The Tragic Irony of Thomas Frank

Unaware of my existence and identity as Thomas Frank appears to be, how could he have known, before clicking SEND on his silly piece in today’s Wall Street Journal, that here I sat, all along, clickyfingers at the ready, secretly able to laugh him down the way he deserves?

He couldn’t. So in the sense that Frank should have thought first and published later, this is an unfair attack on a respected journalist. That said, mark these words:

Consider the poor Washington libertarian. Everywhere else in America his type is an exotic species, a coffee-shop heretic who quotes from “Atlas Shrugged” and steers every conversation toward Ron Paul or gold. Take him or leave him, he doesn’t care. He is his own master.

Not so the Beltway variety. Here, in the very home of the taxing, regulating leviathan, the libertarian is such a commonplace and unremarkable bird that no one gives him a second glance. Here he is a factotum of the establishment, a tiny voice in a vast choir assembled by business and its tax-exempt front groups to sing the virtues of the entrepreneur.

And therein lies his dilemma. Almost by definition, our young libertarian’s job is to celebrate the profit motive from the offices of a not-for-profit organization. He is subsidized, in other words, to hymn the unsubsidized way of life. Rugged individualism may be his creed, but a rugged individual he ain’t.

This is more than just an abstract problem, as I discovered last week at a panel discussion hosted by America’s Future, one of the lesser libertarian nonprofits in the city. The questions that night were whether nonprofit work constituted a “real job” and if moving to the private sector was “selling out” – ideas well known to any liberal do-gooder.

For starters, Frank’s caricature characterization of the Washington libertarian is a hackneyed, zany, and thoughtless version of the one I presented myself earlier today:

libertarians and conservatives bear a similar curse — what they criticize is what makes their existence possible. Even more strangely, I bet, if asked, that many on the left would complain of being stuck self-consciously in a similar paradox. And now let me make the very strange-sounding claim that this is the true genius of Americanism, and the reason why, in the West, only America has truly flourished as a truly modern regime: all of us, regardless of our cultural or political position, more or less are stuck with the knowledge that we are really dependent on what we criticize.

It may shock you, Mr. Frank, but none of us live lives of perfect ideological purity, and this is a good thing. Even — especially — in Washington. How dull, vicious, petty, and absurd it is to argue that no one is entitled to argue for what should be until they have already mastered the art of making it so. No peddlers of libertarian paradise are taken seriously in our national political conversation, and this, too, is a good thing. Except at the irrelevant fringes, Americans don’t do dueling utopias.

Which would you rather have, Mr. Frank — a Washington political scene dominated by warring tribes, each with its own village god, or an atmosphere of collegiality, in which all groups of partisans realized that they’re stuck with one another and with the real-life America in which we all live (when not skipping through dreamland)?

Frank should read up on his David Runciman:

Orwell is an excellent guide to the problem of political hypocrisy, but not in the way he is usually taken to be. He shows us that politics is not about, and should not be reduced to, a choice between sincerity and fakery – seeing it in these terms opens the door to the worst sorts of hypocrisy, or worse still, raw power without the kind of hypocrisy that can keep it in check. The real choice is between different kinds of hypocrisy, and in this context it is democratic hypocrisy, not sincerity, that needs defending.

Just so. Now for the really bad news. Since AF, in its rank hypocrisy, is a conservative and libertarian nonprofit, it must, by Frank’s own measure, be a ‘lesser’ lifeform among libertarian organizations, ideologically impure as it is. But actually he seems not to have much of an idea what AF is. Tragically, ironically, he formed his judgment based on a handful of random panelists when he should have at least done so after spying on a handful of random AF members. He might then have realized that AF is a hotbed of people with variegated, conflicting, sometimes even incommensurable ideas — in short, as good a representative as any of the kind of Washington social scene that Frank thinks is impossible or undesirable in Washington. Sure, most of us aren’t yet old enough to live, breathe, eat and sleep corruption, but Frank has no problem assaulting the kiddies:

what is it that libertarians are selling when they accept the fat paychecks of corporate America? The noble principle of self interest? The utopia of the market itself? Will the workings of supply and demand really seize up if some young Ayn Randette chooses to forsake, say, the Cato Institute and instead help ExxonMobil pile up the pelf?

I, a non-libertarian hypocritically amassing well-funded libertarian friends in order to score free drinks at happy hour, have sold out enough to know that the word is ‘Randian.’ On the other hand, I had to look up ‘pelf,’ so perhaps on vocab we should call it even. On substance, however, it strikes me as beyond preposterous to claim that young conservatives and libertarians these days — AF members least of all — have been brainwashed by soulless old cronies to take jobs that pay you to defraud and debase the principles and policies you’re being paid to defend. The number of AFers I can think of off the top of my head who can manage the complexity of both having strong opinions and enduring open debate about them is so high that I would assign the task of tallying them to Thomas Frank for the length of his intellectual detention.

If ever there were thriving proof that the rule which vexes Frank so deeply isn’t one, it’s the very organization he’s using to symbolize it. As Radley Balko has just blogged, “It isn’t difficult to mock libertarians for arguments they aren’t actually making,” and apparently it’s also a breeze to publish hit pieces on young Washington professionals who are actually busy doing the dead opposite of what you think they are — and right under your nose, at that. Amusingly enough, Frank’s column, for those who don’t read regularly, is called “Fighting Words.” Them’s fightin’ words, all right. I’d keep punching, but I’ve got an AF happy hour to go to. See you there, fellow jaded little moneygrubbers.

(Photo courtesy of Sergio’s viewfinder via Flickr. C’mon, dance.)