Thomas Frank: Pity the Billionaire | truthout
This is not to say that the Right proceeds about its work while renouncing confusion or mystification. Just the opposite: in defending “capitalism,” the leaders of the latest conservative uprising don’t really bother with the actually existing capitalism of the last few years, even though capitalism’s particulars have made for scary headlines on the front pages of every newspaper in the land. They generally do not discuss credit default swaps or the deregulatory triumphs that made them so destructive. They do not have much to say about the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico—the news story that shared the front pages with conservative primary victories all through the summer of 2010—nor about “foreclosuregate,” the revelation a few months later that banks had cut all sorts of legal corners in order to hustle borrowers in default out of their houses as quickly as possible.
Instead, the battle is joined at the level of pure abstraction. The issue, the newest Right tells us, is freedom itself, not the doings of the subprime lenders or the ways the bond-rating agencies were compromised over the course of the last decade. Details like that may have crashed the economy, but to the renascent Right they are almost completely irrelevant. What matters is a given politician’s disposition toward free markets and, by extension, toward the common people of the land, whose faithful vicar the market is.
