by Thomas Frank
Admittedly, the fear is a catchy one: beware the politician who thinks he knows all the answers and holds in his hands the true design for human civilization. But the only first-world politician who ever deliberately tried to “transform” a society in this way in my lifetime was Margaret Thatcher, and the abstract blueprint around which she aimed to remake Britain was … the Right’s beloved free market. Her own words on the matter are far more frightening than any progressive bromide uttered by Barack Obama: “Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul.” (Incidentally, encouraging homeownership was a large part of her intended transformation.)
Those fantastic ambitions were widely exported. Over the last four decades, Thatcher’s ideological comrades brought their free-market plans to countries all around the globe, remaking the souls of Chileans, Argentines, Poles, and Iraqis as the opportunities presented. Societies were “transformed,” all right: dynamited, bulldozed, privatized, swept away. And in the classic 2007 account of this particular chapter in civilization’s development, the journalist Naomi Klein explains that it often happened in the aftermath of crises: hurricanes, military coups, civil wars. An entire program of market-based reforms would be installed all of a sudden as a sort of “shock therapy” when traditional social systems had been knocked off balance.8
Let me repeat, before we proceed, that what I am describing were the acts of conservatives: professional economists using crisis to impose what they knew to be the correct social model—the market model—on nations that were not really interested in it. Also: that this really happened, that the economists talked about it openly.
To hear the resurgent Right tell it, however, the only place where you’ll find such ruinous strategies in discussion are in the war rooms of the sneaky Left, as they plot to destroy the free market itself. In a curious inversion of Naomi Klein’s argument, the rejuvenated Right fastened on a single flippant 2008 remark from then-incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel—“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste”—and convinced itself on the basis of this one clue that a cadre of left-wingers were planning all manner of offenses against democracy including, in some tellings, the overthrow of capitalism itself, with the financial crisis as a pretext.
The Spider, the Starfish, and the Bull Snake
Actually, “pretext” is too small a word for the vast array of liberal shams, fakes, tricks, and black ops that haunt the imagination of the revitalized Right. The liberal stratagems they see around them are the stuff of Cold War duplicity—only with the roles reversed: it’s the liberals who are forever peddling crisis, not the people who used to insist that we were about to lose to the Soviets because we weren’t spending enough on the military. The best expression of this fear of trumped-up crisis comes in the 2010 “thriller” by Glenn Beck, The Overton Window. At one point in the novel, the son of an evil progressive PR genius is explaining his dad’s methods to his rebel-conservative girlfriend. “We never let a good crisis go to waste,” he says, echoing Emanuel, “and if no crisis exists, it’s easy enough to make one.”
Saddam’s on the verge of getting nuclear weapons, so we have to invade before he wipes out Cleveland. If we don’t hand AIG a seventy-billion-dollar bailout there’ll be a depression and martial law by Monday. If we don’t all get vaccinated one hundred thousand people will die in a super swine-flu pandemic.… Now they’re telling us that if we don’t pass this worldwide carbon tax right now the world will soon be underwater.9
As Beck’s plot unfolds, the reader learns of the most diabolical fake crisis of them all: a “false-flag domestic attack” in which these nefarious libs set off an atomic bomb near Las Vegas, blame the deed on Tea Party types, and then, in the ensuing hysteria, put over their grand plan for remaking the country according to their enlightened theories.
But wait: go back a step. Of the several fake crises Beck’s PR boy mentions to his girlfriend, three are standard-issue right-wing talking points. But one of them is not: the 2003 wave of fear that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that the Iraq war was therefore justified. As it happens, one of the most enthusiastic peddlers of this particular line was none other than the network that made Glenn Beck famous, Fox News. Beck himself, back in those days, was leading “Rallies for America” across the country, patriotic demonstrations that often featured a video message from President Bush. Liberals, you will recall, were the wimps on the other side of the issue—the ones like Barack Obama, who called the impending invasion “a dumb war.” To read The Overton Window eight years later, however, the whole episode was just another malevolent deed of the big-government conspiracy, to which only right-wing rebels are wise.
Conservative populists, meanwhile, are imagined by the novelist Beck to be victims of everything big brother can throw at them. They are jailed on the flimsiest of charges. They endure savage beatings by police. The book’s hero is even waterboarded after he signs up with the Tea Party resistance. Their patriotic meetings are infiltrated by police spies and broken up by mysterious agents provocateurs—the descendants, I suppose, of the Red Squads that real-life city governments actually fielded in order to suppress left-wing radicals in the old days.
