Pity the Billionaire Part 5

As a result of their retreat from populism, Democrats have spent the last several decades systematically extinguis.h.i.+ng opportunities to broaden the base of their support. They did little, for example, as their former best friends in organized labor were scythed down by organized money. This was no ordinary misstep, by the way. Labor is one of the last inst.i.tutional bearers of an ideology capable of countering the market-populist faith; had its voice been strong in 2009, things might have played out very differently. Instead, Obama and Company pretty much sat on their hands as the percentage of unionized workers in the private sector sank lower than at any point in the twentieth century. The fatuity of it all, one would think, has surely become obvious to Democrats: they have permitted nothing less than the decimation of their own gra.s.sroots social movement; the silencing of their own ideology. Thanks to this strategy, large parts of America are liberal deserts, places where an economic narrative that might counterbalance the billionaire-pitying wisdom of El Rushbo is never heard and might as well not exist.

The effects of a wrenching recession, on the other hand, aren't likely to touch the new, well-to-do Democrats directly. They know bad things are happening, yes; they express concern and promise to help the suffering, of course; but the urgency of the recession is not something they feel personally. It is not a challenge to their fundamental values. It is, rather, an occasion for charity.

Oh, but a country where everyone listens to specialists and gets along-that's a utopia these new Dems regard with prayerful reverence. They dream of bipartisans.h.i.+p and states-that-are-neither-red-nor-blue and some reasonably-arrived-at consensus future where the culture wars cease and everyone improves their SAT scores forevermore under the smiling, beneficent sun of free trade and the knowledge industries.*

Not even from our society's most gifted political critics did we hear anything different. A few days before the 2010 election, for example, Jon Stewart, the perceptive and often ferocious comedian, tried to answer the various Tea Party marches and Glenn Beck rallies with a protest of his own, which he called the "Rally to Restore Sanity," otherwise known as the "million moderate march." It brought a crowd of several hundred thousand to the National Mall in Was.h.i.+ngton, DC, where they bought "I'm with Reasonable" T-s.h.i.+rts and listened to Stewart's speech about ordinary Americans getting along with their neighbors regardless of political differences.

Now, there was something n.o.ble and even Depressionesque about Stewart's invocation of the common man, and I agree with much of what he said on that occasion. But it is more than a little strange to gaze out over a land laid waste by fantastic corporate fraud and declare that partisans.h.i.+p is what ails us and that reasonableness is the cure. Like the national Democrats, Stewart focused on process and expertise and surface etiquette while the real drama was elsewhere: in the mounting unemployment rate, in the still-lingering shock of the bailouts. Conservatives were out in the cul-de-sacs of America following their strategy from the seventies-"organize discontent"-and here were the liberals, on the mall in DC, trying to save the day by organizing civility.

Conclusion: Trample the Weak.

In 1944, the Hungarian historian Karl Polanyi told the story of what he called the "utopian" idea of the "self-regulating market"-and of what happened when theorists and dreamers tried to put that utopia into effect. "To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment," he wrote, in a celebrated pa.s.sage, "would result in the demolition of society."

Robbed of the protective covering of cultural inst.i.tutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed.1 When Polanyi wrote those words, the experience of the Depression had just persuaded the world to forswear any further pursuit of that deadly free-market dream. Society periodically and instinctively tried to defend itself against the depredations of the market, Polanyi wrote, and for decades, the world a.s.sumed that this pattern was a natural one. Another economic crisis, and you'd get another New Deal.

But this time around we saw a new pattern develop. After the market vandalized American society along precisely the lines Polanyi described-plus a few bonus ways that neither he nor anybody else saw coming-society fairly begged to be trashed again. Its most influential protest movement demanded that America lace up its running shoes and chase the market utopia even more energetically; that we "trample the weak" instead of coddling them.2 Moneyed interests understand that with no second FDR, no incorruptible new cop on the financial beat, no return to the rules that once made banking boring but safe, they have nothing to fear from us, and may do as they please. This is the real tragedy of the Great Recession.

