What's the real bottom line?

What explains this hypocrisy? It's simple: Conservatism is "an expression of American business," Frank writes, and thus "a movement that is about greed, about the 'virtue of selfishness' when it acts in the marketplace." When conservatives say they are for getting the government off our backs, they are talking about the backs of employers who don't want to pay the minimum wage or comply with worker health and safety regulations. The hypocrisy is necessary because "people like the liberal state. They like the prospect of a secure retirement, a guaranteed education for their kids, pure food, clean air, crash-free airplane trips, safe working conditions, and a minimum wage." So it has been hard work for conservatives to take apart the liberal state.

It might seem as if conservatives got everything they wanted during the last eight years. But they lost their biggest battle: the campaign to privatize Social Security (although it's still on John McCain's agenda). That was the real conservative nirvana -- to get ordinary folks to put their Social Security contributions into the stock market. The campaign, led by Bush, argued that everyone would benefit, because the stock market was going to keep going up. Remember that 2000 bestseller "Dow 36,000"? Eight years later, with the Dow closer to 11,000 than 36,000, first editions of the book are selling on Amazon.com for a penny -- I guess that's the free market at work.

Conservatives reply to arguments such as Frank's by claiming "Everybody does it" -- Democrats appoint cronies, Democratic lobbyists make millions and Democratic donors milk the system too. It's true that downsizing and outsourcing were practiced by the Clinton White House. But Frank has strong evidence that the scale of corruption, waste and mismanagement of the last eight years dwarfs anything that came before.

Will electing Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress change all this? That's not really Frank's subject, so he devotes only a few paragraphs to his answer: not necessarily. What is needed is "a revival of the social movements of the left that brought liberalism into being in the first place." That's because "liberalism is a philosophy of compromise, and without a force on the left to neutralize the tremendous magnetism exerted by money, liberalism will naturally be drawn ever further to the right." It may have been hard work for conservatives to wreck the liberal state, but it's going to be harder putting it back together.

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Jon Wiener teaches history at UC Irvine and is a contributing editor of the Nation. His most recent book is "Historians in Trouble."