A Review of the Thomas Frank Book

The Rise of the American Oligarchy
By MICHAEL KINSLEY
Published: January 6, 2012


Thomas Frank is the thinking person’s Michael Moore. If Moore, the left-wing filmmaker, had Frank’s Ph.D. (in history from the University of Chicago), he might produce books like this one and Frank’s previous best seller, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”


PITY THE BILLIONAIRE

The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right

By Thomas Frank

225 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $25


As you can tell from its ham-fisted title, “Pity the Billionaire” is not the world’s most subtle political critique. But subtlety isn’t everything. Frank’s best moments come when his contempt boils over and his inner grouch is released.

This book is Frank’s interpretation of developments since “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” was published eight years ago. Frank’s thesis here is basically that the thesis of the old book has been confirmed. He will not persuade anybody who does not already buy the Tom Frank line. But those who do (as I do, more or less) will enjoy a very good time having their predispositions massaged.

Frank sometimes writes in an arch voice that seemed familiar when I first encountered it but that I couldn’t place. Then I read in his book-jacket bio that he writes for Harper’s Magazine, and I thought, “Zounds, Watson, the man may have Lapham’s Disease.” The symptoms of this malady, named after the longtime editor of Harper’s, Lewis H. Lapham (now of Lapham’s Quarterly), include an elevated, orotund, deeply ironic prose style that, in severe cases, reveals almost nothing about what the topic is or what the author wishes to say about it except for a general sense of superiority to everyone and everything around.

Fortunately, Frank’s case is very mild. What he retains is a healthy refusal to be intimidated by charges of “elitism.” He’s not afraid to give his chapters titles like “Mimesis.” (I looked it up. It’s a good joke.) He says of some right-wing nut who enjoyed 15 seconds of YouTube fame that he possessed “an understanding of German history that bordered on complete fantasy.” His message to liberals is: Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t be so defensive! The other side (Republicans, financiers, business executives, billionaires) has most of the economic — and therefore political — power. Today’s conservatives wield reverse snobbery as a weapon, accusing liberals of sins like living on the East or West Coast. Frank mocks conservatives’ claims that they are victims of an all-powerful liberal establishment. He calls this “tearful weepy-woo.”

Meanwhile, things have gone from bad to worse. Conservatives continue their Sherman’s march through the landmarks of liberal government, burning and looting as they go. They’ve gone after the legacies of Lyndon Johnson (Medicare), Franklin Roosevelt (Social Security; financial regulation) and Theodore Roose­velt (environmentalism). And working people continue to be duped into supporting measures manifestly against their own self-interest. In “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Frank attributed this to a clever bait-and-switch by conservatives, who appeal to middle- and lower-class voters on the basis of social issues like abortion and gays in the military, and values like patriotism and religion. And then they govern on the agenda of traditional Republican groups like businessmen and bankers.

With “Pity the Billionaire,” the emphasis is different and the explanation is simpler: President Obama has betrayed the voters who elected him. He ran like a populist, Frank believes, but he has governed like a plutocrat, or at least a friend of plutocrats. Frank quotes a remarkable passage from Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope” about “people of means” whom he met at Democratic fund-raisers:

“As a rule they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing . . . in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class. . . . They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy. . . . They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital. Most were adamantly pro-choice and anti-gun and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment.”

Obama goes on to admit that by hanging around with these people, he was becoming “more like” them, and Frank — refusing to plea-bargain this stunning confession for a milder sentence — agrees, then piles on.

It seems to me that a Democratic president who gets us health care reform and tough new financial protection for consumers, who guides the economy through its roughest period in 80 years with moderate success (who could do better?), who ends our long war in Iraq and avenges the worst insult to our sovereignty since Pearl Harbor (as his Republican predecessor manifestly failed to do, despite a lot of noise and promises); a president who faced an opposition of really spectacular intransigence and downright meanness; a president who has the self-knowledge and wisdom about Washington to write the passage quoted above, and the courage to publish it: that president deserves a bit more credit from the left than Frank is willing to give him.

Frank may also be a bit overly impressed by what the right has achieved. Evelyn Waugh complained that the British Conservative Party had failed to turn back the clock by a single second. Have the Republicans done much better? (Waugh was speaking long before the Margaret Thatcher revolution, which really did change British society enormously.) Conservatives have dominated the debate, and usually the government, for three decades now, yet they haven’t managed to abolish a single cabinet department or eliminate a single major entitlement program. Nothing big has been “privatized.” Somehow or other, against all expectations and despite a conservative Supreme Court, abortion rights and affirmative action have been preserved. Gay rights are advancing so fast that the Republican Party itself is probably ahead of where Democrats were a generation ago. The Constitution has not been amended to require a balanced budget or forbid flag-burning.

True, they’ve pretty much killed the union movement. While they are not to blame for the effects of globalization and technology on income distribution, they’ve done nothing to mitigate these. And then there are tax cuts — especially tax cuts for the wealthy. That we have had. In spades. Actually, all this tends to confirm Frank’s contention that what Republicans really care about, politically, is money, and all that other stuff is just prole meat.

Frank dates the discovery by conservatives that they are being oppressed by a liberal elite all the way back to 2010, when The American Spectator magazine published an article by Angelo Codevilla called “America’s Ruling Class.” I believe that, in fact, the funhouse-mirror class war (in which liberals and poor people are the upper class and billionaires are among the oppressed masses) has been going on longer than that — at least since Nixon’s “silent majority.” (The man was president, but he still felt oppressed.) But then Frank, as a liberal elitist, has a touching belief in the influence of words. He believes a magazine article can change the world. He quotes from obscure books and pamphlets he has picked up as if each one had been read by everyone in the Tea Party.

The two great antiheroes of “Pity the Billionaire” are Ayn Rand and Glenn Beck. You might say that Frank is intrigued by Beck, or you might say he is obsessed. He is like an intellectual stalker, following Beck around as he attends to his empire of projects, making sure we don’t miss a single lie or absurdity. Beck is influential, and he was enjoying his 15 minutes when Frank was writing this book. But is he more influential than any other radio talk-show host? I’d put my money on Rush. Or how about Grover Norquist, whose ability to pressure members of Congress into supporting his agenda is like nothing since “Red Channels” (the McCarthy-era publication that maintained the blacklist)?

Frank spends 11 out of 187 pages (before the endnotes) in this short book on an entertaining deconstruction of Ayn Rand’s masterwork, “Atlas Shrugged.” “For me,” Frank writes, “it is the political flimflam of our times wrapped up in one big package: the manifesto of the deregulators and free marketeers who caused the economic disaster.” “Atlas Shrugged” is certainly a ridiculous book, and a good illustration of the absurd self-pity of the rich that Frank so deftly skewers in “Pity the Billionaire.” But the notion that this 1,000-page novel about the breakdown of society due to a corrupt government plays any role in, say, the debate over “cap and trade” seems far-fetched.

This is not a book about policy, and Frank shouldn’t be expected to have a 10-point program for reforming the Federal Reserve Board before he allows himself a sarcastic reference to Ben Bernanke. But when he casually uses phrases like “deregulators and free marketeers” to define the bad guys, it does give one pause. For Frank, are government regulations ever excessive? Does he see no merit at all in free trade? Frank surely doesn’t oppose free-market capitalism as a general principle, however much he may dislike Glenn Beck. Or does he? It would have been nice to know a bit more about where Thomas Frank is coming from. Otherwise, he starts to sound like those Tea Party people whom he rightly mocks for being very, very angry with no idea why or what to do about it.