Pity the Billionaire Part 7

2. Introduction to Glenn Beck Special: You Are Not Alone, March 13, 2009. This was the episode in which Beck introduced his 9/12 Project, named after the day when the country supposedly stood unified in the war on terrorism. Franklin Roosevelt's famous "Forgotten Man" speech of 1932 also looked back to a lost time of unity, the days of 1917 when the nation was preparing for World War I.

3. According to Alexander Zaitchik, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance (Hoboken: Wiley, 2010), p. 88.

4. These were the Beck programs for, respectively, November 17, 2009, and November 30, 2010.

5. These quotations are from the introduction and Beck's opening monologue of his "You Are Not Alone" special introducing the 9/12 Project.

6. These quotations are from the 9/12 page on Beck's website, http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/21018/.

7. Overton Window, p. 62. These words are spoken by one of the book's protagonists in an address to a rally modeled after the Tea Party movement. Saint Louis Tea Partier: see "Who Has the Fear," a post for September 22, 2010, on Bill Hennessy's blog: http://hennessysview.com/2010/09/22/who-has-the-fear/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+hennessysview%2FXahR+%28Hennessy%27s+View%29.

8. Richard Viguerie's e-mail newsletter, "News from the Front" and later, "Conservative HQ," summarizes journalism that is of interest to conservative activists. Sometimes the phrase "ruling cla.s.s" would appear in an article the newsletter referenced; sometimes it only appeared in Viguerie's summary. As of January 2011, "Out with the Ruling Cla.s.s" had its own website: http://www.outwiththerulingcla.s.s.com/, the "Conservative Headquarters for Election Victory 2010."

9. I am quoting from the book version of the essay. Angelo Codevilla, The Ruling Cla.s.s: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It (New York: Beaufort Books, 2010), pp. 69, 87, 63.

10. Ibid., p. 31.

11. Ibid., pp. 54, 66.

12. Senator Ron Johnson's affinity for Rand was noted by George Will in his column for May 27, 2010. Paul Ryan gave his thoughts on the novel's prescience in a video posted to his Facebook page in 2009.

13. David Schweikert: see the interview in the Arizona Republic for September 28, 2008. Rich Crawford: see his post for February 5, 2010, at http://twitter.com/#%21/rickcrawfish/status/8709825148. Rand Paul: see his 2010 book, The Tea Party Goes to Washington (Nashville: Center Street), p. 251.

14. Kendra Marr, "Ayn Rand Goes Mainstream," Politico, November 12, 2009.

15. According to Leonard Peikoff's introduction to the 1996 edition of Atlas Shrugged (New York: Signet), p. 6.

16. These quotations can be found on pages 536, 925, and 937 of the 1996 Signet edition of Atlas Shrugged, in case you care.

17. Ibid., p. 680.

18. Ibid., pp. 534, 685.

19. From a letter dated January 23, 1958, and reprinted in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Winter 2007, p. 11.

20. All these quotations come from http://www.ishrugged.org/, "the web page that promotes shrugging," May 31, 2011.

21. We know that Rand used the Great Northern as one of the models for Dagny Taggart's transcontinental rail empire; that the author greatly admired James J. Hill, the Great Northern's founder; and that the present-day Cascade Tunnel, opened in 1929, is nearly eight miles long, as is the Taggart Tunnel in Atlas Shrugged. Like the fictional version, pa.s.senger trains pa.s.sing through the Cascade Tunnel used to be required to switch locomotives, since smoke from a coal-burning engine would have built up inside the tunnel and suffocated the pa.s.sengers.

The predecessor of today's Cascade Tunnel was opened in 1900. It had the same problem with locomotive smoke as the later tunnel, and in the winter of 1910 it was the scene of one of the nation's worst-ever railroad accidents, in which an avalanche knocked a s...o...b..und pa.s.senger train into a ravine, killing ninety-six people. Certain details of that real-life incident are strikingly similar to the plot in Atlas Shrugged: a high-priority train was stalled for days at a town named Wellington (in the novel it's "Winston"); desperate pa.s.sengers pleaded with railroad officials to move the train into the nearby tunnel (for shelter from the feared avalanche); railroad officials refused because of the danger of asphyxiation; as the two sides argued, railroad officials pa.s.sed the buck and tried to evade responsibility; workers walked off the job in droves; and most of the pa.s.sengers were killed soon afterward when the avalanche came to pa.s.s, sweeping the exposed train over the edge.

