Part 3 (2/2)

This song is terrific!!! The theain to us in 2009 like it did in 1929 Please ”world leaders” give us ”Hope for a brighter Future” not this thing called ”Change” spoken by every two-bit politician since Hitler

Brother, can you spare a trillion dollars?

Aain, watch closely what's happening April/Maywill be the ”dropping off the cliff” reality

Call your reps and tell the to help A pork around for all the special interests groups and delayed for years Not gonna work

Stock up on supplies that are necessities, and hold on We're in for a spin

The song's fa, a socialist as later blacklisted during the McCarthy period But in our own enlightened age, it is evidently possible to listen to ”Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and hear it as a call for a purified forainst public works projects, maybe as an endorsement of the Hoover ad all this up in order to score easy points at the expense of confused YouTubers I ht what the posters thehtful heirs to Depression culture That the songs and books and movies of the thirties abound with lessons on the wisdoovernment; that the Red Decade is in fact some kind of spiritual homeland for the free-market sensibility

It is an understandable e, are very different from the thirties we know from the canonical literature of the tile nearly any aspect of the first two Roosevelt administrations is to encounter al for the New Deal felt by conservative entertainers and libertarian economists You can find the works of scholars like Arthur Schlesinger or Irving Bernstein or Michael Denning or Robert McElvaine down at the library if you wish, but if you begin your research on the Internet, the experts you will encounter first are likely to be Amity Shlaes, the author who has tried to recapture FDR's expression ”the forgotten man” for conservatis von Mises Institute, proving to one another over and over again that the New Deal was not necessary, did not help, and very probablygovern when he wrote ”Brother, Can You Spare a Diy of the conte, to mimic successful leftist ht to swipe theera-the Depression, the period that our own ti to present the up to society's masters, it is to the cultural patterns of the thirties that they ht has set out to commit the consummate act of cultural theft

Full of That Yankee Doodle-De-Duain Glenn Beck supplies the extreme case He is ahoe to the cultural for of fascism, for example, was a characteristic fear of that period So it is with his hate for Woodrow Wilson, an opinion that can see the pacifist years after World War I And in classic thirties style, he warns the honest people of Aorous and resourceful Left that is swar with radicals and communists

Much has been made of Beck's rhetorical sihlin, but Beck's populist habits actually seeures His trick of concealing his intelligence behind a facade of boyishness and buffoonery arish suits in Long's case, clashi+ng patterns in Beck's, plus those unlaced sneakers and those untucked shi+rts Beck's one-ures, and intellectuals on flies of secret radicalism could have been lifted from the career of the newspaper titan William Randolph Hearst From the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz comes Beck's favorite metaphor for the deceivers who rule us: ”theto be all-powerful1 From Franklin Delano Roosevelt hi, which Beck uttered in a special TV program in March of 2009: What happened to the country that loved the underdog and stood up for the little guy? What happened to the voice of the forgotten otten man is you2 Back in 2003, when the conservative entertainer was touring the country celebrating what he called ”the real A heartland authenticity not merely in the red states but also in the past, in the ways of the ”Depression people” ere his grandparents3 On one emotional occasion in 2009, he told his TV audience that the answers to present-day econo the lessons of the Depression-by which heup for a labor union or voting for a New Deal-and the following year, a collection of docu of workerist sentimentality that was alraph of a farmer and his wife, Beck burbled, Look at how proud she is Look at the confidence Look at the way she is standing Look at her face She's proud She's strong

Depression people were both the fount of A ”These are the people that built A off of their labors for seventy years! They built it, and we're just using it all up!”

Beck's e to the Depression sensibility was the 9/12 Project, which aihborliness He announced it with great fanfare on his TV show one night in March of 2009, after a dizzy prologue listing all the scary proble Beck beca that he actually began to cry as he spoke these words: ”I toldja-for weeks-you're not alone!”

