Idolatries Of The Marketplace

The 1980s were a fine time to be rich in America—but the 1990s were fabulous. And if you were a CEO or anose-ringed, dot-com entrepreneur, you were a figure of world-historical proportions, not merely a wealthmagnet, but a very example of the New Man to whom the New Economy was giving birth. Here’s the view from thetop: In 1990, average CEO "wages" were 85 times those of the average blue-collar employee. In the nextdecade, that ratio went from merely staggering to truly astronomical, winding up in 1999 at 475 to 1— agreater than fivefold increase in nine years. The CEO-to-worker income ratio in Japan, meanwhile, held steadyat 11 to 1, and in Britain—"the country," writes Thomas Frank, "most enamored of New Economyprinciples after the U.S. itself"—it was 24 to 1.

The New Economy and its CEO speedwagon were fueled by the long Dow boom, but they got a few crucial pushesfrom the U.S. federal government. The result was that every so often, American free-market ideologues had totake a twenty-second timeout from their ritual attacks on government in order to count all the bundles ofmoney that government policies had dumped in their laps. And after the passage of the Telecommunications Actof 1996, media moguls really had to bundle up.

As Frank points out, once the act became law, the telecommunications industry "promptly embarked on aspree of buyouts and monopoly building, with telephone and cable systems merging and converging in a whirlingtangle of free-market ebullience that continues to this day." Transferring public ownership of $70 billionworth of digital frequencies to private interests, the Telecommunications Act presented what Frank calls"one of those tableaux of greed, legislative turpitude, and transparently self-serving sophistry thatAmerican culture ordinarily delights in exposing and deriding." But there was little public protest aboutmetastasizing CEO compensation—and nary a peep from anyone with any meaningful access to state or corporatepower.

Why such silence, and so little gagging? Two reasons come to mind. One, cultural critics on the left werenot significant campaign contributors, and could only fume on the sidelines while corporate dollars bought oneentire major American political party and seven-eighths of the other. Two, the expansion of the stock marketto middle-income Americans, largely by way of 401(k) mutual funds, allowed market apologists to claim thatwhat was good for General Motors was now good for the country’s retirement portfolios. Frank quickly exposesthe speciousness of this claim, noting that because "the vast majority of shares are still held by thewealthy . . . the booming stock market of the nineties did not democratize wealth; it concentrated wealth."

The economy as a whole thus followed the logic of right-wing tax cuts, namely, an extra ten bucks each foryou and your friends, another $10 billion for John Malone, Rupert Murdoch, Jack Welch, and Bill Gates. Andapparently, this strategy worked sufficiently well in the last decade to allow the right wing to propose a newand even more amazing round of tax cuts for the next decade.

One Market Under God, however, is not primarily concerned with such piecemeal, partial explanationsas these. To his credit, Frank seeks bigger game: not the specific people, laws, or campaign contributionsthat secured neoliberalism’s current stranglehold over public policy, but the broader cultural formation(though Frank doesn’t call it that, for reasons I’ll get to below) that made it all possible. Frank callsthis market populism, "a curious but ideologically potent cultural hybrid bringing together theantiauthoritarian strains of traditional populism with the most orthodox faiths of classical economics."

In one sense, market populism is nothing more than the traditional libertarian equation of free marketswith free societies, according to which humans are most free from persecution when corporations are most freefrom government regulation. This equation, notes Frank, has been "part of the cultural wallpaper foryears," but has become standard-issue wallpaper only very recently:

Market populism began in nearly all its varieties as an ideology of business, as a PR scheme for this industryor that, as a simple management tactic, as a dream of the media conglomerates, as an official slogan for theNew York Stock Exchange. What makes it worth studying, though, is its recent triumph in the larger world ofAmerican culture, the process by which even non-bankers, non-CEOs, and non-Republicans learned to accept thelogic of the market as the functional equivalent of democracy.

The triumph of market populism thus renders it something other than garden-variety libertarian socialtheory, since in order to dominate the landscape, market populism has to appeal somehow to people who don’tsubscribe to Reason magazine or Investor’s Business Daily. In explaining this triumph, Frankhas a twofold task: to describe market populism and its apologists and to account for the relative collapse ofother ways of thinking about the world.

Much of One Market Under God is devoted to parsing and exposing the remarkable idiocies of whatpasses for "management theory" these days, and surely one of the delights of the book is the dexterity andélan with which Frank skewers the genre and its gurus—Tom Peters, George Gilder, Peter Senge, and company.Here are the business world’s paeans to the soulful corporation, glassy-eyed treatises on the Tao of Dow,and hymns to the cosmic rightness of free trade, all of which give Frank his title, and all of which earn hiswell-deserved scorn. Frank’s reaction upon reading Thomas Friedman’s fatuous The Lexus and the Olive Treepretty much sums up his relation to most of the material he’s immersed himself in for the past few years:

Enthusiasm for the "rebranding" of Britain, pointless ponderings about the physical weight of eachcountry’s GNP, facile equating of Great Society America with the Soviet Union. Each of them is preposterousin its own way, but thrown together they make a truly dispiriting impression, a feeling akin to the first timeI heard Newt Gingrich speak publicly and it began to dawn on me that this is what the ruling class callsthinking, that this handful of pathetic, palpably untrue prejudices are all they have to guide them as theyshuttle back and forth between the State Department and the big think tanks, discussing what they mean to dowith us and how they plan to dispose of our country.

