A review by kevin_carson
One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy by Thomas Frank

3.0

It's an entertaining read with some worthwhile observations, but Frank's analysis is also incredibly lazy in a lot of ways. He apparently from the observation that assorted neoliberal "market populists" like Tom Peters, Newt Gingrich, Jack Kemp et al talk a lot about "flattening hierarchies," decentralization, distributed networks, and so forth, and then jumps to the incredible conclusion that any discussion of decentralization or replacing hierarchies with networks must be a neoliberal propagandist. He winds up defending bureaucracy and hierarchy as such, and treating the bureaucratic mass production corporation of the mid-20th century as inherently progressive, and any criticism of it as a right-wing Trojan horse. In so doing, he lumps together everything networked and horizontal into an "icky things I don't like" category that includes a lot of the most progressive strands on the left like commons-based peer production.

He reminds me a lot of Doug Henwood, who in a Twitter exchange argued that copyright was progressive and that left-wing currents based on open source, post-scarcity, horizontalism, etc., "sounded like Newt Gingrich."

Frank is far more accurately described as a 20th century managerialist liberal of the Galbraith and Chandler school than a leftist. (I wrote more about this ideological tendency here: https://c4ss.org/content/3094).