And so Beck launched the 9/12 Project with the above-cited tribute to the ”forgotten man” and an invitation to ular people like you”5 Theof local chapters, mass rallies, mosaics made up of thousands of snapshots, and saccharine talk about how capitalist salvation lay soether to revel in their Aer ”feel powerless” As it always does with Beck, the proposal immediately went from all-American solidarity to a dark vision of the insiders who areus

Once you pull the curtain away you realize that there are only a few people pressing the buttons, and their voices are weak The truth is that they don't surround us at all

We surround them

It was a powerful invocation of the archetypal thirties ihteous raphs describing the 9/12 Project, I realized that I was basically describing the plot of one of the most famous films of the Depression era: Frank Capra's Meet John Doe (1941) It is the story of a ether in a spirit of vague civic togetherness under the leadershi+p of a popular radio frontman who often talks about suicide, as Beck does The politics of the John Doe Movement are never made clear in the movie, but both the movement and its putative leader are definitely controlled by a wealthy ul, like Beck's then boss, Rupert Murdoch, who plans to use them for his own quasi-fascist purposes As the h everyone is a sucker except the evil wealthy guy, who is certain to get what he wants

The movie, which was a co the Depression, tells us all we need to know about Beck's operation The 9/12 Project doesn't so much mimic thirties populism as it mimics fake thirties populisus populishtenusness squared; that is the story of Glenn Beck

Waiting for Righty

From President Roosevelt on down, Depression-era Americans reviled the upper class that had steered them into disaster, and as Americans of the twenty-first century took their own turn on the toboggan ride to econoru class” But this time around it wasn't leftists who introduced the phrase, and it wasn't organized workers who dreaht

The existence of a ”ruling class” dawned on the conservative revival very suddenly in the suue for Marxism overtook American literati in the early thirties For example, Beck's Overton Windoarned readers of ”the inevitable rise of tyranny fro class,” while a Tea Party leader in Saint Louis could be found crowing that ”the Tea Party scares the hell out of the ruling class” and speculating that the co of the end of elitisuerie's daily e- class” its pet expression The ”ruling class” was sneering at Sarah Palin, it told readers; the ”ruling class” was trying to silence a controversial radio co class” was uerie eventually becaht watch party actually bore the Jacobin nauests” included such lifelong foes of aristocratic privilege as Grover Norquist, the Lenin of the tax cut, and Tiencies are old of the oil billionaires Koch and Koch8 The unlikely Engels of this strange class as a retired professor of international relations na Class,” was published in the summer of 2010 by the Aer version by thatars thatclass” that legitimizes itself as the nation's intellectual superiors but that is actually defined by its control of the overnment, and a ”country class” made up of nearly everyone else The core of the idea was not new, but the bailouts and economic disasters of our own ti way His indictovernment, Republicans as well as Democrats, both of ere said to hand out econo business was iovernment; in fact, ”the upper tiers of the US econo but networks of special deals with one part of government or another,” Codevilla wrote And fros of this system there was no reprieve and virtually no chance for reforue but noninvasive kind would do ”There is no escape froely bolshi+e line for a conservative hero, weirdly akin to Marx's dictu society is the history of class struggles” But Codevilla's thesis was an i a large part of his radio prograht, all this hard-boiled prole-talk was invigorating stuff Noas conservatisasp at the horrors our society had blithely tolerated all these years The affluence of the ”ruling class,” Codevilla taught, was al with nature-which is to say, with the free s the gaardless of whether the people doing the rigging are Republicans or Democrats, the beneficiaries are always the same: what Codevilla calls the ”Ins” The well-educated snobs The conspirators The ruling class

The regulators and the regulated becoether because they have the power to restrict the public's choices in ways that channel money to themselves and their political supporters Most of the world is too well acquainted with this way of econoelo Codevilla, there was nothing redee about these people or the system that has sluiced life's rewards in their direction A real ht have its virtues, but that's not e have in Aht to bow before scientific expertise, but when viewed in the harsh light of class analysis, we can see that the expertise itself is rotten: expensive Aes simply hand out As to everyone, while professional associations prevent the public fro academic work Their expertise, their social concern-it is, all of it, merely a mask for arbitrary power

Just as in the thirties, ordinary people are now said to be wise to the gaovernment is not the friend of the friendless The Country Class knows that the govern Class' members and supporters” They owe the established order no deference or respect; they have seen through its deceptions, swept aside its gauzy myths, shed its bunk forever They know that the ”tyranny” soabout is in fact here We are in its cruel grip already11 Once She Built a Railroad