For readers like me, this is a seductively satisfying account of Newthink (they have the power, but we havethe brains), but it’s not the best thing about Frank’s book. Rather, what makes Frank worth studying ishis unerring eye not only for the pomposities of market populism but also for their consequences.

Opening the book by noting that free-marketeers treat union supporters as dupes and automatons, "peoplelacking agency of their own, empty vessels filled with the will of others," Frank teases out perhaps themost important feature of market populism, its strategic confusion of who counts as an "agent." Accordingto market populists, people can only act freely and rationally in a free market; thus, anticorporate activistsare really Stalinoid puppets, duped by leftist rhetoric. Furthermore, the globalization of the free market isinevitable, and resistance is the work of flat-earthers and fools.

Now, the first proposition—that trade unionists are dupes—is prima facie absurd, since it entails theancillary claim, as Frank shows, that "workers weren’t victimized by downsizing and job insecurity; thesewere things they wanted, things they fought for, things they needed in order to realize their full humanity,to escape from the corporate conformity of yesterday." But the second proposition—that free markets areinevitable—is not merely absurd but (in tandem with the first) incoherent, for it undermines the very notionthat free markets free people: "How," asks Frank, "can we really be ‘free agents’ or ‘empowered’or ‘liberated’ if we are in the tight grip of inevitability?"

Something at once odd and odious masks this contradiction, a cultural shift that has drawn Frank’s firebefore—namely, the corporate "conquest" of cool. Appropriating the language of populist revolt andpost-punk bad attitude, corporate America has managed to define itself precisely against what most peoplethink of as corporate America, and the terrain of cultural criticism has been transformed accordingly. Thesymbolism runs like so: twenty-somethings with interesting hair configurations are revolutionizing the cultureof the corporation. The new Wall Street’s attitude toward the old, pinstriped Wall Street is like unto theSex Pistols’ attitude toward, say, Elvis. And the Internet? Dude, the Internet changes everything.

So pervasive is this self-representation of the financiers of the New Economy that Frank is hard put tolampoon it. Take, for example, Jonathan Hoenig, P.O.V.columnist, National Public Radio commentator, andauthor of Greed Is Good: "A dramatic shout is being heard in America these days. It’s the voice ofnew money. It’s young people who are determined to be themselves." The best parody Frank can muster inresponse, alas, is mere paraphrase: "It’s the George Gilder model of social conflict—righteous new moneyvs. snooty old—only spiced up in this telling with a few tired slogans from the sixties, as filtered throughdecades of TV commercials. . . . So disgusted are we by the materialism of our wealthy elders that we mustbreak with them altogether and become . . . wealthy!" (second ellipsis Frank’s).

Nevertheless, Frank does not lose sight of the political reality driving this symbolic shift, namely, WallStreet’s ideological investment in inducing Americans to think of themselves as shareholders rather than ascitizens, and thus, as in the passage of the Telecommunications Act, refashioning privatization as anenhancement of the public good. This is surely the main point of the enterprise of private enterprise, theforce behind not only the dot-com bubble but also the related and perhaps incipient privatization of SocialSecurity.

I admire Frank’s project in One Market Under God. And I’ll admit to having learned a good dealfrom it—particularly about the transformation of American business culture and the millennial pretensions ofmanagement theory. The book does, however, have some flaws. Among the most minor of these is theindiscriminateness of its outrage: On one page, Frank insists that "there is no social theory on earth shortof the divine right of kings that can justify a five hundred fold gap between management and labor." Onanother page he’s complaining about the Nortel ad in which an executive recites the lyrics of "ComeTogether." Well, yes, it’s annoying that the surviving Beatles don’t control the rights to their ownoeuvre and that Lennon’s trippy exhortation to simultaneous orgasm has been rewritten as the script of thecompany meeting, but it has been sixty years since Walter Benjamin warned us of the amazing conscriptivepowers of the bourgeois apparatus.

Surely the next Nortel commercial will find some visually arresting way to quote Benjamin on the amazingconscriptive powers of the bourgeois apparatus. Likewise, you can only fulminate about the smugself-congratulation of the movie Pleasantville once in a book. Three times bespeaks either poor editingor repetition compulsion. And you shouldn’t still be defining "market populism" on page 111. But then,there’s a lot of repetition here: too many management theorists and not enough workers, too much aboutTheStreet.com and not enough about government.

These, as I say, are minor flaws. For One Market Under God attempts to chart a new culturalterrain—the details by which "making the world safe for billionaires has been as much a cultural andpolitical operation as an economic one." The book is, in other words, a cultural-studies intervention intothe hegemonic language of neoliberalism; and yet these are "other words" indeed, for if there is oneintellectual tradition with which Frank does not want to align himself, it’s the tradition of culturalstudies. The book’s chapter on cultural studies, as a result, will prove nettlesome for some of Frank’sacademic readers, and though it will win him admirers and blurb-suppliers among those who (a) know nothingmore about cultural studies than what Frank tells them or (b) know just enough about cultural studies to hate,hate, hate Andrew Ross and his earrings, too, it will also cost him some credibility among precisely thosecultural critics who need most to read this book.

Frank’s argument is that the cultural-studies wing of the academic left has aided and abetted the spreadof market populism by undertaking analyses of "subcultures" in which consumers of mass culture turn out tobe empowered by the very practice of consumption. In Frank’s parlance, "cult-stud" scholars are littlemore than cheerleaders for the New Economy, endlessly burbling about how people use products in ways theirmakers never intended and thereby perform the important cultural work of "resistance." To this Frank addsa loosely related bill of particulars: cultural studies is too insular; it’s too preening and faux-hip;it’s too invested in its own European lineage, not sufficiently aware of American sociologists like HerbertGans; it’s too proud of its opposition to the Christian Right; it was badly embarrassed by the Alan Sokal/SocialText affair; it did not attend to the crisis in academic labor; and it has been co-opted by neoconservativeslike libertarian economist Tyler Cowen and the irascible, incoherent advertising critic James Twitchell.

But most annoying about Frank’s attempt to cast cultural studies as the academic wing of Market PopulistsInc. is that he has a point. He’s not always sure how best to make it, and he keeps fingering the wrongsuspects and missing the easy openings, but still, I have to give him his due: he must be among the very fewnonacademics in North America who’s read all of Larry Grossberg’s We Gotta Get Out of This Place, a volumeritually memorized by Grossberg’s graduate students but usually unreadable for anyone else. When Frank goesafter the consumption-as-empowerment school, though, he doesn’t mention its leading exponent, John Fiske,whose scholarly career is basically that of the austere Adorno scholar who one day discovered that wow, hotdogs really taste good and has since devoted himself to the celebration thereof.

Similarly, Frank seems to score a point against "cult studs’ strange fantasy of encirclement byMarxists at once crude and snobbish," but he misses the real antagonists at stake in subcultural analyses ofWorld Championship Wrestling—not the League of Adornian Marxists, certainly, but the tweedy, Moynihan-liberalelders whom DJ the Mozart show on public radio every second Sunday and who just happen to be the distinguishedsenior colleagues whose scholarly sensibilities cultural studies is supposed to offend. In this academiceconomy, of course, the critic with the coolest, most transgressive subculture wins, which is why you don’tsee many cultural studies essays on the Amish.

Yet here, in roundabout fashion, is where Frank lands his most palpable hit. Cultural studies, whatever itsother real or imagined failings, has not said boo about the cultural formation Frank describes in OneMarket Under God, and that’s one reason why Frank won’t use the phrase "cultural formation":"for all its generalized hostility to business and frequent discussions of ‘late capital,’ " hewrites, "cultural studies failed almost completely to produce close analyses of the daily life ofbusiness." There’s simply no disputing this claim.

Of all Frank’s complaints about cultural studies, this is the one cult studs should take most to heart;for with few exceptions (of the Michael Denning and Richard Ohmann variety), American cultural studies hasindeed broken with the Hall-Williams-Thompson tradition of British cultural studies and devoted itself insteadto the unearthing of "counterhegemonic" practices of TV watching. Subcultural analysis has too oftenproceeded from Angela McRobbie’s delusional belief that the market is "an expansive popular system," andcult studs who promote the model of "the intellectual as fan"—not addressed by Frank, though it shouldhave been—usually manage to forget that fans are often quite critical of their objects. (Perhaps what isrequired here is a model of the intellectual as Chicago Cubs fan.) Overdrawn and partial as Frank’s case maybe, his main charge has too much merit to ignore: all the while the New Economy was building us a house ofcards, most cult studs were churning out Gramscian readings of MTV’s House of Style.

Frank is more than smart enough to know, and honest enough to admit, that some of the most trenchantcritiques of cult-stud populism have in fact been launched by cult studs themselves (and here he should havecited Judith Williamson’s classic "The Problems of Being Popular"), but occasionally he lets hispenchant for polemic get the better of his judgment. Early in the chapter, Frank cites a fairly innocuoussentence I wrote in 1992 about how cultural studies tries "to discover and interpret the ways disparatedisciplinary subjects talk back," and proceeds to make this out to be a refrain for the market populism ofcultural studies professors everywhere, as if we’re all chirpy proponents of town meetings and focus groupsin the mode of GOP pollster Frank Luntz.

This is great fun, no question, but anyone remotely familiar with the practice of anthropology sinceLevi-Strauss, let alone the history of prisons and mental illness, knows that the question here is aprofoundly ethical one. And Frank knows it, too: the idea that people can talk back to the institutions anddiscourses that structure their lives is absolutely essential to any populism—and any theory ofdemocracy—worthy of the name. This is why Frank himself closes his book with, of all things, the ringingcadences of people talking back: