Storybook Plutocracy
20th January 2014
Let’s list some of them. There are the “Greats”: Paul Krugman’s The Great Unraveling, David Stockman’s The Great Deformation, Niall Ferguson’s The Great Degeneration, Timothy Noah’s The Great Divergence, Robert Scheer’s The Great American Stickup, and Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation, which should probably be included despite the author’s ultimate optimism.
There are the “Ages,” such as Jeff Madrick’s Age of Greed, Thomas Edsall’s The Age of Austerity, Sean Wilentz’s The Age of Reagan, and The Age of Turbulence, which gets honorable mention because of the great success enjoyed by its author, Alan Greenspan, in screwing the world. There are the “American” tragedies: The Betrayal of the American Dream, The Looting of America, Third World America, and Why America Failed. There are nightmares of falling, like Freefall and Falling Behind. There are weird echoes from one title to another, for example from James K. Galbraith’s The Predator State to Charles Ferguson’s Predator Nation; from Donald Barlett and James Steele’s America: Who Stole the Dream? to Hedrick Smith’s Who Stole the American Dream?; and (please note that I am not complaining here) from my own What’s the Matter With Kansas? to Joan Walsh’s What’s the Matter With White People?
There is the scream-therapy approach—Beyond Outrage, Greedy Bastards. There is the voice of cool reason: The Shock Doctrine, Winner-Take-All Politics. There are the clever titles—Down the Up Escalator—and the genius titles, like Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia. And there are, finally, the classics of the genre, like Tom Geoghegan’s Which Side Are You On? (from 1991) or Christopher Lasch’s Revolt of the Elites (from 1995) or the granddaddy of all inequality reporting, the New York Times’ Downsizing of America (a high-profile series that ran in the paper of record in 1996).
Two things need to be said about this tsunami of sad. First, that the vast size of it, when compared to the effect that it has had—close to nothing—should perhaps call into question the utility of journalism and argument and maybe even prose itself. The gradual Appalachification of much of the United States has been a well-known phenomenon for 20 years now; it is not difficult to understand why and how it happened; and yet the ship of state sails serenely on in the same political direction as though nothing had changed. We like to remember the muckraking era because of the amazing real-world transformations journalism was able to bring; our grandchildren will remember our era because of the big futile naught accomplished by our prose.