Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right by Thomas Frank
Harvill Secker, £14.99
by Ian Williams Tribune
Friday, April 20th, 2012
In What’s the Matter with Kansas?, published in 2004, Thomas
Frank tried to explain how millions of financially challenged Americans
voted for the very people who had picked their pockets – and not even
paid taxes on their loot – and showed every intention of continuing so
to do. Since then, there has been a financial catastrophe and the
response was a grassroots uprising. But, until Occupy Wall Street, it
was led by the Tea Party and a massive surge in populist conservatism.
That the worst recession in modern history should foment popular
movements is not surprising. But that they should favour the people
whose ideas brought about the crash is, on the face of it,
counter-intuitive.
Examining the conservative surge, which became really angry when
Barack Obama succeeded George W Bush, the main architect of the
disaster, Frank points out that, as grassroots go, this grass was
well-watered with corporate money and organising skills – astroturf, in
fact.
Analysing their words, he shows how the New Right studied the Great
Depression and stole the tactics of the left in that era, right down to
their vocabulary and methods of organisation. The generation whose own
experience would have contradicted the curious theory that FDR and the
New Deal caused the Great Depression has now mostly gone to the great
Rock Candy Mountain in the sky. There are now many Americans with no
reality-based immunity to historical bovine excreta.
While the left cherishes the idea that its heyday was in the 1930s,
the historical evidence is contradictory. Think of the Nazis, for
example, (or the Blackshirts in Britain) the Ku Klux Klan and Father
Coughlin, the anti-Semitic radio priest in the United States. France got
the Popular Front while Britain got a Conservative-dominated coalition
for the duration of the decade.
Although it seems odd that so many believe the problems of the
current era were caused by too much regulation and government
interference, it is, as Frank suggests, not much more anomalous than
those who believed that a country of gulags and purges and show trials
held the answer.
As he says, “the new right has not met its goals by deception alone –
although there has been a great deal of this – but by offering an
idealism so powerful that it clouds its partisans’ perceptions of
reality”. The invocation of freedom and attacks on an
all-powerful state resonate, as Ron Paul’s deluded followers
demonstrate. Even the “right to life” is a powerful semantic coup, on a
par with the “death tax”, for conservatives. Union-busting in America
is, by long tradition, the “right to work”. Not since Arbeit Macht Frei
has language been set so radically athwart reality.
In contrast, Frank points out, “modern Democrats don’t do things the
way Roosevelt and Truman did because their eye is on people who believe,
per Obama’s description, ‘in the free market’ almost as piously as do
Tea Partyers. Class language, on the other hand, feels strange to the
new Dems; off-limits. Instead, the party’s guiding geniuses like to
think of their organisation as the vanguard of enlightened
professionalism and the shrine of purest globaloney”.
Obama’s State of the Union speech was typical – a technocratic
exercise that threw scraps to his supporters. He did not have a dream,
authentic or otherwise, to move the masses. Our only hope is that the
dream that moves the right is a nightmare to the majority of Americans.
One drawback with this book is that, in his effort to counter the
left’s prejudices about grassroots conservatives, Frank backpedals on
the recurrent American subtext of racism. The leaders of the right
might not be racists, personally, but they know their audience. The
anger at Obama burns far brighter in many quarters because he is a black
man in the previously all-White House. The not so coded references
implying that welfare beneficiaries are mostly black (they aren’t;
poverty in America is an equal opportunity programme) are designed to
enlist white support against government welfare programmes.
And, of course, there is now a stream of Islamophobia to match the
anti-Semitism of the 1930s.However, those deficiencies in some ways
enhance the relevance of Pity the Billionaire for Britons wondering why,
when the Opposition stops opposing, people start worshipping at strange
altars. The description here of the New Democrats suggests that Bill
Clinton’s Third Way still has them in its grip, just as Tony Blair’s New
Labour project still has its slimy tentacles wrapped around Labour and
the left in Britain. Electors abhor a vacuum: nationalism, racism and
clear ideas, no matter how loony, are preferable to leaders disappearing
up their own colons to agree with the enemy.
