Pity the Billionaire Part 3

CHAPTER 7.

Mimesis.

Mimicry is a familiar phenomenon in the animal kingdom, where moths have developed spots on their wings that look like the eyes of an owl, inoffensive bugs fly about in black and yellow stripes, and harmless snakes have learned, over the millennia, to frighten predators by shaking their tails in the dead leaves. They are mimic rattlesnakes, not the real deal. Don't be afraid. Go ahead and tread on them.

And in human affairs we have a conservative movement that has learned, over the decades, to mimic many of the characteristics of its enemies. The crus.h.i.+ng experience of the thirties taught conservative leaders that it wasn't a good idea to speak in the accent of aristocratic disdain, blasting the poor for not knowing their place. During times of economic collapse, no one loves a defender of orthodoxy or a self-appointed spokesman for society's rightful rulers.

And so, over the years, the movement came to affect a revolutionary posture toward the state that it might have borrowed from Karl Marx or Jean-Paul Sartre. It imitated the protest culture of the sixties, right down to a feigned reverence for anticommunist guerrilla fighters who were its version of Ho and Che. Conservative leaders studied the tactics of communists, applying them to their own struggles. And the movement learned to understand itself not as a defender of "the status quo," in the famous formulation of the conservative organizer Paul Weyrich, but as a group of "radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of the country."1 When the economic collapse of 2008 and 2009 came along, conservatism immediately positioned itself as a protest movement for hard times. Aspects of the conservative tradition that were haughty or aristocratic were attributed to liberals. Symbols that seemed n.o.ble or democratic or populist, even if they were the traditional property of the other side, were snapped up and claimed by the Right for itself.

Bounces Off Me ....

There was, to begin with, a useful confusion in the early days of the economic debacle: was the Tea Party a phenomenon of the Left or of the Right? Its partic.i.p.ants certainly didn't accept the GOP label, which was still radioactive in 2009, thanks to the doings of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay. Maybe, certain commentators thought, this novel form of protest represented something altogether new.

Glenn Beck, the emblematic figure in this mix-up, ritually claims to be a man beyond partisans.h.i.+p. He has deliberately imitated Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 march on Was.h.i.+ngton, and at one point in 2009 he suggested that he might have voted for Hillary Clinton had she won the Democratic nomination for the presidency.* In order to round out his right-wing conspiracy theories, Beck constantly pilfers left-wing imagery and arguments: his critique of the public relations industry, for example, seems to come straight from the pages of Noam Chomsky,2 while his famous charge of racism against President Obama was a clumsy attempt to use a weapon that conservatives feel is usually directed against themselves. The host has also hinted at the reason for his constant swiping from liberaldom. "America needs revolutionaries," he says he once told Newt Gingrich. "Because what you are fighting are revolutionaries."3 The burning need to mimic the Left is also the theme of the National Review Online contributor Michael Walsh, who came up with a novel way to persuade conservatives to adopt the strategy. Walsh dreamed up a pseudonym, "David Kahane," supposedly a rich, arrogant Hollywood radical, and proceeded to confess to his right-wing readers that liberalism was, in fact, an orchestrated, demonic a.s.sault on the responsible and productive, with every federal regulation and insulting TV show and crazy lawsuit part of liberalism's grand plan for disaster. Rightists, "Kahane" insisted in his 2010 book, Rules for Radical Conservatives, were "in the fight of your life, up against an implacable foe that has loathed you and sought your destruction not for years or even centuries, but for millennia," and they needed to understand how to fight back. The prescription for activist conservatives was obvious: Do exactly as those nefarious, successful liberals (are imagined to) do. "Pretend to be like us, so do what we do: lie. Adopt all of our manners and mores, right down to our mannerisms."4 Wingers needed to mimic the libs and "give no quarter." They needed to act like ancient Visigoths turned loose on "the effete Romans." Above all, they needed to reverse the age-old perceptions of which party represented the establishment and which the insurgent public. "We're the Man now-fat, sa.s.sy, and socialist," "Kahane" confessed on behalf of his fellow libs. "Which means we're also ripe for a takedown."5 This is a pretty fair description of how the Right played things as conservatism signed up the nation's unfortunates in what appeared to be a cla.s.sic hard-times social uprising. On the surface, this uprising seemed to have all the necessary indicators: people with placards, people protesting banks and big corporations, people yelling through bullhorns, people organizing boycotts. There were marches on Was.h.i.+ngton and big talk about strikes.

What's more, it was cast as a people's movement with no leaders. A movement that was so profoundly democratic, so virtuously rank-and-file, so punk rock, that it was actively against leaders. A movement that was downright obsessed with being "sold out" by traditional politicians, with betrayal, with guarding its independence and its precious authenticity.6 At its most primitive, the crypto-leftism of the right-wing revival took the form of simple duplication, in which the signature images and catchphrases of liberals during the Bush years were swiped and echoed simply because it is perfectly legal to do so. Thus Mich.e.l.le Malkin appears to have t.i.tled her 2009 Obama book Culture of Corruption for no other reason than that "culture of corruption" was a famous phrase applied to Republican officeholders in 2005 by Nancy Pelosi.* In 2010 Ben Quayle, son of Dan, announced his candidacy for Congress with TV commercials proclaiming, "Barack Obama is the worst president in history"-a description of George W. Bush that libs had been repeating constantly a short while before. (Quayle won, of course.) Conservative pundits learned to frighten their flock by describing Democratic plans to grab a permanent lock on the electoral system, a repurposed liberal fear from 2004 and 2005.7 Tea Partiers favored a variation on another famous Bush-era put-down-"Somewhere in Kenya a Village Is Missing Its Idiot"-while others on the Right sold clocks that would count down the days until Obama left office, just as their counterparts had done in the Bush years. Images of Const.i.tutions being sucked into paper shredders, a popular motif during the early days of the Patriot Act, were picked up by an entirely new demographic. Meanwhile, opponents of the administration's health-care reform also imagined-and boasted, with stickers and T-s.h.i.+rts-that they were on "Obama's Enemy List," thus s.h.i.+fting one of Richard Nixon's most famous sins onto the shoulders of a man who was twelve when the enemies list was made public.

Of course, all of this is much like writing a book called Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man as a response to a book called Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot-the I'm-rubber-you're-glue school of disputation. It serves no purpose greater than sowing confusion.

The mimicry becomes more interesting when it is taken to the next level, where an ideologue projects the sins of his own movement onto his adversary. Take, for example, that phrase of Barack Obama's-that he would "fundamentally transform" America, a throwaway line Obama used once on the campaign trail but which was quickly magnified into a favorite Tea Party nightmare, sending a thousand would-be Paul Reveres through every cyber-age village and town. On the basis of that one ten-second video clip, the new Minutemen have determined that tyranny is on the way, courtesy of a would-be king who thinks he's so smart that he can dispense with the work of G.o.d, the Founders, and all the accretions of the centuries.

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 homeowners.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.sic 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 pa.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 j.a.panese 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 pa.s.sions that drove America's actual history of politicized prosecution, conservatives need only consult the Official Tea Party Handbook, a 2009 booklet auth.o.r.ed 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 movement 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 compet.i.tion 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 t.i.tled 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 t.i.tle 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 bas.h.i.+ng 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 d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k, 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-wors.h.i.+pping 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 d.i.c.k 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 leaders.h.i.+p secrets of the Communist Party* and to read a book by the famous neighborhood organizer Saul Alinsky; their idea for a big march on Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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-cla.s.s 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.

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 h.e.l.l, 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 s.e.x Pistols' "G.o.d 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 endors.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.sume: 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 Inst.i.tute, 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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 cla.s.sic 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, clas.h.i.+ng patterns in Beck's, plus those unlaced sneakers and those untucked s.h.i.+rts. 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 t.i.tan 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 doc.u.mentary 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 n.o.bility 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, ma.s.s 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 b.u.t.tons, and their voices are weak. The truth is that they don't surround us at all.

