Pity the Billionaire

Chapter 2

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Fear was all the rage. The celebrated "red state" blogger Erick Erickson (along with his coauthor, Lewis Uhler) has given an almost clinically precise description of what he and his fellow alarmists achieved.

Many Americans who had never been politically active, never walked a precinct, never interrupted their golf games, family gatherings, or vacations to discuss politics, government, or the Const.i.tution, were suddenly gripped with the sense that their government, nation, and way of life were being stolen from them.4 People all across the nation were tuned to the Mars-invasion broadcast this time, and many Americans found the coming catastrophe satisfying, delicious, even addictive. It was the o.r.g.a.s.maclysm: They tingled to imagine the outrageous injustices that would be done to them by the coming "death panels." They purred to hear about the campaign of "indoctrination" that the new president had planned for their innocent kids; their pulse quickened to think of the "chains" he was preparing for their mighty wrists; and they swelled with imagined bravery to picture how they would be targeted by "the coming insurrection." Their heroes, they quivered to learn, were victims of "persecution," their nation was under "systematic a.s.sault" by its own leaders, and they who had defeated Soviet communism; they who rejoiced to see their enemies writhe in the dungeons of Guantanamo-why, now they were "Gulag Bound," as a popular website of the day moaned rapturously.5 This time it was apocalypse that moved the needle, that swayed the undecided, that made the sale.

We the Market.

And what it sold was the great G.o.d Market. The market"s invisible hand would lift the threat of "destruction" from the land. It would restore fairness to a nation laid waste by cronyism and bailouts. It would let the failures fail, at the same time comforting the thrifty and the diligent. Under its benevolent gaze, rewards would be proportionate to effort; the lazy and the deceiving would be turned away empty-handed, and once again would justice and stability prevail.

From the day the newest Right emerged from the sh.e.l.l of its rattlesnake egg, apocalypse (on the one hand) and perfect capitalism (on the other) have been its two lodestars, its omega and its alpha, its fear and its hope. "What do we say to socialism?" went the rallying cry at a Los Angeles Tea Party protest in 2009, according to two pollsters who have studied the movement. "Nooooo," yelled the crowd on hand. "What do we say to free market?" "Yessssssssss."6 "The most powerful, proven instrument of material and social progress is the free market," declares the preamble of the 2009 Tea Party manifesto, the "Contract from America." Or heed the words of the publishing magnate Steve Forbes, who maintains in his 2009 book, How Capitalism Will Save Us, that "markets are people voting with their money." And then in the very next sentence, that "in many ways, a market is an ecosystem."7 This gets us closer to the grand social vision of the newest Right. Markets are both natural and democratic; they are, in fact, naturally occurring democracies, places of innocence and wonder. Just as we don"t want to interfere in the fragile and no doubt democratic community of the coral reef, so we must leave (say) oil drillers alone to do their equally natural thing and express the popular will.

A particularly telling expression of the free-market faith occurs in a 2009 Tea Party pamphlet called Spread This Wealth. In order to teach readers about the nature of capitalism, the author, C. Jesse Duke, follows the doings of an imaginary primitive man who finds a stick, kills a deer, and trades things with other primitive men. Duke then makes the following p.r.o.nouncement.

This whole process of free markets and the trading of time and energy is just the natural order of the world. A tree exchanges oxygen for carbon dioxide. A fire exchanges heat for oxygen. Atoms exchange electrons to become other atoms. Plants collect light to make chlorophyll, which nourishes animals, which become food for other animals and man, and so on. Everything in nature is constantly exchanging. So the free exchange of time and energy between people is the G.o.d-designed, natural order. Conflicts erupt when this order is upset.8 Remember the larger situation in which Duke (and Forbes and the anonymous contributors to the contract) felt moved to pen all these remarkable words. Our economy was in ruins thanks largely to unfettered investment banks trading complex financial derivatives that not even experts could understand. Monopolies and oligopolies were everywhere. Hourly wages had been falling for decades. But according to these voices of protest, the way to make sense of it all was by imagining a state of economic nature. By presuming that G.o.d Himself wants government to stay out of it.

I quote Mr. Duke here not to rain down mockery on his works but because the above pa.s.sage is the clearest distillation I have yet seen of the movement"s deliberate naivete concerning economics. Capitalism is a system of balance and harmony and simplicity, the latest generation of conservatives insisted, regardless of what the newspapers say about shadow banks or credit default swaps. Armed with this universal truth, the newest Right vowed to accept no compromises, like better rules for Wall Street or smarter supervision; this was to be a war over ideals, over clashing utopias, over fundamentals. Economic policy needed to be understood as a quest for authenticity. And when that was clear, you understood that what we were suffering from was a conflict between true capitalism and some phony, gimcrack amalgam slapped together over decades of compromises. As Glenn Beck asked his radio audience in September 2008: Why did Fannie and Freddie not work? Because it is the hybrid between government and capitalism. It is taking political power and injecting money into it. That"s why it didn"t work. Socialism doesn"t work. Marxism doesn"t work. Fascism doesn"t work. Capitalism works. Capitalism put a man on the moon.*

Capitalism was a simple thing, once you stripped away the complexities with which progressives had saddled it over the years-so simple that Beck actually painted a picture of it, t.i.tled Capitalism, that he offers for sale as a lithograph: a red rectangle with smokestacks attached, peacefully pooting out little dollar signs. There are no human figures complicating the picture, and no cars or power lines or anything else surrounding the object. Just a basic shape in red with its name underneath: Capitalism. In its bricklike simplicity it"s a sort of counterpoint to Beck"s tangled world of conspiracies and disaster schemes-his serenity s.p.a.ce, maybe, whence he travels mentally to escape from what must be his constant anxiety. Serene, soothing capitalism.

The problem that confronts us isn"t how to fine-tune the controls; it"s how to get back to that tranquil place. The only system that works is the real system-the true system, the system G.o.d made.9 With the economy in ruins, our mission was to recover that authentic state of pure capitalism, rediscovering in the process what the Founders really meant and what the Const.i.tution really instructed us to do. It was as simple as one of those self-help recovery books where we come face-to-face with our honest selves: we had to take our country back, purge the body politic of compromises and alien ideas.

They Are Us.

It is strange for the free market"s reputation to have bounced back so quickly after its devotees came close to ruining us all, but it is doubly strange when you consider the nature of free-market fandom. Aside from the occasional Steve Forbes, the conservatives who are proclaiming their market-love these days are not tyc.o.o.ns or economists or bankers; they are average people.

