"Pity the Billionaire" Author Thomas Frank on the Post-Collapse Rise of the Right

Thomas Frank’s new book, Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right is yet another leap through the looking glass from the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? which spent nearly 40 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Frank, a columnist for Harper’s and the founder of the buzzworthy journal The Baffler, regards with a nuanced and sardonic eye conservatism’s Phoenix-like rise following the 2008 economic collapse and how it regained power in the 2010 midterm elections with a populist message that flew in the face of economic realities. It was not Wall Street that was to blame, it was the government. “Let us give the rebels their due,” he writes. “Before this recession, people who had been cheated by bankers almost never took that occasion to demand that bankers be freed from ‘red tape’ and the scrutiny of the law. Before 2009, the man in the bread line did not ordinarily weep for the man lounging on his yacht.”

How did the Right hijack the narrative? “They saw their opportunity and they took it,” Frank told Millionaire Corner. “They learned the lessons of the Great Depression. They got wiped out in the 1930s, and one of the reasons was that their response to the Depression was to dress up in their tuxedos, go on the radio, and tell the country to get back in line. That was a colossal failure. This time around, they played it the other way.

They pretended to be a kind of left wing protest movement.”

The Tea Party protests, he said, had a hard times appeal that resonated. “I went to the first rally in February 2009,” he said. “I didn’t know it was going to be as successful as it was, but I was astonished to see that instead of following the obvious direction in which history was pointing—that the age of deregulation was over and conservative Republicans would have to become more moderate—they were going to do the opposite.”

A key player, Frank writes, is Glenn Beck, who joined Fox News in January of 2009 and became one of his biggest stars and lightning rods for controversy until he left the air in June of 2011. His influence may have waned, but his ascendency, he writes, was fortuitously timed to coincide with the wave of rage then building in the country. And the Tea Party was listening to his doom-and-gloom conspiracy theories. “They were very much in debt to Glenn Beck,” Frank said. “I listened to what they were saying (at their rallies) and thought they were reiterating what Beck was saying.”

As canny and successful as the Right has been in packaging its populist message, so have the Democrats failed to offer a counter-narrative, Frank observed. “During the health care debate, I was listened to a number of town hall meetings. You’d have a large contingent of conservatives who would show up and berate the Democrat (conducting the meeting) with questions about freedom and liberty. The Democrat would almost always retreat into ‘expert opinion,’ as in ‘We need to do this because that’s what the experts say.’ They had no answer for the grander ideological questions, and once upon a time, that’s what being a Democrat was all about.”

Meanwhile, the Right hammers home the notion of Democrats as “elite.” Presidential candidate Rick Santorum, for example, recently said that the Obama White House was full of “elite snobs.” A recent New Gingrich quote about the elite who ride New York’s subways proved rich fodder for late night comedians.

“I've been writing about this since the 90s,” Frank said. “The right understands itself as a movement of working class, average people. ‘Elites’ is a critical word for them. For 40 or 50 years, Democrats and liberals have presented themselves as the party of professionals. There is no one who has been a worse offender than Barack Obama.  They constantly walk right into the elitism critique. It is self-defeating and wrong in a million different ways, but only in a cartoon sense does it describe reality.”

The irony that the proponents of economic deregulation are stronger than ever at a time when conventional wisdom agrees that said deregulation led to the economic collapse fascinates Frank and is at the heart of Pity the Billionaire. “Politically, it’s kind of depressing to see how the liberals bungled the situation. I hate using this word, but 2008-2009 was the greatest opportunity for change had we had a Franklin Roosevelt figure in there. That’s what I thought Obama was at first. That’s a very disappointing thing. We need to look reality in the face.”