On this glorious day of The Speech, I give recognition to Thomas Frank, who's book, "What's the Matter With Kansas," was a brilliant harbinger of uncovering the truth about the Republican Party under the control of the neocons, Rove and Bush. The reviewer of Frank's new book, "The Wrecking Crew," is shallow I think.
By MICHAEL LIND
Published: August 15, 2008
In “The Wrecking Crew,” the liberal journalist Thomas Frank tells the story of free-market ideologues who came to Washington to start a revolution and built a lucrative lobbying empire instead. Now a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Frank established his reputation as the editor of The Baffler and then as the author of the best-selling “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” (2004) by combining two things absent from most liberal commentary: muckraking reporting and satiric wit.
Frank’s gifts as a social observer are on display in his description of the contemporary Washington metro area: “The airport designed by Eero Saarinen; the shopping mall so vast it dwarfs other cities’ downtowns; the finely tuned high-performance cars zooming along an immaculate private highway; the masses of flowers in perfectly edged beds; the gas stations with Colonial Williamsburg cupolas; the men all in ties and starched, buttoned-down shirts; the street names, even, recalling our cherished American values: Freedom, Market, Democracy, Tradition and Signature Drives; Heritage Lane; Founders Way; Enterprise, Prosperity and Executive Park Avenues; and a Chivalry Road that leads, of course, to Valor Court.”
The growth of government as an industry, Frank notes, has transformed the capital region: “The richest county in America isn’t in Silicon Valley or some sugarland preserve of Houston’s oil kings; it is Loudoun County, Va., a fast-growing suburb of Washington, D.C. … The second richest county is Fairfax, Va., the next suburb over from Loudoun; the third, sixth and seventh richest counties are also suburbs of the capital. ”
While there were millionaires in Washington in the past, “in those days the millions almost always came from somewhere else.” Since the 1980s, Washington’s “millionaires were homegrown, and the template for Washington housing was ostentatious, aristocratic and gargantuan.” Frank’s Washington “is a perfect realization of the upper-bracket dream of a white-collar universe, where economies run on the information juggling of the ‘creative class’ and where manufacturing is something done by filthy brutes in far-off lands.” And in Washington the dominant white-collar figure is the lobbyist.
The increasing supply of lobbyists, Frank observes, “should have driven the price of lobbying down, not up. … The most credible explanation … is that clients grew more and more confident that their lobbyists could deliver something of value in exchange for their fees. … The reason companies started buying, in other words, was that Congress began selling.” Special-interest earmarks in legislation by members of Congress have exploded in number, while careers in elected or appointed office are apprenticeships for lobbying jobs.
Frank blames conservative Republicans for the recent cancerous growth of the lobbying industry for two reasons. First, right-wingers like Tom DeLay saw K Street as another front alongside Pennsylvania Avenue in the war on liberal government. Even more important, according to Frank, is the contempt for government shared by conservatives who believe that “the liberal state has no more claim to legitimacy than the thief who robs you at gunpoint.” In other words, it’s O.K. to steal from robbers. Treating the scandals that brought them down as an all but inevitable result of their ideological politics, Frank takes DeLay, the convicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff and many of their allies on a perp walk through his pages.
Frank’s analysis of why there are so many libertarian think tanks in a country with so few libertarians is dead on: “The reason that we have so many well-funded libertarians in America these days is not because libertarianism suddenly acquired an enormous grass-roots following, but because it appeals to those who are able to fund ideas. … Libertarianism is a politics born to be subsidized.”
Frank’s portrait of the conservative movement, however, sacrifices complexity to caricature. “Conservatism has always been an expression of American business.” Conservatism equals libertarianism equals plutocracy. According to Frank, Grover Cleveland Democrats in the 1890s and Grover Norquist Republicans in the 1990s are different incarnations of the same eternal evil: the subordination of democracy to money.
Frank dates the beginning of the modern lobbying era to 1995 and the arrival of Gingrich Republican idealists. That may be so, but the father of Washington lobbying was Franklin Roosevelt’s former aide Thomas Corcoran, known as Tommy the Cork, a private figure so powerful that President Harry Truman ordered the F.B.I. to wiretap him. Dan Rostenkowski, the powerful and corrupt Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in the 1980s and early 1990s, preceded Jack Abramoff into prison. Frank holds up a minor Indiana congressman, David McIntosh, who pushed lobbying reforms before quitting government to become a lobbyist, as an example of conservative hypocrisy. But Fred Dutton, Robert Kennedy’s campaign manager in 1968 and the champion of a “new politics” uniting suburban idealists, college students and racial minorities (sound familiar?), went on to become a lobbyist for Mobil Oil and Saudi Arabia, earning the nickname “Dutton of Arabia.”
Missing from “The Wrecking Crew” is any acknowledgment of what, from a left perspective, should be considered good news: the defeat of the antigovernment right in most major policy battles, from Social Security privatization to private school vouchers. Bush’s plan for Social Security was so unpopular it never came to a vote in the Republican Congress, which enacted (to be sure, with payoffs to pharmaceutical companies) the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the biggest increase in government involvement in the health care industry in the United States since Medicare’s creation. Incapable of overthrowing big government, even when they controlled all three branches, the right has been limited to tinkering with it.
Indeed, one might argue that the defeat of the attempted libertarian revolution puts the money-making schemes of Frank’s villains in a different light. Former young conservative firebrands like Abramoff settled for enriching themselves precisely because they were unable to repeal the New Deal.
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.” On Chivalry Road or Valor Court, no doubt.
Michael Lind, the Whitehead senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of “The American Way of Strategy.”
