Let the Good Times Roll

Flash back a little more than a year ago. The country was awash in the euphoria of a stock market that had apparently freed itself from any laws of financial gravity. The panjandrums of CNBC and CNN could barely control their awe as, each day, the Nasdaq composite average rocketed to a new all-time high, and every investing fool in motley plowed IRA and 401(k) dollars into newfangled stocks with no earnings, betting on a future that would arrive, if not within nanoseconds, then at least within weeks or months and surely in time to pay for Junior’s college tuition.

So it was that Priceline.com was bid up until its value was twice that of United Airlines while Business Week declared that the world was undergoing a “Copernican Revolution” in commerce. Amazon.com CEO and 1999 Time magazine’s Man of the Year Jeff Bezos went so far as to proclaim that we were witnessing a change as fundamental as what occurred 500 million years ago with the dawn of the Cambrian Era, when life first appeared on Earth.

What a difference a year makes. In April 2000, the Internet bubble burst and, unlike the soap bubbles of children, which explode soundlessly and instantaneously, sprinkling tiny droplets on the heads of happy tykes, this bubble’s explosion was loud and protracted. With the Nasdaq composite index down 41% for the year 2000 and more than 50% from its March high, it is safe to say that we are not experiencing a Cambrian explosion in the world of American turbo-capitalism. Rather, we are mired in an imploding bear market for technology stocks, the kind beloved by spoilsports and short traders the world over, for whom Y2K provided a bonanza of opportunities to delight in Schadenfreude, the sourest of human emotions, that dark secret pleasure we take in the misfortunes of others.

Dinesh D’Souza, a research scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is apparently a stranger to Schadenfreude, for his is a sunny disposition. Reveling in the dismal ironies of failed projects and thwarted ambition is not part of his project, which is nothing less than to serve as head cheerleader for the free market libertarian flank of the Republican Party. Having composed a hazy hagiography of his hero Ronald Reagan and a much-discussed book attacking the culture of “political correctness” in the American university, as well as other books, D’Souza has established himself as a member of the punditocracy. “The Virtue of Prosperity” is his account of the practical and ethical dilemmas the United States faces in what he takes to be an unparalleled age of plenty.

D’Souza argues that the old distinctions between left and right have broken down in the new millennium, leaving us with what he terms the “Party of Yeah,” whose members embrace computer technology, genetic engineering and risky entrepreneurship; and the “Party of Nah,” whose constituents believe that our rush into a technologized future impoverishes our souls and saps our communities.

D’Souza is enamored of his categories, but they are less descriptive than he believes. For instance, although he believes that the “Party of Nah” unites environmentalists and fundamentalist Christians in protest against the materialist rapacity of the New Economy, it is hard to imagine Earth-Firsters and the Christian Coalition achieving anything like a political union. Though D’Souza champions the techno-capitalism that has ushered in the boom and bust of the dot-com age, he is nonetheless anxious that our affluence has not yet translated into moral excellence, and he worries about the existential question of human happiness throughout his book. Though D’Souza claims that technology and wealth will work together to produce a good ethical life, this is more an article of faith for him than a demonstrable argument; in the end, “The Virtue of Prosperity” has much more to say about prosperity and its attendant fantasies than it does about virtue.

Indeed, it is prosperity above all that fires D’Souza’s imagination, and his book may be read as a love letter to the Bill Gateses of the world, a panegyric about the mystical wisdom of the stock market. “Somewhat to our surprise,” he writes, “we are in possession of a money machine, and it keeps on spitting out silver coins and green notes.” If the stock market machine of D’Souza’s dreams has once again proven to be chimerical, at least the machine of his prose is up and running; indeed, it will churn out cliche after cliche for the next 10 chapters. “Being super-rich,” he informs us, “is fashionable again,” and D’Souza seems to want nothing more than to hobnob with the moneyed classes. For D’Souza, the super-rich are quasi-magical beings, “limited in what they can do only by their imagination.” To hell with war, disease, pestilence and death; the rich can buy off such depredations. In a world from which God has departed, the over-class is apparently composed of tiny godlings who offer intimations of immortality not in the erstwhile odes of the Romantics but in the oodles of securities in their hedge funds. Agog at the vast possibilities of genetic engineering, D’Souza suggests that with control over our genes, we will be able “to eradicate aggression and become a more passive species or to eliminate the genetic differences that lead to inequality.” Ideologically, everything is in the predicate of this sentence. Inequality for eugenics enthusiast D’Souza is not the result of history but of DNA. The rich are rich, he seems to suggest, because they are genetically superior to the rest of us.

D’Souza believes the United States is “well on its way to creating the first mass affluent class in world history.” No doubt the American standard of living, if measured mainly by consumption, is the envy of much of the world. But to move from this observation to Manhattan Institute member Peter Huber’s claim that “the problem of poverty has been solved” in the United States is surely fatuous. Huber clearly doesn’t get out much, but this does not stop the chipper D’Souza from adding his huzzah to the celebratory chorus. “Poor people in America,” he suggests, live “better than the average Western European does today.” This underclass really isn’t so bad off, for as D’Souza claims, echoing Reagan’s infamous attack on “welfare cheats,” “poor people often grossly underreport their incomes, no doubt to maintain their eligibility for federal programs.” Though D’Souza is loath to admit it, when it comes to grossly underreporting incomes, nobody does it better than the rich; that’s what fancy accountants are paid for, after all.

