Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right

by Thomas Frank

  Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?

  Once I built a railroad, made it run, made it race against time.

  Once I built a railroad; now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

  Once I built a tower to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;

  Once I built a tower, now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

  Once in khaki suits, gee, we looked swell,

  Full of that Yankee Doodle-de-dum,

  Half a million boots went sloggin’ through hell,

  And I was the kid with the drum.

  Its obvious incitement of unrest got the song banned by certain radio stations. In the grand history of cynicism, the only other hit record I know of that comes close to it is the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen,” or maybe the Vietnam-era song “Fortunate Son.”

  In 2009, someone posted Rudy Vallee’s recording of “Brother” on YouTube; immediately people began to share their reactions to that wrenching bit of Depressiana. Here are a few entries that caught my eye.

  This song speaks to the failures of Keynesian Economics. Public spending on infrastructure to stimulate the slowing econonmy—it has never worked, and never will. It turns recessions into depressions like it did in the 30’s, and like it is doing now.

  Kinda sounds like today, with the bailouts and stimulus packages. The whole, government making it worse thing.

  This song is terrific!!! The theme applys again to us in 2009 like it did in 1929. Please “world leaders” give us “Hope for a brighter Future” not this thing called “Change” spoken by every two-bit politician since Hitler.

  Brother, can you spare a trillion dollars?

  America is staring this in the face again, watch closely what’s happening. April/May … will be the “dropping off the cliff” reality.

  Call your reps and tell them NO to the proposed “stimulus.” It’s not going to help Americans when it’s spreading pork around for all the special interests groups and delayed for years. Not gonna work.

  Stock up on supplies that are necessities, and hold on. We’re in for a spin.

  The song’s famous lyrics were written by Yip Harburg, a socialist who was later blacklisted during the McCarthy period. But in our own enlightened age, it is evidently possible to listen to “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and hear it as a call for a purified form of free-market economics, as a warning against public works projects, maybe as an endorsement of the Hoover administration, even.

  I do not bring all this up in order to score easy points at the expense of confused YouTubers. I mean merely to highlight what the posters themselves assume: That conservatives are the rightful heirs to Depression culture. That the songs and books and movies of the thirties abound with lessons on the wisdom of markets and the folly of government; that the Red Decade is in fact some kind of spiritual homeland for the free-market sensibility.

  It is an understandable mistake. The thirties, as we know them in the Internet age, are very different from the thirties we know from the canonical literature of the time or the standard histories of the period. To Google nearly any aspect of the first two Roosevelt administrations is to encounter almost immediately the obsessive loathing for the New Deal felt by conservative entertainers and libertarian economists. You can find the works of scholars like Arthur Schlesinger or Irving Bernstein or Michael Denning or Robert McElvaine down at the library if you wish, but if you begin your research on the Internet, the experts you will encounter first are likely to be Amity Shlaes, the author who has tried to recapture FDR’s expression “the forgotten man” for conservatism;* or the bitter libertarian economists of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, proving to one another over and over again that the New Deal was not necessary, did not help, and very probably made the Depression worse. Of course Yip Harburg was bemoaning government meddling when he wrote “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” What else was there to bemoan?

  If the strategy of the contemporary Right is, roughly speaking, to mimic successful leftist movements, it is only natural that they have sought to swipe the memory of liberalism’s defining era—the Depression, the period that our own times so closely resemble. For anyone wishing to present themselves as a friend of the common man, standing up to society’s masters, it is to the cultural patterns of the thirties that they must ultimately turn. And so the revitalized Right has set out to commit the consummate act of cultural theft.

  Full of That Yankee Doodle-De-Dum

  Again Glenn Beck supplies the extreme case. He is a man of distinct Depression sensibilities, routinely paying homage to the cultural forms of the Red Decade. His constant worry about the coming of fascism, for example, was a characteristic fear of that period. So it is with his hate for Woodrow Wilson, an opinion that can seem bizarre today but that was common enough during the pacifist years after World War I. And in classic thirties style, he warns the honest people of America against a vigorous and resourceful Left that is swarming with radicals and communists.

  Much has been made of Beck’s rhetorical similarity to the notorious “radio priest,” Father Charles Coughlin, but Beck’s populist habits actually seem to be drawn from a whole range of Depression-era figures. His trick of concealing his intelligence behind a facade of boyishness and buffoonery might be borrowed from the Louisiana “Kingfish,” Huey Long: garish suits in Long’s case, clashing patterns in Beck’s, plus those unlaced sneakers and those untucked shirts. Beck’s one-man red scare, in which he hounds professors, foundation figures, and intellectuals on flimsy charges of secret radicalism could have been lifted from the career of the newspaper titan William Randolph Hearst. From the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz comes Beck’s favorite metaphor for the deceivers who rule us: “the man behind the curtain,” pulling the levers and pretending to be all-powerful.1 From Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself comes such rhetoric as the following, which Beck uttered in a special TV program in March of 2009:

  What happened to the country that loved the underdog and stood up for the little guy? What happened to the voice of the forgotten man? The forgotten man is you.2