And the markets that the people love, according to the newest conservatism"s way of thinking, love the people right back. According to the populism of the revitalized Right, markets are democratic systems, with consumers and investors making their desires known through the channels of supply and demand. When markets are allowed to function without interference, this form of populism holds, they are essentially elections, perfectly articulating the will of the people. That"s why those who partic.i.p.ate most intimately in the market"s doings-like Rick Santelli"s bond traders-wear the halo of common-man averageness (they are the "silent majority," you will recall), while those who regulate markets from the outside are invariably "elitists": autocratic eggheads thwarting the will of the people with their iron fists.

A reverse Marxism like this appeals to the country"s winners for obvious reasons: it casts their success as the thundering approbation of the public, while depicting their traditional enemies-especially those parasitical government bureaucrats-as arrogant know-it-alls. That"s why the idea"s origins are found in the literature of wealth: management books that tell bosses they are liberating humanity when they outsource the work to China; investment guides that extol the stock-picking genius of the small-town grandma; and those grand historical tracts that retired bank presidents like to write, a.s.suring us that free markets are fueling popular uprisings in all countries.

When I first started writing about market populism many years ago, it was almost exclusively a faith of the wealthy. To write about it was to write about propaganda. Average people, I thought, no more believed that the corporations of America were democracies than they believe that a Pontiac is "fuel for the soul."

But then came a near-catastrophic failure of the economic system, and market populism, the sole utopian scheme available to the disgruntled American, went from being a CEO"s dream to the fighting faith of the millions. One reason for this is that utopian capitalism can look pretty good in a time of disillusionment and collapse. It is a doctrine that seems to have all the answers. We were suffering, it held, because our leaders had broken faith with American tradition, meaning the laissez-faire system that prevailed before the dawn of organized labor and the regulatory state. The system we thought of as everyday American practice-"capitalism"-was, it told us, an "unknown ideal" that we had never really lived up to. Our elected officials had never been pure enough; our business leaders had always sacrificed principle to grab at subsidies; government"s presence had grown and grown-and now, the story went, we would have to shape up if we wanted to prosper again.

That we don"t have a pure market system in America is not some unique revelation vouchsafed to the Tea Party awakening. For decades, the idea has been a staple of the Left, where the limited-capitalist model is generally understood as a good thing. The state is involved in the economy in thousands of ways, the libs say, because it has to be. A complete free market would be a disaster, something not even the business community itself wants to try. As a famous labor historian wrote in 1975, "Not a single major American industry could survive today without government."10 The real problem, from the liberal perspective, is that government doesn"t go far enough; it merely doles out public subsidies of one kind or another while shareholders of private companies walk off with the profits, in the now-familiar scenario of socialized risk and privatized gain. The bailouts are a perfect example, the liberal critic says: the system allowed investment bankers to gamble however they wanted and then took over the losses after the bankers" bets went bad.

The revitalized Right simply turned this argument upside down. Yes, government has its finger in every segment of the economy, and that"s what is to blame for everything that has happened. Market forces have never been truly free, and therefore they bear none of the blame for our current predicament. And so the obvious answer arose from a thousand megaphones: Get government out of the picture completely! Smash what"s left of the liberal state! Until the day free enterprise is totally unleashed, capitalism itself can be held responsible for nothing.

Glenn Beck stages an allegory of the true faith in his 2009 book, Arguing with Idiots, in which a Founding Father in a powdered wig argues with a Soviet soldier over issues of the day. One of them asks whether the financial crisis was brought on "by a failure of capitalism, or by an abuse of it by the government?" The answer is simple, and Beck"s Founding Father character enlightens us: "Under true free-market capitalism, the government would have no involvement in homeownership whatsoever."

They wouldn"t encourage it through artificially low interest rates, Fannie and Freddie, tax breaks, or a "Community Reinvestment Act," but they wouldn"t discourage it either.* Rates would be set by market partic.i.p.ants, based on risk, reward, and a clear understanding that making bad loans would result in bankruptcy.

Do you see how awesome that would be, reader? Without regulation, everyone would live in harmony with nature and the intent of the Founders, and nothing like collateralized debt obligations would ever be invented. Bubbles would never happen. Bankers would never build systems that rewarded them for making bad loans-their rational self-interest wouldn"t let them! To get back to Beck: But we"ve done the complete opposite of that. The housing market is manipulated by the government every step of the way. So while some may argue that we need more regulation to prevent those future "excesses," I would argue that it"s the existing regulations that created those excesses in the first place. In other words, what has failed isn"t the idea of free markets, it"s the idea that a market can be free when it"s run by an increasingly activist government.11 In order for markets to deliver us to our destiny, we had to become mindful of their freedom. And ordinary people by the millions heard the call. In October of 2010, Glenn Beck exhorted his host of alienated followers to donate money to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce-the biggest, baddest business lobby in all of Washington, DC-on the grounds that "they are us." Ordinarily, of course, gifts to the chamber are denominated in the hundreds of thousands and are made by enormous corporations, but such a deluge of small donations followed Beck"s appeal that it crashed the chamber"s servers.12

CHAPTER 5.

Making a Business of It.

A handful of Washington"s leading conservative inst.i.tutions had seized the opportunity of the Santelli "rant" to stage the first Tea Party protest, and other organizations immediately scrambled on board. Certain groups could legitimately claim to have been partying since the beginning, like Grover Norquist"s Americans for Tax Reform and whatever establishment Newt Gingrich was heading at the time. Outfits financed by the Koch oil billions, like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, were also quick to get on the bandwagon.

Once the Tea Parties looked like they might take off, just about everyone on the Right grabbed at the opportunity. The Fox News Channel, for example, presented the emerging protest campaign as if it was the network"s own reality show. People from the Cato Inst.i.tute were not hard to find at Tea Party conventions, nor were the folks from the Heritage Foundation. Ed Meese, attorney general in the Reagan administration, started the Conservative Action Project, supposedly an organization in which the new Tea Party groups could come together with existing movement leaders; its "only paid staff member," according to a Washington Post story in February of 2010, was Patrick Pizzella, a former a.s.sociate of Jack Abramoff.* And today there is no more fervent Tea Partier than Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail genius of the seventies who remade himself with "ConservativeHQ," a website aggregating news from around the right wing.

