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One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy

By Scott McLarty
The epilogue of 'One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy' by Thomas Frank was written a few months too soon.

The market exuberance of the 1990s was already over by the time Frank wrote it in May, 2001. Later last year, the Enron scandal broke, followed by MCI-Worldcom, and numerous other corporate debacles. Frank also missed out on dramas like Vice President Dick Cheney's refusal to hand over documents to the GAO detailing oil industry's role in crafting Bush's energy policy.

Greens should read Frank's book anyway. It's the best critique of 1990s corporate culture I've read, and belongs on the shelf next to Naomi Klein's 'No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.' Thomas Frank, who edits the The Baffler, an octavo that comes out once or twice a year, analyses how adoration of the free market economy has perverted our very definition of democracy.

'One Market Under God' is a textbook for Greens and others who understand that the dominant paradigm of our time is no longer capitalism vs. socialism but global corporatism vs. democracy, and that global corporatism and corporate culture inform the ideology of the Dems as much as Reps. "The party of working people," "health care, human rights, and the environment," and other claims by the Democratic Party have little to do with the agenda of Democrats; such associations are the result of branding in the same way that Campbell's soup is branded as authentic home-cooking rather than salty gelatin from a can.

A Suppressed History of U.S. Democracy

The perversion of democracy didn't happen by accident. Since the mid 20th century, Americans have enjoyed a prosperity unprecedented throughout history (well, prosperity for most whites; it's been limited and delayed for blacks and some others). Grandpa might crow that he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, but the high standard of living after World War II was really the outcome of massive government investment in industry and housing (especially in the suburbs; cities deteriorated in the wake of reduced urban funding, relocation of industry, and sprawl), grants such as the GI Bill, and powerful unions that counted 47% of the workforce as members by the late 1940s, a number that has since slipped under 10%.

In the 40s, Americans still remembered what had happened when corporations functioned without restraint. The late 19th century 'Gilded Age' rule of the robber barons was reversed through child labor laws, clean-up of the stockyards, the 40-hour work week, and the monopoly- and trust-busting of socialists like Upton Sinclair and reformers like Teddy Roosevelt. The 1929 stock market crash required New Deal reforms like the regulation of the stock market and financial institutions under measures like the (now gutted) Glass-Steagle Act. Smart people still remembered that the basis for Hitler's and Mussolini's fascism was an alliance between corporate elites and the military.

In other words, mid 20th century prosperity was based neither on corporate largesse nor heroic entrepreneurial individualism, but on a delicate balance of power that was achieved by the late 1940s in which corporations, inherently antidemocratic, were reined in on one hand by unions and on the other by a government that in some limited way was willing to "promote the welfare of the people," through investments and protections, a role that was expanded even further during the civil rights era. Corporate management didn't grant the 40-hour workweek, benefits and pensions, weekends and vacations, and safe workplaces willingly and cheerfully. On the contrary, they fought these reforms intensely and sometimes violently, as in the 1986 Haymarket Affair, the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, and the violent police response to strikes by coalminers, textile workers, and others during the 1930s. By the 1960s, these struggles had begun to pay off. Even the Nixon Administration, our last liberal presidency, acknowledged some degree of responsibility to working people, and established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and supported guaranteed wages.

The balance began to collapse with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. At the heart of the Reagan Revolution was a master plan to dismantle 'big government' (i.e., he would end government as a democratic protector of the 'welfare of the people,' and restrict its role to providing money and legislation for the benefit of large corporations and the US military) and dilute the power and membership of unions, beginning notoriously with the air-traffic controllers union.
The Reagan Revolution continued in full force through the Clinton years, with Clinton's signature on the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Telecommunications Act, and the Welfare Reform Act, all of which only a Democratic president could probably have accomplished, support for 'Fast Track' presidential power to negotiate trade deals with minimal congressional say in the matter, and cancellation of the Democrats' pledge since 1948 of national health insurance, in favor of a managed care plan favoring a few of the largest insurance firms. In 1995, Clinton endorsed pro-corp ideologue Newt Gingrich's condemnation of big government. The ideological convergence of the Democrats and Republicans in the mid 1990s coincides with the first move by the Greens to organize into a national electoral force, through the first Nader campaign and the founding of the Association of State Green Parties in 1996.

