by Thomas Frank
The next day, the host’s rage went on, but the story was slightly different. This time, Beck declared himself staggered that a “failed” company (AIG) was shelling out millions in bonuses (correct), and that its bailout had effectively sent taxpayer money to foreign banks (also correct). Sure, the bonuses were an outrage (and here the muddling begins), but the recipients were sort of entitled to them, and, besides, Democrats had approved them. In fact, Democrats were the true culprits here: They had taken campaign donations from AIG employees, he announced, and now they were following their script from “last time,” which is to say, the thirties, “whipping up mob rule” and stoking public anger against the AIG executives. They were doing nothing less than trying to “channel the outrage” and “direct it towards the faceless bonus recipients at AIG.”9
Which was an odd thing to say because “fake populist anger,” as the host described it with disgust, was Beck’s very raison d’être. Channeling the outrage was what he was put on Fox News to do. In this particular case, he was using any form of reasoning he could dream up to steer the nation’s outrage toward Democrats, the party of government, “the weasels in Washington.”10
This may seem confusing to you, but to the leaders of the conservative renaissance the muddling came easy. For them, Democrats were devil figures; there was no contradiction in depicting them as both the pawns of the banks and also the persecutors of them. Democrats were so malignant they could play both roles simultaneously. That is why a characteristic text of the movement, 2010’s Red State Uprising, seethes about the “bailouts of Obama’s Wall Street friends”: apparently Wall Street was bailed out because Wall Street’s kept politicians give Wall Street whatever it wants. Just two pages later, however, the sinister Obama is said to use “rhetoric for job creators and Wall Street that would be better reserved for Al Qaeda”—now we are to pity the poor financiers!11
By that fall, the muddle was canonical, the stuff of TV commercials. Rand Paul’s Senate campaign, for example, ran an advertisement called “The Machine” that shows a monstrous robotic Capitol building, reaching out with steel tentacles and “scooping up Wall Street banks [the AIG logo], businesses [the GM logo], our health care,” as the narrator woefully puts it. Here AIG is the hapless victim of the grasping, nationalizing, socialist monster. Then, a few seconds later, the commercial accuses Paul’s opponent of “raising campaign money from the very people who supported the bailouts”—including a fund-raiser “hosted by lobbyists for bailed-out AIG”—these latter words spoken with the sneer that always accompanies AIG’s name. Now the company is the villain, buying politicians to get itself a bailout. The viewer is expected both to hate AIG and feel compassion for it in the space of thirty seconds.
Into the swirling waters of national bewilderment waded a new generation of leaders, sharp-minded individuals who saw the opportunities in all this ruination. They felt our fury, they knew where it needed to be directed, and they also seem to have had a pretty good idea of who would benefit from it all.
CHAPTER 4
Nervous System
Much of this desperate bamboozlement looks pretty transparent today. Still, the duplicity led to exactly the grassroots phenomenon that its promoters imagined. The thinking at its core was sloppy, maybe, but in its general tenor it hit precisely the right note for those anxious days. While the world was coming to pieces in the storm, the newest Right acknowledged our terror and offered a utopian ideal, a beacon of authentic Americanness that glowed like a lighthouse through the swirling muddle.
Fear Itself
The reinvigorated Right has no leader, it is often said. But it does have a favorite doomster: this man Beck, whose career at Fox News began in January of 2009 as the wave of rage was building to a crest. For three years prior to that, Beck had presided over a TV show on a CNN station, but without ever managing to achieve popular success, let alone make himself the face of an era. Now, from the stage of Fox News, Beck would become the voice of American discontent, stoking public fury and then escorting our outrage away from any logical target and over to a quarry more to his liking.
Glenn Beck is an unlikely hero. In 2008, when I first tuned in and heard him moan about leftist conspirators, I immediately dismissed him as some programmers’ bet gone wrong: How could anyone think the George W. Bush era was the time to unleash a crew-cut red hunter? Or that the age of the Internet was the moment to get behind a man whose many wrong assertions could be so easily checked?
Then there was the man’s odd combination of ignorance with chalkboard-scrawling didacticism. His snarling vindictiveness, punctuated with episodes of maudlin self-pity. His boyish clothes and winsome comic voices, sprinkled with shocking expressions of pure loathing. I doubted him, but I was wrong. From the start of his Fox News program until he left the air in June of 2011, he was one of the network’s biggest stars, drawing in unprecedented numbers of viewers for his 5 p.m. time slot.
One of Glenn Beck’s acknowledged heroes is the thirties boy genius Orson Welles; Beck’s production company, Mercury Radio Arts, is actually named after Welles’s Mercury Theatre group. When the latter was organized in 1937, it was hailed in the Communist Daily Worker, but Welles’s number-one modern-day fan seems to take inspiration less from his hero’s left-wing politics than from his 1938 radio drama, “War of the Worlds,” which described an invasion from Mars.* The mass hysteria that Welles accidently caused back then—many listeners didn’t know the radio show was a Halloween drama—seemed to be Beck’s conscious objective.1 Night after night, the announcer would send his viewers shivering from their TV sets with scary fables of onrushing doom: Constitution-tearing power-grabs, civilization-ending inflation, leftist revolutionaries in the streets. And each end-times scenario, he would swear, was really happening; the Martians were really coming; this time the end was really here—almost.
