Thomas Frank's One Market Under God

...Frank does, and that's a problem...

...Every day brings fresh news of the dissolution of George W. 156 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 Bush's fragile consensus...

...or for bringing to our attention cover stories like the one entitled "Free Agent Nation" (appearing in Fast Company, the sassiest of these market populist publications), which, topsy turvy, re-imagines the now casualized white-collar salartariat as brash, empowered, in-your-face folk not about to take any guff from their corporate employers...

...It's hardly necessary to genuflect in gratitude to recognize that the "business community" frequently fails to act communally, that its multiple fissures generate diverging tendencies, some more and some less friendly to the unrestricted free market...

...This can suggest a fatalism about it all that Frank may or may not feel...

...To defend its own self-interest as a ruling class, a ruling class must be able to transcend its own self-interest...

...The phrase captures a stunning reversal in the way many people think about the free market...

...That is all ye know and all ye need to know...

...Business is one and indivisible...

...This was true as well of his first book, The Conquest of Cool...

...his assiduous gathering of sometimes inane, sometimes strikingly laconic Internet communiques...

...Moreover, the book is redundant...

...Its naked corporate pimping is sometimes hard to swallow even for politically savvy members of the Party of Cool...

...There's a brilliant riff on George Gilder as chief ideologue of the new class struggle, that is, the one that pits Entrepreneurial Man against the resentful world of old money, which conspires through its control of the media, universities, and the liberal foundations to get the poor to join in unholy alliance against the forces of creative destruction...

...Frank's mordant humor and acerbic voice freshen up each new illustration, but the message rarely varies...

...Here then is a counterrevolution that looks to the future, is not hung up on the past...

...A bon mot captures the fatuousness and empty sentimentality of the new "people's capitalism": "all Capra, no CIO...

...Its unwavering resistance to each and every form of state regulation has at long last been rewarded...

...To begin with, the book's premise is itself worth interrogating...

...ONE MARKET UNDER GOD: EXTREME CAPITALISM, MARKET POPULISM, AND THE END OF ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY by Thomas Frank Doubleday, 2000 414 pp $26 T T His Is THE story of a bizarre and, accord ing to its narrator, victorious cultural counterrevolution...

...He speaks as if from a great distance looking down on this planetary weirdness...

...His prose style might DISSENT / Fall 2001 • 1 53 BOOKS be described as the ironically oracular...

...In times of political and social equipose, it may be possible to sustain the illusion to the contrary: to rule the nation as if it were a collection of oil companies...

...If, as Frank would likely agree, the Republican Party has for twenty years functioned as the principal political vessel of market populist counterrevolution, how account for a leadership of the Party of Cool consisting of Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay, and Dick Armey, about as unhip a group of suits as one might conjure...

...They endure...

...He wants to simplify matters by declaring cultural conservatism over and done with, having over-reached itself in the Clinton impeachment fiasco...

...That may also be its weakness...

...All of this digging pays off, unearthing a river of apercus and scathing insights that provoke thought...

...Frank takes a certain pleasure in reciting "market populism's" transparent contradictions just to make its triumph that much more marvelous...

...Morgan, was designed to circumvent the free market, to stay clear of the treacherous shoals of laissez-faire capitalism that had set off a series of acute economic as well as political and social crises throughout the late nineteenth century...

...STEVE FRASER is the author of Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor and is writing a cultural history of Wall Street...

...Standing silently backstage of all the market populist histrionics, the great institutions continue to deploy their power—the mighty corporations, the implacable Wall Street bankers (news of their reported eclipse having been recently retracted), the imperious headquarters of international finance...

...Conversely and oddly, the book includes only the most abbreviated allusions to what might be dubbed "the Seattle syndrome...

...He shows how this fairy tale shamelessly appropriates the images of a venerated producer mythology, so that stockbrokers and bankers assume the roles "once played by such folks as tillers of the soil and builders of cars...

...A fair amount of what Frank applauds as genuine economic democracy, that is, the public oversight and regulation of the "free market," arose out of what might be crudely characterized as the war between new money and old...

...Frank, a witty, trenchant, and always lucid writer, tells this story well...

...As the recent escalation of violence in Genoa reminds us, the last half dozen years are witness to the largest, most diverse, and militant anticorporate social movement in more than fifty years...

...How this must madden corporate hipsters who thought they acquired the franchise to the counterculture, only to discover it staring at them from the other side of the barricades...

...But of course, the current agonizing within the Republican Party over stem cell research is only one of a dozen indications that the cultural right is alive and well and still throwing its weight around...

...I I COULD GO ON and on...

...Coming of intellectual age under Reagan, as Frank did, he might think that the world conforms to this more stripped-down version of free market revanchism...

...One reason may be the way Frank conflates the free market and the corporation, as if they were stand-ins for each other...