And should we continue down this path, it is fairly certain how matters will unfold. Investment banking will eventually recover from its brush with mortality, and it will romp again like an elephant loosed from its cage. As regulatory enforcement diminishes, financial frauds will of course multiply, growing grander and more lucrative in the future just as the subprime fiasco was grander than Enron, and Enron was grander than the financial scandals of the eighties. Anyone else with a viable monopoly strategy will have much to look forward to. The health-care industry, for which patriots shed so many tears in 2009, will hold on to its ability to impose costs, comforted by the knowledge that many Americans would apparently prefer to throw Medicare overboard than do something to rein those tyc.o.o.ns in. Ditto for the megalomaniac schemes of the software industry. The oil barons. The defense contractors. This land is a.s.suredly their land.

But the scenario that should concern us most is what will happen when the new, more ideologically concentrated Right gets their hands on the rest of the machinery of government. They are the same old wrecking crew as their predecessors, naturally, but now there is a swaggering, an in-your-face brazenness to their sabotage. We got a taste of their vision when they reconquered the House of Representatives in 2010-in the name of a nation outraged by economic disaster, remember-and immediately cracked down on the Securities and Exchange Commission, the regulatory agency charged with preventing fraud on Wall Street. They brought the Obama administration's one big populist innovation-the brand-new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau-under a sustained artillery barrage, proposing ingenious ways to cripple the new body or strip away its funding. And during the debt-ceiling crisis of 2011, they came close to bringing on the colossal train wreck that they have always said we deserved.

Given a chance actually to run the government of the most complex economy on earth like a small business, they will slam the brakes on spending and level the regulatory state. Dare we even guess at the consequences? At the levels of desperation the nation will hit when they withdraw federal spending from an economy already starving for demand? At the orgy of deceit into which Wall Street will immediately descend?

This, though, is for certain. As the nation clambers down through the sulfurous fumes into the pit called utopia, the thinking of the market-minded will continue to evolve. Before long they will have discovered that certain once-uncontroversial arms of the state must be amputated immediately. One fine day in the near future, it will dawn on them that the FDIC, for example, just delivers bailouts under another name; that the lazy man down the street should no more get his money back when his bank fails than when the housing market fell apart. What are interstate highways and national parks, they will ask, but wasteful subsidies for leeches who ought to be paying their way? What is disaster relief but a power grab by the losers who can't get themselves out of the path of a hurricane? And though public schools have been under a.s.sault for decades on charges of rampant secularism, the time is not far off when the freeloading by poor kids will be the factor that galls our leaders most.

Social Security, of course, will be one of the first inst.i.tutions to go on the chopping block, as the essential injustice of protecting the weak dawns on them. Why should society pay for the retirement of someone who hasn't been responsible and collected Krugerrands? The older generation had a rendezvous with destiny, their hero FDR used to say, and soon it will occur to America's cla.s.s-war populists that every slow-moving moocher and senior-parasite needs to make that rendezvous-which is to say, that appointment with the human resources guy at the local big-box store.

Every problem that the editorialists fret about today will get worse, of course: inequality, global warming, financial bubbles. But on America will go, chasing a dream that is more vivid than life itself, on into the seething Arcadia of all against all.

Notes.

Introduction.

1. As far as I can tell, the first to use a form of this metaphor was Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA), who told the Was.h.i.+ngton Independent reporter Dave Weigel in September of 2009 that the movement was an "awakening in America." "Instapundit" Glenn Reynolds, writing in the Was.h.i.+ngton Examiner on February 7, 2010, was so affected by a Tea Party convention that he upped that description to a "Third Great Awakening." Michael Reagan, son of the former president, made the same point in his syndicated column for September 16 of that year, calling the Tea Party movement "A Great Awakening," while "Signs of a 21st Century Political Awakening" is the subt.i.tle of Don't Tread on Us, a coffee-table book of protest placards, published by WND Books in 2010.

2. d.i.c.k Armey and Matt Kibbe, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), p. 8.

3. See the excerpt from Sidney Blumenthal's book that appeared on Salon.com on April 24, 2008. It is important to remember that Blumenthal, never one to underestimate the dynamism of conservatives, also presciently acknowledged that conservatives had not accepted this verdict and could very well decide to turn farther to the right: "The radicalization of the Republican Party is not at an end, but may only be entering a new phase," he wrote.

