Have you ever wondered about the seemingly endless scandals that have become an everyday attribute of Conservative rule? Have you ever been appalled by the incompetence smothered with a thick coating of self righteous greed?
Have you ever thought that these endless scandals can’t be an accident, or random coincidence?
Well, wonder no more. It is by design.
In August, Thomas Frank will have a new book out.
It is called "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule" and it helps to explain why there is so much failure and corruption when Republicans are in charge—it is part of their plan.
The August issue of Harper’s Magazine has an essay adapted from the book. This is perfect reading material on the way to or from Netroots Nations or whenever you can get your hands on a copy.
To the jump...
I have read an advance copy The Wrecking Crew" and I highly recommend it. Frank exposes the black heart of corruption that is at root of conservative governance. This is a book that will cause many a conservative head to explode. And as you might expect, the subject of Jack Abramoff comes up in the book. Now, I have been researching and writing about Abramoff for almost a decade and can honestly say that I’ve learned a lot from Frank’s detailed research. I thought I knew Jack, but Tom Frank may know more. This book is a must read because it will give you the frame and the language you need to go after the deep roots of conservative rule and destroy them.
Frank’s essay in August issue of Harper’s Magazine focuses on the rise of conservative power in the Reagan era. Look for it on the newsstands (or subscribe and read it online).
The story Frank tells explains a lot about how and why the Bush Administration does what it does. The details will appall you. He starts by using the example of the Abramoff scandal to frame the problem (emphasis added):
Journalistic coverage of the Abramoff affair has clung reliably to the "bad apple" thesis, in which the lobbyist's sins are carefully separated from the movement of which he was once a prominent part. What Abramoff represented, we read, was "greed gone wild." He "went native." He was "sui generis," a one-of-a-kind con man, "engaged in bizarre antics that your average Zegna-clad Washington lobbyist would never have dreamed of."
In which case, we can all relax: Jack Abramoff is in jail. The system worked; the bad apple has been plucked; the wild greed and undreamed-of antics have ceased. But the truth is almost exactly the opposite, whether we are discussing Abramoff or the wider tsunami of corruption that has washed over the capital in recent years. It is just this: Fantastic misgovernment is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is 'friendly to industry not just by force of campaign, contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, what follows from that: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington. [snip]
But put conservatism in charge of the state, and it behaves very differently. Now the "values" that rightist politicians eulogize on the stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely different set of priorities-priorities that reveal more about the unchanging historical essence of American conservatism than do its fleeting campaigns against gay marriage or secular humanism. The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school: Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing topnotch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.
From here, Frank’s essay follows the early career of Abramoff and his fellow Republican grifters. He lays out a straight line from Reagan to Bush to McCain all connected by the legions of Right-Wing Con Men dedicated to destroying our Constitution and Government for profit and a sense of entitlement thinly masked as a "conservative" political philosophy.
Thomas Frank exposes how the modern Republican Party and the Wing-nuts who control it have created a massive industry based on capturing Government and then using the levers of power to enrich themselves, their patrons and destroy their enemies—especially the Government that they have captured. It is a very profitable and entrenched industry and dismantling it will take years of effort and focus. Frank’s essay gives us an idea of the scale of the problem we face:
There is so much money in conservatism these days that Karl Rove rightly boasts, "We can now go to students at Harvard and say, 'There is now a secure retirement plan for Republican operatives.'" The young people who, like Jack Abramoff before them, have answered conservatism's call over the past three decades were obeying their conscience, perhaps, but they were also making a canny career move.
Canny career moves are just about all we can expect from conservative government these days: tax breaks for wealthy benefactors, wars started and maintained for the benefit of American industry, fat contracts granted to the clients of the right consultant. Like Bush and Reagan before him, John McCain is a self-proclaimed outsider, but should he win in November he will merely bring us more of the same: an executive branch fed by, if not actually made up of, lobbyists and other angry, righteous profiteers. Washington itself will remain what it has been-not a Babylon that corrupts our pure-hearted right-wingers but the very seat of their Industry Conservatism, constantly seething and effervescing, with tens of thousands of individuals coming and going, each avidly piling up his own tidy pile but between them engaged in an awesome common project.
And the common project is the destruction of our liberties, our Government and our Nation. It is way past time to take on and stop these thugs. Thomas Frank understands what the Culture of Corruption is and that we must crush it if we want to take this Country back.
Every Wednesday, he is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I find myself looking forward to it every week.
His column from June 18, 2008 is an example. This was a stinging indictment of the hypocrisy of the Right and it offered a clear roadmap for Progressives who want to strike at the heart of the beast.
Frank begins with the standard reaction of the right to their many scandals and failures:
The movement's ideals of "reform" and "justice" did not fail, intoned this towering figure of virtue; conservatism just never got a proper shot in the first place. "To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton," Mr. DeLay wrote, "conservatism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."
Did Mr. DeLay's head rotate on his shoulders, Linda Blair-like, when he wrote that line? I don't know. But it sure made this liberal chuckle. Nothing in this world Tom DeLay has ever wanted has been left untried.
