The Rah-Rah Boys

Thomas Frank weighs in with this indictment of the "gurus who prophesied an unending bull market" during the 1990s. He writes:

America's current problems stem not from an excess of dissent but from the utter unaccountability of corporate apologists like Cramer, Kudlow, Glassman and the Wall Street Journal. What was and is needed in America is not the complete and final quieting of dissent but a vibrant counterpoint to the chorus of promoters who virtually monopolized economic discussion in the 1990s. What will prevent bubbles and manias and mass delusions and maybe even bad government is a new set of public thinkers willing at least to entertain the notion that capitalism might not always allocate goods fairly or efficiently; that markets may not always be synonymous with democracy; that voting and collective bargaining are expressions of the popular will every bit as legitimate as shopping and day trading.

Maybe market meltdowns are what happen to a country when commentary on matters economic becomes the exclusive province of business thinkers. When labor unions are systematically crushed. When dissent is divorced from matters economic or social and becomes instead a quality of middle-class taste preferences, of "extreme" cars and "radical" packaged goods. When management theorists take it as their duty to dazzle us with a crescendo of free-market worship. When leaders of left parties cleanse their ranks of laborites, of New Dealers, of Keynesians, of socialists. When newspapers refuse to open their columns--on grounds of laughable, self-evident dinosaurdom--to doubters and second-wavers and old-school liberals.

Today we are paying for each of these, for all of the ways in which we expunged the common sense of our parents' America from our lives. With each month's nauseating returns, we are making good the intellectual folly of the last 10 years.

FYI: Here's a different synopsis of Frank's "market populism" argument than the one I mentioned a few days ago.