Billionaires Are the Victims! Thomas Frank on the Republican Strategy

Oct 3, 2012 10:50 PM EDT

Welcome to an America where billionaires are the victims and capitalism is in chains, or so they say, writes Thomas Frank. Plus, read the transcript of our live chat about why billionaires are whining and the Republicans are winning on a strategy of victimhood.

During the financial crisis and bailouts of 2008, it probably occurred to very few average people that we were entering a period of hardship for billionaires. But among the nation’s economic titans, the idea of billionaire victimhood caught on immediately. And so, in the months and years that followed, the believers in true capitalism gathered in the nation’s parks to make their voices heard—and to complain sorrowfully about how this nation of moochers and looters persists in making snippy remarks about the successful.

I admit that I was impressed at first by the unconflicted way in which these proud voices of the strong—these hymners of Darwinian struggle, of the freedom to fail, of competition to the death—advanced their war on the world by means of tearful weepy-woo. But then I started to get it: self-pity is central in the consciousness of the resurgent right.