Revelations of the Market God

Here's a review I wrote a while ago of Thomas Frank's ONE MARKET UNDER GOD. In his more recent work WHAT HAPPENED TO KANSAS, which I also highly recommend, Frank relates the story of his political awakening from unexamined Republican (by family affiliation) to left-wing writer.

His conversion occurs at a large Midwestern college where he discovers a social hierarchy which reinforces the dominance of the rich, Republican kids at the expense of anyone less rich, including less rich Republicans. Awakened by the starkly visible lineaments of this regime, the scales drop from his eyes, he begins to read classic sociology texts. He is especially drawn to fellow midwesterner Thorstein Veblen's crititque of "conspicuous consumption" in THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS and eventually embarks on his career as left-wing social critic, publishing a magazine called The Baffler.

In ONE MARKET UNDER GOD, Frank deconstructs and then deflates the claims of the neo-liberal economists, revealing their theories for what they are: the latest apologia for the ruling class, a ruling class which, under the class-compassionate Bush regime, is experiencing an obscene recrudescence rivaling the era of Veblen's leisure class robber barons.

Revelations, October 12, 2005
In ONE MARKET UNDER GOD, Thomas Frank brilliantly unpacks the self-serving ideology of the corporatocracy. As he did in CONQUEST OF COOL and WHAT HAPPENED TO KANSAS, he examines the many self-serving narratives of the corporate state, showing how each story supports a pseudo-populist philosophy designed to whip up anti-elitist sentiments in order to better serve the interests of that elite.

Legitimacy, since the Great Crash, had, until fairly recently been a fairly daunting problem for business. Now, as Frank points out, with the children of the Depression passing away, the corporatocracy and its junior partners in government have been emboldened to portray themselves as the heirs to Populism, Progressivism, and the New Deal, to advertise themselves as the vanguard of a revolutionary movement, a movement which through the millennial workings of the market is clearing the way for a new birth of freedom in the U.S.A., and throughout the world.

Frank notes, for instance, that throughout the 90s Americans were told that average working stiff could easily become the "millionaire next door," and further, that the average guy was much better off owning stock than relying on his pension or Social Security to see him through his golden years. So pervasive did this free market farrago become in the media, that even now, well after the New Economy bubble burst, many still hear it as gospel, believe that inevitably everything must be privatized. So cunning has the pro-business rhetoric of the corporate state become that the average American blames himself for not being "entrepreneurial" enough, when instead Frank says he should be working to reverse the corporatocracy's 30-year rollback of worker's and citizen's rights.

A profoundly funny writer with a razor-sharp satiric edge, Frank will have you laughing out loud at the transparent self-serving cant of the corporatocracy and their handmaidens in the media, academia, and government. Frank knows his history, and clearly sees through the latest lies of that great unregenerate beast, redder now in tooth and claw than ever before.