The economic collapse turned out to be the perfect environment for this peculiar act. Every afternoon at five, there Beck would be with another installment in the unfolding tale of the nation’s destruction: sometimes based on fact, sometimes almost purely imaginary, but always catching the fearful mood of the moment. And the central fear in his system of dread is that the Left is on the march, as people used to say in the thirties. Not openly on the march, mind you. No; advances by the Left are always made by stealth; their marchings are largely invisible to the untrained eye. Which meant it was up to Beck to inform us that the government was crawling with secret subversives, that the president was building a private army, and that liberals were scheming to make the economy worse so that an anguished public would turn to them to fix things—the hard-times scenario as a left-wing doomsday device. In fact, one of the talker’s most demented ideas—he repeated it countless times, making it something close to gospel on the newest Right—was that many of the nation’s problems, from the subprime debacle to the bailouts to the health insurance crisis, were manufactured according to a leftist plan that was published in the Nation magazine in 1966.*
“Most people will dread economic recessions and depressions,” said the TV host in March of 2010, explaining the theory that had, by then, animated his show through a year of economic disaster. “But some people don’t dread them. Some people are a little more opportunistic. They view this as their big chance. A window of opportunity to seize power to fundamentally transform things.* They don’t see this as, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re struggling,’ they see this as ‘Now is our time.’”
If the hard-times scenario was unfolding, it was coming not as an inevitable public response to Wall Street chicanery, Glenn Beck seemed to believe, but because leftists had carefully arranged matters to make all this happen. First they caused the financial crisis, Beck charged, then they seized power in response to it, and now they were pressing forward with a socialist program that would only make matters worse and thus increase demand for their brand of politics.
Blaming economic downturns on liberals—meaning everyone from academic leftists to labor unions to ou
r bleeding-heart government—is a time-honored practice on the Right. You simply match up the crash, recession, or disaster in question with some contemporaneous expression of doubt about markets by a liberal politician, or with the announcement of some plan for a tax increase or a tariff hike. They happened at the same time, you announce; therefore, one caused the other. For larger, more systemic disasters, you simply heap the blame on grander works of liberalism like the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie Mae, or the existence of the Federal Reserve System.
But Beck took the scapegoat strategy far beyond these terrestrial conventions. Liberals hadn’t merely blundered us into downturns with well-meaning regulations; they had done it deliberately, in order to put the hard-times scenario into effect. They are, in Beck’s imagination, what Beck is in reality: entrepreneurs of fear.
Conspiracy theorists have always been with us. But Glenn Beck brought them into the mainstream. And so began one of the most distinctive features of the right-wing renaissance: a rhetorical rapture-race in which pundits, bloggers, and candidates for high office competed to paint the most alarming end-times picture. Suddenly everyone was talking about the Martian invasion. The nation was being destroyed from within, the Constitution subverted, Freedom itself placed in mortal danger. We were on a march to socialism, a roller coaster to socialism, a bullet train to socialism—no, wait: socialism was already here, being crammed down our throats by the well-known socialist Barack Obama.
I got an unforgettable taste of this doomsday mania in March 2010, standing in a Tea Party crowd on the lawn of the Capitol building, listening to angry speeches in the open air while the members of Congress droned over the Democrats’ health-care bill inside. A few of the speakers addressed some contested aspect of the measure, but the crowd’s favorites were the ones who saw it as a colossal battle between good and evil—like the actor Jon Voight, who told us he prayed that legislators would find “the will, the strength, the courage to turn [their] back[s] on this destruction of America.”
“Destruction of America”: those were the words that rang the bell, that brought down the house in this new age of panic. During the health-care debate of 2009 and 2010, when it looked like the government was going to provide universal health insurance for all citizens—another big intervention into the marketplace—end-times foreboding ran riot. “The end of America as you know it” was the modest way Glenn Beck described the health-care measure. Its object was “robbing you of your humanity,” protested Rush Limbaugh; another radio talker said it was “the end of the Republic.”2
Although Newt Gingrich’s contributions to the genre were not the spiciest, they were remarkable because he had once been a man we entrusted with weighty governing responsibilities. In 2010, however, Gingrich stepped forward to tell us the Obama administration “represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.” The question before us, he continued, is “whether the United States as we know it will cease to exist.”3
Gingrich didn’t say these things off the cuff in a TV interview; he wrote them with deliberation and put the lines right smack at the beginning of his book To Save America. Not “To Renew America”—that had been Newt’s title back in 1995, when he was bubbling over with big ideas about the information age. But mere “renewal” wouldn’t cut it now. Things had gotten so inconceivably worse that our requirement now was existential. We needed salvation.
Newt’s ridiculous proclamations should have disqualified him from the political debate, but to judge by the thousands and maybe millions of people who were saying similar things, this accusation of betrayal from on high—of a corruption so universal, of a conspiracy so immense, of a crisis so dire—spoke convincingly to the anxiety gripping the land.
