Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right
Amazon Exclusive: A Conversation Between David Sirota and Tom FrankJournalist andBack to Our FutureauthorDavid SirotainterviewsThomas Frank, author ofWhat's the Matter with Kansas?andThe Wrecking Crew,about his latest book.David Sirota: Do rich people in America genuinely feel persecuted, or are their requests for pity a political ploy to combat their critics?Tom Frank:  Well, we’re talking about something that’s self-evidently preposterous.  The phrase “Pity the Billionaire” is the absurd but inevitable  end-point of the present conservative argument. The book is about people  trying to depict themselves as the victims of a situation where they  are manifestly not victims: imagining that corporate enterprises are  ground under the iron heel of an over-regulating government, that banks  were forced to issue the loans that puffed up the real-estate bubble,  that taxes are by definition onerous and thieving, that businesspeople  are all, as a rule, hard-working, unassuming, and straight-shooting—and  that they have risen up righteously in a great strike, like in Ayn  Rand’s and John Boehner’s fantasy.Sirota:Why has the economic crisis resulted in a rise of conservative economic populism rather than progressive populism?Frank:Because conservatives got there first with the most money.Remember, the right has been “populist” for a long time now, raging  against this educated elite and that. Populism is a language and a style  that the conservative movement is comfortable with. It wasn’t hard to  turn a well-funded, well-organized movement already accustomed to  thinking of itself this way into a protest movement for hard times.Of course, this involved the swiping of a whole range of traditional  left-wing ideas and symbols, everything from the exaltation of the  strike to the notion of a despicable “ruling class.”The other side of the question is, why weren’t the liberals there to  contest this larceny? Where was the left-wing populist movement? Occupy  Wall Street didn’t turn up until three whole years after the September  ‘08 crash.The answer to this, I’m afraid, is that genuine populist movements don’t  just spring up overnight, in the way the Tea Party did. They come  together slowly. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, which is the  traditional home of working-class movements, has grown very  uncomfortable with populism. They don’t like it, they don’t trust it,  they sure as hell don’t know how to talk it. The Democratic Party more  and more sees itself as the party of conscientious professionals—of  bankers who are socially liberal, for example—and not as the party of  working people.Click here to read more of the conversation