Baffled

A liberal might wish to support them, but the globalizers targeted by these new activists can now claim to have one of the left's most cherished ideals on their side -- improving conditions in the Third World. In a recent issue of the Economist, an editorial states, "In terms of relieving want, 'globalization' is the difference between South Korea and North Korea, between Malaysia and Myanmar, even (switching timespan) between Europe and Africa." Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn sound a similar note in a recent New York Times Magazine excerpt from their book "Thunder From the East." "Fourteen years ago, we moved to Asia and began reporting there. Like most Westerners, we arrived in the region outraged at sweatshops," they write. "In time, though, we came to accept the view supported by most Asians: that the campaign against sweatshops risks harming the very people it is intended to help." Kristof and WuDunn are careful to decry brutal, abusive conditions in many sweatshops, but they insist "Asian workers would be aghast at the idea of American consumers boycotting certain toys or clothing in protest. The simplest way to help the poorest Asians would be to buy more from sweatshops, not less. For all the misery they can engender, sweatshops at least offer a precarious escape from the poverty that is the developing world's greatest problem."

The left must refute this idea, conceive a better economic policy that incorporates it, or risk devolving into a kind of ugly nativism. So far, it's hard to find much evidence that contradicts Kristof and WuDunn's view (Frank mocks it, but doesn't offer anything to challenge it). Until the left devises a better plan for lifting people in the Third World out of poverty, it won't be able to mount much of an ideological challenge to unfettered capitalism. A widespread loss of faith in socialism and other grandiose plans for economic reordering has robbed most left thinkers of any enthusiasm for that task.

Ultimately, "One Market Under God" exposes a profoundly depressing situation, whips up our righteous indignation and then leaves us with no real place to channel it. It recalls the conclusion of "The End of Utopia." After bemoaning the demise of the left's utopian fervor and the rise of both cynicism and reform-minded practicality, Jacoby writes on the last page, "What is to be done? The question, routinely addressed to all critics, insists on a practicality inimical to utopianism. Nothing is to be done. Yet that does not mean nothing is to be thought or imagined or dreamed." If nothing can be done but dream, that brings us right back to the meaningless symbolic politics that he assails. The few sentences Frank devotes to solutions are less resigned, but equally amorphous.

Frank's critics have called him on his refusal to offer answers to the problems he so deftly elucidates. In a Baffler debate between Frank and Jay Rosen over public journalism, Rosen asked what good comes of Frank's talent for satire and corruption-spotting in the absence of a positive objective. To this, Frank responded, "Rosen's most serious accusation is that I spend comparatively little time proposing real-world solutions to the problems I describe ... It seems odd, to put the kindest spin on it, for a superjournalist like Rosen to assert that shaping opinions through well-reasoned argument, as I attempt to do, is somehow a less legitimate pursuit than shaping opinion through foundation-backed blueprints for the production of feel-good anti-argument."

To a point, he's right. "One Market Under God" is valuable simply because it points out the way a moneyed elite has enlisted the media and popular opinion in its cause. But until Frank or someone starts seriously grappling with how to save American jobs and curb corporate power without sacrificing Third World workers or dampening prosperity, the fury his book stirs up feels impotent.

Obviously, there are real things we can do to ameliorate inequality -- increase the social safety net, improve education, raise taxes on the rich, end the wholesale imprisonment of young black men engendered by the drug war. But none of those reforms really challenges the consensus about globalization, hypercapitalism and an economy that benefits investors at the expense of workers, and Frank doesn't propose anything that does. We're left with the conviction that the current system is bad, but little clue about how to make a better one.

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