On Tuesday’s Rachel Maddow show, Maddow asked author Thomas Frank about the prospects presented by the defection of some allegedly libertarianish Tea Partiers on the renewal of USA PATRIOT. Isn’t there a split between the libertarian and authoritarian strands of the conservative movement?, she asked. Well, yeah, Frank said. There’s some underlying tension between the socially conservative wing and the pro-business wing (“or as they prefer to be called, ‘pro-market’”).
In hinting at the pro-business vs. pro-market distinction, of course, Frank scored at least an oblique hit on an important point: The so-called “libertarian” wing of the conservative movement, for the most part, is more pro-business than pro-market. As he suggested himself, if you examine their agenda closely, despite all the rhetoric it’s not really about whether government is big or small. It doesn’t matter so much what size government is as who it helps out. What they mean by “pro-market” is a big government that helps out business interests.
But Frank himself ignores this same distinction in all three of his books. In each of them — One Market Under God, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, and The Wrecking Crew — Frank equates the corporate economy untold dozens of times to “the free market” or “laissez-faire,” and denounces corporate mercantilists like the folks at Heritage, AEI and FreedomWorks as “free market fundamentalists.”
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James Tuttle,
Regular Columnist, THL
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