  Back in 2003, when the conservative entertainer was touring the country celebrating what he called “the real America,” Beck made a point of locating heartland authenticity not merely in the red states but also in the past, in the ways of the “Depression people” who were his grandparents.3 On one emotional occasion in 2009, he told his TV audience that the answers to present-day economic distress lay in remembering the lessons of the Depression—by which he meant being thrifty and neighborly, not signing up for a labor union or voting for a New Deal—and the following year, a collection of documentary Depression photos produced from him an outpouring of workerist sentimentality that was almost Soviet in its proletarian bathos.4 Gazing upon a photograph of a farmer and his wife, Beck burbled,

  Look at how proud she is. Look at the confidence. Look at the way she is standing. Look at her face. She’s proud. She’s strong.

  Depression people were both the fount of American authenticity and the source of our material well-being. “These are the people that built America into what it is,” he declared. “We have been feasting off of their labors for seventy years! They built it, and we’re just using it all up!”*

  Beck’s most telling homage to the Depression sensibility was the 9/12 Project, which aimed to rekindle hard-times neighborliness. He announced it with great fanfare on his TV show one night in March of 2009, after a dizzy prologue listing all the scary problems Americans were then facing. Beck became so overwhelmed by the nobility of what he was doing that he actually began to cry as he spoke these words: “I toldja—for weeks—you’re not alone!”

  And so Beck launched the 9/12 Project with the above-cited tribute to the “forgotten man” and an invitation to meet people from “all across the country,” that is, “regular people like you.”5 The movement was to be a thing of local chapters, mass rallies, mosaics made up of thousands of snapshots, and saccharine talk about how
capitalist salvation lay somehow in the collective—that when angry citizens got together to revel in their Americanness they would no longer “feel powerless.” As it always does with Beck, the proposal immediately went from all-American solidarity to a dark vision of the insiders who are manipulating us.

  Once you pull the curtain away you realize that there are only a few people pressing the buttons, and their voices are weak. The truth is that they don’t surround us at all.

  We surround them.6

  It was a powerful invocation of the archetypal thirties image: the masses; the righteous millions; the people, yes.

  After writing the above paragraphs describing the 9/12 Project, I realized that I was basically describing the plot of one of the most famous films of the Depression era: Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941). It is the story of a mass movement in which ordinary people get together in a spirit of vague civic togetherness under the leadership of a popular radio frontman who often talks about suicide, as Beck does. The politics of the John Doe Movement are never made clear in the movie, but both the movement and its putative leader are definitely controlled by a wealthy media mogul, like Beck’s then boss, Rupert Murdoch, who plans to use them for his own quasi-fascist purposes. As the movie’s plot unfolds, it seems as though everyone is a sucker except the evil wealthy guy, who is certain to get what he wants.*

  The movie, which was a commentary on the manipulation of political clubs during the Depression, tells us all we need to know about Beck’s operation. The 9/12 Project doesn’t so much mimic thirties populism as it mimics fake thirties populism. It is a replica of a replica in which bogus populism shores up ironclad elitism and where bogus enlightenment serves the most grotesque form of dupery. Bogusness squared; that is the story of Glenn Beck.

  Waiting for Righty

  From President Roosevelt on down, Depression-era Americans reviled the upper class that had steered them into disaster, and as Americans of the twenty-first century took their own turn on the toboggan ride to economic calamity, they once again began to grumble about what they called the “ruling class.” But this time around it wasn’t leftists who introduced the phrase, and it wasn’t organized workers who dreamed of shutting the oligarchy down; it was the revitalized Right.

  The existence of a “ruling class” dawned on the conservative revival very suddenly in the summer of 2010, the way a vogue for Marxism overtook American literati in the early thirties. For example, Beck’s Overton Window warned readers of “the inevitable rise of tyranny from the greed and gluttony of a ruling class,” while a Tea Party leader in Saint Louis could be found crowing that “the Tea Party scares the hell out of the ruling class” and speculating that the coming elections would mark nothing less than “the beginning of the end of elitism in America.”7

  Richard Viguerie’s daily e-mail newsletter increasingly made “ruling class” its pet expression. The “ruling class” was sneering at Sarah Palin, it told readers; the “ruling class” was trying to silence a controversial radio commentator; the “ruling class” was made up of sore losers, and so on. Viguerie eventually became so attached to the phrase that his 2010 election-night watch party actually bore the Jacobin name “Out with the Ruling Class”; the roster of “special guests” included such lifelong foes of aristocratic privilege as Grover Norquist, the Lenin of the tax cut, and Tim Phillips, the leader of a grassroots group whose insurgencies are made possible by the Moscow gold of the oil billionaires Koch and Koch.8

  The unlikely Engels of this strange class war was a retired professor of international relations named Angelo Codevilla; his manifesto, “America’s Ruling Class,” was published in the summer of 2010 by the American Spectator and was issued a short while later in a longer version by that magazine’s book-publishing arm.

