"One Market" was written as the boom was peaking. Its thesis is that the New Economy represented "not some novel state of human affairs but the final accomplishment of the long-standing agenda of the nation's richest class." That agenda included free trade, cheap labor and deregulation, including the near-abandonment of antitrust enforcement. Frank calls its proponents "market populists."
"Their fundamental faith was a simple one," he writes. "The market and the people . . . were essentially one and the same. By its very nature, the market was democratic, perfectly expressing the popular will."
The dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the same year "One Market" came out. Before long, even Fortune magazine was asking, "Can We Ever Trust Wall Street Again?" Not long afterward, the Baffler ran a full-page ad for Frank's book.
Under the headline "Great Minds of the New Economy Deplore Cynical Account of Bountiful New Era," it gleefully quoted only negative reviews.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee
The entrepreneurial provocateur moved to Washington from Chicago last year -- his wife, an economist, landed a job here -- but he was writing "What's the Matter With Kansas?" at the time and says he didn't get outside much for a while.
Given what Washington thinks of his views, this reclusiveness may have been wise.
Conservatives have a simple question for him. It was posed by David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and chronicler of "bourgeois Bohemia," several years ago in a Slate-sponsored online dialogue with Frank:
If not capitalism, what?
At the time, Frank was unable to reply -- he'd finished his part of the exchange and signed off -- but he's happy to respond today. "We live in a capitalist state now," he says, "but we also lived in a capitalist state in the 1960s and the 1950s and the 1940s. And yet it was a very different country." The balance of power between labor and management hadn't collapsed. Wealth distribution hadn't reverted to a 19th-century pattern, with ever-increasing concentration at the top. That capitalism was a better model, he thinks.
Brooks doesn't. "I don't think a left-wing economic agenda would be a successful agenda," he says now. "Economic populism has been tried and it hasn't worked."
Meanwhile, "New Democrats" -- the kind whose champion Bill Clinton became, the kind who rally around the Democratic Leadership Council -- have an even simpler question for Frank:
Are you nuts?
In the concluding chapter of "Kansas," Frank assigns "a large part of the blame for the backlash phenomenon" to the "criminal stupidity" of the Democratic Party in abandoning its commitment to labor and economic justice in pursuit of white-collar votes and corporate contributions. The DLC in particular, he writes, thinks that "to collect the votes and -- more important -- the money of these coveted constituencies," Democrats must stand firm on issues like abortion rights while making "endless concessions on economic issues" such as NAFTA, welfare, privatization and deregulation. The result? Democrats become Tweedledum to the Republicans' Tweedledee on the laissez-faire economy, leaving their opponents free to woo blue-collar voters with backlash issues.
Earlier in the book, Frank takes his anti-DLC rhetoric to an even higher pitch. He notes that generous contributions from the Kansas oil billionaires who run Koch Industries have propped up numerous institutions that champion laissez-faire economics, from the Cato Institute to Citizens for a Sound Economy. And he includes the DLC on his list of Koch-funded "hothouses of the right."
