Thomas Frank spends no time gloating about how right he has been.
His predictions of a stock market bust, the dot-com disaster and the corruption at Enron Corp. leave him a little cold now that they’ve been proven.
“Nobody wishes a recession on their country,” said Frank, shaking his head over the jobs and small-investor dollars lost during the past year.
But the Hyde Park intellectual, whose scathing anti-big-market writings make him a favorite among liberals and a nuisance to new-economy loyalists, sees something redeeming in the mire: It could open people’s eyes.
The Enron debacle, particularly, could serve as a catalyst for unveiling the hoax of big business and lax governmental oversight, Frank said, as he cruised the circular path of a condo he shares with his wife, Wendy, and their 1-year-old daughter, Madeleine.
“Enron is not a weird, anomalous thing. It’s the way it works when you let capitalism go,” he said.
In the past several years, Frank has become one of the most prominent far-left voices on the economy, but he is hardly predictable, and he’s full of contradictions. A staunch critic of big capitalism, he lost money in the recent market downturn. Frank has only a vague idea about how many copies of his books and journals he has sold, and he does not even publish his economic and cultural journal, The Baffler, regularly. Yet he draws considerable attention from the media, with his ideas generating intense debate.
He reads like a modern-day hipster, bucking the system and sticking up for the individual, but he claims that hipness has gone mainstream, even corporate. Hip is no longer hip.
That is a central theme of his 1997 book “The Conquest of Cool,” a study of advertising in the 1960s, which was the subject of Frank’s doctoral dissertation in American history at the University of Chicago.
The cover article for the most recent issue discusses the irony of a market in which many participate only to be ripped off by the market and many of the companies in which they have invested.
It has been three decades since U.S. citizens were suspicious of free markets and factory owners, Frank writes. “Hell-bent to get government off our backs, you installed a tyrant infinitely better equipped to suck the joy out of life,” he scolds.
In person, Frank is witty and smiles far more than you would expect from a cynic.
He moves fast, in person and in his mind. He dislikes being pinned to any one idea or ideology, preferring to rattle off a list of things he favors, such as national health insurance and environmentalism.
But Frank, 37, quickly returns to his mantra, decrying the evils of capitalism run amok.
“The government should protect people from the depradations of capitalism. All I’m arguing for is a return to the welfare state, with a larger hand from government and labor,” he said.
That kind of talk–along with Frank’s caustic cultural criticism in The Baffler–landed him on Newsweek’s 1997 list of “100 people to watch as America prepares to pass through the gate to the next millennium.”
Certainly the media watches Frank, whose ideas can be polarizing. The Washington Post and The New York Times panned Frank’s 2000 book “One Market Under God,” with the Post’s reviewer calling it “another in a series of superficial, ill-informed, poorly thought out screeds on the shortcoming of modern capitalism.”
Meanwhile, The Atlantic said Frank made the anti-new-economy argument “as convincingly as anyone.” The New Republic praises Frank, and Salon calls The Baffler “legendary,” saying Frank is “one of our most brilliant critics.” A reviewer in the New York Observer wrote that “One Market Under God” was “just about the smartest work of cultural criticism I’ve read in years.”
In late 2000, before the economic bubble burst, The National Review sarcastically heralded Frank as the “Malcontent du Jour,” for daring to rebut icons like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
To hear The National Review tell it back then, Frank ignored one fundamental truth about the market: “It’s been good for just about everybody.”
“Given Frank’s loathing of the current state of affairs, though, it’s just possible he might prefer the collapse of prosperity,” The National Review reporter conjectured.
Frank did not enjoy the collapse. Besides deploring what it meant nationally, Frank said it hurt to watch friends and family lose money in the stock market.
He lost money, too, a surprise to those who expected such an outspoken critic of the markets to avoid them. His explanation: “I have problems with it, but I don’t really have a choice.”
In fact, the best Frank can do is point out the problems of big business, a pastime that became popular even before the market and Enron fell.
The difference in Frank’s critiques of “extreme capitalism” is their own extremism. He attacks individual companies–including Enron in “One Market Under God”–but he goes much further, pointing to the faux hipness of modern culture.
Just about everyone and everything in the United States has been hoodwinked by the money and power of big business, in Frank’s view.
“Pick up any recent book of management theory: Today, hip is the orthodoxy of Information Age capitalism. It’s being your own dog, Reebok letting U.B.U., Finding Your Own Road in a Saab; it’s Ginsberg shilling for the Gap and William Burroughs for Nike; it’s business texts quoting Gurdjieff and Bob Dylan and bearing titles like Thriving on Chaos and The Age of Unreason,” he wrote in The Nation in 1996.
Frank’s awareness of advertising, a byproduct of his graduate work, also underlies his early thoughts about Enron.
In a footnote to “One Market Under God,” he berates the Houston company’s political contributions and coziness, and says one of its television spots “comes very close to making the entire argument of this book in just 30 seconds.”
The commercial depicts an electricity industry spokesman asking “Why?” of a group of stodgy politicians who are balking at deregulating utilities.