Still, the sentiment is worth pondering. Present a conservative with a list of the recent scandals and episodes of misgovernment that have turned voters so overwhelmingly against the Republican Party -- a good number of which involve Tom DeLay, as it happens -- and you can be almost certain that they will respond as "The Hammer" does. They can't be held responsible for that stuff, they will say, since true conservatism is opposed to "big government." [snip]
We know the right will respond this way because this is how it always responds, disavowing its former champions as "K Street conservatives," as "impostors," or as liberals in disguise. Corruption and misgovernment are defined away as properties unique to the left; conservatism, meanwhile, is a doctrine of surpassing purity, accountable for no misdeeds of any kind, standing reliably on the side of principle and freedom and goodness every time. If it didn't deliver those fine things, that's because it never really got the chance.
The bald opportunism of this argument should be apparent to anyone.
Frank went on to cite examples of why the latest effort to re-brand the GOP and the Conservative movement is a transparent exercise in hypocrisy.
And then he offers us some solid advice about the two course of action Democrats could pursue as they move towards a governing majority and the November election (emphasis added):
The comfortable course of action for Democrats will be merely to pocket the coming windfall, to burble about how they have lifted the curse of ideology from the land, to replace the current gang of free-marketeers with their own gang of free-marketeers, and to resume the merry triangulations of eight years ago. The ins will give way to the outs, and they will rule happily ever after . . . until the next culture war takes them by surprise and sweeps them again from their contented perch.
Another route is possible, though. If they are willing to go beyond the regal rhetoric of post-partisanship, Democrats might find that they are, for the first time in decades, running against a philosophy of government that has utterly discredited itself. Should they choose to make 2008 a referendum on conservatism itself, they might deliver the knockout blow. They should start with the bad ideas that have delivered such disastrous consequences.
When I read that I smiled, because that is what we have to do.
We need to make the 2008 Election a Referendum on the Right—a Referendum on the effectiveness of conservatives controlling the levers of power.
It is time to take the fight to these bastards and force them to explain their corruption, their failure and the wide gap between the rhetoric and reality of their policies.
Only by exposing the myths, lies and intentional graft of the conservative movement can we deliver a well-deserved knock-out blow. The modern conservative movement is a failure and deserves a spot on the ash heap of history next to the other failed forms of tyranny.
Do yourself a favor and pre-order The Wrecking Crew from your favorite bookseller. Get the August issue of Harper’s Magazine and read about the early years of the Right Wing Grifters who have captured our Government. And follow their ongoing adventures in Frank’s weekly WSJ column.
For example, if you read his July 2 column, Charlie Black’s Cronies, you would have learned that McCain’s campaign Manager, used to belong to a right-wing youth group that included the Spanish fascist anthem Cara al Sol in their songbook:
Doing some research in the Library of Congress recently, an associate of mine came across a curious artifact of the Young Americans for Freedom, the high-spirited conservative group of the Vietnam era. It is a songbook prepared for the outfit’s 1971 convention, and in its mimeographed pages you will find a lyric poking fun at "Adlai [Stevenson] the bald-headed Com-Symp," and another moaning that, in the State Department, "everyone’s a Commie slave." All good clean fun, surely. Turn a few pages, though, and you will find that the righteous ones also lifted their young voices to warble "Cara al Sol," the humor-free anthem of Spanish fascism. [snip]
This year’s most prominent YAF graduate is Charlie Black, who was an officer of the group in the period when it sang fascist hymns and who now serves as a senior adviser to John McCain. [snip]
One way to know is by the company he has kept. In 1975 Black founded, with the help of fellow YAFer Terry Dolan, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which would contrive so brilliantly to poison the political atmosphere over the next decade. [snip]
NCPAC’s calling card was slime—"there have been a few mistakes made in terms of research," was all Black would admit—and the group’s main accomplishment was dodging the campaign-finance laws of the day, a curious achievement for a man John McCain would pick to advise his campaign. [snip]
Then there was Roger Stone, who became Charlie Black’s colleague in his 1980s lobbying firm Black, Manafort & Stone. Another YAFer, Stone made his reputation for scummy politics in the 1972 Nixon campaign, and has since become such a well-known impresario of calumny that the Weekly Standard described him last year as "a U.S. Army of treachery: He screws more people before 9 a.m. than most people do in a whole day." [snip]
These are only glimpses of Charlie Black’s story, but they are sufficient to suggest the larger picture. The man is a living link between the malevolent old conservatism and the pocket-lining new version, both of them united in derision at the notion that government might someday be conducted on the level. As that old YAF songbook instructed, "Keep the faith with cynicism / Cut the opposition down!"
As I said, I now look forward to Wednesday’s WSJ and I highly recommended The Wrecking Crew. Frank’s last book, What’s the Matter with Kansas helped Democrats re-learn how to compete in those Red States. This book will help us learn how to deliver a well deserved knock-out blow to the Right Wing by calling out their governing philosophy for what it is: corruption rooted in bullshit.
It is way past time to take this Country back and the quickest way to do that is to expose and defeat the intentional corruption, lies, myths and nonsense of the Right.
Cheers