Similar fears come up all the time in the larger conservative movement culture. In 2009, for example, the populist Right was swept by panic that the new Democratic administration was preparing internment camps for conservatives. On TV, Glenn Beck managed to feed this peculiar fear even as he debunked it, and in The Overton Window he plays it the same way: the existence of the camps is first suggested by an unreliable person, yet the main character seems to end up in just such a facility after his waterboarding. Fortunately, Beck has attached a nonfictional “Afterword” to the end of the novel to sort things out, and here he reminds the reader that a former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency once proposed rounding up undesirables during a national emergency.10
This historical factoid is a favorite of conspiracy theorists and X-Files fans, but it is generally discussed absent an important detail: the FEMA boss who suggested those infamous plans was brought to Washington by Ronald Reagan; he was a close friend of the Reagan adviser and Tea Party sympathizer Ed Meese, and the object of his emergency scheme was to prevent a recurrence of the antiwar agitation of the sixties.11 The McCarran Act of 1950 also authorized a big roundup of left-wing radicals should a “national emergency” arise.12 And exactly such a roundup actually occurred in 1919, during the first red scare, when radicals and labor organizers were arrested and, in many cases, deported.
The truth is that neither federal nor state governments have ever mounted a campaign to intern the free-market faithful or blacklist the hardworking proletarians in the Chicago futures pits. However, they have used force over the years to break up strikes, imprison labor organizers, keep minorities from voting, round up people of Japanese descent, and disrupt antiwar movements. Today, though, it suits the resurgent Right to imagine itself as the real victim of state persecution, which no doubt enhances its aura as a dissident movement taking on a merciless establishment.
To see the sort of passions that drove America’s actual history of politicized prosecution, conservatives need only consult the Official Tea Party Handbook, a 2009 booklet authored by an Arizona activist named Charly Gullett. “Socialism is treason,” Mr. Gullett proclaims.
It is criminally motivated political terrorism. Both terrorism and treason are anathema to Liberty and those who advocate it are political criminals. This is not complicated. Clear-thinking Americans must begin to view Socialism as a prosecutable crime and recognize those who conspire to advance it are in fact criminals to be adjudicated in courts of Federal law. We must embrace the notion our Founding Fathers defined high crimes because they are real, they are being perpetrated against America and they need to be prosecuted.13
The Political Economy of Self-Pity
Reminding our conservative friends of their mile-wide law-and-order streak seems a little unfair. Their m
ovement has got such a beautiful heroic-outlaw thing going that it seems almost a deliberate buzzkill to point out their slips into Grand Inquisitor mode, hunting down the heretics. So let us stay on the well-marked trail, descending now from the misty heights of conspiracy theory and approaching the river of tears the new conservatives cry for their own sufferings, bawling that they, not liberal darlings like minorities or the poor, are society’s true victims.
As we approach this raging torrent, however, let us remember that it was not always such a swiftly flowing stream. The first Tea Party rally I attended was largely devoid of self-pity; it was a straightforward political j’accuse. The protesters were there because they disliked the TARP and the stimulus package; as far as I recall, none of them took it to the second remove by moaning about being persecuted because they were protesting. True, at a CPAC speech I went to a little later on the same day as the protest, I heard Mitt Romney say that he needed to get through his prepared script “before federal officials come here to arrest me for practicing capitalism.” But the prosperous crowd in attendance there got the joke: arrested for practicing capitalism—that’s a hot one!
A year later, though, and that second-remove grievance had far overshadowed the original cause. Now people protested not only to advertise their views on a given issue but out of resentment at the insults heaped upon protesters. The collecting and categorizing of these insults had by then become such an absorbing pursuit among Tea Partiers that it made up a good part of one of the earliest Tea Party books to appear, the radio talker Michael Graham’s 2010 effort, That’s No Angry Mob, That’s My Mom. In his book’s first chapter (“My Mother, the Terrorist”), Graham proposes a theory of political motivation that begins and ends with liberal insults heaped on “normal” Americans, veering off into actual issues only incidentally.
Stupid, backward, bigoted, racist. You’ve probably been called all this and more.… Then one day, you had enough. You got tired of the attacks on private enterprise. [!] … Then you went to a tea party, and that’s when you really crossed the line. Every morning the newspaper calls you a dangerous, hate-filled kook. Every night, the TV news declares you an ignorant, potentially violent redneck. And in between, political pundits and even politicians denounce you with juvenile insults like “teabagger.”14
These details may amuse, but it is the paradox of the phenomenon that I wish to emphasize, the unconflicted way in which these proud voices of the strong—these hymners of Darwinian struggle, of the freedom to fail, of competition to the death—advance their war on the world by means of tearful weepy-woo.
Self-pity has become central in the consciousness of the resurgent Right. Depicting themselves as victimized in any and every situation is not merely a fun game of upside down; it is essential to their self-understanding. They are the ones to whom things are done. This is the reason they have taken as their banner a flag that reads, “Don’t Tread on Me.” The slogan is a concise expression of the grand distortion that undergirds everything I have been describing: the belief that we are living in an age of rampant leftism; that progressivism is what brought the nation to its awful straits; that markets were born free but are everywhere in chains.