We surround them.

It was a powerful invocation of the archetypal thirties image: the ma.s.ses; 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 ma.s.s movement in which ordinary people get together in a spirit of vague civic togetherness under the leaders.h.i.+p 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 sh.o.r.es 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s." 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 cla.s.s" 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 cla.s.s," while a Tea Party leader in Saint Louis could be found crowing that "the Tea Party scares the h.e.l.l out of the ruling cla.s.s" 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 cla.s.s" its pet expression. The "ruling cla.s.s" was sneering at Sarah Palin, it told readers; the "ruling cla.s.s" was trying to silence a controversial radio commentator; the "ruling cla.s.s" 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 Cla.s.s"; 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 gra.s.sroots group whose insurgencies are made possible by the Moscow gold of the oil billionaires Koch and Koch.8 The unlikely Engels of this strange cla.s.s war was a retired professor of international relations named Angelo Codevilla; his manifesto, "America's Ruling Cla.s.s," 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-publis.h.i.+ng arm.

There are but two social groupings that matter in America, the retired professor maintained, a "ruling cla.s.s" 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 cla.s.s" 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 cla.s.s" 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 cla.s.ses."9 It was a strangely bols.h.i.+e line for a conservative hero, weirdly akin to Marx's dictum that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s," 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 sn.o.bs. The conspirators. The ruling cla.s.s.

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 cla.s.s a.n.a.lysis, we can see that the expertise itself is rotten: expensive American colleges simply hand out As to everyone, while professional a.s.sociations 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 Cla.s.s knows that the government is there to serve the strong: the Ruling Cla.s.s' 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 tyc.o.o.n heroes. For free-market true believers, the tome is their very own Uncle Tom's Cabin, or, more accurately, their Caesar'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 Mich.e.l.le 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.sic 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 Actually, Rand's revival makes perfect sense in our upside-down age. Atlas Shrugged is the story of an alternative Great Depression in which everything happens the way market-minded conservatives would have had it happen: meddling government is the obvious culprit of the economic slowdown; business types are both heroes and victims; and the gigantic strike that is the book's central thread is led not by some labor type but by genius entrepreneurs who are sick of being told what to do by politicians.

Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957 and is set in the indefinite future, but to judge by its account of American life it is actually a commentary on events of several decades previous. It chronicles an era when steel and railroads, the two industries described most prominently in the novel, were at the vanguard of American enterprise. That era is most definitely not the fifties, when railroads were in catastrophic decline, but it could well be the thirties, when streamliners and steel mills were the symbols of American economic might. And although the book was published well into the television age, the various speeches in which the characters mouth Rand's market-friendly Nietzscheanism are all radio broadcasts, the great medium of the thirties. TV is mentioned only in pa.s.sing.

The novel seems in many of its details to be an artifact of the Depression. Its first page describes an exchange between one of the main characters and a "b.u.m" who has "asked for a dime." And ill.u.s.trating the great literary fear of 1932-the sense that society itself was disintegrating-is one of Rand's few points of aesthetic strength. Atlas Shrugged gives us scene after scene of rural poverty, of listless people who don't know what to do with themselves, of houses and towns overgrown with weeds, of desperate humans carting their belongings down the road, of children turned into roving animals; each might have appeared in some collection of essays surveying the ruins of the nation in the days of Herbert Hoover.

The same is true of Rand's cast of capitalist hero-victims. One of them was reportedly inspired by the financier Ivar Kreuger, a villain of the Depression years.15 The travails of another of her main characters, a steel manufacturer, appear to have been borrowed wholesale from a 1935 episode in the comic strip Little Orphan Annie.* And of course there's a righteous gangster we are supposed to admire in the manner of Woody Guthrie's 1939 song "Pretty Boy Floyd," only with the poles reversed: he robs the government to fill the bank accounts of the deserving rich.

