"One Market Under God" by Thomas Frank blasts DLC concessions to GOP

[BurtWorm]

I've just started it and am finding it even more delicious than "What's the Matter with Kansas?" (which I also highly recommend). The ideas in the latter book were first formulated and more deeply probed in the earlier book, which, published in 2000, takes a scathing view of Clintonian accomodation to Reaganite tenets about the free market. It's not a Clinton-bashing book, however, if that would prevent you from reading it. It's main target is corporate culture in the 1990's. This book will infuriate you and give you many more reasons to want to kick Bush's corporate ass back to Crawford--but also to put pressure on the Democratic Party to stop betraying its roots and rank-and-file, whether they're back in power in November or still out of it.

[chuck555]

1. A few quotes please.

I have heard some interviews with him and the DlC was never mentioned. I think you are putting your own bias in here.

[BurtWorm]

2. The book is about the New Economy of the 1990s

Frank charges that Clinton and Blair essentially bought the Republican/Tory premise (or propaganda) that the free market is a purer form of democratic expression than democracy itself, that it more clearly expresses the people's wishes than legislation or elections, and that there is no use resisting (paradoxically) the direction corporations are pulling us toward, which is away from aggregate labor and toward aggregate capital. I do not have the book in front of me and cannot cite chapter and verse where he specifically criticizes the DLC, but he has very harsh words for Clinton's welfare reform, media restructuring, and other pet projects of the DLC. In other, more recent contexts, Frank has charged that the DLC essentially sold out the rank-and-file working class and working poor to court the campaign contributions of the socially liberal millionaires.

[BurtWorm]

3. kick for an excellent read