For what it's worth, Commodify Your Dissent, the 1997 anthology of essays from the first years of Thomas Frank's magazine, the Baffler, changed my life. A few years before, during an extended junior year abroad, I had seen in Russia, in primitive, transparent condition, the workings of a modern capitalism based on violence, a free press paid for by large moneyed concerns, and a political system run by cronyism, the brazen theft and resale of natural resources, and the naked manipulation of public opinion. I became a leftist. But I returned to a campus where student activism was still dominated by identity politics and to classrooms in which my literature professors, arguing in the wake of the canon wars for their very lives, suggested that the classic texts wer...

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