The book's Depression flavor goes beyond its setting and characters; it is also a thirties novel thematically and philosophically. Atlas Shrugged may be the favorite novel of the millionaire cla.s.s, but it is also the most commercially successful exemplar of that short-lived literary vogue of the thirties, proletarian fiction. If that literary school is remembered at all anymore, it is for its stereotyped businessmen-parasites, its hackneyed plots in which a worker-hero attains cla.s.s consciousness, and the climactic strikes toward which its plots seem always to steer. The genre was a species of propaganda that shunned wit and seemed to privilege leaden writing; it was only slightly more sophisticated than a comic book. It was also the paradigmatic hard-times literary style.

Atlas Shrugged deserves to be considered part of the genre.* It retains the wit-free writing and the heavy-handed propaganda, with conversations between characters frequently devolving into multipage philosophical monologues. (How any real human could stand to listen to these tedious stem-winders is one of the points of disbelief that this Rand reader found it most difficult to suspend.) As far as its characters are concerned, appearances are almost always reliable indicators of essence: bad guys are usually 100 percent bad, as the reader knows from their first step upon the stage, while good guys are uniformly awesome, endowed with the same good taste, the same weird syntax, the same mechanical apt.i.tude, the same marksmans.h.i.+p, even names with the same crackling consonant cl.u.s.ters.* For some reason, they almost all seem to know how to fly airplanes.

It is, of course, a novel about a strike, a standard plot device of the Popular Front era. As per the genre's requirements, its protagonists are n.o.ble producers who are unfairly oppressed. But in this iteration of the proletarian novel, the self-interested businessman is the hero instead of the villain. The parasites are the rest of us, the rabble and the intellectuals who use government to mooch and freeload on the labors of the virtuous capitalist.

In Rand's dystopic America, government meddling of the New Deal variety has been allowed to run wild. Was.h.i.+ngton interferes constantly in the affairs of private businesses, from big decisions to small ones, and then interferes more when the first interference doesn't achieve the desired result. The government forces inventors to surrender their inventions, rich men to turn over their income, producers of raw materials to divert supplies from their rightful clients to more politically favored ones. The business cla.s.s resents the threats and the meddling, and, as in standard Marxist agitprop, slowly becomes aware of their exalted nature and their victimization at the hands of politicians and intellectuals. Cla.s.s consciousness!

Billionaire solidarity having been achieved, the great tyc.o.o.ns disappear one after another into a mountain hideout pioneered for them by the genius inventor John Galt. This strategic withdrawal of entrepreneurs.h.i.+p-the strike-is so crus.h.i.+ng that civilization itself begins to unravel. It's war between the "subhuman creatures" of the world and "their betters," as one heroic capitalist describes the two sides. But the subhumans, meaning the general public, won't give in or learn their lesson. And so Galt, the leader of the walkout, delivers an ultimatum over the radio. "If you desire ever again to live in an industrial society," he tells the "moral cannibals" of the human race, "it will be on our moral terms."16 One of the stated objectives of the capitalists' strike in Atlas Shrugged is to reverse the conventional hard-times understanding of social cla.s.s. Workers didn't build America, Galt and Company intend to prove; businessmen did. "We've heard so much about strikes," Galt lectures his industrialist friends, "and about the dependence of the uncommon man upon the common."

"We've heard it shouted that the industrialist is a parasite, that his workers support him, create his wealth, make his luxury possible-and what would happen to him if they walked out? Very well. I propose to show to the world who depends on whom, who supports whom, who is the source of wealth, who makes whose livelihood possible and what happens to whom when who walks out."17 Maybe you had trouble following that pa.s.sage, with all its interweaving "whos" and "whoms," but the general sentiment is simple enough. Successful businesspeople, which is to say, society's victims, are going to rise up and show the world who's boss. You are to acknowledge their suffering and their power at the same time. As the novel ends, they are preparing to resume their rightful position over the nation.