Logo Politics

Dismantling the checks on corporate power has been no easy task for the warriors in the boardrooms and K Street lobbying offices. Americans don't take kindly to someone chopping away at their wages, health coverage, health coverage, right to organize and complain, etc. So the corporados had to make it appear that the triumph of the market was really the triumph of democracy, that CEOs and stock market gurus are the equivalent of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., that privatization of public resources and services and deregulation of business portend the liberation of the masses.

That's the theme of 'One Market Under God.' Thomas Frank's target is the giant propaganda machine that sought to have Americans believe that their power lie not in the exercise of their rights as citizens and voters in a democracy, but in their choices as consumers and small-time stock traders and 301K investors, mechanisms that seemed to allow regular Mom and Pop to hold the same stakes in the market as CEOs in the market's success -- a myth now extinguished, we hope, by the Enron revelations. The populist anthems of the 90s were Nike's 'Just do it' and Cisco System's 'Are you ready?'

This is what Greens are up against. Citizens have been trained over the past decade not only to believe in the historical inevitability of the two-party system, but also the 'end of history' -- the notion that the fall of the Soviet empire equals the triumph of global corporate capitalism, the fruits of which we all enjoyed throughout the 1990s. History rudely reasserted itself on September 11, 2001, but many Americans prefer to believe that the attacks were caused, according to George W. Bush and Dan Rather, by 'evil-doers' who 'hate our freedoms' instead of the specific political objectives clearly stated by the atrocious Mr. bin Laden. It'll take a few years of Green education and engagement to reverse this kind of contextless, anhistorical thinking, which is at least in part the result of the sound-byte-driven style of reporting we get on the evening news.
Thomas Frank, who also edited the anthology 'Commodify Your Dissent' a few years back, is at his best in his chapters on account planners (a culture of corporate brand-shamans you probably didn't know existed), Nike's quest for 'authenticity' (e.g., ads that feature an urban girls' basketball team struggling heroically -- in African-American neighborhoods devastated by the transfer of jobs to Indonesia, Vietnam, China, and other places where Nike subcontracts for the manufacture of its overpriced sneakers), and academic cultural studies.

It's in the latter that market populism has been the most subtlely pervasive and ironic. Conservative philistines like David Horowitz, William Bennett, and Rush Limbaugh have launched wave after wave of assault on collegiate political correctness and the relativism of deconstruction and other modern academic trends, but Frank assures the know-nothings they had little to worry about. The 1990s cultural studies profs have rivaled Rush in their rejection of the kind of socio-political analysis of culture practiced by the Frankfurt School -- critics like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, who stressed mass culture's power to control and alienate.

The cultstuds, on the other hand, lecture about the postmodern and transgressive power of the consumer to mold and manipulate received culture to suit one's own tastes, which Frank reminds us is not the same as political freedom practiced in a democracy. On the contrary, the license to choose Coke over Pepsi is a freedom emptied of political content. Obsession with the shallow led to absurdities like the normally astute cultural critic bell hooks fawning in Spin Magazine over white corporate computer geek Jaron Lanier because of his fulsome dreadlocks. In a time when rebellion is just another consumer choice, corporate culture loves culture studies.

The seductiveness and pervasiveness of market ideology has been dealt a blow by the recent corporate scandals; a lot of Americans are a little warier of the privatization and deregulation schemes, even while the Bush White House clings to idiocies like Wall Street accounts replacing Social Security. It's given the Green Party an opening where the Democrats as much as Republicans have been compromised by their ties to Enron. People are beginning to get it.

It helps that Thomas Frank writes with wit and clarity, avoiding a lot of the cliché, posturing, and pointless density that passes for leftoid writing. For a foretaste of 'One Market,' check out Frank's "The God That Sucked" and other essays from The Baffler.