...Its drive for pelf and power is cloaked in the dream coat of insurrectionary cool...

...What happens, to this reader at least, is not merely that one tires of the echo...

...The strength of the book is its scouring of the cultural landscape for each and every telltale sign of this new "populist" persuasion...

...Old-fashioned populism held that laissez-faire capitalism presented the gravest danger to freedom, democracy, equality, and the material well-being of most citizens...

...It is often suggestive in this regard...

...Insofar as evidence for the triumph of market populism can be culled from the output of management theorists, media pundits, market philosophes, commercial promotions, advertising campaigns, public relations Oaks, and the occasionally loquacious CEO, Frank makes his case...

...Generation X, Frank shows us, is sold the privatization of Social Security in the idiom of coolness...

...Full of reassurances that in the long run nothing works better than the market in leveling the playing field, market populism blesses unprecedented levels of income and wealth inequality, measuring progress by the growth in the earth's square acreage of billionaires...

...The omission is all the more stunning once one takes note that this anticorporate uprising climaxed in the late nineties, precisely when Frank registers the triumphant completion of market populism's long march through the corridors of power...

...It conjures up the audacious urges of the creative artist and visionary scientist...

...BOOKS indeed, One Market Under God is a kind of reprise and elaboration of that book's central theme: in the interests of securing its cultural legitimacy, business, ministered to by an advertising industry in touch with the zeitgeist, assumes the countercultural position...

...A century and a half before anyone dreamed up market populism, he was there at the birth of the movement for "free soil, free labor, free men" and other allied struggles for economic democracy...

...While poking fun at gurus like Tom Peters for speaking in the first person plural, he sometimes lapses into that voice himself, leaving some ambiguity about whether market populism is to be considered a plot or a mass mania...

...It marshals the emotions of the anti-elitist and anti-authoritarian...

...Despite living in contradiction, market populism vanquishes its foes, Frank tells us, precisely because it has adopted the lingo of its putative opposition...

...The corporate regime that replaced it, while dedicated to the defense of private property, had no patience with the unpredictable Donnybrook of freeforall competition...

...The antitrust movement, the "money trust" investigations of 1913, the Pecora hearings of the early thirties, Louis Brandeis's war on railroad monopolies, New Deal-era securities and banking legislation, the attack on the public utility holding company, Keynesian fiscal policy, even the justly ridiculed Sherman antitrust act (which nonetheless Bill Gates is now compelled to wrestle with) drew inspiration and energy from various sources...

...While relations between teamsters and turtles have chilled, the larger fact of the matter is that the labor movement, long a nesting ground for cultural conservatism, has opened itself up to the social and cultural transgressiveness it once found repugnant...

...It has with single-minded determination yearned to break free...

...It's hard to tell...

...Meanwhile, at the very millennial moment when market populism had accomplished, as Frank tells the story, a total mindfucking of the citizenry, voters went to the polls and elected Al Gore, hardly a champion of economic democracy to be sure, but not the reincarnation of Ayn Rand either...

...If the market rules, as Frank persuasively tells us it does, then why all the hullabaloo, why this elaborate charade of corporate self-repudiation...

...It persuades us that the market is the gateway to universal liberation...

...Frank uses his favorite management Punchinello, Tom Peters, to let us in on just how crazy things can get...

...If all lingering opposition—trade unionism, New Dealism, and so on—pretty much threw in the towel during the Reagan eighties, as Frank—I think rightly—claims, from where then derived the urge driving the market populist counter-revolution of the nineties...

...Management theorists and market planners no doubt exert influence, but they don't actually run corporations, and they skate perilously on the thin ice of public incredulity...

...This portentous high concept of a "new order" is rolled out whenever other rationales fail to bite...

...Teamsters and turtles are not only reactionary, conniving myopically to deprive the world's poor of the fruits of global capitalism...

...Today, market populism is Wall Street driven, a vision made of pure money, all ego (no superego), and ideological hallucination...

...Taking the longer view, it is nearly impossible to exaggerate the antiquity and stature of Entrepreneurial Man within the American public imagination...

...For Frank, however, the historic war between "new money" and "old money" is not to DISSENT / Fall 2001 •I55 BOOKS be taken seriously...

...While the marketeers work up a Jacobin rage against each noxious sign of class pretension, they worship a pantheon of CEOs in an ascending order of cupidity...

...Thanks to the courageous efforts of stock market "democrats" like Charles Schwab and Peter Lynch, and, above all, thanks to the liberating wonders of the Internet, the marble palaces on Wall Street are declared to have fallen at the hands of an insurgency as grass-rooted and militant as the civil rights or feminist movements...

...Market populism turns that skepticism inside out...

...And in a maddening piece of ideological larceny, it invokes that ultimate sanction—once the principal asset of the left—the stamp of historic inevitability...

...But shrink-wrapping the argument like this leaves out a lot...