In pus.h.i.+ng this absurd social theory, the novelist is most emphatic. Captains of industry are "the great victims," as one character puts it, "who have contributed the most and suffered the worst injustice in return." And as the long, long novel plods slowly on, Rand doubles down on the idea, having John Galt declare himself to be "the defender of the oppressed, the disinherited, the exploited-and when I use those words, they have, for once, a literal meaning."18 The libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises loved Atlas Shrugged, nailing the book's antipopulist message in a single perceptive sentence. "You have the courage to tell the ma.s.ses what no politician told them," he wrote in a fan letter to Rand: "you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you."19 It is hardly a democratic formula. Indeed, democracy is part of the problem for Rand, since it puts "ward heelers" in legal authority over captains of industry. And so Atlas Shrugged pushes this political dilemma to its logical conclusion, with the politicians making crus.h.i.+ng demands and the business elite rising up against them. It's a sort of Marxism for the master cla.s.s, a hard-times story in which business is a force of pure light* and the "looters" in the government are responsible for every last little disaster.

Why Atlas Shrugged appeals to successful businesspeople is no mystery. But how does a book that tells the rest of the world You are inferior become the manifesto of a populist revival?

The usual explanation for the newfound popularity of Atlas Shrugged, as we noted, is its supposed prescience: it seems to predict the emergency bank-rescue measures of 2008 and 2009, plus the hounding of business leaders by federal officials that supposedly followed. There have even been efforts to take matters to the next level. During the AIG bonus debacle, a Wall Street type published a peevish resignation announcement as an op-ed in the New York Times; he was walking out, he wrote, because he was sick of being "unfairly persecuted by elected officials." And in September 2011, House Speaker John Boehner announced that the economy wasn't improving because "job creators in America, basically, are on strike." We needed to "liberate" these powerful ones from taxes and an insane, meddling government-or else. If talent isn't treated the way talent wants to be treated, it will walk. Just try running your economy then.

But Atlas Shrugged also resonates on a much grander scale than this. It has all the answers-and I do mean "all"-for a world facing Great Depression II. The inst.i.tutions of government have grown corrupt and misguided, Rand tells us; they have become instruments not for protecting us but for robbing us. When the economy falls into catastrophic collapse, she insists, it is always because government has interfered in its destructive and self-serving way. And salvation can only come after the producer cla.s.s has been liberated from the state.

For its readers, Atlas Shrugged acts as a sort of expose, pulling back the curtain to reveal the powers that manipulate our world. Angelo Codevilla's Country Cla.s.s is figuring out the essential perfidy of the "ruling cla.s.s," and this great novel of the age of Obama is there to a.s.sist them in the project of unmasking. The resurgent Right regards it as a powerful cry for justice.

But what starts out as a cry for justice quickly becomes a sort of bonus track from that event where the coal-mine CEO claimed to speak for the working people of West Virginia. Rand fandom is the equivalent of those working people rus.h.i.+ng the stage to acclaim that CEO's wisdom, cheering hip-hip-hooray for that government-d.a.m.ning tyc.o.o.n.

And so average Americans declare that they are joining the great strike of the producer cla.s.s, shouting to the world that they have had it, that henceforth they will shut down their coffee shops, fill no more cavities, paint no more houses. They link arms in solidarity with John Galt and announce from their websites that they, too, hereby declare war on the government for all the ways it has stifled their ambitions, pocketed the fruits of their hard work, and coddled the lazy. They are "going Galt," they proclaim.

We have seen a proud, strong country fall to her knees. Her people have become slovenly, inept and irresponsible. We do not see any morality in working hard for the benefit of those who choose not to. We do not see any moral value in contributing to a society that seeks to rule, rather than govern and steal from the Producers to give to them who are Looters and Moochers. We herby [sic] withdraw our Producing abilities, from a society that is unworthy of such contributions.

You, who would d.a.m.n us, for a pursuit of success, for aspiring to our greatest human potential; yet who depend on our contributions to a society which you leach [sic] from.