Must Reading Before the 2012 Elections

Thomas Frank of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" fame is back with a new book that deserves a read so one can understand the bizarre and surprising comeback of the right in the United States. Pity the Billionaire:The Hard-Times swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right (Metropolitan Books.) Thinner than his previous contributions, Frank reviews the reasons for the 2008 financial collapse and how and why conservatives didn't retreat but adopted an almost pure view of free market economics. Some of the issues I've written on in past posts--like the strange view conservatives hold that none of the past Republican administrations were conservative enough or embraced free market economics. In an age when our financial institutions were de-regulated and labor unions were eviscerated, how psychologically do you get to the point of blaming regulations and the government for the collapse of the economy, except if you say they didn't act--which was true. But to read the worst economic situation since the Depression as the clarion call to unfettered free market capitalism as the solution is very bizarre.

Frank does an excellent job is walking the reader through the strange mindset of the New Right and how its ideological commitment is very much like utopian leftists during the last Depression. Reality need not intrude. Frank is especially good on busting the myth of small business as a job creator since American small businesses have dramatically dwindled in size so that they are not that significant factor in our economy. He is also good about how the technocrats have failed us and how they provided the Greek chorus for the last generation of bubbles and derivatives and stock speculation.

Frank also writes how the Tea Party was an astro-turf movement created by insiders who were precisely the same people who brought the system down in the first place. Frank also takes up the issue that permeates his Wrecking Crew--how conservatives lost their way by monetizing their movement. He cites chapter and verse how people like Richard Viguerie and others made the Tea Party into a money-making venture.

There is a psychopathology to all this that few ever call out these people on. Frank refers to them as the depression people, people who now eulogize those people who went through the Depression as a type of spiritual renewal. In other words, the Right does not believe that the situation of the American people should be ameliorated in anyway but excerbated so that a purer American will emerge. The Forgotten Man is the businessman and that he alone symbolizes civic virtue. This helps explain how in a time of Depression Ayn Rand and Fountainhead makes an improbable comeback. A doctrine based on the virtue of selfishness becomes the supreme value. As Frank points out, any policy recommended by the New Right will have even more calamitous results than the previous supply-side economics.

Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson's The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford) is one of the few accounts of the tea party phenomenon, which is based on extensive fieldwork and interviews of local tea party leaders throughout the country. The two authors basically divide their findings up into the actual grassroots movement, the Koch-funded and corporate financed activities and the media coverage of the Tea Party via Fox News. What they found is that the media and the corporate funded components are at odds with the basic grassroots components of the Tea Party. They found what others have concluded that the Tea Party grassroots types are very conservative Republicans,better educated than most Americans, middle class or above and enjoying retirement, pensions, social security and Medicare. If you will, there is a generational warfare part of this phenomenon.

The authors found that the tea party types were not inherently racist, although very extreme right elements crept into local structures, and were dominated by small business types, who did identify with large corporate interests. The latter seems strange but the tea partiers felt that both elements of the private sector encountered the same problems and of course they were caused by Government and government regulation.

Their fixation was on the national debt and even though they were in part a reaction to George W. Bush, the prime target of their anumus is Barack Obama, who is "not one of us." On social issues, they are all over the map. Generally the identification of the tea party types with the religious right occurs according to region--particularly in the South. This book actually makes one understand how the campaign managers for Michelle Bachmann could easily switch sides to Ron Paul, something that would seem incompatible.

This book helped me understand how the tea party people will vote for Mitt Romney, precisely for the reasons many Americans will not--he's superrich from a field of dubious merit, doesn't pay alot of taxes, wants to eliminate corporate taxes and wants to cut out Medicare for younger people. In short, Mitt is what all the teabaggers aspire to.

The last must read is not about today except by historical analogy. Sally Denton The Plots against the President: FDR, A Nation In Crisis and the Rise of the American Right (Bloomsbury Press). It's hard to believe in the 21st century that American political leaders and captains of industry wants believed the most successful leader in the world was Benito Mussolini. At the tale end of the Hoover Administration, there was concern throughout the political system that American democracy was no longer viable and that America needed an El Duce to make it through the Depression. Sally Denton does a wonderful job of capturing the inadequacies of Herbert Hoover, the noblesse oblige of FDR, the atmosphere which fueled the rise of the radical Right with Father Coughlin and the populist Left with Huey Long. The book first explains the plot by Guiseppe Zangara, an Italian anarchist, who tried to shoot President-elect Roosevelt and ended up killing the Mayor of Chicago. Then the book details the Wall Street Putsch and the plot to involve two-time Medal of Honor winner Smedley Butler in "neutralizing FDR" and making him a figurehead President to be run by the likes of Howard Pew, Dow Chemical and insurance companies. While we read Seven Days in May in our youth, little did we know that it was based on a real plot during the FDR administration.

Denton's book recalls the rhetoric used against FDR, which is very similar to that used against President Obama. FDR was a socialist, a Communist, a fascist and under the control of Jewish bankers. And he was of the American elite so Barack Obama shouldn't complain. Also, the attacks on FDR from the Left remind one of the criticism of Barack Obama by liberals. And Denton does a great job in portraying FDR's cool, his noblesse oblige and his nonchalence in dealing with those demanding immediate answers to the country's crisis. I sympathize with those around FDR who found the waiting nerve-wracking. It's alot like people with high expectations of President Obama, wondering what he's going to do with the GOP obstructionism.

This short book reminds us that American democracy is not a sure thing,that it has been under seige many times in our history and frequently the most powerful were tempted to sacrifice it for their own good. What struck me was what temptations FDR avoided. Denton portrays a group of the leading bankers waiting on the new President to urge him to nationalize all the banks, something unheard of today. Like in the current financial crisis, the President did save the big banks and gradually restored the solvency of regional banks, much to the displeasure of the Left. At the same time, the wealthier classes were urging FDR to become a dictator like Mussolini, which he would not do even though he loved executive power.

And then there are the powerful monied interests. They thought FDR was a weak character, who could be bent to their purposes. They actually believed--during the two, not one coup attempt--that FDR would just succumb to their pressure and OK their plans to take over the government.

A good read and a reminder of where the most pernicious elements of the Right came from.