Baffled

Surveying literature on the ostensible left and the business right, Frank paints a disturbing picture of a society that has neutralized most kinds of dissent through irony, fatuous theorizing and the transformation of alienation into a niche market. So if Frank's analysis is so right on, why is "One Market Under God" occasionally maddening? Partly it's because his master narrative of the symbiosis between hipsters and capitalists stamps out ideological nuance. Sure, if you believe that things like abortion rights, gay marriage and free speech online are simply distractions from economic issues, then there is no real difference between Grateful Dead lyricist-turned-cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow and Newt Gingrich.

Yet the fact is that civil rights do remain under attack. In Frank's preface, "Deadheads in Davos," he faults Barlow and his ilk for objecting to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 because of the Communications Decency Act and not because it ushered in an orgy of media mergers. The CDA attempted to criminalize the transmission of "indecent" material online. Frank dismisses the seriousness of this threat to free speech, writing that it was "destined from the get-go to be struck down by courts. But that hardly soothed Barlow ... who proceeded to sound the tocsin of cyberlibertarianism."

It seems strange, though, to suggest that a public outcry against the CDA was unwarranted. Even if a Supreme Court's overturn was completely assured (which it wasn't -- moderate Sandra Day O'Connor and Chief Justice William Rehnquist dissented), Congress' blithe dismissal of elementary free speech rights surely merited anger. Besides, the issue of free speech on the Internet has only grown more serious. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Motion Picture Association of America succeeded in convincing a judge to ban Web sites from even linking to code for reverse-engineering DVDs. A clothing company has been sued for printing the code on T-shirts. Imagine being taken to court for making a shirt that big business finds threatening -- that alone should prove free speech isn't a moot issue. In their way, the cyberlibertarians are capable of challenging the culture industry -- they're not always simply stooges for capital.

But given the scope of Frank's book, this is a relatively small point. The bigger problem is, in a way, not even Frank's fault -- it has to do with the decline of the left generally. Frank is right -- there is a mainstream consensus that laissez-faire capitalism is inevitable. But this consensus results as much from the left's failure to offer a coherent strategy for dealing with global economics as it does from big business's PR savvy.

Frank's chapter on cultural studies hints at the left's lost bearings, but in other ways he skirts the issue. Surely, part of any challenge to a consensus should include an alternative vision, but on this Frank is uncharacteristically vague. "I believe that the key to reining in markets is to confront them from outside," he writes. "What we must have are not more focus groups or a new space where people can express themselves or etiquette lessons for executives but some countervailing power, some force that resists the imperatives of profit in the name of economic democracy."

The closest that Frank comes to identifying what this countervailing power might be is in the book's last sentence, which says, "And on the streets of Seattle, just as on the prairies of Kansas a hundred years before, a truly eclectic coalition astonished the world with the power of the language of democracy." This hardly solidifies Frank's position, since the agenda of the protesters in Seattle, Washington and Prague has remained diffuse. As the Economist smugly notes, even Naomi Klein, author of the celebrated anti-corporate book "No Logo," has called the protesters "a movement of meeting-stalkers, following the trade bureaucrats as if they were the Grateful Dead." They may speak the language of democracy, but what are they saying?

Of course, some of the protesters champion issues that anyone with lefty sympathies would support -- protection for the environment and debt relief, for example. But on the larger issue of globalization, the protest movement, like the left in general, has yet to come up with a workable scheme. Frank lambastes the pundit class for painting Seattle union protesters as "the deluded, racist foot soldiers of protectionism." Yet old-fashioned protectionism is indeed what many of them are fighting for.

Next Page: If globalization isn't inevitable, what's the alternative?

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