There are former Bush administration office holders, like John O"Hara, late of the U.S. Department of Labor, who published the first book about the Tea Party movement. There are lobbyists, like d.i.c.k Armey, formerly of the DLA Piper firm and now the figurehead at the Koch-backed FreedomWorks pressure group. There are the free-market policy wonks, like Phil Kerpen of the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity gra.s.sroots group, whose policy interests tend toward arcane corporate regulatory matters-opposing "net neutrality," fighting proposed credit-card rules and suchlike-but who also writes essays celebrating the Tea Party"s "true populism" and boasting of the fear it brings to the hearts of "powerful elites."1 Pelf and Populism.

As the Tea Party grew, becoming the official populist response to the economic disaster, opportunists both political and economic saw the gathering crowds and the spreading outrage as their very own ship, sailing benevolently into port. Indeed, the categories of "politics" and "profit" became so thoroughly scrambled on the resurgent Right that by September of 2010 it was possible for Mike Pompeo, a Republican candidate for Congress in Wichita, Kansas, to describe the political movement itself as "a restoration of the great American entrepreneurial spirit."2 There were so many entrepreneurs, and they swung into action so quickly in the wake of the protests, that you sometimes wondered if their affluence wasn"t the object of the agitation all along.

The most famous example was the National Tea Party Convention, held in Nashville in February of 2010, which featured an appearance by Sarah Palin and charged attendees $549 each. What"s more, the sponsoring organization turned out to be a for-profit outfit headed by a man who was reportedly trying to set up a kind of Facebook-style web empire for wingers. "What was celebrated here in Nashville," wrote the journalist Will Bunch, after cataloging the trinkets for sale there, "wasn"t so much the coming out of the conservative movement as the commoditization of it."3 The commodification continued wherever the movement pitched its tent. There were Tea Party cigars, $125 per box, perfect for those moments when you want to relax and "contemplate what has gone wrong and how to fix our government." An outfit called 912 Citizens, Inc. offered for sale a silver coin commemorating the movement"s big Washington, DC, rally of September 12, 2009; it could be yours for $59.99.*

The commemorative coins on sale at the September 12 rally the following year were of some baser metal, but they were painted in full color; I picked one up at the Liberty XPO held at the Sh.o.r.eham Hotel in Washington for a mere sixteen dollars. At that same trade fair, I perused a collection of tiny tea bag jewelry, countless T-shirt designs, b.u.mper stickers that deliver "stinging slogans," a self-published book offering success tips distilled from Army field manuals, and a "hand signed lithograph" of American soldiers, with a wordy homage at the bottom proclaiming the man-at-arms" superiority over various civilian occupations.

This robust synergy of politics and profit extends to the highest reaches of the right-wing revival. It is, to name but the most obvious case, the signature approach of the movement"s snarling sweetheart, Sarah Palin, who gave up her elected post as governor of Alaska in order to indulge in a series of cash-in opportunities: books, speaking gigs, TV shows. Let someone else do the scut work of governing.

Then there"s Glenn Beck, who has gone from being a TV performer able to cry on cue to a one-man brand in a few short years. For example, his nightly forecasts of onrushing doom dovetailed nicely with the paranoid marketing strategy of his gold-vending sponsor-an outfit for which he also cuts commercials.* Another product of Beck"s preternatural opportunism is the 9/12 Project, whose putative object was to promote a vague civic togetherness of the kind Americans supposedly felt on September 12, 2001, along with a pa.s.sel of antigovernment sentiments that the TV host a.s.sociated, inexplicably, with that occasion. The "project" did much to inspire a large rally that took place in Washington, DC, in the fall of 2009. But to me the 9/12 effort always looked like something knocked together in a hurry in order to slap a proprietary claim on the then-emerging Tea Party-to brand the larger movement as a project of the empire of Glenn.*

And from the ever-shrewd Richard Viguerie there came an expensive DVD set revealing "Fundraising Secrets for Tea Party Leaders." Not only was he charging $297 for the DVDs-hopefully yielding a profit for Viguerie"s outfit-but the declared goal of the instruction was to teach you to take advantage of the right-wing ferment to raise money for your own outfit. "Not since the late 1970s has there been a more favorable climate for you to launch a conservative organization," the entrepreneur Viguerie enthused in his advertis.e.m.e.nt for the DVD set. "The fundraising winds are at your back ... and those winds are now blowing at hurricane force!"4 It was entrepreneurship squared, with every party to the transaction an acknowledged mercenary: Viguerie would sell you the secrets of fund-raising so you could get started as a political entrepreneur in your own right.

I bring all this up not because I think Tea Partiers are uniquely covetous but-the very opposite-because the marketing of discontent is so typical of the way modern right-wing movements unfold. Viguerie, for example, introduces his website with a salute to political entrepreneurship from Benjamin Franklin: "It is incredible the quant.i.ty of good that may be done in a country by a single man who will make a business of it."

"Making a business of it" is exactly right. That is the formula that gave modern conservatism so many of its most notable inst.i.tutions and adventures: the direct-mail revolution of the seventies, when it first became obvious that fearmongering was a profitable enterprise; the Iran-Contra episode, with its galaxy of panic-slinging fund-raising stars; the archipelago of Washington think-tanks and pressure groups that, for a modest consideration, will supply foot soldiers for your corporation"s war with unions or environmentalists or consumer advocates; the careers of Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist, and the rest of the gang; and, of course, the entrepreneurial brilliance of the K Street Project.5 And why shouldn"t conservatives sell their services? They are cadres for capitalism, after all. When disgruntled activists criticized the 2010 National Tea Party Convention for cra.s.s commercialism, its organizer returned fire by calling those critics "socialists."6 While his insult missed the mark, his sense of having been unfairly criticized was accurate enough. Viewed in the context of the last forty years, there is nothing strange about those who understand conservative politics as a career opportunity. Nor is there anything contrary to conservative principle in regarding gra.s.sroots movements as ready-made roundups of suckers. On the contrary; opportunism is one of the factors that has made conservatism so fantastically successful.

Still, the appearances can be off-putting, and the resurgent Right often struggles to reconcile such naked enthusiasm for gain with its self-image as the simon-pure voice of the common people. Yes, the movement loves capitalism, but even prophets of the profit motive do not like to think of themselves as exploiters or corruptionists. Markets must triumph everywhere, they tell us, but spondulics must never mix with statesmanship. This is why a Tea Party coffee-table book that includes dozens of pictures of protest signs praising capitalism also begins with a foreword (written by the action star Chuck Norris) complaining that "the Const.i.tution has been ousted by cash" and that "the Bill of Rights has been bartered for corporate bonuses."7 It is another undecidable muddle, and the movement resolves it by simply having it both ways. Take lobbying, for instance, the most basic activity of commercialized politics. Tea Partiers think of lobbying as unspeakably dirty, an industry so repugnant that it can only be understood as a branch of the liberal empire. That"s why few on the right are willing to embrace Abramoff or DeLay as one of their own anymore, regardless of those men"s successes as political entrepreneurs. On the other hand, lobbyists like d.i.c.k Armey, who are not stained with felony convictions, are welcome in the movement"s leadership. And no stigma attaches to the Tea Party Express, supposedly a mobilizer of the millions that was actually set up as a fund-raising operation by a well-known California political consultancy.8 Ma.s.s Individualism.

The opportunism I am describing extends all the way to the newest Right"s lowliest precincts. The movement"s trademark expression may be the rally in the town square, but Tea Partiers are not ma.s.s men. Attend such a rally, and you will notice that just about everyone seems to be angling for a moment in the spotlight, with shocking homemade placards or outrageous costumes. At a 2010 rally in Denver, a guy who stood a few feet away from me blew an old army bugle every time he heard from the podium a sentiment of which he approved. At the 2010 Virginia Tea Party Convention, I watched a man amble through the lecture sessions with a snake flag actually draped over his shoulders. Other men thought it was appropriate to show up wearing pistols strapped to their belts, even though the event was held in the safe, civilized, and almost antiseptic premises of the Richmond Convention Center. And, of course, people dressed in colonial garb-sometimes Revolutionary War reenactors or professional impersonators of Founding Fathers-are a well-known attraction at Tea Party events.

It can be a little embarra.s.sing to watch the newest Right"s rank and file arguing over who was the very first Tea Partier, exhorting their comrades to adopt some flag that they have designed, trying to impress one another with patriotic arcana like the forgotten fourth verse of the "Star Spangled Banner," or strategizing to parlay a single moment of YouTube notoriety into a lifelong career. But these stabs at personal branding, these efforts people make to transform themselves into walking advertis.e.m.e.nts-they are all of a piece, I believe, with the conservative establishment"s efforts to capitalize on the gra.s.sroots awakening. Both are specimens of a kind of entrepreneurial self-a.s.sertion that distinguishes the American Right.

That"s why the movement"s gatherings are filled with freelance James Madisons, each one working on some patented political contraption out in the garage. Go to enough rallies, and you will learn about a group called GOOOH, which developed a plan to "evict the 435 career politicians in the U.S. House of Representatives and replace them with everyday Americans just like you." You will meet the folks from iCaucus, who promise to apply a metaphorical "Big Stick" to members of Congress in retaliation for the bank bailouts. You will discover that "the answer we"ve all been waiting for has arrived" in the form of another group"s "Redeclaration of Independence," which all are exhorted to sign. Someone else launched a movement called We Read the Const.i.tution, which aims to have people all over America hold parties where they will declaim that doc.u.ment aloud. It may sound boring, but in truth it"s a "profoundly moving exercise," so sign up.9 Everyone is a philosopher. This is a movement of manifestoes, blogs, and small-press books in which thousands of self-taught Montesquieus spin theories of government villainy they dreamed up using only the information provided by the Bible, the Const.i.tution, and The Glenn Beck Program. Read through these brave declarations of political faith, however, and what astonishes is not their idiosyncrasy but their sameness. Using the same ingenious reasoning, each self-published philosophe comes to the same conclusions: The divinity of markets. The elitism of the liberals. And the extreme danger hanging over the head of the Republic.

Going Viral.

All of these themes came together over the course of a story that began at a public meeting in a depressed part of Washington State in August of 2009. This was "Town Hall Summer," when protesters took their complaints from the streets and into the traditional Q-and-A sessions held by their elected representatives. It followed the same trajectory from contrived to genuine as did the Tea Party movement itself. At first, memos appeared from leadership groups instructing conservatives how to make themselves heard at town hall gatherings or even how to disrupt same.10 Then, after a few town hall meetings were duly disrupted in spectacular fashion-with the disruptions captured for eternity on handheld video cameras-the fad caught on. The chance to inflict spectacular humiliation on some politician before the eyes of the nation was apparently the opportunity for which thousands had been waiting.

At the town hall meeting that concerns us here, the subject was the Democrats" various health-care proposals; the politician on stage was Brian Baird, a bland, affable Democratic congressman in khaki pants and a light-colored shirt; the local unemployment rate was well above 10 percent; and all across the country, public meetings of this kind were giving way to explosions of rage. Representative Baird had made the mistake of labeling such protests "brownshirt tactics," thus painting a big bull"s-eye on himself.

Thanks to those ubiquitous video cameras, the man who would emerge from the meeting with the spotlight fixed on his burly frame was David W. Hedrick, a management consultant and former marine. At some point in the Baird gathering, partic.i.p.ants had talked over a federal proposal to encourage the teaching of parenting skills, and now, as the cameras hummed, this man Hedrick stepped up to the microphone on the floor of the auditorium to tangle with Representative Baird. "I heard you say tonight about educating our children, indoctrinating our children, whatever you want to call it," Hedrick began, after introducing himself. On the soon-to-be-famous videotape, the congressman can be heard mumbling a reply, but before he finishes Hedrick erupts: "Stay away from my kids!"

The audience explodes with approval at the unprovoked a.s.sault. But the man on the floor is just beginning; thirty seconds later he is imparting "a little history lesson" to the hapless Dem: "The n.a.z.is were the National Socialist Party. They were leftist." These n.a.z.is, according to Hedrick and countless leaders of the revived Right who have seen fit to educate the nation on the subject of World War II, seized the very industries that the Democrats were now also ominously accused of coveting: banks, automakers, health care. Therefore, if liberals such as Nancy Pelosi wanted to search the country for people wearing swastikas, the angry man on the floor insisted, in a voice growing husky with righteousness, "maybe the first place she should look is the sleeve of her own arm."

The audience was on its feet now, shouting; a standing O for a guy who thinks we fought World War II to free mankind from universal health care. Or, more likely, because it"s always fun to see a politician get a good verbal thrashing, regardless of the delusions involved. Hedrick, for his part, was not quite done yet; there was one more insult yet to come. He had earlier mentioned the oath to "support and defend" the Const.i.tution that soldiers and public servants take-a matter of grave significance where Tea Partiers gather-and now he flung it in the Democrat"s face. "As a marine," Hedrick insisted, "I"ve kept my oath. Do you ever intend to keep yours?" As the congressman mumbled again, the former marine turned his back and marched to the rear, as if from an overwhelming disgust.

