Book review: ‘Pity the Billionaire,’ by Thomas Frank

Chronicling the American political zeitgeist has never been easy — voters are fickle beasts — and in the past few years it’s been nearly impossible to keep up. The tea party movement, that nascent power that drove the 2010 elections, has seen its popularity and influence wane as new movements on the left — Occupy Wall Street, for instance — have stormed onto the stage. Pity the soul who is trying to document the chaotic scene — someone like, say, Thomas Frank.

In the past decade, Frank has created a voice that is part reporter, part op-ed columnist and part late-night comic, all looking through a liberal political prism. Since 2004, when his best-selling “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” was published, he has become an important voice for the political left. He is one of its chief political decoders, explaining how conservatives have captured the votes of people who should be voting Democratic — or at least who Frank thinks should be voting Democratic.

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Those acquainted with Frank’s prose will slip comfortably into his new book, “Pity the Billionaire.” He employs his usual technique to look at the rise of the tea party movement as he examines what the subtitle calls “The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right.” Frank believes that after Barack Obama’s election, the nation took a sharp rightward turn, in large part because conservatives, bankers and their lobbyist friends hoodwinked the country and hijacked a nascent populism.

The book, a quick read of fewer than 200 pages, is meant as an exploration and explanation of how it all went wrong for progressives post-2008 and how politics got to where they are in 2012. And it is, sometimes. At its best, “Pity the Billionaire” is a kind of “Chicken Soup for the Liberal’s Soul,” offering answers and humor to disillusioned MSNBC viewers. At its worst, it is simply a left-wing version of the hyperbole liberals say they hate when it comes from the right.

That mix is to be expected with Frank’s trademark combination of wisecracks and righteous indignation. At a more basic level, however, “Pity the Billionaire” has some bigger flaws.

Perhaps the most critical problem for Frank’s larger arguments is his comparison of the economic collapses of 2008 and 1929. For proof that the political and economic scene is out of whack, he talks about what “should” have happened after the troubles of 2008, which he argues were brought on by a lack of regulation and bad behavior in the financial sector.

“If a financial order deserved a thirties-style repudiation, this one did,” he writes. The fact that such a comeuppance never came is the impetus for much of the book.

He may be right. But the primary reason that repudiation didn’t happen, that the banks didn’t get the big slapdown he wishes for, was the government’s response to the crash. The stock market plunged, and the housing market collapsed, and the government got involved. You can love the Troubled Asset Relief Program or hate it, but whatever you think, it prevented the Great Recession from becoming another Great Depression. Things got bad and stayed bad for a long time, but a total 1930s-style collapse, complete with 25 percent unemployment, never happened.