...Beneath its flashy exterior, One Market Under God is a meditation on the making of a ruling class as an act of ideological cohesion and hegemony...

...It speaks the language of the disenfranchised and the rebellious...

...So many of these signs consist of infomercials and other effluvia, one is bound to wonder if anyone takes this all as seriously as Frank does...

...r r RANK IS A historian as well as a cultural critic...

...154 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 Frank possesses a gimlet eye for the cultural and intellectual inversions that are part of the outrageous appeal of market fabulism...

...The heroic new rich turn out to be not only cool, but gluttons for hard work...

...But segments of the business community were always prominent among them...

...But these are hardly the ingredients of political and social integration and stability...

...The modern corporation, invented during the age of J.P...

...Not for long, however, not in a finely reticulated international political economy...

...youthful, soulful, and truth-telling, it is the sworn enemy of pretense, bureaucracy, hypocrisy, and elitism, at war with every vestige of social conformity...

...Thomas Frank calls it "market populism...

...Egalitarian beyond compare, the free market eviscerates every authoritarian instinct, every hierarchical institution, every form of elitist snobbery...

...It's not that there's no possible explanation for this congruent with Frank's schemata, only that he doesn't offer one...

...This "Morgan dispensation" was itself challenged on many fronts, including by a business milieu that resented being shut out of an increasingly concentrated and coagulating economy...

...his patient and attentive listening to what must have been hundreds of clever and not so clever television commercials...

...T T HE PROBLEM really is to explain the cohabitation of cultural conservatism with free market fanaticism...

...Market populism champions choice, but leaves no room for doubt that the market is the only choice...

...Groping in the murk of political horse-trading and coalition building might muddy up the otherwise pristine purity of the market populist party line...

...Just for the sneaky pleasure of it, one wants to thank Frank for ferreting out an ad like this one from Merrill Lynch: "Corporations like to refer to themselves as 'families.' Shouldn't it be the other way around...

...Market populism, as a form of cultural narcissism, seems, on the contrary, inherently more fissionable, less a counterrevolution than a breakdown in the social and cultural reproduction of a ruling class...

...In the culminating, "extremist" phase of market populism, Peters, once the promoter of "excellence," has mutated into the Darth Vader of corporate death, a kind of market terrorist, a true believer that "destruction is cool," so cool he recommends that management create a new post, a CDO or "Chief Destruction Officer...

...The Street is a boulevard open to all, a veritable "socialism of the stock exchange...

...Inspired by the free-spirited, anything goes anarchy of the market unchained, dripping with contempt for the bureaucrat's iron cage, these avatars of free agency nonetheless live out their lives under a regime of great corporations as hierarchically put together as the Vatican...

...There's no question, for example, that mutual funds, pension funds, and the Internet help assemble a certain middle-class following for the rule of Wall Street, one whose true size, however, is grossly exaggerated, as Frank notes...

...Actually, market libbers argue, it is precisely those collectivist institutions, those legislative restraints, those ideological delusions standing outside the charmed circle of the marketplace—trade unions, government regulatory agencies, safety nets, codes of fair conduct, the leftovers of a smart-ass social engineering mentality, in a word, all the paraphernalia of the old populism—that short-circuit a full emancipation...

...And a fair portion of his book is devoted to past business practice and theory...

...One can only admire his endurance in wading through the gaseous, if sometimes hilarious, meditations of people like George Gilder and Tom Peters...

...investing as the ultimate act of generational rebellion...

...Which is to say, parenthetically, that the sixties, whose esprit Frank sometimes carelessly merges with the thirties, were far more preoccupied with the transgressions of the liberal state than with the world of business per se...

...All this recycling flattens the analysis, leaving One Market Under God a more one-dimensional book than it should be...

...Yet it elides a range of vital questions...

...Seen through this looking-glass, the leisure class become the overworked, the working class, the malingering poor...

...they are hapless as well, doomed to become roadkill under the wheels of an irresistible historical juggernaut...

...Historically of course this has not always been so...

...One Market Under God is a story of counterrevolution with very little politics in it, either Seattle style or elite style, or for that matter, boring old mass-electoral style...

...It conducts a twenty-four-hour-a-day plebiscite on the people's preferences, an exquisitely more sensitive barometer of popular desire than the cumbersome and rickety apparatus of democratic political wrangling...

...But here Frank is caught in a bind...

...It cherishes democracy, but is out of temper with every form of popular government or social movement with the chutzpah to challenge the market's omniscience...

...Street politics are even more wildly out of sync...

...A simmering passion for old-style economic democracy animates the book, yet Frank seems infatuated with the very hipness he mocks...

...And then on top of that some of them turn out to be, like Dick Cheney, corporate heavyweights of precisely the sort market populists disdain...

...Take politics...

...Now it has entered the Elysian fields of the free market and carried the rest of us along with it...