Pig in a poke?

Thomas Frank goes to market

by Catherine Tumber

ONE MARKET UNDER GOD:
EXTREME CAPITALISM,
MARKET POPULISM,
AND THE END OF
ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY
By Thomas Frank. Doubleday, 414 pages, $26.

"There was a time," writes Tom Frank in his new book, "when the suggestion that business was merely a more perfect version of democracy would have been greeted with a na

tional horselaugh." But now, what Frank calls "market populism" is firmly in the saddle, and it is time to put the lie to the impostor: the much vaunted "populism" of the Reagan/Clinton-engineered New Economy is concentrating wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands -- as capitalism always has. We must reclaim historic populism, he urges, with its powerful critique of monopoly, to win back the protections that culminated in the New Deal.

With mounting horror and a humorist's natural delight in good material, Frank has been tracing the advancing victory of business values since 1988, when he founded the widely acclaimed 'zine the Baffler. His first book, The Conquest of Cool (1997), studied the rise of hip advertising in the '60s. So he's been on the scent for a while.

Combining the debunking style of H.L. Mencken with the best in populist moralism itself, Frank shows how this thing, this convoluted market populism, is no ordinary wolf in sheep's clothing. Its triumph has involved the almost complete subordination of politics to culture -- a process that has made political resistance to the market increasingly difficult to frame. The denizens of the New Economy have marketed the idea of "the market" with uncanny success. "What is `new' " about today's economy, Frank argues, "is this idea's triumph over all its rivals; the determination of American leaders to extend it to all the world; the general belief among opinion-makers that there is something natural, something divine, something inherently democratic about markets."

Frank takes the measure of the New Economists' most obvious handiwork: the unseemly worship of venture capitalists like "investment deity" Warren Buffett, who's celebrated for his "down-home averageness," and books like Tom Peters's 1992 Liberation Management, which convinced a generation of bosses that they could "empower" their employees while downsizing, exporting jobs, and busting unions. But where these people have most cleverly succeeded, he argues, is in removing from the scales all countervailing weights on capitalist excess. Not only has "jes' folks" hype persuaded millions to place their future security in the impermanent bull market, and therefore to oppose wage increases as inflationary, but the traditional wells of conscience have become curiously dry. The academy has become home to "cultural studies" and "post-colonial" scholarship, he observes, much of which bolsters the ethic of global markets and equates liberty with consumer choice. And now that the independent press has been gobbled up by a small number of huge media conglomerates, the foundation-sponsored "public journalism" movement has nothing to say about breaking up monopolies like Gannett. Instead, it condemns "adversarialism" (just when we need it most!) and calls merely for more "civility" in the media and more popular pulse taking through polling and focus groups.

The self-proclaimed capitalist tools of the New Economy have set the tone for all this by staging a loud rebellion against their generational predecessors, the buttoned-down old white guys who brokered business deals over golf, ate meat and potatoes, and thought "in the box." Indeed, Frank is at his best in showing how today's new elites, who preside over steep hierarchies of global scale, have assumed the role of subversive revolutionaries in the fight against "elitism" -- because in our hot economy anyone can be a millionaire. Just ask all those snowboarding CEOs and Deadheads in Davos. Not only that, but these fake hipsters have run a ruthless PR campaign equating any form of criticism with elitism and reducing both to "cynicism" -- the cardinal sin of New Economic theology.

Frank is no dour ideologue: he does not begrudge us our bread and circuses. Rather, he reminds us that we are forgetting how to call things by their proper names, that we've been betrayed by our language stewards and opinion shapers. If we're to restore the market to its appropriate place in the nation's moral economy, he insists, our politicians, journalists, academics, and religious leaders must use our civic lexicon properly, must recognize the rich and specific historical meanings of words like "democracy," "populism," "elitism," "racism," even "spirituality." Although his brush strokes are occasionally too wide, Frank has that rare quality possessed by only the most brilliant critics: his prose inhabits the sensibility of the alternate world he wants to see rise from the ashes. It is the sensibility of not only a more just world but also a livelier one.