The video of the confrontation "went viral," as the expression had it. Its image of a pa.s.sionate everyman speaking up (literally, upward) at uncaring power was an awesome, inspiring sight, a populist moment of the most moving sort-that is, if you put aside the asinine things Hedrick actually said. In the days that followed, the clip appeared on countless conservative websites. It was played endlessly on Fox News. Someone set it to music. The former marine himself appeared on Sean Hannity"s TV program several days after the showdown, informing the host that the Democratic administration"s policies were the same "almost line for line" as those of the n.a.z.is.

The world briefly seemed to be at the former marine"s feet, thanks to YouTube, the revitalized Right, and an understanding of German history that bordered on complete fantasy. Hedrick was the political star of the moment, the Santelli of the summer. But the summer did not last.

Shortly after his appearance on Hannity"s show, David Hedrick showed up at another town hall meeting for Congressman Baird, clearly trying to duplicate his original stunt. This time things didn"t go as well. Hedrick burned up his allotted time pouting about all the abuse he had received since his last go-round on the public stage and then made the rookie mistake of asking Baird to read from the Const.i.tution; the long, boring disquisition that followed took the wind out of the proceedings.

Still, as we media-age citizens know, it"s hard to return to anonymity after a moment of stardom. Hedrick decided to run for Baird"s seat in Congress; of the several Republicans vying for the post, the former marine distinguished himself by the extremist purity of his stance. It won him an intense gra.s.sroots following, Hedrick claimed.11 Even though he was now a congressional candidate, articles about Hedrick still usually began by noting his long-ago moment of YouTube glory, and in July of 2010 he showed up at a public budget hearing, clearly aiming to rekindle the populist magic, this time by throwing accusations at Washington governor Christine Gregoire while the cameras rolled. She ignored him. In August he lost the Republican primary to a state legislator.

Still, Hedrick could not seem to let go. Toward the end of the year he made one more attempt to capitalize on his fame: a Tea Party book for kids-the very kids that he was remembered for having warned that congressman to stay away from. As far as I can tell, the only notices the book drew were written in the key of can-you-believe-this-s.h.i.t. But let us give Hedrick his due. He produced here one of the movement"s most memorable doc.u.ments: blunt, forthright, compact, insulting-and, most typically, written at an elementary-school level.*

The book was, of course, a Christmas story-which is to say, a contribution to the vast literature of complaint about how Christmas has been debased and uprooted from its rightful origins. The Liberal Claus, Hedrick called it, and it was a simple fable for the Tea Party era. It seems that evil liberal elves had stolen an election and installed a usurper on Santa"s throne: the "Liberal Claus," a.k.a. Barack Obama. This impostor Claus (""Are you even from the North Pole?" an elf questioned") buys off the children of David Hedrick"s town, Camas, Washington, with free candy. He flouts the "Christmastution," claiming that "very smart" people can find authorization for his misdeeds in that doc.u.ment even though ordinary people can"t. He even requires Santa"s elves to join unions, using as his enforcer an elf who uses German words and wears "jackboots," a clever nod, apparently, to Hitler"s alliance with organized labor, something I had never heard of before but which I guess history-minded Tea Partiers know all about.

Spoiler alert: the kids of Camas, Washington, get their hands on a snake flag and rise up against the pretender Claus. Critical verdict: the metaphors are tortured, the prose is lousy, the caricatures are heavy-handed, and in a sort of demented homage to Where"s Waldo? the ill.u.s.trations include images of a Stalin elf, a Castro elf, and a Hugo Chavez elf, all of them lending a hand to their liberal North Pole pals. Of course, Hedrick and his singular accomplishment had to be mentioned in the story, too: at the bottom of a page of the Christmas Times, the reader can see the following headline: "Camas man"s rant goes viral," over a caricature of Hedrick himself.

David Hedrick was not elected to Congress, but his story tells us something valuable nevertheless. The relentless grabbing of opportunities, the blending of politics with profit, the ceaseless striving to build a career on a single moment of media glory-these are the elements from which the conservative resurgence has grown. In this particular episode, the entrepreneur failed. But thanks to the many others in which entrepreneurs succeeded, the resurgent Right was able to conquer Congress and put its crippling agenda into effect.

CHAPTER 6.

A Mask for Privilege.

Another revealing artifact: an enormous flag, waved by a man at the Code Red rally on the west lawn of the Capitol in March of 2010. This remarkable banner featured the stripes of the traditional Old Glory but replaced the stars with the Tea Party movement"s coiled-rattlesnake emblem, over the words "GET BACK!" The red and white stripes, meanwhile, were filled with carefully lettered political demands, eighteen of them in all, plus the name of the website where you could buy a flag just like it for forty dollars, plus shipping. Talk about political entrepreneurship: here was a flag with a built-in advertis.e.m.e.nt.

When I was young, I used to wonder what the elements of the American flag were supposed to represent; this particular ensign seemed to have been designed as an answer to that question, with each stripe carefully labeled so no misinterpretation was possible. It was difficult to read while flapping in the March breeze, of course, but now, after having visited the flagmaker"s website, I can tell you that, among other things, the stripes call upon our elected officials to: "Balance the Budget," "Protect Free Markets," "Respect Property Rights," and to make "No Regulation Without Representation," which sounds a lot like a call to let corporations vote.

I didn"t buy a "Get Back" flag. Instead, I picked up a book of political theory, Spread This Wealth (And Pa.s.s This Ammunition), in which the flag designer, the aforementioned C. Jesse Duke, can be found declaring that America was "settled, built, and defended by ordinary people, just like me-laborers, lumberjacks, farmers, soldiers, share-croppers, and others who make their living by the sweat of their brow." These are also, I guess, the people who want government to keep its hands off "free markets" and to stop its infernal regulating-laborers and sharecroppers, acting through their intermediary, the Tea Party movement. "I take pride in the fact," Duke continues, "that I"m one of them and not an intellectual."1 But C. Jesse Duke isn"t exactly "one of them." The About the Author page in his book describes him not as a lumberjack or a sharecropper but as "a self-employed small business owner for thirty-eight years." And with that mix-up about social cla.s.s, I submit, we encounter the movement"s most essential obfuscation.

