Oct 26

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BOOK REPORT: ONE MARKET UNDER GOD

One Market Under God:
Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism,
and the End of Economic Democracy
by Thomas Frank
Doubleday

* * *

My friends are tired of hearing me go on about Tom Frank, so now it’s your turn.

In the decade plus since he founded that snarly little cultural criticism journal, The Baffler, Frank has bettered all the pundits in asking just what the hell is wrong with this (big) picture. His eminently readable 1997 screed The Conquest of Cool shredded received ideas of a radical 1960s and the birth of hip capitalism. His relentless, ongoing derision of “alternative” culture and its corporate manufacture keeps slapping the smirk off of goateed marketing VPs and blathering Cultural Studies academics. Don’t get him started on the music industry, post-structuralism, management theory, and pretty much any collision of money and culture.

In One Market Under God, Frank takes on no less than the 500lb gorilla of the New Economy: the consensual hallucination that is Dow 10k, the dotcom revolution, and Clinton’s Third Way. Central here is the definition of a new market populism, in which corporate destroyers like Warren Buffet and Sam Walton are admired for their folksy ways, new-jack robber barons assume the role of pioneering rebels (“This plutocracy was cool!”), and everyone may count themselves among radicals whose defiance of past oppression is shouted with every eight-dollar E*Trade.

Frank argues that the best thing ever to happen to market capitalism, just as to advertising, was the ritual staging of its own hanging: the new Gordon Gekkos (“modern capitalist mavericks, shattering the old broker universe”) rose up beating down the old, evil, “elitist” Gordon Gekkos, then lit the same matches to the same piles of money.

It’s rare to meet a critic who can both write and deliver the punch, and Frank serves up his measured rage with piercing wit, a near-superhuman ear for irony, and remarkably tenacious research skills, in prose easily shelved alongside H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis

In an age of universal irony and programmed rebel chic, in which idealism and earnestness are a bore, and an Eisenhower conservative named Clinton is denounced as leftist, what remains if you actually give a shit? Read this book.