Thomas Frank, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule

A lot of times I'm just wordy. But usually there's a purpose, beyond laziness, even if the purpose isn't achieved. Usually it is to show connections - connections among seemingly isolated events and also to show the context of how I got to the idea. The chart below is an attempt to make some of this clearer. Unfortunately, the way I use simple computer tools to cobble things together means I couldn't put links in the chart. But they're below.




So, KWMD, a radio station licensed in Kasilof, but translated into other areas like Anchorage at 104.5 and 87.7 on the FM dial, plays a lot of shows plucked from all over the country. Things that some people would call way left. But I remember before Nixon resigned 34 years ago this week (August 8, two days after my son was born). It was during Republican Nixon's administration that legislation like the Clean Water Act, The Environmental Protection Agency, the Privacy Act, and Affirmative Action passed. At the time he was considered a conservative Republican. So I would say that while KWMD makes NPR seem reactionary, it really is only slightly left of Nixon.

Tonight, KWMD aired a show called Media Matters from WILL, a station in Illinois. On that show, host Bob McChesney interviewed Thomas Frank, author of The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule.

This week [August 10, 2008] our guest is Thomas Frank. Well-known author of What's the Matter with Kansas and Commodifying Dissent, Frank has recently been appointed a columnist at the Wall Street Journal. His new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, has just been released on Metropolitan Books.

You can hear the RealPlayer version of the Media Matters Interview with Frank.

You can also hear a short audio excerpt from the book (Alaska's corruption is briefly mentioned within the first two minutes.)

So why should you care? Because Frank, in the interview and I assume in the book which I do plan to get, fills in a lot of the details of what I watched happening as a professor of public administration with the rise of the conservatives. His narrative matches one that I think is a plausible explanation of what has gone on since Reagan came into office.

Essentially you have a group of folks with overlapping world views - Republicans, Conservatives, and people whose goal in life is to amass money and power. Some of these people are honorable people who sincerely believe in the Constitution, the rule of law, and rational debate. Others are scam artists whose basic interest is their own and they are willing to play people who can help them. It's the honorable ones who are writing insider exposes as they are growing more and more disgusted with how the Bush administration has perverted their conservative values. But, they did go along with much of it because they had ideological beliefs that they thought were being pursued. And they found social issues - abortion and then homosexuality - with which they could seduce the so called Religious Right to join their party, though these weren't issues they really cared about.

What are those beliefs?

• Government is the problem.
• Free enterprise is the answer.

So the agenda of the most Machiavellian members of this cabal were to trash government institutions - The Wrecking Ball - and make this change as permanent as possible. Why?

Some honestly believed that government power threatened the free market and was wasteful. And after years of Democratic rule, the left wing ideologues and the equivalents of the greedy ones on the right, had done their share of looting and caused their share of government inefficiency and corruption.

More sinister were those who saw advantages in weak, incompetent government:

• it can't perform its regulatory functions efficiently (thus allowing corporations to get away with health, safety, labor, and environmental violations)
• it makes government look bad, thus gaining voters to their own candidates

Frank argued in the interview that conservatives have been carefully plotting this for forty years (and we've seen more and more evidence of this coming out as in the right wing Federalist Society training lawyers for federal judgeships) and they worked to make these changes permanent for the inevitable day that they are out of power. (Well there was Rove's Permanent Republican Majority, but fortunately people who 'know' they are right are also blind to their own arrogance and weakpoints.) Frank listed two ways they do this:

• Deficit spending takes money out of the treasury that can support the Left's programs. Clinton inherited a deficit that made it impossible for him to fund the programs he wanted to set up, like a new health care system. He spent his eight years creating a surplus which W quickly turned into an even greater deficit. Frank argued, and I'm inclined to believe it because I've heard conservatives talk about this strategy, that it was all intentional to gut government. And an Obama administration, should we get there, would face the same harsh reality.
  
• Privatizing as much of government as they can, thus getting rid of the collective memory and competence that was the legacy of a time when people trusted (mainly) the government. If their jobs weren't simply eliminated through privatization, then many were so disheartened they left or took the privatized jobs which paid three or four times as much as they earned working for government.

Privatizing also has the advantage of giving away chunks of valuable governmental investments at bargain rates to friends and supporters. (I can go into much more detail on most of the points, but this is a blog post, not a book. But as an example, I worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) when the Reagan administration came into power in 1981. I saw the incredible group of dedicated experts with years of experience who would have been dispersed if the proposals to privatize the weather service had been carried out. And how private companies would have greatly benefited from cheaply gaining control of the enormous investment taxpayers had made for the weather satellites and other infrastructure.)

A caller suggested a third method of perpetuating the destruction of government:

• Filling the courts, particularly the Supreme Court, with extreme conservatives who have been raised in this ideology. Frank amplified the point saying that one of the ways this group plans to dismantle what is left of the New Deal is to have social programs that redistribute wealth declared as unconstitutional unfair taking of property.
  

I've heard enough bits and pieces of evidence over the years that suggest this is a plausible narrative to describe what has been happening. You can listen to the interview to fill in some of the details, or better yet get the book and judge for yourself.