Duke"s idea of society"s structure is actually something you come across all the time in the rhetoric of the resurgent Right: America is made up of two cla.s.ses, roughly speaking, "ordinary people" and "intellectuals." According to this way of thinking, as we see again and again, either you"re a productive citizen, or you"re some kind of sn.o.b, a university professor or an EPA bureaucrat. Compared to the vivid line separating intellectuals and productive members of society, all other distinctions fade to nothingness. Between small-business owners and sharecroppers, for example, there is no difference at all, just as other Tea Party authors saw no real difference between Rick Santelli"s bond traders and "working people."*

Erasing cla.s.s distinctions in this self-serving way is one of the conservative revival"s great recurring techniques. There is no better instance of this erasure than the enormous rally held in West Virginia on Labor Day 2009 for the express purpose of announcing the solidarity between coal miners and the coal mine operators who employ them. The get-together featured the protest favorites Sean Hannity and Ted Nugent and was presided over by Don Blankenship, the CEO of Ma.s.sey Energy, a pollution-spewing, strikebreaking mogul of the old school.2 Dressed in American flag clothing and boasting that the gathering had cost him "a million dollars or so," Blankenship took the stage and declared that he was there to "defend American labor because no one else will." Specifically, the CEO was standing tall against "our government leaders," who are, with their safety and environmental meddling, "American workers" worst nightmare."

Eight months after that rally, twenty-nine workers in Ma.s.sey"s Upper Big Branch mine were dead from a huge underground explosion that almost certainly would have been minimized if Ma.s.sey had followed standard safety and ventilation practices-or if U.S. mine inspectors had backed up their many citations of the operation with proper enforcement.3 Now, when we find a mine operator claiming that his own struggles against regulation are actually the struggles of mine workers-workers who are then killed because mine regulations are not properly observed by said operator-we have stumbled upon a nearly perfect example of what the sociologists call "complete horses.h.i.t." The man"s ideas about cla.s.s are so contrary to reality, so absurdly false, that they serve to bring into sharp focus precisely the difference they are meant to conceal.

In this new populist set piece, the intellectuals are once again the villains, but for reasons that have shifted with the times. In the Bush years, the crime of the intellectuals was always supposed to be their contempt for the values of the red-state heartland-their disrespect for the sanct.i.ty of the fetus as well as the fine points of NASCAR. In the present situation, though, the intellectuals" sin is different: they doubt the hand of the almighty Market.

The common people, by contrast, supposedly understand their place in the Market"s order, whether they trade bonds or dig ditches. Indeed, these humble souls are indistinguishable from the Market Itself since It is an expression of their wants and aspirations. And the embodiment of this populist spirit of humility before the Market is the small-business person. Unlike the bureaucrat or the college professor-or that unholy cross of the two, President Obama-the small-business person is a purely Market-made creature, an individual who gets by on his initiative alone, an entrepreneur who works hard, who reaps what he sows, who receives no a.s.sistance from government, who even accepts failure uncomplainingly if that"s the way the Market wants it.

Dictatorship of the Entrepreneur.

We know, anecdotally at least, that the people who show up for Tea Party rallies tend to describe themselves as victims of the recession. But this is not to say that Tea Party protestors have been pauperized by the downturn or even that they are unemployed, in the manner of 1932"s Bonus Army, although individuals here and there certainly are. In fact, Tea Partiers tend to be better off than the public generally; read their accounts of hard-times suffering closely, and you will often find that the form it takes is a downturn in their business.

This is no poor people"s movement. Just look around you at a Tea Party event: the protestors" clothes look new; their hair was recently barbered; and male protestors sometimes wear neckties even when not in Washington, DC. One man I met at a rally in Denver showed up in an ascot. Nor are they a desperate mob. The favored rhetorical style of the movement is vituperation with overtones of righteous bloodthirst, but when addressing one another the protesters tend to be polite-at least, in my experience.* They say "excuse me" as they make their way through the crowd, and according to right-wing legend they always put their litter in the trash can when they leave.

Management-speak saturates the movement. Tea Partiers sometimes write about "core competence" when they mean protesting, "political entrepreneurs" when they mean leaders, and "early adopters" when they mean rank and file.4 One of the movement"s favorite texts is a work of management theory. There even used to be a Tea Party website that kept a list of favorite CEOs.5 The entrepreneurial personality is never absent where tea-sippers gather. Don Crist, author of the booklet What Can I Do?: After the TEA Party, describes himself as a "small business consultant," while Stephen D. Hanson, author of Transcending Time with Thomas Jefferson, is "a small business owner and mortgage loan executive." Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, the Tea Party kingmaker, tells fans that his prepolitical career as a "small business owner" is where he learned his signature antigovernment politics.6 And Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain earned his own conservative spurs back in the nineties when he denounced Bill Clinton"s health-care proposal on behalf of the nation"s small businesses; today he presents himself as a man in touch with "the real folk."7 Glenn Beck also glories to remind the world of his small-town, small-business roots, and throughout the fall of 2009, the TV host could be found protecting the pale flame of small-business populism as it flickered unsteadily in the socialistic winds blowing from Washington, DC. He interviewed panels of small-business owners, talked up the number of jobs small-business owners create, and saluted their generalized, all-American greatness: "They represent the spirit of America," he said on one particularly maudlin occasion, "what used to be the American Dream."8 The new crop of conservatives elected to Congress in the 2010 landslide often talk as though protecting small business was the special cause for which they had been called forth from behind the plow. Mark Kirk, now a U.S. senator for Illinois, proposed a "Small Business Bill of Rights" during the 2010 campaign season,* while the campaign website of Congressman Francisco Canseco of Texas included this astounding call for the dictatorship of the entrepreneur: "We must put the reigns [sic] of our economy back into the hands of American small business owners."9 Empty rhetoric, to be sure, but consider the implications had Canseco meant this sincerely: given that small business surrendered the economy"s reins to finance and large-scale manufacturing in the period after the Civil War, he would essentially be demanding the reversal of nearly a century and a half of modernity.

A survey by the New York Times found that small-business owners made up nearly 40 percent of the Republicans swept into the House of Representatives in 2010-a dramatic increase from small business"s representation in previous years.10 If we count the GOP freshmen who were endorsed by the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB, the main small-business trade a.s.sociation), our census of small business allies comes to 74 percent of the new Republicans in Congress.* Soon after arriving in Washington, a bunch of these entrepreneurial legislators got together in what they called the "Congressional Job Creators Caucus," open only to small-business types. And when they held the economy hostage during the 2011 debt-ceiling debate, they did so because they knew government had to operate like a small business.11 Wait, go back: the Job Creators Caucus? Let me admit here that, for all my skepticism, I was a little startled by the epic fraudulence of that phrase, the fake sense of accomplishment that it must require to call yourself a "job creator" while excluding almost all of your colleagues from the designation. Nearly everyone in Congress believes they"re helping to create jobs, whether they"re voting for the giant stimulus package of 2009, writing up a tax loophole for a campaign contributor, or earmarking a "bridge to nowhere"-heck, even supporters of the Obama administration"s hated cap-and-trade proposal believe it will create jobs.

