Chronicling the American political zeitgeist has never been easy – voters are fickle beasts – and in the last few years it’s been near impossible to keep up. The tea party movement, that nascent power that drove the 2010 elections, has seen its popularity and influence wane as new movements from the left – the Occupy crowd, for instance – have stormed onto the stage. Pity the soul who is trying to document the chaotic scene – someone such as, say, Thomas Frank.
In the past decade, Frank has created a voice that is part reporter, part op/ed columnist and part late-night comic, all done looking through a liberal political prism. Since 2004, when his best-selling “What’s the Matter with Kansas” was published, he has become an important voice for the political left. He is one of its chief political decoders, explaining how conservatives have captured the votes of people who should be voting Democratic – or at least who Frank believes should be voting Democratic.
Those acquainted with Frank’s prose will slip comfortably into his new book, “Pity the Billionaire.” In it he employs his usual technique to look at the rise of the tea party movement as he examines what the book calls “The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right.” Frank believes that after Barack Obama’s election, the nation took a sharp rightward turn in large part because conservatives, bankers and their lobbyist friends hoodwinked the nation and hijacked a nascent populism.
The book, a quick read, is meant as an exploration and explanation of how and why it all went wrong for progressives post-2008 and how politics got to where they are in 2012. And Frank does that, sometimes. At its best, “Pity the Billionaire” is a kind of Chicken Soup for the Liberal’s Soul, offering answers and humor to disillusioned MSNBC evening talk viewers. At its worst, it is simply a left-wing version of the hyperbole liberals say they hate when it comes from the right.
That mix is to be expected with Frank’s trademark combination of wisecracks and righteous indignation. At a more basic level, however, “Pity the Billionaire” has some bigger flaws.
Perhaps the most critical problem for Frank’s larger arguments is his comparison of the economic collapses of 2008 and 1929. For proof that the political and economic scene is out of whack, he talks about what “should” have happened after the troubles of 2008, which he argues were brought on by lack of regulation and bad behavior in the financial sector.
“If a financial order deserved a thirties-style repudiation, this one did,” he writes. The fact that such a comeuppance never came is the impetus for much of the book.
He may be right. But the primary reason that repudiation didn’t happen, that the banks didn’t get the big slapdown he wishes, was the government’s response to the crash. The stock market plunged, and the housing market collapsed, and government got involved. You can love the Troubled Asset Relief Program or hate it, but whatever you think, it prevented the Great Recession from becoming another Great Depression. Things got bad and stayed bad for a long time, but the complete 1930s-style collapse, complete with 25-percent unemployment, never came. TARP worked in conjunction with programs put in place during the New Deal, such as unemployment insurance, which Frank rightly cites as important accomplishments that kept human suffering from reaching Depression-era depths this time around. Frank fails to do justice to the extent to which New Deal programs and their legacy operated to help keep us out of a 1930s-style depression in the last couple of years.
Frank’s other problem is that in his quest to create a clear “what went wrong” narrative, he uses heavy doses of black and white paint to depict his bad guys. For instance, his discussion of the housing crisis, where he goes after mortgage lenders and banks, is valid on some points. It’s true that the financial industry supported giving loans to unqualified people in order to keep the housing boom going. But is it right to blame just the financial sector or even lax regulators? Don’t homebuyers who put zero down on a house they could barely afford deserve some criticism? Yes, the financial sector bears most of the responsibility, but the truth is that the country as a whole was complicit. We all enjoyed years of economic growth funded by a mirage.
Frank expresses contempt for the ways the Republican Party and conservatives directed and manipulated the populist anger of the tea party. But is that villainous and cynical or simply what happens in the American two-party system to any young political movement with an enthusiastic core? Groups full of energy are usually co-opted, or they disappear.
This book has some highlights. Frank’s wit is as sharp as ever, and his eye for detail and his ability to capture a scene reminded me of reading zoologist Dian Fossey on a group of strange political primates. His chapter on how people tried to make a buck off the tea party movement is wickedly funny: tea party cigars at $125 a box, commemorative coins for $59.99, a tea party children’s book featuring Barack Obama as a socialist Santa Claus. And his scathing portraits of various voices on the tea party right, from Glenn Beck to CNBC’s Rick Santelli, are entertaining.
But on the whole, “Pity the Billionaire” feels like a document from a time already gone – from before the appearance of the Occupy movement in the fall. And the book’s big premise – that the conservative right and the tea party are an ascendant force pushed forward by a marching legion of supporters – simply seems less true. Current polls show the tea party’s support sits somewhere in the 20-percent range.
That very shift in the electorate exposes the central flaw in Frank’s book. Considering the huge electoral vacillations over the past decade – remember the Republican permanent majority and the Democratic waves of 2006 and ’08 that came just before the tea party – it is difficult to write a definitive book about the nation’s political direction. Political journalists are an impatient bunch. We want answers. We want to understand where the country is going. We want realigning elections. But the only thing that’s clear is the moment in front of us. And lately, it doesn’t last.
