The Contrarian Manifesto

You don’t hear much about class anymore. If you believe the pundits, the whole tricky issue has been rendered moot by the emergence of the “new economy,” in which everyone can buy into the market and stake out a piece of the pie. During the recent campaign, in fact, every time Al Gore attacked the Bush tax plan as a sop to the rich, his ideas were criticized as musty, hopelessly mired in the past. What, after all, does class have to do with the brave new world of spreading affluence and global business? How can such an obsolete political language speak to our post-ideological times?

These, suggests Thomas Frank, remain fundamental questions, but then Frank has never doubted that class is an important factor in our lives. In his new book, “One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy” (Doubleday), he argues that present-day America has become an economic oligarchy, with the majority of consumers manipulated into financial serfdom under the guise of market choice.

“Let’s face it,” he says by phone from the Chicago offices of the Baffler, the journal of social criticism he has edited since 1988, “abuse of the language of choice is a hallmark of the age. The conglomerates like to say they’re giving people what they want, but so many choices are taken off the table before the conversation begins.” Nowhere, Frank believes, is this more true than when it comes to what he calls “market populism”--”a powerful new mythology” in which “the market and the people . . . [are] essentially one and the same.”

According to this perspective, Frank writes, “the market was democratic, perfectly expressing the popular will through the machinery of supply and demand, poll and focus group, superstore and Internet. In fact, the market was more democratic than any of the formal institutions of democracy--elections, legislatures, government. The market was a community. The market was infinitely diverse.” For Frank, the notion that the market could ever signify a purer form of democracy is ridiculous, a bit of sophistry to say the least. “I coined the term ‘market populism,’ ” he laughs, “to represent a system people invent to further their own interests. That’s what market populism is, a bogus system of thought.”

On the one hand, there’s a certain incendiary rhetoric to such a statement, as if Frank were slinging word bombs just to see where they might land. Yet if he gleefully admits that this is part of his intention--”one of the points of the book,” he says, “is to expose all this and make it laughable”--he’s also among our most insightful social observers, an expert at cutting through the cant of contemporary culture to pinpoint all the contradictions underneath.

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“I think his work is extremely important,” says critic and author Barbara Ehrenreich, “the kind of intelligent dissent that, for the most part, is no longer being done.” Frank’s first book, “The Conquest of Cool,” vividly delineated the relationship between consumerism and the counterculture, tracing the rise of so-called “hip capitalism” as a social force. “The Baffler,” meanwhile, has honed the art of Mencken-esque invective to a rapier-sharp point. In that regard, “One Market Under God” makes for something of a natural progression, bringing this same sensibility to bear on a broader area of discourse: the way our entire society seems to have lost sight of itself. “There’s been a gradual shift, since the 1960s, in the way we think about ourselves,” Frank points out. “Ad agencies in the 1960s didn’t talk about the market; they were cool capitalists, who wanted us to think they stood apart. Now, though, it’s become cool to talk about the market instead of people, which is really just conservative common sense. So what you see is a melding of hip ad culture with this conservative worldview.”

In many ways, the process Frank’s describing is not merely a function of the marketplace. Rather, it’s come to influence almost everything, from our sense of style and family to the increasingly homogenous world of politics. If there’s one idea the political landscape has in common with the market, after all, it’s a distrust of the dissenter, a scrupulous avoidance of debate. Surely, this was one of the hallmarks of the 2000 election, and, Frank argues, it’s a defining ethos of the new economy, as evidenced by the language of its most rabid boosters, from management theory avatars such as Tom Peters to free-market gurus George Gilder and Jeffrey Bell, who deride opposing viewpoints as the grumblings of a cynical and discontented elite.

On some level, Frank notes, that’s a continuation of the country’s 30-year-long culture wars, translated from the ethical to the financial sphere. The irony, though, is that by framing things in terms of elitism and populism, the market gurus return us to the language of social class.

