Thomas Frank on the Bush Administration: Sabotage by Design (Rick Perlstein)

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Thomas Frank

The author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?" discusses the corrosive relationship between conservatives and business, liberal bias and his new book about Republican misrule.

Aug. 7, 2008 | Thomas Frank is back with another hunk of dynamite. His "What's the Matter With Kansas?" monopolized political discussion for over a year when it came out in the summer of 2004. "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule" should monopolize political conversation this year. It's the first book to effectively tie the ruin and corruption of conservative governance to the conservative "movement building" of the 1970s, and, before that, the business crusade against good government going back at least to the 1890s.

{xtypo_quote_right} For me, this gets at an essential aspect of conservatism: In addition to being a movement it is also an industry, a field in which entrepreneurs can prosper. The right fights the left and gets paid for it. {/xtypo_quote_right}

Here, for example, is a splendid bit Frank pulled from the Journal of Commerce from 1928 about why it's best for business to wreck the state:

"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 house pet by comparison."

The guy who wrote that was a military contractor and former head of the national Chamber of Commerce. The genius of today's conservative movement, however, is that it doesn't need barons of commerce to say these things anymore. Conservatives have won over a species of the bright-eyed madmen -- kids writing for college newspapers, who can call themselves "principled" conservative "idealists," fighting the "battle of ideas" while carrying the water of corporate America.

We see the results before us. While the Bush administration "presided over one of the greatest expansions of federal spending in history, the number of federal employees actually decreased during Dubya's term of office." The conservative ascendency did not merely change the composition of government; they sold government off to business, piece by piece -- and, of course, it was sabotage by design.