When the Wellington disaster was still part of living memory, plenty of people blamed it on Rand's heroes at the Great Northern Railway. The railroad was eventually absolved from charges of negligence by the courts. But Rand tells us in her famous 1961 essay, "America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business," that misdeeds by a corporation are not really something to worry about in the first place: "All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by governmental intervention into the economy." Disasters that people blame on business will usually, upon scrutiny, turn out to be the responsibility of government.

And so Rand seems to rewrite the 1910 disaster in a way that demonstrates this faith. She sets it in the Rockies instead of the Cascades; there is no snow and no avalanche; and she completely reverses the power dynamics among management, government, and customers. In Atlas Shrugged, the railroad is always the victim. The reason its special locomotive isn't ready as usual to pull the train through the tunnel is because it's been commandeered by some grandstanding politician. The reason its employees keep melting away is not because they are paid poorly, as in the 1910 reality, but because of insane government rules that have taken all the joy out of life. One of the stranded pa.s.sengers, meanwhile, possesses great political power; he is able to threaten top railroad officials and have the train proceed into the tunnel of desire just like the flesh-and-blood pa.s.sengers of 1910 wanted. And then the pa.s.sengers are suffocated for his insolence. Politics, in short, is what causes train accidents. Government does not protect pa.s.sengers; it imperils them. If allowed to act on their profit-maximizing own, corporations would never endanger pa.s.sengers' lives, much as those moochers deserve to be endangered.

For more on the Wellington disaster, see Ruby El Hult, Northwest Disaster: Avalanche and Fire (Portland, OR: Binfords and Mort, 1960) and Gary Krist, The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche (New York: Henry Holt, 2007). To get up to speed on the history of train wrecks, try Mark Aldrich's Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 18281965 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

Chapter 9. He Whom a Dream Hath Possessed Knoweth No More of Doubting 1. The official being quoted is Sir John Gieve. "'Capitalism Is Still the Only Game in Town': Bankers and Regulators See Little Sign of Change," Guardian Weekly, August 13, 2010, p. 1.

2. The cla.s.sic example is a March 19, 2003, National Review essay by David Frum, denouncing conservatives who weren't on the Iraq war bandwagon. Among their sins: "The websites of the antiwar conservatives approvingly cite and link to the writings of John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Noam Chomsky, Ted Rall, Gore Vidal, Alexander c.o.c.kburn, and other anti-Americans of the far Left." What makes this so striking is that Frum himself was ultimately pretty much expelled from the movement for his independent conservative ways.

It is important to note that a handful of conservatives themselves, such as the blogger Julian Sanchez, have taken note of this phenomenon, which they mourn as a kind of "epistemic closure." See Patricia Cohen, "'Epistemic Closure'? Those are Fighting Words," New York Times, April 27, 2010.

3. Jill Lepore, Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 38.

4. The t.i.tle for this chapter, "He Whom a Dream Hath Possessed Knoweth No More of Doubting," is the t.i.tle of a poem by Shaemus O'Sheel; Murray Kempton comments on it at length in Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955).

5. Kempton, Part of Our Time, p. 155.

6. Ibid., p. 159.

7. Harvey Swados, The American Writer and the Great Depression (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. xviii.

8. Malcolm Cowley, New York Times Book Review, December 13, 1964, p. 5.

9. Kempton, Part of Our Time, p. 11.

10. Jerome Tuccille, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand: Revised and Updated (Kindle edition, 2010), n.p.

11. After the crash, several bloggers compiled lists of economists and government officials who had pooh-poohed the idea of a housing bubble. Two useful lists can be found at http://economicsofcontempt.blogspot.com/2008/07/official-list-of-pundits.e.xperts-who.html and http://bubblemeter.blogspot.com/search/label/Flashback.

12. See Frank Easterbrook and Daniel Fischel, The Economic Structure of Corporate Law (Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 283. The best-known advocate of market self-regulation was probably Alan Greenspan; in 1996 he reportedly told Brooksley Born of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that there was really no need for laws against fraud of the kind she had proposed. (See the profile of Born in the MarchApril 2009 edition of the Stanford University alumni magazine by Rick Schmitt, "Prophet and Loss.") The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report extensively doc.u.ments the consequences of this faith; see chapter 4 in particular.