Whereas the vicious poor shirk labor to revel in the luxury of federal handouts, leaving their Bed-Stuy tenements to drink martinis poolside in Aruba, the virtuous super-rich toil day and night to build the companies that provide the nation’s wealth. In a truly scandalous moment, D’Souza writes, “The rich are the hardest-working people in society.” Tell that to a blue-collar worker who has to hold down two and three jobs merely to make ends meet. Having managed to turn the super-rich into slaves of the Protestant work ethic, D’Souza buys off bad consciences by endorsing the oldest game in the Blue Book: the turn to philanthropy. So it is that D’Souza ends his book on a hopeful note, as the super-rich will doubtless salve our social wounds by virtue of their foundations, even as he endorses the inequity of our New Economy. “We accept these inequalities as part of life. They have been delivered to us by the god of the market.” Like any true believer, D’Souza knows how and why to grovel before his god.

Thomas Frank’s “One Market Under God” takes aim at the rhetoric of techno-capitalism exemplified by “The Virtue of Prosperity.” Given the stock market free-fall of 2000, Frank’s book could not have arrived at a more apposite time, and his piercing skepticism about the inflated and myopic claims of the market analysts appears very prescient indeed. Frank’s rhetorical stock-in-trade is the oracular ironic; he writes as if he were located 50 years hence looking back on the craziness of our period with a mixture of amusement and contempt. Of the new class of technological super-rich, Frank writes, “They were people’s plutocrats, doing without tie and suit, chatting easily with the rank-and-file, building the new superstore just for us, seeing to it that the customer was served, wearing name tags on their work-shirts, pushing the stock prices up benevolently this time, making sure we all got to share in the profit-taking and that even the hindest hindmost got out with his or her percentage intact.” Here the paternalism of the new tycoon masked as egalitarian friendliness comes clear, just as the class antagonisms D’Souza would paper over rear their ancient ugly heads. Class serves as Frank’s primary critical category, hearkening back to the social criticism of Vance Packard and C. Wright Mills.

Frank comes armed with a passel of alarming statistics that ought to be repeated throughout our land in order to galvanize resistance to the current organization of American capitalism. In 1990, the average CEO in America enjoyed a salary equivalent to 85 times that of his blue-collar workers. In 1999, that figure had ballooned to 475 times. Though D’Souza would perhaps say that the CEO works at least 475 times harder than a line worker, Frank is outraged by this imbalance in equity. The richest 1% own 40% of the wealth in the United States, while fully 86% of the gains in the great bull market of the 1990s accrued to the accounts of the richest 10% of the country’s population. These numbers paint a truly staggering picture of financial inequality, a skewing of fiscal resources and rewards not seen in this country since the gilded age of the 1920s.

As Frank demonstrates, the truly astonishing thing is that Americans have come to accept and even to relish these inequities (thus the CNBC “Wealth-Meter,” a daily feature that allows viewers to track the effect of stock price fluctuation on the net worth of the nation’s richest men). How this came to be is Frank’s great subject. As Frank argues convincingly, techno-capitalism has successfully co-opted the rhetoric of Populism, so that whereas, say, in the 1930s, Populism was “a rebellion against the corporate order,” now Populism insists on acquiescence to the imperatives of big business. Since Reagan, corporate chieftains, aided and abetted by the Republican Party, have sought to foment the anxiety of lumpen America against what Christopher Lasch called the “New Class,” which Frank describes as a “motley assembly of liberal journalists, liberal academics, liberal foundation employees, liberal politicians, and the shadowy powers of Hollywood.” The obverse side of the resentment toward “big government” in America is the affection for business, which is presumed to be more efficient, more honest and finally more American than government could ever be.

With the aid of this pincerlike ideological maneuver, corporate plutocrats have been able to forge an alliance with the very people whose economic interests the likes of the Bushes and the Gateses could not but be fundamentally opposed. So it is that 20 years after the Gipper’s epochal arrival in Washington and just days before his ideological godson W ascends the executive throne, we find ourselves awash in market Populism: The “fundamental faith was a simple one: The market and the people--both of them understood as grand principles of social life rather than particulars--were essentially one and the same. By its very nature, the market was democratic, perfectly expressing the popular will through the machinery of supply and demand, poll and focus group, superstore and Internet.” Over the course of his book, Frank quotes at length from apostles of market Populism such as James J. Cramer, Joseph Nocera, Peter Lynch, Lester Thurow and Thomas Friedman, subjecting their bromides to unusually acidulous analysis.

Though Frank is unusually astute in his analysis of the rhetoric of the New Economy, and though he can turn phrases with a vengeance, “One Market Under God” would be stronger if it were shorter, as Frank tends to repeat his central thesis too often, locating market Populism in the mediocre books of so many market gurus that it becomes hard to separate them from one another. And though Frank’s deconstruction of the paradoxes of what he calls Extreme Capitalism is never less than intelligent, finally he runs into the cul-de-sac of the contemporary left, for he does not and cannot suggest a system to replace it.