Thomas Frank on "The Wrecking Crew"

Four years ago, Thomas Frank wrote what many thought was the definitive book capturing the zeitgeist of George W. Bush' first term and the 2004 election. What's The Matter With Kansas? was part travelogue, part small-town journalism, part Big Picture politics. Frank traveled around his home state of Kansas, seeking an answer to the question: How have Republicans mastered the art of getting people to vote against their own interests? He examines the ability of the conservative movement and its embodiment, the modern Republican Party, to get voters focused on cultural issues to the exclusion of all else in their electoral decision making. He reports on how the Democratic Party has too often played into the conservatives' game. And he takes an elegiac look at the damage that a generation of conservative, free-market policy have wreaked on his homeland.

Appearing at Book People tonight, Frank said that the goal of his new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, was to examine what happened when these same masters of campaigning try their hand at governing. The result, he says, is a disaster.

The conservative mindset, he says, glorifies the so-called "free market," arguing (with little evidence) that it is, in every case, superior to government at performing any function or addressing any ill. The laws of the free market are universal, resolute and ultimately beneficent. Government, in this worldview, hinders the efficient operation of free markets, sabotages the common weal, and creates its own constituencies determined to continue and even expand its reach.

It is to this life-and-death struggle against government and its apologists that the conservative movement -- which he calls "the organic embodiment of the American business community" -- has dedicated itself. In his presentation tonight, he quoted from his book the words of one Homer Ferguson, a president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in 1928:

The best public servant is the worst one. A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger. If he is an enthusiast -- a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world -- the black plague is a housepet by comparison.

Frank quoted Grover Norquist -- whom he called the "most brilliant political mind of the conservative movement," lamenting that liberals had no one of his caliber -- in 1984 urging conservatives to follow Josef Stalin's model in consolidating their hold on the apparatus of government. Norquist, of course, has famously said he wants to shrink government down to the size where he could "drown it in the bathtub."

What are the consequences of this approach? As Frank says in the book, "the chief consequence of conservatives' unrelenting faith in the badness of government is ... bad government." This is the end-product of the conservative ideology about government. And Frank took it a step further: for conservatives, bad government is an okay outcome. Why?

First, conservatives see, and definitely market, themselves as outsiders: they're never "in charge" and thus responsible for government's failings. If, as happened with Reagan in the 1980s and Bush in the 2000s, a conservative governing class screws up, that's because they're "impostors," not true to conservative ideals. REAL conservatives would have avoided those mistakes, they argue.

Second, public perception of government inefficiency paves they way for the preferred conservative solution to everything: out-sourcing. Out-sourcing allows the conservatives to boast of their "shrinking government" accomplishments (the Bush Administration proudly notes that the number of federal employees is at the lowest level since the 1950s) while the budget bloats up like a Macy's Thanksgiving parade balloon. More importantly, out-sourcing rewards the people who fund the conservative movement by giving them lucrative government contracts, often based less on competence or even low-bidding than on ideological and political loyalty to the movement.

Third, bad government feeds cynicism about government, and about civic engagement in general. This serves conservative ends: the less you're paying attention or the less you think you can do to change what's going on, the better off they are.

Frank's thesis is compelling, and his speech at Book People laid out his argument well. He spoke for about 35 minutes, then took about 20 minutes of Q&A.

The Wrecking Crew researches and lays out the argument I first heard from George Lakoff two years ago: that the incompetence (Katrina, the Iraqi occupation), venality (Duke Cunningham, Ken Lay) and corruption (Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay) we've seen from the Bushies is not an aberration; it is the logical result of the governing philosophy they've implemented.

It seems fitting that Frank spoke in Austin on the day that the Sunset Commission staff recommended abolishing the Texas Residential Construction Commission, created of, by and for the homebuilders to shield themselves from responsibility for their actions by creating an almost criminally-incompetent and hog-tied bureaucracy.