And so we have the works of Matthew Continetti, a journalist who specializes in profiles in victimhood: a catalog of every nasty thing anyone has ever said about Sarah Palin that he actually titled The Persecution of Sarah Palin; a cover story for the Weekly Standard about the persecution of the Koch brothers, two of the nation’s richest men and most influential political donors, but who, it is Continetti’s solemn duty to report, receive mean e-mails every day. They are in fact “the latest victims of the left’s lean, mean cyber-vilification machine.”15 Pity these billionaires, reader.
And we have the latest bestseller by David Limbaugh, a book that understands both the health-care debate and the financial crisis largely in terms of the slurs that Democrats have cast upon the insurance and banking industries. These dirty things-that-were-said are “Crimes Against the Private Sector,” which are in turn a form of Crimes Against Liberty (the title of Limbaugh’s book), and the author lists them in the detailed manner of a man in whom indignation throbs righteously: There was “slander”; there was “vilifying”; there was “derogatory and bellicose language.” There were “malicious claims” made against doctors and harsh words “castigating Wall Street bankers”; there is a president who “delights in bashing American businesspeople”; and there is Tim Geithner’s “Chicago-style machismo”*: “‘As the [financial reform] bill moves to the floor,’” quoth that brute, “‘we will fight any attempt to weaken it.’”16 Tremble before the iron Treasurer, reader, as he muscles a bill through Congress! And weep for the Nation as the insolent words of the liberals fasten fast the chainy chains of Servitude around the neck of Liberty!
If this is the first time you’ve encountered the Right’s victimhood rap, you might feel that it’s just a mild irritant, an unconvincing act meant to becloud the Democrats’ traditional appeal to society’s actual outsiders. But this is only part of the story. Understanding themselves as the true victims is, in fact, essential to the conservative revival. There are few political or cultural situations in which they don’t instinctively reach for the mantle of the wronged, holler about bias, or protest about how unfairly they’ve been treated. It goes on even in the most improbable precincts. Army generals must be consoled. Job creators must be honored by those they employ. Billionaires must know we love them. And former majority leaders of the House of Representatives need your sympathy.
I refer, of course, to Dick Armey, who, along with his coauthor, Matt Kibbe, chooses to enliven the pages of his “Tea Party Manifesto,” Give Us Liberty, with a chapter that catalogs every insult directed against him and the Tea Party movement over the last three years. Oh, reader, they called what Armey’s group did “Astroturfing,” he remembers. They objected when people organized by his group disrupted town hall meetings; they called him names; they said his movement was racist; they made fun of his hat.
But before you weep for poor ragged Dick, recall that Armey was a congressional bigwig who eventually cashed in his legislative chips for a lobbying job at the enormous international law firm DLA Piper (which also employs former Democratic Senate majority leader Tom Daschle). When not himself one of the most powerful men on the planet, Armey has been an adviser to the most powerful men. From his 2003 book of market-worshipping aphorisms to his labors on behalf of the Marianas Islands sweatshops, he has consistently sided with the moneyed and against the weak. But now, with tearful self-regard, he asks us to consider all the slights and insults he has endured in the course of his long career.
Why must the world be persuaded to think of Dick Armey as a victim? For the same reason that Glenn Beck channels Martin Luther King Jr., that Paul Ryan shouts, “Down with big business,” and that conservatives generally have learned to apply the term “fascist” to their foes: because, consciously or not, all of them are following a political strategy that works in hard times.
At Armey’s FreedomWorks pressure group, for example, there is reportedly a deliberate effort to look and sound like a left-wing organization. The idea, according to Armey, was “not just to learn from their opponents on the left but to beat them at their own game.” The outfit’s leaders write that after the Tea Party conquers the GOP and Congress, it “will take America back from The Man,” explaining helpfully to readers that this is “the term the New Left used to refer to the political establishment.” Activists that the group trains are asked to learn the leadership secrets of the Communist Party* and to read a book by the famous neighborhood organizer Saul Alinsky; their idea for a big march on Washington came to them from another favorite text: a famous history of nonviolent protest. To fill the streets with demonstrators rallying for free markets—why, according to Armey and Kibbe, “in Washington, D.C., this is known as radical. Even dangerous.” It is so radical, so dangerous, that “the establishment doesn’t like it one bit.”17
“Hard work beats Daddy’s money,” the revolutionaries of FreedomWorks like to say, since they are such jolly, wisecracking opponents of privilege.18 And I suppose the slogan is true enough, if by “beats” you mean “protects” or “increases” or “compounds” Daddy’s money. So off they go, studying communist tactics and doing everything in their power to make market utopianism sound like legitimate democratic protest—and behold: Daddy’s money multiplies and reproduces and turns cartwheels of joy; Daddy’s money comes zooming into Dulles airport in its private jet, wreathed in smiles, to help elect you to a long career in the DC wrecking crew.
CHAPTER 8
Say, Don’t You Remember
“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” was the so-called anthem of the Depression, a transcendent expression—if such a thing is possible—of the hopeless disillusionment of 1932. It derides patriotism in the voice of a working-class everyman, along with the American dream, and even the promise of the future.
They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob.
When there was earth to plough or guns to bear, I was always there, right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead.