Doubling Down on Disaster

Thomas Frank, one of the country’s leading elegists of American representative democracy and a columnist for Harper’s Magazine, has spent his career chronicling the nation’s descent into plutocracy. This week he sang against the forces of free-market dominion on Bill Moyers’ television show.

Of the expanding and prevailing belief that market activities are democratic exercises, Frank says: “There are people who — I’m going to get cynical on you here, Bill — there are people who believe that the more money we have in politics, the closer we become to a democracy. They think it’s better for there to be more money in politics.

“Why do they think that? Because they think that the market is a democracy, that markets are democracy and that government is, when government interferes in the economy, it’s illegitimate by definition. And so the more money we get in there, the more it allows entities like JPMorgan to defend themselves against the sort of, you know, the heavy-handed meddling of some, you know, Washington bureaucrat.”

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

Moyers & Company: