Pity the Billionaire

Thomas Frank. Pity the Billionaire: the Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right. New York: Henry Holt, 2012

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Columnist, author, and former editor of the Baffler Thomas Frank asks the question, in his latest book Pity the Billionaire, how is it possible that the political Right thrived in the 2010 elections despite the economic meltdown of 2008? Why then were the trajectories of the 1932 and 2008 elections so different?  One would think that the “newest Right” should have been as discredited as Herbert Hoover with no chance to win an election anytime soon. Yet, alas, they did.

Frank argues that the “newest Right” is something like a bunch of zombies in a cheesy Hollywood movie;  the undead have amazing recuperative powers. In early 2009 the chattering class was presiding over the funeral of the Republican Party.  By August of that year the Democrats were back on their heels playing defense at town hall meetings where health care reform was the topic.  By 2010 the Democrats were in full retreat suffering a historically devastating defeat in the midterm elections. “If you had brought the world’s teenaged anarchists together in some great international congress and asked them to design an ideal crisis they could not have discredited market-based civilization more completely than did the crash of 2008” (p.26).  Pity the Billionaire seeks to answer the question of why this counter-intuitive conservative resurgence in 2010 could have taken place.

The real genius of the newest Right has been to unleash the “cynical idealism of billionaire America” (p.44) on a country ready for its cold embrace.  The brilliance of equating “we the people” with derivatives traders and convincing the victims of the great recession that not only would it be wrong and a form of “class warfare” to criticize investment bankers, but that they should show some sympathy for the beleaguered billionaire class, is not to be underestimated.  This peculiar form of billionaire inspired populism maintains that markets are democratic systems with consumers and investors making their desires known through the naturally recurring phenomenon of price auction theory.  Whereas market populism used to be the domain of the wealthy, now it is for the masses.

A significant part of Pity the Billionaire is basically an ethnography of the Tea Party Movement. The Tea Party is little more than the petit bourgeois white supremacist wing of the Republican Party. With their own cable news channel as a megaphone,  and a corporate media that could not get enough of their eccentric act, they were effective in framing the issue as choice between a small business utopia and a government imposed socialism.  Frank, who has read C. Wright Mills carefully, well understands that small business is useful to big business as a mascot for the ideology of utopian capitalism. Using small business folklore as the basis for a populist front is the preferred methodology of the corporate robber barons.  In this respect the top down faux populism of the Tea Party represents this triumph of three decades of neoliberal ideology.

Whereas the top down construction of a phony populism was successful, the Obama administration’s efforts at bailing out the economy from on high, at the expense of multitude, were politically less so.  F.D.R. worked to save and restructure the economy from the bottom up.  Rather than placing itself at the forefront of the populist anger against Wall Street (breaking up the banks, stopping the foreclosures, jailing the criminals etc.) the Obama administration made itself the embodiment of cronyism, i.e., instead of another F.D.R. we got Clinton II.  Not only was catering to Wall Street an act of moral cowardice it was a huge tactical error which allowed the Right to gather itself and quickly counterattack.

The delusions of the Right are situated in the shibboleth of an unfettered free market. However, Obama and the modern Democratic Party are equally delusional. The Democrats cognitive break with reality is not based on economics but emanates from the world of political science according to Frank.  Their collective hallucination manifests itself in a “cult of centrism and compromise.” Like another tall gaunt politician of yesteryear, Obama must have imagined himself waving a piece of paper in the air proclaiming, “We have bi-partisan consensus in our time!” Frank states that “President Obama tries to stay on the good side of companies like Goldman Sachs and BP even as he desperately drives his hook-and-ladder around a world they have set on fire.” (p. 136) Fearful that he might be seen as a radical, Obama has dutifully carried the water for Wall Street.

Another explanation for the politically inexplicable may be that we were cheated out of seeing the full effects of the train wreck. The banking industry did not suffer the consequences of a collapse because the much maligned bureaucracy in Washington D.C. saved them.  The deus ex machina of the federal government saved the ungrateful lords of Wall Street. As thanks, the Right has been able to shift the blame from the scene of the crime to Washington D.C.

Find this book (and place a hold on it!) at the Free Library of Philadelphia: McN 12336742 (at about eleven branches, and checked out or on its way to a branch to be checked out.)

The Cracked Bell

Tristam Riley-Smith, The Cracked Bell: America and the Afflictions of Liberty. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2010

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Riley-Smith’s Cracked Bell is a breezy tour de force that at times seems like a panegyric to the “American Dream” which offers little original, or profound, in the way of insight or analysis.

Enough praise.

