At Salon, Thomas Frank brings back an oldie but goodie of his. Heres how he describes it (and then you can go read it yourself!). Tom 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. salon/2014/07/06/the_god_that_sucked_how_the_tea_party_right_just_makes_the_1_percent_richer/
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 13:00:01 +0000
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