Baffled

He's savaged the '60s counterculture, "hip" capitalism and cyberlibertarianism, so what does Tom Frank believe in?

By Michelle Goldberg

Oct 26, 2000 | Contemporary American politics have devolved into a chimerical, hyperstylized battle of images. We live in a world where George W. Bush can play a homespun outsider, businessmen pose as paradigm-busting radicals and poorly paid professors are imagined to be a maniacal elite. Thomas Frank is one of our most brilliant critics precisely because he sees through all this, zeroing in on the economic dynamics obscured by predictable culture-war skirmishes. He's made it his mission to expose the fallacy behind our thoughtless conflation of "hip" and "subversive," arguing that our reverence for coolness plays right into conservative consumer capitalism.

Perhaps more important, Frank has followed Barbara Ehrenreich in pulling back the curtains on the right's trumped-up cultural populism, which functions as a distraction from economic policies that hardly favor the little guy. When Republicans can claim to be defending mainstream America families from threats like the "homosexual agenda" while repeatedly voting against the kind of minimum wage regulations that allow working families to buy shoes for their kids and put food on their tables, the right has managed to divorce the language of populism from any notions of economic equality. In illuminating the harsh economic realities underlying the late '90s boom, Frank suggests the possibility of a left that stands for more than a cornucopia of lifestyle options, piercing through trendy jargon to reclaim the ideals of social justice.

Frank, editor of the legendary zine-cum-academic journal the Baffler, is a dazzling writer, with a wit that recalls H.L. Mencken's. It's hard to imagine any other work of business history that could make a reader embarrass herself by laughing out loud on the bus as I did while reading his new book, "One Market Under God." Frank's writing is caustic, but he's nowhere near as cynical as those on the academic left who've abandoned the unfashionable poor for ever more baroquely irrelevant studies of pop culture's "hidden loci of resistance." As he wrote in the Baffler essay "When Class Disappears," "We've got an entire academic pedagogy devoted to the notion that symbolic dissent -- imagining, say, that the secret police don't want us to go to the disco, but that we're doing it anyway -- is as real and meaningful, or, better yet, more real and more meaningful than the humdrum business of organizing and movement-building." He's inspired by the old labor left, and his writing burns with passionate outrage on working people's behalf.

Yet despite the acuteness of his analysis, finishing "One Market Under God," I felt nearly as frustrated as illuminated. This has partly to do with one of Frank's only weak spots as a critic -- he dismisses any causes that aren't strictly economic as a result of his contempt for frivolous lifestyle politics. Beyond that, though, "One Market Under God," like so much of Frank's work, can be exasperating because it describes problems in intricate detail and then only obliquely points toward hazy solutions.

"One Market Under God" is both a persuasive attack on new economy rhetoric and a history of what Frank calls "market populism" -- the theory, almost ubiquitous in the last few years, that markets are inherently democratic, even more so than democratically elected governments.

Once Americans imagined that economic democracy meant a reasonable standard of living for all -- that freedom was only meaningful once poverty and powerlessness had been overcome ... Today, however, American opinion leaders seem generally convinced that democracy and the free market are simply identical -- What is "new" 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. A better term for the "New Economy" might simply be "consensus."

By fetishizing groovy concepts like difference and change and "thinking outside the box," Frank argues, the new economy's consultants, PR firms and media organs neutralize old objections to capitalism that were based on the soul-sucking conformity of bygone decades. The '90s consensus, he says, "was a struggle to establish the legitimacy of the free-market order by grounding it in something decidedly un-conservative; it was a consensus based not on obedience to God or deference to great men but on the volatile new idea that social conflict affirmed the principles of the market." The new corporate ideology celebrates "change " and "chaos." As Frank notes, "One of the more disheartening commercial fads of the nineties was the tendency to compare a given company's products to the civil rights movement.

Next Page: How square businessmen became cool capitalists

• View blog reactions