One Market Under God

One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy is a 2000 book by historian and author Thomas Frank.^[1] It was published by Anchor Books.

The book traces the development of what Frank decries as 'market populism': "the idea that markets are a far more democratic form of organization than democratically elected governments." He also discusses many facets of the New Economy, "culture studs," and internet brokerages.

An excerpt of the book was the cover story of the October 12, 2000 issue of The Nation.^[2]

Topics covered

Television commercials

One topic that Frank devotes considerable page space to is television commercials, especially those for brokerages and mutual funds. He cites many examples of corporations being compared to rock stars, the civil rights movement and the French Revolution and God.

Beardstown Ladies

Frank discusses the Beardstown Ladies, an informal investment group comprising elderly women from Beardstown, Illinois. He covers their usage by the media to promote the idea (mostly fallacious, in Frank's estimation) that Average Joe Americans were just as good, if not better than professionals at picking stocks.

Contents

• Preface: A Deadhead in Davos
• 1. Getting to Yes: The Architecture of a New Consensus
  • Let Us Build Us a Bill Gates
  • Consensus and the Legitimacy Problem
  • From Culture War to Market Populism
  • Just Plain Bill
  • Sources of the New Faith
• 2. A Great Time or What: Market Populism Explains Itself
  • Great Books
  • All the Cats Join In
  • Stealth Reactionaries
• 3. The Democracy Bubble
  • Year 1 in the Republic of Al
  • Your Share of America
  • The Madness of Crowds
  • Mutual, Omaha
  • "We" Get "Ours"
  • Meet John Doe, Arbitrageur
• 4. I Want My NYSE
  • The Web Changes a Few Things
  • And Zig a Zag Ah!
• 5. Casual Day, U.S.A.: Management's 1930s
  • He Bag Production
  • Bogue Millionaires / Cool Millionaires
  • The Horror of Management
  • Elitism Was the Crime
  • Labor on the March
  • Benevolent Dictators
  • The Uses of Bolshevism
• 6. In Search of Legitimacy: How Business Got Its Soul Back
  • How Does Management Literature Manage?
  • Symbolism I: The Corporate Naive
  • Symbolism II: People of the Market
  • The Church of Change
  • Moving with the Cheese
• 7. The Brand and the Intellectuals
  • So much depends upon...
  • People's War on Bummer Brands
  • Ritual, Romance, and the Brand
• 8. New Consensus for Old: Cultural Studies from Left to Right
  • Closing Down the American Mind
  • The Importance of Being Studly
  • What Business Culture?
  • And a Dreadlocked Libertarian Shall Lead Them
  • Making History Just as They Please
• 9. Triangulation Nation: Journalism in the Age of Markets
  • Back to Normalcy II: The Theory
  • Tycoon a Bus: The Practice
  • Pro Patria et Pro Gannett: The Monument
• 10. To the Dot-Com Station
  • The Wages of Reaction
  • Zeitgeist and Weltgeist
  • From New Times to New Economy
  • The Pump and Dump Future
  • The Age of Incantation
• Afterword

Reception

It was reviewed in The American Prospect on December 18, 2000,^[3] in The New York Times on December 21, 2000 ^[4]

References

1. Frank, Thomas (2000). One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. Anchor Books. ISBN 0-385-49503-X.
2. "Broken link".
3. King, Michael (December 19, 2001). "Divine Commerce". Frank is to be commended for his extraordinary endurance in simply collecting and cataloging the range of atavistic poppycock that sustains most conventional commentary on markets
4. Schwartz, John (December 21, 2001). "The Little Guy Is on His Mind; An Author Savagely Indicts Notions of a New Economy". New York Times. Mr. Frank is, in his way, trying to restore a languishing tradition — social criticism — and bring it to a popular audience, reaching back to the time of Edmund Wilson and the preternaturally cranky H. L. Mencken.

External links

• The book at Thomas Frank's website
• Excerpt that appeared in The Nation
• Review in The American Prospect
• Review in The New York Times