The ultie 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged To its present-day fans, it is a work of a, liberty-s Obama administration told more than fifty years before it actually happened For me, it is the political flie: the ulators and free marketeers who caused the econolimmer of awareness by the protest roup of business leaders fighting big-governed has been popular since it was first published, especially aul types who see themselves in the book's tycoon heroes For free-market true believers, the tome is their very own Uncle Tom's Cabin, or, more accurately, their Caesar's Coluuration in January of 2009, sales of Atlas Shrugged registered a remarkable uptick Everyone could see that it was the novel for the era The opinion page of the Wall Street Journal hailed it as the tale of our tied readers to emulate the book's entrepreneurial heroes Officers of the Ayn Rand legacy organizations began appearing at Tea Party rallies, stoking the fires of discontent; protest signs started quoting famous lines from the novel; someone issued silver coins emblazoned with the name of the book's main character; and a reat anticipation of the resurgent Right (It flopped) Rand fans heard the call to the colors A our characters, Rick Santelli and Mike Poested in 2009 that ”we are right now living in an Ayn Rand novel, ress, the fandohtly Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin refers to Atlas Shrugged as his ”foundational book”12 Representative David Schweikert of Arizona cites Atlas Shrugged as his favorite book, Representative Rick Crawford of Arkansas quotes Rand on his Twitter feed, and Senator Rand Paul describes Atlas Shrugged as a ”must-read classic in the cause of liberty”13 The novelist's biographer Jennifer Burns expressed puzzlement at the book's newfound popularity When the econoraced certain Ayn Rand acolytes, she told Politico in 2009, ”I thought, 'Wow Ayn Rand Dead and buried forever' But she's coht back”14 Actually, Rand's revival ed is the story of an alternative Great Depression in which everything happens the waygovernment is the obvious culprit of the economic slon; business types are both heroes and victiantic strike that is the book's central thread is led not by soenius entrepreneurs who are sick of being told what to do by politicians

Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957 and is set in the indefinite future, but to judge by its account of American life it is actually a commentary on events of several decades previous It chronicles an era when steel and railroads, the two industries described uard of American enterprise That era is most definitely not the fifties, when railroads were in catastrophic decline, but it could well be the thirties, when streamliners and steel h the book was published well into the television age, the various speeches in which the characters mouth Rand's reat

The novel seems in many of its details to be an artifact of the Depression Its first page describes an exchange between one of the main characters and a ”bureat literary fear of 1932-the sense that society itself was disintegrating-is one of Rand's few points of aesthetic strength Atlas Shrugged gives us scene after scene of rural poverty, of listless people who don't knohat to do with theroeeds, of desperate hus down the road, of children turned into roving aniht have appeared in so the ruins of the nation in the days of Herbert Hoover

The same is true of Rand's cast of capitalist hero-victims One of theer, a villain of the Depression years15 The travails of another of her main characters, a steel manufacturer, appear to have been borroholesale from a 1935 episode in the cohteous gangster we are supposed to ad ”Pretty Boy Floyd,” only with the poles reversed: he robs the govern rich

The book's Depression flavor goes beyond its setting and characters; it is also a thirties novel theed may be the favorite novel of the millionaire class, but it is also the most comue of the thirties, proletarian fiction If that literary school is remembered at all anymore, it is for its stereotyped businessmen-parasites, its hackneyed plots in which a worker-hero attains class consciousness, and the climactic strikes tohich its plots seeanda that shunned wit and seehtly ed deserves to be considered part of the genre It retains the wit-free writing and the heavy-handed propaganda, with conversations between characters frequently devolving into ues (How any real human could stand to listen to these tedious stem-winders is one of the points of disbelief that this Rand reader found it most difficult to suspend) As far as its characters are concerned, appearances are aluys are usually 100 percent bad, as the reader knows frouys are uniforood taste, the same weird syntax, the same mechanical aptitude, the sa consonant clusters For some reason, they almost all seem to kno to fly airplanes

It is, of course, a novel about a strike, a standard plot device of the Popular Front era As per the genre's requireonists are noble producers who are unfairly oppressed But in this iteration of the proletarian novel, the self-interested businessman is the hero instead of the villain The parasites are the rest of us, the rabble and the intellectuals who use government to mooch and freeload on the labors of the virtuous capitalist

In Rand's dystopic A of the New Deal variety has been allowed to run wild Washi+ngton interferes constantly in the affairs of private businesses, fro decisions to small ones, and then interferes more when the first interference doesn't achieve the desired result The government forces inventors to surrender their inventions, rich men to turn over their income, producers of raw htful clients to more politically favored ones The business class resents the threats and the itprop, slowly becomes aware of their exalted nature and their victimization at the hands of politicians and intellectuals Class consciousness!