13. Jim DeMint, Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America's Slide into Socialism (Nashville: Fidelis, 2009), p. 29. "The Siren Song of Socialism" is the name of the chapter in which this sad story is related.

14. Ibid., p. 29.

15. Gilbert Seldes, Mainland (New York: Scribner's, 1936), p. 394.

16. Ibid., pp. 39495.

Chapter 10. The Silence of the Technocrats.

1. As Christina Romer put it later in another context, "Policy would be better if we listened to the experts." On the other hand, I do not mean to single out Romer for this criticism. For professional economists to consider only the economic side of political questions is typical and perhaps even unremarkable.

Romer's 2009 speech is available at http://www.brooking.edu/~/media/Files/events/2009/0309_lessons/0309_lessons_romer.pdf. She made the comment about experts to the TV host Bill Maher in August 2011. See a recording of it at http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/08/06/christina_romer_on_credit_downgrade_were_darned_fked.html.

2. Reviewing the persistent failure by the president to make his ideological case, the psychology professor Drew Westen wrote in 2011 that "Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end." Telling the story, Westen insisted, was not a detail that had been unfortunately overlooked; it was an essential part of the president's job. Drew Westen, "What Happened to Obama's Pa.s.sion," New York Times, August 7, 2011.

3. See James Stuart Olson, Herbert Hoover and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, 19311933 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1977), pp. 5160.

4. Quoted in ibid., p. 53.

5. James Stuart Olson, Saving Capitalism: The Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the New Deal, 19331940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 42, 44, 47. Jesse Jones with Edward Angly, Fifty Billion Dollars (New York: Macmillan, 1951), pp. 49, 70, 107, 110, 144.

6. Olson, p. 60.

7. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (New York: Crown, 2006), pp. 11314.

8. Ibid., p. 114.

Conclusion: Trample the Weak 1. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1957 [1944]), pp. 140, 73.

2. "Trample the Weak" is tea-partying Ted Nugent's summary of his political views. (It was also, apparently, the t.i.tle for his 2010 tour.) See his editorial, "Trample the Weak, Hurdle the Dead," in the Washington Times, June 24, 2010.

Let Us Now Thank Famous Men I did not take a geographic perspective when I began Pity the Billionaire, but looking back over it, I am struck by how many of the episodes I describe took place in Washington State, and how many of the book's characters are sons and daughters of the Pacific Northwest. I have no explanation for this coincidence, but it is probably appropriate that the idea for the book first came to me in the summer of 2009 as I drove down Washington Route 112 to Cape Flattery-the end of the world-listening on the car radio as a town hall meeting somewhere seemed to dissolve into a support group for the chronically suspicious. Later on, I wrote big pieces of the book in the old public library of Port Townsend, a place where I found it easy to get into the 1932 mood.

Several of the pa.s.sages incorporated in this volume began as columns for the Wall Street Journal, and I am much obliged to the editorial team at the WSJ op-ed page for their help with the essays I published there. Another heaping of grat.i.tude goes to the editors at Harper's magazine, who helped me with the pa.s.sages that first saw daylight in that publication-also for allowing me to disappear into my book work at crucial moments. Thanks, also, to Lee Froelich at Playboy, who first got me thinking about Glenn Beck.

Bill Black and Jamie Galbraith gave valuable a.s.sistance as I tried to make my way through a set of economic issues that are, after all, distinguished by their power to confuse. Moe Tkacik helped in this regard as well, as did Kim Phillips-Fein. My research a.s.sistant, Annie Sw.a.n.k, was a whiz with the search engines. Chris Lehmann offered excellent editorial advice, as did David Mulcahey and Jim McNeill. Scholars Jacob Hacker and James Olson guided me through certain very particular problems. David Sirota offered a roof when I went to Denver to absorb some vox pop. Alexander Kelly came through with some important research at a crucial moment. And although I don't know anyone there personally, it was uncanny how many times I found myself starting with a clue I gleaned from the collection of right-wing ephemera compiled by Media Matters for America.

My wife, Wendy Edelberg, deserves the greatest appreciation of all for putting up with a solid year of my awful book-writing habits. Joe Spieler looked after my literary affairs with his usual ability. And Sara Bershtel and her colleague Riva Hocherman once again proved themselves the best editors in the business. This book would have been impossible without them. One of these days, I promise, I will write a proper set of acknowledgments and all of you will finally understand the obscure, mumbling grat.i.tude of the scribbler.