Pity the Billionaire, by Thomas Frank, is a showcase example of the problems that can be created by the long lead time (six to nine months or more if a project has not been fast-tracked) involved in publishing a topical book in an age when news is instantaneous, and there is 24/7, wall-to-wall coverage of hot-button issues.
Mr Frank’s thesis is that in the wake of the fiscal calamities of 2008 – at a time when unemployment remains high, many ordinary people are reeling from the recession, and you might expect anger at the deregulatory policies that enabled banks to run amok – Conservatives have managed a surreal comeback. The Tea Party has become a vocal force, the Republicans surged to capture the House in the 2010 midterms, and the right, in his view, has doubled down on the dream of a “laissez-faire utopia”. Conservatives have managed this resurgence, Mr Frank argues, by hijacking public anger over the bailouts and the bad economy and by shifting “the burden of villainy from Wall Street to government”.
In explicating this hypothesis, he makes only passing mention of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which began last September, apparently too late to get any real attention in this book. Their denunciations of corporate greed, social inequality and fiscal malfeasance have helped shift the national conversation, yet he argues, “as I write this, the most effective political response” to the worst recession since the ’30s has been a campaign by Conservatives “to roll back regulation, to strip government employees of the right to collectively bargain, and to clamp down on federal spending”.
Adding to this sense of being out of date is Mr Frank’s constant harping about Glenn Beck, who left his perch at Fox News last summer, and his by now familiar observations about the Tea Party, many of which have been made before in books like The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama, by Will Bunch (2010).
In many respects Pity the Billionaire is a sort of bookend to Mr Frank’s much talked about 2004 book, What’s the Matter With Kansas?, in which he argued that conservative leaders, dedicated to a big-business agenda, duped citizens “who would once have been reliable partisans of the New Deal” into voting against their economic interests by rallying them around values issues like abortion, flag burning and affirmative action.
This time, Mr Frank argues, a different sort of swindle has taken place. “The fog of the culture wars has temporarily receded,” he writes, as the right has pushed “the grand economic debate” into the spotlight. “Utopian capitalism,” he says, “can look pretty good in a time of disillusionment and collapse,” and Conservative leaders have duped the gullible masses by posing as representatives of the common folk and equating free markets with “the very essence of freedom”. As a result, he contends, “market populism”, which used to be “almost exclusively a faith of the wealthy”, became “the sole utopian scheme available to the disgruntled American” and “went from being a CEO’s dream to the fighting faith of the millions”.
This development, Mr Frank observes, is as nonsensical and extraordinary “as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear power plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.”
The problem with Mr Frank’s arguments is that he willfully simplifies what has happened in the past couple of years. He writes that the function of the Tea Party movement was to “ensure that an economic collapse brought on by Wall Street does not result in any unpleasant consequences for Wall Street”, while playing down conservative activists’ concern with lowering the deficit and cutting government spending.
Not only does Mr Frank arbitrarily cherry-pick illustrations that support his thesis, but his vitriolic denunciations of capitalism and free markets also make him sound like a parody of the sort of left-wing “socialist” agitator that the right loves to hate.
Mr Frank has some interesting points to make along the way about how Conservatives have portrayed themselves as revolutionaries and insurgents and how Democrats have allowed Republicans to define the terms of the public debate after the election of 2008. His comparisons of the very different reactions to the Great Depression of the 1930s and today’s recession can be instructive as well.
His critical analysis of the causes and consequences of the crash of 2008, however, lacks the intellectual rigour of the arguments that the economist Joseph Stiglitz laid out in his 2010 book, Freefall, just as they lack the journalistic insights into Wall Street’s relationship with Washington that Michael Hirsh offered in his 2010 book, Capital Offense.
In fact, even Mr Frank’s more credible arguments here are undermined by his ideological certainty, his reductive logic and his hectoring tone: some of the very qualities he so detests in the conservatives he tries to eviscerate in these pages.
PITY THE BILLIONAIRE
The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely
Comeback of the Right
Thomas Frank
Metropolitan Books; 225 pages; $25
©2012 The New York Times News Service
