Default-126600373.html.

  12. Nan Hayworth: see the report dated January 28, 2011, in the Westfair Business Publications, http://westfaironline.com/2011/10481-leave-jobs-creation-to-business-says-congresswoman/. Glenn Beck: see the Glenn Beck TV programs for March 5 and October 27, 2009.

  13. A particularly painstaking debunking of the myths of small-business job creation and innovation can be found in “What Do Small Businesses Do?,” a Brookings Paper on Economic Activity by economists Erik Hurst and Benjamin Wild Pugsley of the University of Chicago, dated August 2011. Another is “Who Creates Jobs? Small vs. Large vs. Young,” by economists John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, and Javier Miranda, a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper from 2010.

  For a decent journalistic summary of the debunkment, see Steven Pearlstein, “Small Business, Big Fable,” Washington Post, July 8, 2009. According to Scott Shane, a professor of entrepreneurial studies, the true numbers are just about the reverse of what the propagandists of small business would have us believe. In an article he wrote for the New York Times website on August 5, 2009, Shane used Small Business Administration numbers to show that the largest businesses (those with over five hundred employees) created 36 percent of jobs over the peri
od 1992–2008, followed by medium-size businesses (those with between fifty and five hundred employees), which created 30 percent. The smallest businesses created the fewest jobs. Read more at http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/are-medium-sized-businesses-the-job-creators/.

  14. See http://www.davidrivera.org/issues.html, accessed August 27, 2011.

  15. According to the transcript of Ronald Reagan’s speech on the website of the “American Presidency Project,” http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=41324.

  16. See Virginia Postrel, “Populist Industrial Policy,” Reason, January 1994.

  17. See, for example, the actual editorial denouncing “socialism” circulated by the Conference of American Small Business Organizations in 1949 and quoted by John H. Bunzel in The American Small Businessman (New York: Knopf, 1962), p. 109.

  18. According to an item dated November 1, 2010, found on Pat Meehan’s website: http://www.meehanforcongress.com/news/heading-into-election-day-pat-meehan-reiterates-his-commitment-to-improving-economy. This is actually incorrect; the stimulus and the bailout were two separate things.

  See Robb Mandelbaum, “Whom Does the N.F.I.B. Represent (Besides Its Members)?,” a contribution to the New York Times’ small-business blog, August 26, 2009. Read it at http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/whom-does-the-nfib-represent-besides-its-members/. This is an old story in small-business politics. Richard Lesher’s 1996 account of small-business involvement in the Gingrich Revolution, Meltdown on Main Street (New York: Dutton, 1996), claims that the famous freshman class of 1994 “[are] all over the lot on volatile social issues such as abortion,” but that they speak with one voice “in their outspoken criticism of big government” (p. 11).

  19. I am referring to Richard Lesher’s 1996 book, Meltdown on Main Street, which supplies a seemingly endless tattoo of such tales.

  20. Read the interview at http://www.alternet.org/story/148941/?page=entire.

  21. See Jonathan J. Bean, “Shame of the Cities: Setting Aside Justice for the ‘Disadvantaged,’” Independent Review 7, no. 1 (Summer 2003). See also Bean’s longer essay, “‘Burn, Baby, Burn’: Small Business in the Urban Riots of the 1960s,” Independent Review 5, no. 2 (Fall 2000).

  22. Richard A. Viguerie, “Bloomberg Vindicates Tea Party Outrage over Favors to Wall Street Aristocracy,” an essay posted on Conservative HQ on August 24, 2011. Read it at http://www.conservativehq.com/article/bloomberg-vindicates-tea-party-outrage-over-favors-wall-street-aristocracy

  23. NRA was Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration of 1933–35, which wrote “codes” for various industries in cooperation with the big players in each. OPA was the Office of Price Administration, which set price controls during World War II. OPM was the Office of Production Management in that same period. WPB was the War Production Board, which coordinated industry. Bunzel, The American Small Businessman, p. 118, emphasis in original.

  24. Bunzel notes that one of the “standard works on small business … is dedicated simply to ‘The American Way of Life’” (ibid., p. 20).

  25. This line appears near the beginning of Paul Ryan’s essay “Down with Big Business,” Forbes, December 11, 2009.

  26. C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 35, 49, 52, 53, 34.

  27. Banking deregulation: see “Banking Deregulation Helps Small-Business Owners Stabilize Their Income,” a paper published in the Regional Economist, a magazine issued by the Saint Louis Fed, in April of 2007, just a month after the first shock of the financial crisis. NAFTA: see the 1993 Heritage Foundation report on NAFTA, Why the Governors Support the NAFTA (and Washington Doesn’t), available at http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/1993/06/bg946nbsp-why-the-governors-support-the-nafta.

  28. Dick Armey, for example, stated this unfortunate principle back in 2008 when Mike Huckabee was riding high in Republican primaries. “One of his [i.e., Huckabee’s] favorite lines is that he represents the interests of ‘Main Street, not Wall Street,’” Armey wrote on the FreedomWorks website. “But this assumes that the interests of the two are not in alignment, that somehow, one group can only gain at the expense of the other—never mind that the jobs and livelihoods of America’s workers and small towns are tied inexorably with the larger economy.” See http://www.freedomworks.org/news/huckabees-counterproductive-sweet-talk.

  29. Phil Gramm, “Reform Will Simplify Banking,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 16, 1999.

  30. This particular exchange, which took place on August 12, 2011, must be seen to be believed. One place to watch it is on YouTube: http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAWvVTMz5o0&feature=player_embedded#!

  31. Dan Eggen, “GOP Freshman Pompeo Turned to Koch,” Washington Post, March 20, 2011.

  32. Ryan, “Down with Big Business.”

  33. Dan Eggen and T. W. Farnam, “GOP House Leaders See Corporate Donations Surge,” Washington Post, January 22, 2011.

  34. The first quotation comes from Amy Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research; it appeared in a blog entry dated October 29, 2010. The second one is by Tom Borelli, director of the NCPPR’s Free Enterprise Project. The “opportunistic parasite” phrase first appeared in a press release dated July 28, 2010 (http://www.nationalcenter.org/PR-GE_Jet_072810.html).

  35. Numerous right-wingers talked up the idea of a national Tea Party strike; CNN’s “political ticker” ran a report on the strike on January 4, 2010. The particular enthusiast I am quoting is one Mike McGowan, who blogged on the subject on January 5, 2010. See http://whenfallsthecoliseum.com/2010/01/05/the-tea-partys-national-day-of-strike/.

  Chapter 7. Mimesis

  1. Cynicism, protest tactics, guerrilla fandom, mimicking communist tactics: see my book The Wrecking Crew, chapters 3 and 6. Weyrich: John S. Saloma III, Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984), p. 49.

  2. For more on this, see my article “The Confessions of Glenn Beck,” Harper’s, March 2011.

  3. Another example: in 2009, Glenn Beck professed nearly daily outrage that Barack Obama desired to “fundamentally transform” the country, but by the beginning of 2011, Beck had decided to make that phrase his own; “fundamental transformation” was now “required,” he said—provided it followed Beck’s own instructions. See Beck’s TV program for January 4, 2011. His comments to Newt Gingrich were related to listeners of his radio show on May 17, 2011, according to the transcript on glennbeck.com.

  4. David Kahane (Michael A. Walsh), Rules for Radical Conservatives: Beating the Left at Its Own Game to Take Back America (New York: Ballantine, 2010), pp. 155, 159.

  5. Ibid., pp. 180, 217, 226, 160.

  6. Of course, it was no such thing. According to political scientist David Campbell and sociologist Robert Putnam, Tea Party activists tended to be highly partisan Republicans before the Tea Party conquered the headlines in 2009. See Campbell and Putnam, “Crashing the Tea Party,” New York Times, August 16, 2011.

  7. See, for example, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/Examiner-Opinion-Zone/matthew-vadum-The-Lefts-Blueprint-for-perpetual-power-94527604.html.

  8. See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (New York: Metropolitan, 2007), pp. 6–7.

  9. Glenn Beck, The Overton Window, p. 147.

  10. Ibid., pp. 74, 276, 286, 296–97, and again on 303–4.

  11. FEMA’s plans also would have outlawed strikes. See Jack Anderson’s column on the subject, September 25, 1984. See also Alfonso Chardy, “Reagan Advisers Ran ‘Secret’ Government,” Miami Herald, July 5, 1987.

  12. According to the historian David Caute, the act included a measure “providing for camps in times of national emergency, invasion or insurrection to detain without trial anyone who had been a member of the Communist Party since January 1, 1949.” Caute, The Great Fear (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 39. Harry Truman vetoed the McCarran bill, but it was passed anyway; most of it was later struck down by the Supreme Court.


  13. Charly Gullett, Official Tea Party Handbook: A Tactical Playbook for Tea Party Patriots (Prescott, AZ: Warfield Press, 2009), pp. 39–40. It is also worth recalling that in 2004, future Tea Party darling Michelle Malkin wrote a book about the roundup of Japanese Americans during World War II that was entitled In Defense of Internment: The Case for “Racial Profiling” in World War II and the War on Terror.

  14. Michael Graham, That’s No Angry Mob, That’s My Mom (Washington, DC: Regnery 2010), pp. 5–6.

  15. Matthew Continetti’s “Paranoid Style in Liberal Politics” appeared in the Weekly Standard for April 4, 2011. The cover of the magazine depicted the Kochs being burned at the stake. Like Joan of Arc, I guess.

  16. David Limbaugh, Crimes Against Liberty (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2010), pp. 210, 213, 231, 219, 221, 220, 233.

  17. “Beat them at their own game,” FreedomWorks reading list: Kate Zernike, Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America (New York: Times Books, 2010), pp. 47, 38–39, 46. Armey and Kibbe, Give Us Liberty, pp. 97, 167, 174. The book on nonviolent protest that inspired FreedomWorks is A Force More Powerful, by Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall. Zernike tells us how it influenced FreedomWorks personnel on page 47 of Boiling Mad. See also this April 2009 essay by FreedomWorks campaign director Brendan Steinhauser: http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/bstein80/we-are-all-community-organizers-now.

  18. Zernike, Boiling Mad, p. 39.

  Chapter 8. Say, Don’t You Remember

  1. Wizard of Oz references recur with alarming frequency in the Beck oeuvre. In addition to the political uses I describe here (for an example, see Beck’s “Welcome” in Fusion magazine for April 2010), he wrote a book of teenage spiritual awakening, The Christmas Sweater, in which he uses the familiar plot of the movie to describe the protagonist’s moral epiphany. The boy decides to “come home” by walking through a swirling storm, leaving behind an awful monochrome cornfield for a beautiful “Technicolor” landscape. The story ends with the teenager waking up from a deep sleep and realizing that it was all a dream. Glenn Beck, The Christmas Sweater (New York: Threshold Editions, 2008).