Fear was all the rage. The celebrated “red state” blogger Erick Erickson (along with his coauthor, Lewis Uhler) has given an almost clinically precise description of what he and his fellow alarmists achieved.
Many Americans who had never been politically active, never walked a precinct, never interrupted their golf games, family gatherings, or vacations to discuss politics, government, or the Constitution, were suddenly gripped with the sense that their government, nation, and way of life were being stolen from them.4
People all across the nation were tuned to the Mars-invasion broadcast this time, and many Americans found the coming catastrophe satisfying, delicious, even addictive. It was the orgasmaclysm: They tingled to imagine the outrageous injustices that would be done to them by the coming “death panels.” They purred to hear about the campaign of “indoctrination” that the new president had planned for their innocent kids; their pulse quickened to think of the “chains” he was preparing for their mighty wrists; and they swelled with imagined bravery to picture how they would be targeted by “the coming insurrection.” Their heroes, they quivered to learn, were victims of “persecution,” their nation was under “systematic assault” by its own leaders, and they who had defeated Soviet communism; they who rejoiced to see their enemies writhe in the dungeons of Guantánamo—why, now they were “Gulag Bound,” as a popular website of the day moaned rapturously.5 This time it was apocalypse that moved the needle, that swayed the undecided, that made the sale.
We the Market
And what it sold was the great god Market. The market’s invisible hand would lift the threat of “destruction” from the land. It would restore fairness to a nation laid waste by cronyism and bailouts. It would let the failures fail, at the same time comforting the thrifty and the diligent. Under its benevolent gaze, rewards would be proportionate to effort; the lazy and the deceiving would be turned away empty-handed, and once again would justice and stability prevail.
From the day the newest Right emerged from the shell of its rattlesnake egg, apocalypse (on the one hand) and perfect capitalism (on the other) have been its two lodestars, its omega and its alpha, its fear and its hope. “What do we say to socialism?” went the rallying cry at a Los Angeles Tea Party protest in 2009, according to two pollsters who have studied the movement. “Nooooo,” yelled the crowd on hand. “What do we say to free market?” “Yessssssssss.”6
“The most powerful, proven instrument of material and social progress is the free market,” declares the preamble of the 2009 Tea Party manifesto, the “Contract from America.” Or heed the words of the publishing magnate Steve Forbes, who maintains in his 2009 book, How Capitalism Will Save Us, that “markets are people voting with their money.” And then in the very next sentence, that “in many ways, a market is an ecosystem.”7
This gets us closer to the grand social vision of the newest Right. Markets are both natural and democratic; they are, in fact, naturally occurring democracies, places of innocence and wonder. Just as we don’t want to interfere in the fragile and no doubt democratic community of the coral reef, so we must leave (say) oil drillers alone to do their equally natural thing and express the popular will.
A particularly telling expression of the free-market faith occurs in a 2009 Tea Party pamphlet called Spread This Wealth. In order to teach readers about the nature of capitalism, the author, C. Jesse Duke, follows the doings of an imaginary primitive man who finds a stick, kills a deer, and trades things with other primitive men. Duke then makes the following pronouncement.
This whole process of free markets and the trading of time and energy is just the natural order of the world. A tree exchanges oxygen for carbon dioxide. A fire exchanges heat for oxygen. Atoms exchange electrons to become other atoms. Plants collect light to make chlorophyll, which nourishes animals, which become food for other animals and man, and so on. Everything in nature is constantly exchanging. So the free exchange of time and energy between people is the God-designed, natural order. Conflicts erupt when this order is upset.8
Remember the larger situation in which Duke (and Forbes and the anonymous contributors to the contract) felt moved to pen all these remarkable words. Our economy was in ruins thanks largely to unfettered investment banks trading
complex financial derivatives that not even experts could understand. Monopolies and oligopolies were everywhere. Hourly wages had been falling for decades. But according to these voices of protest, the way to make sense of it all was by imagining a state of economic nature. By presuming that God Himself wants government to stay out of it.
I quote Mr. Duke here not to rain down mockery on his works but because the above passage is the clearest distillation I have yet seen of the movement’s deliberate naïveté concerning economics. Capitalism is a system of balance and harmony and simplicity, the latest generation of conservatives insisted, regardless of what the newspapers say about shadow banks or credit default swaps. Armed with this universal truth, the newest Right vowed to accept no compromises, like better rules for Wall Street or smarter supervision; this was to be a war over ideals, over clashing utopias, over fundamentals. Economic policy needed to be understood as a quest for authenticity. And when that was clear, you understood that what we were suffering from was a conflict between true capitalism and some phony, gimcrack amalgam slapped together over decades of compromises. As Glenn Beck asked his radio audience in September 2008:
Why did Fannie and Freddie not work? Because it is the hybrid between government and capitalism. It is taking political power and injecting money into it. That’s why it didn’t work. Socialism doesn’t work. Marxism doesn’t work. Fascism doesn’t work. Capitalism works. Capitalism put a man on the moon.*