Loss of the Congress in 2006 is not accepted as reproach. Quite the opposite, it is understood by the Republican right as the result of lack of will and nerve, failure of ideological purity, errant immorality by members of Congress, betrayal by the media, and by moderates within their own party. They may never recover from the election of 2004, when they believed their agenda received majority support and they ecstatically thought they were the "Right Nation."

4. Sean Wilentz: "Conservative Era Is Over," U.S. News & World Report, November 24, 2008. Francis f.u.kuyama: "The Fall of America, Inc.," Newsweek, October 4, 2008. Politico: Daniel Libit, "'Deregulator,' Our Old Friend," October 1, 2008.

5. Charles Blow: New York Times, May 16, 2009. Kathleen Parker: Was.h.i.+ngton Post, November 29, 2009. Stu Rothenberg: see http://rothenbergpoliticalreport.com/news/article/april-madness-can-gop-win-back-the-house-in-2010. Of course, Rothenberg was hardly alone in this prediction; at that stage in the cycle, nearly everyone believed the Republicans' day was done.

6. There have also been several valuable studies of the Right's racial att.i.tudes in recent years. One conducted in 2010 by political scientists at the University of Was.h.i.+ngton found that "true believers" in the Tea Party movement held less charitable views of blacks than the general population. (You can read about the study at http://depts.was.h.i.+ngton.edu/uwiser/racepolitics.html.) A study of Tea Party rhetoric from that same year, on the other hand, discovered few instances of overt racism; instead it found that the Tea Party's concerns were overwhelmingly with economic policy. (See "Few Signs at Tea Party Rally Expressed Racially Charged Anti-Obama Themes," Was.h.i.+ngton Post, October 14, 2010.) Most interesting is the 2009 study of the Right by Stanley Greenberg t.i.tled The Very Separate World of Conservative Republicans. The report concluded: "Instead of focusing on these intense ideological divisions, the press and elites continue to look for a racial element that drives these voters' beliefs-but they need to get over it.... We gave these groups of older, white Republican base voters in Georgia full opportunity to bring race into their discussion-but it did not ever become a central element, and indeed, was almost beside the point." Read the full report at http://www.greenbergresearch.com/articles/2398/5488_The Very Separate World of Conservative Republicans 101609.pdf.

7. Amy Gardner, "Gauging the Scope of the Tea Party Movement in America," Was.h.i.+ngton Post, October 24, 2010.

Chapter 1. End Times.

1. Christina Romer, "Lessons from the Great Depression for Economic Recovery in 2009," a paper presented at the Brookings Inst.i.tution, March 9, 2009, p. 2.

2. All of these facts are drawn from chapters 8 and 12 of Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 19201933 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010 [1969]). The quotes are found on pages 317 and 422.

3. According to Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 2.

4. I am relying here on the summary of economic orthodoxy found in Richard Parker's biography of the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who was studying economics at Harvard at the time. See Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp. 12, 48, 77.

5. The line comes from The Green Pastures, a popular 1930 play by Marc Connelly.

6. Similar statements litter Drucker's first book. In the economic collapse of the thirties, man "can no longer explain or understand his existence as rationally correlated and co-ordinated to the world in which he lives; nor can he coordinate the world and the social reality to his existence. The function of the individual in society has become entirely irrational and senseless." Peter Drucker, The End of Economic Man: A Study of the New Totalitarianism (New York: The John Day Company, 1939), p. 55.

7. Nation's Business: as quoted in William E. Leuchtenberg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 6. Another pa.s.sage that once struck me as overwrought but which now, in the aftermath of 2008, seems bluntly accurate is this summation by the historian Richard Pells in his 1973 book about writers and thinkers in the thirties, Radical Vision and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper & Row, 1973): The sense of total collapse, of a society in various stages of decomposition, had a profound effect on most Americans-intellectuals as well as ordinary citizens. The depression meant more than simply the failure of business; it was to many people an overwhelming natural catastrophe, much like an earthquake that uprooted and destroyed whatever lay in its path.... It gave Americans the feeling that their whole world was literally falling apart, that their traditional expectations and beliefs were absolutely meaningless, that there was no personal escape from the common disaster. It propelled the individual into a void of bewilderment and terror (p. 72).

