'The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule' by Thomas Frank
BOOK REVIEW
As the author of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" argues, the GOP's goal is to free big business and big interests from government regulation: And if that means appointing mediocre bureaucrats and adopting damaging social policies, they'll do it.
The Wrecking Crew
How Conservatives Rule
Thomas Frank
Metropolitan Books: 372 pp., $25
HOW CAN we explain the incompetence, the scandals, the corruption, the waste, the giveaways, the bridges to nowhere and the no-bid contracts in Washington, D.C., today? "Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident," Thomas Frank writes in "The Wrecking Crew," "nor is it the work of a few bad individuals." Those who run our government "have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives." They want government to fail, he argues, because that gives them a stronger argument for cutting regulations and taxes that reduce corporate profits. Some may see this as a powerful argument for electing Democrats this November.
Frank's last book, "What's the Matter With Kansas?," answered the question liberals were asking after President Bush was reelected in 2004: How did the Republicans do it? How did they get ordinary people to vote for tax cuts for the rich? His answer was that Republicans confused ordinary voters with a phony kind of class-war rhetoric and with the culture wars. Close a town's factory, he observed, and the next week the unemployed workers are picketing the local abortion clinic -- as if that was the source of their problems. The book was widely debated.
In his new book, Frank has shifted the focus from the metaphorical Kansas to the real Washington, from the voters to those who govern -- not just the president and Congress but the lobbyists, government contractors and political operatives who have shaped so much of what has gone wrong in the last eight years. The challenge of writing a book like this is to avoid wearing the reader down with gloom and outrage. Frank acknowledges this problem at the outset, in one of his characteristically glorious sentences: "We climb to the rooftop, but we cannot find the heights of irony from which we might laugh off the blend of thug and pharisee that is Tom DeLay. . . ." Nevertheless from his rooftop, he has met the challenge, often brilliantly. He tempers his rage with bitter sarcasm, and his gloom is leavened by an eye for the unexpected and the absurd.
