In today’s Age, Thomas Frank writes:

One of the most tenacious myths of the “culture wars” that have been going on in America for more than 30 years is that youth counterculture possesses some sort of innate transgressive power – that the eternal battle between hippie and hard-hat, disco-dweller and churchgoer or individualist and conformist is every bit as important as the struggle between classes used to be.

In a review of Frank’s last book, One Market Under God, I wrote

The most interesting part of Frank’s story relates to the way in which the entrepreneurs of the Internet boom appropriated the rhetoric of the Vietnam-era left, to the extent that venture capitalists refer to themselves as VC and the employees of Internet firms call themselves ‘dotcommunists’. Simultaneously claiming victory in the cold war, they denounced both governments and Old Economy corporations as little better than Soviet commissars. In this story, the entrepreneurs stand for the liberation, not of the workers, but of ‘new money’.

A cameo appearance is made by the postmodernists, whose alleged drive to destroy Western civilisation formed the basis of numerous denunciations of ‘political correctness’ in the 1990s. The postmodernist beliefs that all truth is relative, and that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ find their natural 1990s expression in work for the burgeoning advertising industry. The tools of critical theory and radical anthropology are pressed into service in the creation of a mythical reality for, say, a brand of toothpaste. The ultimate outcome of this radical theorising is the view that, not only nations, but individuals are, ultimately, brands, and that most are in dire need or rebranding.

I did another version of this review here. The para I quoted above is from Frank’s latest The Conquest of Cool, which sounds great.