Ah, but according to the purified market populism of the conservative renaissance, those other members of Congress are simply mistaken. Government cannot create jobs; it"s impossible by definition. The only ent.i.ty endowed with this power is business, and the smaller that business is, the more potent its job-generating magic. Thus one of the great catchphrases of the period: "Government doesn"t create jobs; you do," as Republican freshman Nan Hayworth of New York put it in a speech to business leaders in her district.

One reason the Right fastened on the "job creator" line so avidly is because it allowed them to flip the script of the hard-times scenario. When people were out of work, they insisted, the important thing was not stimulus packages or public works or social insurance: it was giving small-biz trade a.s.sociations every last little item on their legislative wish list. The nation"s job creators had to know they were loved. Their confidence had to be carefully built up; their biases had to be catered to; their every caprice had to be enshrined in state policy.

Unfortunately, no one seemed to know for sure the exact quant.i.ty of jobs these job creators actually created. In 2009, President Obama credited small business with 70 percent of the new jobs in the economy, but conservatives sneered at such a feeble number. Ninety-seven percent of new jobs was the figure Glenn Beck gave during an interview with the president of the American Small Business League in March of 2009; by October of that year, his views had moderated slightly, and small business was said to be creating only 80 percent of the new jobs in America.12 The reason no one can give a definite answer is that small-business job creation is a myth. It has been thoroughly debunked by journalists and academics over the years; it only got its start thanks to a statistical illusion created during the eighties, when big businesses were beginning to outsource everything they could to small, no-benefits firms in order to suppress labor costs.13 But against the amplified righteousness of the conservative revival, such facts had as much chance of being heard as does a kitten"s gentle purring while a freight train roars by ten feet away. The country was in a deep recession; unemployment was high; the job creators must be empowered to do their thing.

So it was that David Rivera, a GOP freshman from Florida, was able to declare on his campaign website that "the biggest problem our economy is facing"-the biggest problem, mind you, even after the near collapse of the nation"s financial structure-"is that business owners, especially small business owners are nervous, and reluctant to start hiring again."14 And since small-business owners were such world-champion job creators, their nervousness was a matter of grave public concern. If we wanted to help the unemployed, we had to soothe small business"s jitters. We had to a.s.suage their fears. We had to grant their wishes.

Let"s Drink to the Salt of the Earth.

Small business is traditionally cloaked in a haze of populist heroism. Like family farmers before them, entrepreneurs are thought to be sacred: they are individualism in the flesh, the plucky strivers who have always made the American economy go. If you put aside details like the benefits that mom-and-pop stores generally don"t provide their workers, small business can sometimes seem like the last redoubt of Jefferson"s independent yeomanry.

In a 1983 speech commemorating Small Business Week, for example, Ronald Reagan started off by saying, "Every week should be Small Business Week, because America is small business."* It just got sappier from there: "entrepreneurs are forgotten heroes"; they"re "the faithfuls who support our churches, schools, and communities, the brave people everywhere who produce our goods, feed a hungry world, and keep our homes and families warm while they invest in the future to build a better America."15 Oh, they"re the salt of the earth. The roots of the gra.s.s, the dreamers of the dream, the vox of the populi, the common man in all his upstanding righteousness.

And everyone wants a piece of that righteousness. Liberals, for example, like to salute small business because that way they can seem to be "pro-business" without openly endorsing Walmart or Exxon or JPMorgan.16 Perhaps also, deep in their subconscious, lingers a tribal memory of the days when small businessmen were members of the progressive coalition, soldiers in William Jennings Bryan"s crusade against monopoly, and reliable supporters of reform because reformers used to make a point of enforcing the nation"s ant.i.trust laws.

Not only has the conservative revival harvested the righteousness of the brave little entrepreneur; it has adopted the small-business mind-set. With this understood, several of the peculiar ideas of the newest Right immediately make sense. Its insistence that an alliance of big government, big business, and big labor have come together under the banner of "socialism" and closed off true compet.i.tion in America, for example, might have been drawn from some pamphlet circulated by a small-business trade a.s.sociation generations ago.17 The movement"s undimming rage against organized labor, otherwise so pointless in the largely union-free twenty-first century, is one of the fixed obsessions of the small-business mind. And the notion that "real" capitalism can and should be quickly restored has been the entrepreneur"s panacea pretty much ever since small business surrendered pride of place to large-scale industry in the mid-nineteenth century.

Similarly, the movement"s reverence for an imaginary past, for "taking our country back," is merely a displaced longing for the distant days when small-business people were men of preeminence in their community. The conservative revival"s single-minded focus on bailouts stems from small business"s historic hostility toward monster banks, now reincarnated as "too big to fail" inst.i.tutions and locked in an unholy union with monster government.* ("Congress spent billions of dollars in stimulus money to bail out big banks and financial inst.i.tutions," declared Congressman-to-be Pat Meehan of Pennsylvania in 2010. "But your average small business owner simply has not seen the benefits.") Even the Tea Party"s famous agnosticism on social issues reflects small-business priorities. While almost all entrepreneurs tend to be conservatives on matters economic, according to the NFIB, many of them take a liberal stance on social issues like school prayer.18 But it is the movement"s obsessive fear of "burdensome regulation" that really marks it as a product of the small-business mind.

For decades, middle-cla.s.s Americans loved telling one another scary stories about Invasive Regulators. The tales always unfolded in the same way: A small businessman was doing something eminently reasonable, minding his own beeswax, when-out of nowhere-he was. .h.i.t with some outrageous EPA fine or tripped up by some hypertechnical OSHA demand. Obvious realities would be disregarded in the bureaucrat"s zeal for rule-following; time would be wasted; business would not get done. It was as though our government wished to punish productive effort!