In the first instance the argument that the gap between the “American Dream” and the “American Crisis,” that cultural dissonance between the ideal of freedom and its more prosaic reality, which Riley-Smith cleverly analogizes with the crack in the Liberty Bell, is less than compelling. What are we talking about?  The attempt to reconcile the divergence between nationalist ideology and everyday life is present in many societies.  Implicit in Riley-Smith’s argument is the idea of American exceptionalism.  What exactly is unique to the Americans then? Yes, the American consumer is primus inter pares among the consumers of the world but only by virtue of a convergence of accidental historical circumstances.  Is the American public irrationally enamored of their beloved military? Clearly, yes they are. But, given the opportunity everybody loves a parade.  It’s just that Americans have had the ability to spend more lavishly on theirs. It is hardly noteworthy then that Americans are overweight, under-educated, adore successful imperialism, and spend too much time and money at Walmart.

Noteworthy however are the various instances of an empirical misreading of history which betray a right-of-center political bias. Due to the confines of brevity I will restrict myself to  three.
Riley-Smith writes that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina “A vengeful mob had taken over the Big Easy within hours of the thin veneer of law and order being removed.” (p.70)  This “mob” in his view was made up of the angry and frustrated armed consumers of New Orleans’ underclass. They were also irrational insofar as “Few of the looters had homes in which to install the commodities and there was no electricity to power them. This was postmodern shopping, deconstructed to the point where it became a form of performance art – an end in itself” (p.70).

How about the “looters” who were taking bottled water and food from closed and abandoned stores merely for survival?  What kind of postmodernist spectacle was this?  And this talk of the “mob” is very much in keeping with the reporting  by the corporate media in the immediate aftermath of Katrina.  Ironically there is no mention of the “gangs” of armed whites making an exit from the city impossible or the police violence against unarmed Blacks.  I feel that these offensive remarks by Riley-Smith should be immediately treated with both Michael Eric Dyson’s Come Hell and High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster and Spike Lee’s documentary film When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.   The neglect and overt hostility with which the Black population of New Orleans was treated in the wake of Katrina was clearly much more about race than missed shopping opportunities; this seems to have alluded Riley-Smith.

On the subject of political correctness Riley-Smith argues that it came about as an attempt to counter the “excesses” of racism, sexism, and homophobia et cetera. He opines that “However, the phenomenon tends to reinforce these varieties of intolerance and introduces a new form of illiberal behavior that suppresses the public expression of views that are deemed beyond the pale” (p.229). Riley-Smith is certainly not alone in this type of irresponsible and risibly paranoid palaver which has continued more or less unabated for about twenty years now.

Is there a ministry of political correctness somewhere enforcing its dictates on those who are innocently engaged in a moderate and thoughtful discourse of racist, sexist, and anti-gay bigotry? Just like the mythical gerbils in hospital emergency rooms and soldiers returning home from Vietnam to be spat upon by anti-war protestors, nobody has ever met an actual victim of political correctness.  Yet there are legions of actual victims of racism, sexism, and anti-gay bigotry making Riley-Smith’s false equivalency that much more pernicious.

As if to demonstrate that there are multiple ways to read history, Riley-Smith holds out Larry Sommers and his asinine comments about the inability of women to perform mathematics and engineering at a high level, reflecting something more than gender discrimination, as an example of left-wing intolerance. Ah, Larry the lefty. When he is not out marching in a May Day parade or organizing a general strike he’s practicing that brand of left-wing intolerance which makes any revolutionary proud.

As ridiculous as all of this is, Riley-Smith’s take on the American Empire - or if there actually is an empire - stands out as the most absurd part of this deeply flawed book.  To examine the nature of U.S. imperialism what better place to start than the American Enterprise Institute.  The AEI, which is widely regarded as the headquarters for the neoconservatives, is a dispassionate enough spot in Riley-Smith’s judgment to get at the essence of U.S. militarism.  As evidence that there is not in fact an American Empire Riley-Smith sites neocon Robert Kagan.  He identifies him as merely from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and neglects to mention his Skull and Bones affiliation or his connections to numerous publications including the Weekly Standard and Commentary.  Nor does he let the reader know that as a co-founder of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) he was a signatory to the now infamous letter to President Bill Clinton in 1997 urging immediate military action against Saddam Hussein (because of the threat that the dictator’s possession of weapons of mass destruction represented to the United States).

Riley-Smith proudly avers that for an anthropologist, as far as the possible existence of the American Empire is concerned, what is primarily of interest is not whether the empire actually exists but what the Americans think about the empire. Further, he considers it a paradox that “The champion of liberty is compelled to develop an engine of war to safeguard cherished freedoms at home” (p.211).  What Riley-Smith calls a “paradox” one could label as hypocrisy;  insofar as one is interested in imperialism from the viewpoint of those who support it, why not a discussion of rape from the perspective of the rapist?

Riley-Smith, not surprisingly, concludes his analysis with a statement that Americans possess the power to overcome the American Crisis and put themselves back on the path to the American Dream.  This is a positively cheery way to describe an empire in decline.