8. Calvin Coolidge, quoted in Charles A. Andrews, "'I'm All Burned Out,'" Good Housekeeping, June 1935, p. 209. Wrote Coolidge's biographer William Allen White of the same period, "The whole world of Calvin Coolidge and his pride in the power of brains and wealth was toppling." White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938), p. 432.

9. Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 172. Writers and intellectuals: see Malcolm Cowley, "The 1930s Were An Age of Faith," New York Times Book Review, December 13, 1964. Robert McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 19291941 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993), p. 202.

On the other hand, in Bowling Alone, the sociologist Robert Putnam calls the thirties an era of "civic drought," because members.h.i.+p in all manner of professional and civic a.s.sociations shrank instead of increasing as in the periods before and after.

10. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 22.

11. "But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed," Keynes continued. John Maynard Keynes, "National Self-Sufficiency," Yale Review 22 (1933): 761.

12. Andrew Mellon is quoted in The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 19291941 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 30.

13. One place the idea was tried was in Detroit in February 1933, where the local tyc.o.o.n Henry Ford refused to join the effort to rescue a large local bank. "'Let the crash come,'" RFC chairman Jesse Jones quotes Ford as saying. Jones continues thusly: "If everything went down the chute there would be a cleaning-up process, [Ford] said, and everybody would then have to get to work. Whatever happened, he said he was sure he could again build up a business, as he still felt young." The result, though, was the catastrophic Michigan bank panic and a "bank holiday" that led to the complete national bank shutdown the next month. Jesse Jones with Edward Angly, Fifty Billion Dollars: My Thirteen Years with the RFC (New York: Macmillan, 1951), p. 62.

14. William Randolph Hearst: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Politics of Upheaval (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 85. The president of the American Liberty League was Jouett Shouse, a former Kansas congressman, but its main backers were the DuPont family, the Koch brothers of their day. The speech in which this pa.s.sage occurs was called "The New Deal vs. Democracy" and was issued as a pamphlet by the league in 1936.

15. See the account of the American Liberty League in Kim Phillips-Fein's Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: Norton, 2009), p. 13.

16. Remley J. Gla.s.s, "Gentlemen, the Corn Belt!" Harper's, July 1933, pp. 199202.

17. "Virtually impossible": cited in Theodore Saloutos and John D. Hicks, Twentieth Century Populism: Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West 19001939 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1951), p. 448. "We pledge ourselves": as quoted in Gilbert Seldes, The Years of the Locust (America, 19291932) (Boston: Little, Brown, 1933), p. 286.

18. "The days of 1776": Seldes, The Years of the Locust, p. 284. "They say blockading the highway's illegal": Mary Heaton Vorse, "Rebellion in the Cornbelt," 1932, reprinted in David Shannon, ed., The Great Depression (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960), p. 125. A South Dakota partic.i.p.ant in the farm strike told Studs Terkel in 1970 that "it was close in spirit to the American Revolution." Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 256.

Chapter 2. 1929: The Sequel.

1. Joshua Cooper Ramo, "The Three Marketeers," Time, February 15, 1999.

2. On financial innovation and its application to real estate, see Simon Johnson and James Kwak, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (New York: Pantheon, 2010), pp. 10513.

3. These examples are all drawn from the first eighty pages of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States (New York: Public Affairs, 2011).

4. John Lippert, "Friedman Would Be Roiled as Chicago Disciples Rue Repudiation," Bloomberg, December 23, 2008.

5. Gary Becker, quoted in John Ca.s.sidy, "After the Blowup," New Yorker, January 11, 2010. His colleagues, Becker further confessed, had not fully understood derivatives, deregulation, or the problem of banks that were "too big to fail." Becker also admitted that federal intervention had spared the nation a much greater disaster.

6. Richard Posner, A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 306. The crash was the result, Posner wrote, of "innate limitations of the free market-limitations rooted in individuals' incentives, in irresponsible monetary policy adopted and executed by conservative officials inspired by conservative economists ... and in excessive, ideologically motivated deregulation of banking and finance compounded by lax enforcement of the remaining regulations." See the similar argument made by Jacob Weisberg in "The End of Libertarianism," Slate, October 18, 2008.

7. In 2008, Charles Koch wrote that we "could" be facing this "loss of liberty"; in his January 2009 missive, "Perspective," Discovery, the Quarterly Newsletter of Koch Companies, January 2009, he announced that "that prediction is coming true."

8. Moe Tkacik, "Waiting for CNBC," Columbia Journalism Review, MayJune 2009.

9. See Max Abelson, "The New Doom," New York Observer, July 13, 2010.

10. "Never underestimate the capacity of angry populism in times of economic stress," Robert Reich told the New York Times on March 16, 2009. "A big challenge for President Obama will be to maintain a rational and tactical public discussion in the midst of this severe downturn. The desire for culprits at times like this is strong."

11. See the account in The Hill dated January 21, 2010. http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/77365-afl-cio-cites-working-cla.s.s-revolt-in-special-election-aftermath?page=2.

12. The story by Amy Gardner ran in the Was.h.i.+ngton Post on February 18, 2010; the main figure she followed, Representative Rick Boucher of western Virginia, was defeated in November.

13. "57 percent [of whites with no college education] wanted to repeal the health care law-even though they are uninsured at much higher rates than whites with more advanced education." Ronald Brownstein, "White Flight," National Journal, January 7, 2011, http://nationaljournal.com/magazine/in-2012-obama-may-need-a-new-coalition-20110105?page=1. See also Brownstein's article "Populists Versus Managers," National Journal, December 17, 2010, http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/populists-versus-managers-in-the-gop-race-20101217.

Chapter 3. Hold the Note and Change the Key.

1. "Simply working people": John M. O'Hara, A New American Tea Party (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010), p. 2. It is worth noting here that John O'Hara, the author of the above sentence, had been an employee of the U.S. Department of Labor during the Bush administration. Surely he would be in a position to know that what workers wanted was to go untroubled by the needs of their neighbors.

2. "Plain-speaking-little-man": Frank Ahrens, "Five Questions for Rick Santelli," November 13, 2008, Was.h.i.+ngtonPost.com.

3. The TARP, write d.i.c.k Armey and Matt Kibbe in their Tea Party book, is the device that "ignited the firestorm we see today." d.i.c.k Armey and Matt Kibbe, Give Us Liberty, p. 37.

4. See ibid., p. 68.

5. Ibid., p. 38, my emphasis. See also the appendix to Give Us Liberty, in which the value of the home owned by a Tea Party activist plunges, but she doesn't complain. "'We cut our budget and I went back to work. That was my bailout plan,'" she says. "Meanwhile, politicians in Was.h.i.+ngton were bailing out companies and rewarding people who had made bad investments in homes and mortgage-backed securities," write Armey and Kibbe. "The contrast between her experience and the soft landings for Citigroup, GM, and AIG was galling" (p. 228).

In his Tea Party book, the radio talker Michael Graham devotes an entire chapter of denunciation ("Honk If I'm Paying Your Mortgage") to the subject of s.h.i.+ftless mortgage borrowers who are now hoping to get off the hook. "Normal Americans," he writes, were going "bonkers" at the bailouts because

the bailout regime that began under President Bush and blossomed under Obama has repeatedly rewarded those who engaged in bad behavior-and the worse the behavior, the bigger the bailout. The people left holding the bag are those who've sacrificed immediate gratification to do the right thing. They were dumping their change every night into a blue water bottle in the closet of their dumpy apartment, saving for a down payment on their future dream home. Meanwhile, their neighbor was moving into a house he couldn't afford, on a no-money-down, interest-only subprime loan backed by Freddie and Fannie, hoping to ride the real estate bubble and flip it at a profit. (Michael Graham, That's No Angry Mob, That's My Mom: Team Obama's a.s.sault on Tea-Party, Talk-Radio Americans [Was.h.i.+ngton, DC: Regnery, 2010], p. 77.) 6. Broke is even the t.i.tle of one of Beck's 2010 books: Broke: The Plan to Restore Our Trust, Truth and Treasure (New York: Threshold Editions, 2010). The "Laws of Nature" are referenced in Glenn Beck's Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine (New York: Threshold Editions, 2009), p. 15.