Stories of Invasive Regulators were a constant feature of the comfortable midwestern milieu into which I was born. Ronald Reagan tossed them off all the time on his way to the White House. The plot of Ghostbusters (1984) turned on just such a small-business set piece. And the Republican Revolution of 1994 was largely driven by small-business anecdotes like these-that is, if the account of that revolution written by the then president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is to be credited.19 But it"s no longer so much fun to swap stories about the ignorant overreaching of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a favorite target of the storytellers of old. That particular agency was lobotomized so effectively by the George W. Bush administration it couldn"t spot the lead paint on imported Chinese toys. Toothless regulatory agencies are what allowed the rampant safety violations at both the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the ill-fated West Virginia coal mine mentioned earlier. And the idea of a bank regulator getting up in an entrepreneur"s grill is the real joke nowadays. Bank regulators! They"re the ones who did so much to protect the big banks from nosy state-level officials who actually wanted to stop fraudulent mortgage lending.

One reason the bogeyman of the Invasive Regulator can still mobilize the troops, I think, is that small businesses actually experience the regulatory presence, such as it is, far more acutely than do their big-business colleagues. When we talk about the age of deregulation or the era of "neoliberalism," we are referring to the gradual rollback of certain banking rules, the rise of a certain school of economic thought, and the privatizing of certain government functions. These are important developments in the grand, historical sense, but to a struggling small-business owner they might seem completely irrelevant. It"s hard to convince a man sweating over a fifty-page income-tax return that the state has gone away or that markets are now in charge.

And after 2008 there were some good reasons to believe-to fear-that the regulatory state was back, most obviously the universal health-care law signed by President Obama in 2010. Not only did Obamacare contain a-yes-burdensome provision that would have required businesses to issue 1099 forms for nearly every expenditure they made (it was promptly repealed in early 2011), but it required businesses with fifty or more employees to provide health insurance for workers, possibly stripping away one of the greatest compet.i.tive advantages that such firms possess.*

If "capitalism" is the system in which you eke out a living installing plumbing or selling farm equipment, it is understandable that you feel that government interferes enough in capitalism already. If "capitalism" is the system in which no-doc loans are handed out indiscriminately in order for the management of some mortgage firm to hit some bonus target, then packaged up and sold off to some hedge fund so that its management can hit another bonus target, well, we are talking about something entirely different. The journalist Matt Taibbi got this aspect of the right-wing renaissance exactly right when he recounted, in a 2010 interview, how most of the Tea Party people I talk to-a lot of them are small business owners. They have hardware stores or restaurants, and they see regulation as an ADA inspector or a health inspector coming to bother them and ring them up with little fines here and there. That"s their experience with government regulation. And so when they think about JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs and regulating those banks, to them it"s the same thing. They have no idea that regulation for these big companies is really a law enforcement problem, that it"s not this little niggling health inspector type of business.20 The distinction between these two kinds of capitalist practice is not something the renewed Right has much interest in clarifying. Rather than acknowledging the outlandish practices that actually went on in the mortgage industry, to name the most important chapter of recent business history, conservatives push the blame back where many business owners suspect the blame belongs: the deadbeats who took out all those mortgages in the first place.

And also back to the usual, all-purpose culprit: government. The only way lending standards get weakened, in many businesspeople"s experience, is when federal agencies get involved. And where they"ve seen such weakening most prominently-or believe they"ve seen it, as certain historians of small business attest21-is with minority-owned enterprises, which are sometimes granted set-aside government contracts. It"s simple enough to imagine that the pattern extended to mortgages as well; that the feds forced banks to hand out special loans to minority borrowers, as the famous theory goes;* and thus to conclude that the entire financial crisis was a consequence of government interference in what ought to be-used to be!-private affairs.

And the bailouts! To your average entrepreneur, it was an unmitigated insult to watch the big banks get an injection of capital from the Fed and the Treasury on terms that no local business ever receives. For some, the bitterness still lingered nearly three years later. When it was revealed in August 2011 that the bailouts had been far larger than originally reported, conservative leader Richard Viguerie took the occasion to look back in anger. Recalling the optimistic statements issued by Morgan Stanley at around the time the firm was borrowing almost a hundred billion dollars from the Fed, Viguerie wrote, "Try that line with your bank examiner and securities regulators if you are a local banker." Describing the deal"s outrageously favorable terms, he steamed, "Try getting that deal if you are a small manufacturer anywhere in America."22 For Viguerie and for thousands of others, the bailouts confirmed one of the baseline convictions of the small-business mind: that big business is in league with big government. The idea is powerful because it is essentially true; it has been around for a long time; in fact, in 1962 the political scientist John Bunzel unearthed an expression of this bitter sentiment that, though written in the mid-fifties by an officer of a small-business trade a.s.sociation, might have been published on a Tea Party blog last week. Big business, the accusation went, goes along with big labor, with big government, with fascist [!] and corporative tendencies in the government-with NRA first and then with OPA and OPM and WPB industry committees-anything for harmony and convenience and job safety for management, regardless of what happens either to the country or to the other fellow.23 It is because of fixed images like these that the bailouts triggered such an immediate reaction on the Right: it was the entrepreneur"s nightmare fear coming true in broad daylight.

The age of the giant corporation is here to stay of course, and as long as it is, big government must be on hand to curb its abuses. When the system is corrupted, as it obviously was in the case of the bailouts-and the subprime lending spree, and the West Virginia mine disaster, and the BP oil spill-the obvious answer is to clean up government so it can perform its police function properly.

But that"s not how the revivified Right understands things. Instead, they blast the entire structure of the modern economy as "crony capitalism" or "socialism" and find, conveniently, that we can only cure its ills by doing away with the big-government side of the equation-with the regulating and taxing and pension-giving side.

And thus are our choices spread before us. On the one hand, the small-business utopia; on the other, "socialism." One system is "capitalism," the "American Way of Life"; it is in harmony with the rhythms of nature itself; but the other is something alien, something impure, something dishonest.24 Taking this tack allowed the renaissance Right to do a very remarkable thing: to pretend to be an enemy of big business.* Not because market actors misbehave, of course, but because big business is insufficiently capitalist. There is some truth to the accusation, naturally, since megacorporations do indeed lobby for subsidies, and bailouts, and government contracts, and even sometimes for regulation, which in a few well-known cases has been designed to protect existing players from new compet.i.tion. But as ever, the particulars of the charge mattered less than the rhetorical thrust-the claim that the struggle for a purified free-market system was a revolt against big money as well as big government. This was the point of an amazing 2009 essay in Forbes magazine penned by soon-to-be-famous Congressman Paul Ryan and t.i.tled "Down with Big Business." The giant corporation, Ryan wrote, could not be counted upon to defend capitalism in its hour of need: "It"s up to the American people-innovators and entrepreneurs, small business owners ... to take a stand."25 False Flag.

It"s exciting to imagine a vigilant small-business everyman disciplining the giant corporation for its deviat

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