Billionaire solidarity having been achieved, the great tycoons disappear one after another into a enius inventor John Galt This strategic withdrawal of entrepreneurshi+p-the strike-is so crushi+ng that civilization itself begins to unravel It's war between the ”subhuman creatures” of the world and ”their betters,” as one heroic capitalist describes the two sides But the subhuive in or learn their lesson And so Galt, the leader of the walkout, delivers an ultiain to live in an industrial society,” he tells the ”moral cannibals” of the human race, ”it will be on our moral terms”16 One of the stated objectives of the capitalists' strike in Atlas Shrugged is to reverse the conventional hard-ti of social class Workers didn't build America, Galt and Company intend to prove; businessmen did ”We've heard so much about strikes,” Galt lectures his industrialist friends, ”and about the dependence of the uncommon man upon the common”

”We've heard it shouted that the industrialist is a parasite, that his workers support him, create his wealth, make his luxury possible-and ould happen to him if they walked out? Very well I propose to show to the world who depends on whom, who supports whom, who is the source of wealth, who makes whose livelihood possible and what happens to ho walks out”17 Maybe you had trouble following that passage, with all its interweaving ”whos” and ”whoh Successful businesspeople, which is to say, society's victi to rise up and show the world who's boss You are to acknowledge their suffering and their power at the sa to resuhtful position over the nation

In pushi+ng this absurd social theory, the novelist is reat victims,” as one character puts it, ”who have contributed the most and suffered the worst injustice in return” And as the long, long novel plods slowly on, Rand doubles down on the idea, having John Galt declare himself to be ”the defender of the oppressed, the disinherited, the exploited-and when I use those words, they have, for once, a literalvon Mises loved Atlas Shrugged, nailing the book's antipopulist e to tell the masses what no politician told them,” he wrote in a fan letter to Rand: ”you are inferior and all the iranted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you”19 It is hardly a democratic formula Indeed, democracy is part of the probleal authority over captains of industry And so Atlas Shrugged pushes this political dile crushi+ng deainst them It's a sort of Marxism for the master class, a hard-tiht and the ”looters” in the government are responsible for every last little disaster

Why Atlas Shrugged appeals to successful businesspeople is no mystery But how does a book that tells the rest of the world You are inferior become the manifesto of a populist revival?

The usual explanation for the newfound popularity of Atlas Shrugged, as we noted, is its supposed prescience: it seeency bank-rescueof business leaders by federal officials that supposedly followed There have even been efforts to takethe AIG bonus debacle, a Wall Street type published a peevish resignation announce out, he wrote, because he was sick of being ”unfairly persecuted by elected officials” And in September 2011, House Speaker John Boehner announced that the econo because ”job creators in America, basically, are on strike” We needed to ”liberate” these powerful ones froovernment-or else If talent isn't treated the way talent wants to be treated, it alk Just try running your econorander scale than this It has all the answers-and I doGreat Depression II The institutions of governuided, Rand tells us; they have beco us When the economy falls into catastrophic collapse, she insists, it is always because govern way And salvation can only come after the producer class has been liberated froed acts as a sort of expose, pulling back the curtain to reveal the powers that elo Codevilla's Country Class is figuring out the essential perfidy of the ”ruling class,” and this great novel of the age of Oba The resurgent Right regards it as a powerful cry for justice

But what starts out as a cry for justice quickly becomes a sort of bonus track from that event where the coal-inia Rand fando the stage to acclaioverne Areat strike of the producer class, shouting to the world that they have had it, that henceforth they will shut down their coffee shops, fill no more cavities, paint no more houses They link arms in solidarity with John Galt and announce froovernment for all the ways it has stifled their ambitions, pocketed the fruits of their hard work, and coddled the lazy They are ”going Galt,” they proclai country fall to her knees Her people have become slovenly, inept and irresponsible We do not see anyhard for the benefit of those who choose not to We do not see anyto a society that seeks to rule, rather than govern and steal froive to them who are Looters and Moochers We herby [sic] withdraw our Producing abilities, from a society that is unworthy of such contributions

You, ould dareatest human potential; yet who depend on our contributions to a society which you leach [sic] from