7. "There's no need to bring progressivism back ... because it never left," writes Glenn Beck in a characteristic pa.s.sage of Arguing with Idiots. The history of the last century, he believes, with the exception of the magical eighties, was merely a gigantic extension of the Progressive era.

Over the years, it hasn't seemed to matter whether a Republican or Democrat was in office-the government just kept growing and growing. Very few presidents met an agency, department, or program that they didn't want to create or expand and our debates have become less about big vs. small government and more about obscenely large vs. really large government. (Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government [New York: Threshold Editions, 2009], pp. 214, 231.) A slightly more intellectual example of the same blind view of history can be found in a blogger's review of a 2011 book by former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who criticized what he saw as the long reign of "libertarianism" in Was.h.i.+ngton. In response, a libertarian blogger exploded in outrage: "What the h.e.l.l is he talking about? Spitzer's 'libertarian period' is the most regulated period in the history of the United Sates [sic]." The conventional view of the period is upside down, he argued, since the Federal Reserve existed, regulations continued to exist, and true free-marketeers never got to do everything they wanted.

Thirty years of libertarianism? A period when the United States central bank, the Federal Reserve, boosted the money supply from $1.6 trillion to $7.7 trillion. A period during which it became near impossible to start a brokerage firm to compete against the banksters, without spending literally millions to pa.s.s through all the regulatory hurdles. A period during which government attempts to regulate every nook and cranny of our lives exploded. This Spitzer tells us was a period of libertarianism.

See http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2011/07/eliot-spitzers-outrageous-attack-on.html.

8. Moore's article compared the Paulson scene with scenes from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, in order to establish that book's amazing prescience. Stephen Moore, "'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years," Wall Street Journal, January 9, 2009.

9. All of these quotations are from Glenn Beck's TV show for March 18, 2009.

10. Beck's populism continued to evolve. In July of 2009, he announced that the government bailed out AIG because Goldman Sachs had an interest in AIG's solvency-in other words, because government was a puppet of big money. (See his radio show for July 14, 2009, according to the transcript available at http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/27840/.) A few weeks later, he suggested that the AIG logo, along with some other corporate emblems, should take the place of the stars on the U.S. flag, since government and corporations had been so thoroughly merged. Then, in the novel Beck published in the summer of 2010, The Overton Window (New York: Threshold Editions, 2010), the blame for the financial crisis and the bailout was fixed firmly on Wall Street itself, with government and bankers both being steered by the "all-powerful puppetmaster behind it all, Goldman Sachs" (p. 247).

11. Erick Erickson and Lewis K. Uhler, Red State Uprising: How to Take Back America (Was.h.i.+ngton, DC: Regnery, 2010), pp. xv and xvii.

Chapter 4. Nervous System.

1. Glenn Beck describes his admiration for Orson Welles on pages 186 and 187 of The Real America: Messages from the Heart and Heartland (New York: Pocket Books, 2005). The fact about the Daily Worker comes from the historian Michael Denning's account of left culture in the thirties, The Cultural Front (New York: Verso, 1996). Given Beck's obsession with the fascist threat, it is interesting to recall Denning's observation that much of Welles's work from that period consisted of "allegories of anti-fascism"; in particular, the 1938 radio show about the Martian invasion was part of a then-familiar genre about fascist atrocities. Denning, The Cultural Front, pp. 367, 371, 382.

2. These lines were used, respectively, by Glenn Beck on November 19, 2009; Rush Limbaugh on September 30, 2009; and Jim Quinn on January 5, 2010. All of these and many more panic-screaming accounts were compiled by the good folks at Media Matters for America at http://mediamatters.org/research/201003220034.