Alex Massie Alex Massie

Can there be satire on the left?

Reviewing Thomas Frank’s new book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, last week, Michael Lind wrote:

But “The Wrecking Crew” is a polemic, not a dissertation. With rare exceptions like John Kenneth Galbraith, conservatives — from Juvenal and Alexander Pope to H. L. Mencken, Tom Wolfe and P. J. O’Rourke — have been the best satirists. In Thomas Frank, the American left has found its own Juvenal. Consider his update of a 1945 civics primer, “We Are the Government,” which followed the cheerful wanderings of a dime that paid for a variety of enlightened New Deal regulations. In Frank’s contemporary version, the dime travels from a private government contractor to a trade association, which “gives the dime to a Washington consultant who specializes in fighting federal agencies, and this man launches challenge after challenge to the studies that the agency is using. … It takes many years for the agency to make its way through the flak thrown up by this clever fellow. Meanwhile, with his well-earned dime, he buys himself a big house with nice white columns in front.”

To which Tyler Cowen responded that Lind:

…left out Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain.  I doubt if Monty Python or Stephen Colbert would count as “conservative” in the political or partisan sense of that word, but still the emotional modes of how their material works are not inconsistent with this observation.  Do you agree?  And what is the underlying implication?  Are conservatives somehow more at ease with ridicule or do they have a clearer fixed point from which to proceed?

In one sense, I suppose it’s true that conservatives have a more natural bent for satire.

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