  There are but two social groupings that matter in America, the retired professor maintained, a “ruling class” that legitimizes itself as the nation’s intellectual superiors but that is actually defined by its control of the machinery of government, and a “country class” made up of nearly everyone else. The core of the idea was not new, but the bailouts and economic disasters of our own times allowed Codevilla to apply it in a new and uncompromising way. His indictment of the “ruling class” fell on anyone connected with government, Republicans as well as Democrats, both of whom were said to hand out economic favors to the connected. Big business was implicated too, insofar as it was in cahoots with big government; in fact, “the upper tiers of the U.S. economy are now nothing but networks of special deals with one part of government or another,” Codevilla wrote. And from the remorseless workings of this system there was no reprieve and virtually no chance for reform. Only “revolution” of some vague but noninvasive kind would do. “There is no escape from the conflict between the classes.”9

  It was a strangely bolshie line for a conservative hero, weirdly akin to Marx’s dictum that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” But Codevilla’s thesis was an immediate sensation nevertheless, with Rush Limbaugh devoting a large part of his radio program to it when it first appeared. For the newest Right, all this hard-boiled prole-talk was invigorating stuff. Now it was conservatism’s turn to gasp at the horrors our society had blithely tolerated all these years. The affluence of the “ruling class,” Codevilla taught, was almost entirely ill-gotten, the result of government meddling with nature—which is to say, with the free market. Using regulation, bailouts, and taxes, government rigs the game this way and that, and regardless of whether the people doing the rigging are Republicans or Democrats, the beneficiaries are always the same: what Codevilla calls the “Ins.” The well-educated snobs. The conspirators. The ruling class.

  The regulators and the regulated become indistinguishable, and they prosper together because they have the power to restrict the public’s choices in ways that channel money to themselves and their political supporters. Most of the world is too well acquainted with this way of economic life. Americans are just starting to find out.10

  For Angelo Codevilla, there was nothing redeeming about these people or the system that has sluiced life’s rewards in their direction. A real meritocracy, he allowed, might have its virtues, but that’s not what we have in America. We are taught to bow before scientific expertise, but when viewed in the harsh light of class analysis, we can see that the expertise itself is rotten: expensive American colleges simply hand out As to everyone, while professional associations prevent the public from influencing or investigating academic work. Their expertise, their social concern—it is, all of it, merely a mask for arbitrary power.

  Just as in the thirties, ordinary people are now said to be wise to the game. They are aware, Codevilla writes, “that government is not the friend of the friendless. The Country Class knows that the government is there to serve the strong: the Ruling Class’ members and supporters.” They owe the established order no deference or respect; they have seen through its deceptions, swept aside its gauzy myths, shed its bunk forever. They know that the “tyranny” so many have been fretting about is in fact here. We are in its cruel grip already.11

  Once She Built a Railroad

  The ultimate act of thirties usurpation is Ayn Rand’s thousand-page 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged. To its present-day fans, it is a work of amazing prescience, the story of the overregulating, liberty-smothering Obama administration told more than fifty years before it actually happened. For me, it is the political flimflam of our times wrapped up in one big package: the manifesto of the deregulators and free marketeers who caused the economic disaster, embraced without a glimmer of awareness by the protest movement that the disaster stirred up.

  The story of a group of business leaders fighting big-government oppression, Atlas Shrugged has been popular since it was first published, especially among the sort of self-pitying mogul types who see themselves in the book’s tycoon heroes. For free-market true believers, the tome is their very own Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, more accurately, their C
aesar’s Column.

  With Barack Obama’s inauguration in January of 2009, sales of Atlas Shrugged registered a remarkable uptick. Everyone could see that it was the novel for the era. The opinion page of the Wall Street Journal hailed it as the tale of our times foretold. The influential blogger Michelle Malkin urged readers to emulate the book’s entrepreneurial heroes. Officers of the Ayn Rand legacy organizations began appearing at Tea Party rallies, stoking the fires of discontent; protest signs started quoting famous lines from the novel; someone issued silver coins emblazoned with the name of the book’s main character; and a movie based on the book was released to the great anticipation of the resurgent Right. (It flopped.)

  Rand fans heard the call to the colors. Among our characters, Rick Santelli and Mike Pompeo are both disciples. Paul Ryan suggested in 2009 that “we are right now living in an Ayn Rand novel, metaphorically speaking.” Among the freshman class in Congress, the fandom burns brightly. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin refers to Atlas Shrugged as his “foundational book.”12 Representative David Schweikert of Arizona cites Atlas Shrugged as his favorite book, Representative Rick Crawford of Arkansas quotes Rand on his Twitter feed, and Senator Rand Paul describes Atlas Shrugged as a “must-read classic in the cause of liberty.”13

  The novelist’s biographer Jennifer Burns expressed puzzlement at the book’s newfound popularity. When the economic collapse disgraced certain Ayn Rand acolytes, she told Politico in 2009, “I thought, ‘Wow. Ayn Rand. Dead and buried forever.’ But she’s come roaring right back.”14