“You can see it,” Frank says, “when the Wall Street Journal distills George [W.] Bush as a humble man, a true man of the people, because he understands the market, while Al Gore is denounced as a snob for raising questions, as if only an arrogant intellectual would stand outside.” The class structure may be inverted--with the rich, or the new rich, taking on the role of people’s heroes--but the rhetoric is strangely familiar, incendiary even, as if this were less a conversation about economics than a cultural revolution of some kind.

Of course, as Frank is quick to point out, cultural revolution resides at the very heart of consumer capitalism, or at least the illusion of it does. “Capitalism,” he explains, “is, by its nature, at war with an inherited value system. It’s dynamic, and it has a great interest in diversity and deviance, since without that, there’s no engine to make the system grow.” In that sense, there is a certain insurrectionary quality to the way our market functions, with its ability to turn the culture to its own ends. “Take the fact,” Frank notes, “that we now have ads on everything, or the way we’ve managed to reconcile our love of money with our distaste for its trappings”--a subtle bit of revolutionary thinking that allows us to pursue the center, even as we continue to consider ourselves rebels, for whom the standard rules do not apply.

The problem is that, for all our hip iconoclasm, it’s a superficial rebellion, concerned with the image, not the substance, of our lives. “When we’re talking about culture,” Frank explains, “you have to put aside the notion that it reflects the people--it doesn’t. There’s a lot of coercion going on.” As an example, he cites the North American Free Trade Agreement, which passed, despite the objections of 75% of the population, because American business wanted it done. If that’s not enough, Frank points to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, in which the government gave away “$70 billion worth of digital frequencies to existing broadcasters,” without letting the public into the debate. “Traditionally,” says Ehrenreich, “government was our defense against the market run wild, but you have to ask, is there any defense anymore?” That’s a point Frank takes to heart, arguing that we’ve come so far from any sense of the public interest that it’s impossible to know what the public wants.

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If the idea of a populism out of touch with the public seems almost Orwellian, it’s an interpretation Frank stands by. “I don’t think you can say we’ve chosen the world we live in,” he declares almost wistfully, a sentiment that seems increasingly reflected in our daily lives. According to the myth of market populism, we inhabit an era of unprecedented prosperity, but if you look at the concerns of most Americans, they revolve around the standard issues--education, health care, rising prices--of the middle class. What this suggests is that, for all the talk of the market as a democratizing influence, our prosperity is a selective one.

“Certainly,” says Darrol Stanley, a professor of finance at Pepperdine University, “the concentration of wealth is accelerating, which is to the detriment of society. CEOs in the United States make more, [proportionally], than in any other country. We’re right up there with the Third World.” More to the point is that, with the rise of globalization, it may be impossible to put the genie back in the jar. “The debate over whether to globalize,” argues Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of “The Lexus and the Olive Tree,” “that’s over. What we should debate is how we globalize, how we get the best out of a global economy and cushion ourselves against the worst.” Yet despite Friedman’s optimism, it’s hard not to be skeptical, especially since, as Stanley points out, “with all the global back and forth of commerce, governments inevitably become less important. Who’s more powerful now, the executives of the Dow 30, or the president of the United States?”

Ultimately, it is this that Frank finds chilling, perhaps more than any other aspect of the new economy. In the face of an ascendant market, the government becomes just another player, albeit one with a particularly strong portfolio. Already, you can see the ramifications of this thinking in the attempt to repeal the estate tax (which Frank characterizes as “one of the cornerstones of progressivism”), or the debate over the future of Social Security. Both of these, Frank suggests, are invented issues, manufactured by special interests to manipulate the public into subsidizing “the biggest ka-ching in corporate history.” Still, if that’s what market populism finally boils down to, there is another option--”to live in a social democracy like America used to be.” It may or may not be too late for such a reversal, although Frank insists, “I don’t think every battle is lost.” But either way, he argues, “if you gave the public the opportunity, I believe they’d make that choice.”