Thomas Frank: The god that sucked: How the Tea Party right just makes the 1 percent richer

Business won on welfare, taxes, regulation, then sat silent as the crazies took over the GOP. Now we're all screwed 

This Independence Day weekend let’s uncork some vintage Jeremiad. I wrote “The God That Sucked” for Baffler magazine in 2001; the title (for those who don’t remember the Cold War) refers to The God That Failed, an anticommunist tract that had been ubiquitous in the Fifties. My target, however, was a different god, and my setting was the tail end of the “New Economy” boom of the 1990s, during which the worship of “free markets” had become a kind of mania, a millennial revival, even. It was an age of extraordinary consensus on matters economic; everyone believed they had seen the light, that history’s great problems had been solved. And nothing could persuade them otherwise. The market god would punish us again and again as the years passed, but its followers could not be shaken from their simple faith. Today the situation is different, of course. The financial disaster of 2008 put a permanent dent into the reputation of the deity. The public came to despise Wall Street and the One Percent. Weirdly, however, our leadership class still chatters on as happily and obliviously as before. For them nothing has changed, the god’s benevolence has never dimmed, all’s still right with the world—and the stern accountability of the marketplace only applies to others. The original version of this essay appeared in Baffler #14 in 2001 and was later reprinted in the magazine’s anthology, Boob Jubilee; this version has been slightly edited. Read more at TheBaffler.com

 

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Despite this, many economists still think that electricity deregulation will work. A product is a product, they say, and competition always works better than state control.

“I believe in that premise as a matter of religious faith,” said Philip J. Romero, dean of the business school at the University of Oregon and one of the architects of California’s deregulation plan. — New York Times, Feb. 4, 2001

Time was, the only place a guy could expound the mumbo-jumbo of the free market was in the country club locker room or the pages of Reader’s Digest. Spout off about it anywhere else and you’d be taken for a Bircher or some new strain of Jehovah’s Witness. After all, in the America of 1968, when the great backlash began, the average citizen, whether housewife or hardhat or salary-man, still had an all-too-vivid recollection of the Depression. Not to mention a fairly clear understanding of what social class was all about. Pushing laissez-faire ideology back then had all the prestige and credibility of hosting a Tupperware party.