Thomas Frank gets it absolutely right. If you read nothing else this year, read this. (Lifted, quite illegally, from Asia Times, 8/7/08.):

Follow this dime

By Thomas Frank

Washington is the city where the scandals happen. Every American knows this, but we also believe, if only vaguely, that the really monumental scandals are a thing of the past, that the golden age of misgovernment-for-profit ended with the cavalry charge and the robber barons, at about the same time presidents stopped wearing beards.

I moved to Washington in 2003, just in time for the comeback, for the hundred-year flood. At first it was only a trickle in the basement, a little stream released accidentally by the president's friends at Enron. Before long, though, the levees were failing all over town, and the city was inundated with a muddy torrent of graft.

How are we to dissect a deluge like this one? We might begin by categorizing the earmarks handed out by Congress, sorting the foolish earmarks from the costly earmarks from the earmarks made strictly on a cash basis. We could try a similar approach to government contracting: the no-bid contracts, the no-oversight contracts, the no-experience contracts, the contracts handed out to friends of the vice president. We might consider the shoplifting career of one of the president's former domestic policy advisers or the habitual plagiarism of the president's liaison to the Christian right. And we would certainly have to find some way to parse the extraordinary incompetence of the executive branch, incompetence so fulsome and steady and reliable that at some point Americans stopped being surprised and began simply to count on it, to think of incompetence as the way government works.

But the onrushing flow swamps all taxonomies. Mass firing of federal prosecutors; bribing of newspaper columnists; pallets of shrink-wrapped cash "misplaced" in Iraq; inexperienced kids running the Baghdad stock exchange; the discovery that many of Alaska's leading politicians are apparently on the take - our heads swim. We climb to the rooftop, but we cannot find the heights of irony from which we might laugh off the blend of thug and Pharisee that was Tom DeLay - or dispel the nauseating suspicion, quickly becoming a certainty, that the government of our nation deliberately fibbed us into a pointless, catastrophic war.

Bad apples all around

So let us begin on the solid ground of these simple facts: this spectacular episode of misrule has coincided with both the political triumph of conservatism and with the rise of the Washington area to the richest rank of American metropolises. In the period I am describing, gentlemen of the right rolled through the capital like lords of creation. Every spigot was open, and every indulgence slopped out for their gleeful wallowing. All the cliches roared at full, unembarrassed volume: the wines gurgled, the T-bones roasted, the golf courses beckoned, the Learjets zoomed, the contractors' glass buildings sprouted from the earth, and the lobbyists' mansions grew like brick-colonial mushrooms on the hills of northern Virginia.

Democrats, for their part, have tried to explain the flood of misgovernment as part of a "culture of corruption", a phrase at once obviously true and yet so amorphous as to be quite worthless. Republicans have an even simpler answer: government failed, they tell us, because it is the nature of government enterprises to fail. As for the great corruption cases of recent years, they cluck, each is merely a one-of-a-kind moral lapse unconnected to any particular ideology - an individual bad apple with no effect on the larger barrel.

Which leaves us to marvel helplessly at what appears to be a spectacular run of lousy luck. My, what a lot of bad apples they are growing these days!

Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system's first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exists to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials. We Are the Government, insisted the title of a civics primer published in the earnest year of 1945. "The White House belongs to you," its dust jacket told us. "So do all the other splendid buildings in Washington, DC. For you are a citizen of the United States." For you, young citizen, does the Post Office carry letters to every hamlet in the nation. For you does the Department of Agriculture research better plowing methods and the Bureau of Labor Statistics add up long columns of numbers.

The government and its vast workforce serve the people: The idea is so deep in the American grain that we can't bring ourselves to question it, even in this disillusioned age. Republicans and Democrats may fight over how big government should be and exactly what it should do, but almost everyone shares those baseline good intentions, we believe, that devotion to the public interest.

We continue to believe this in even the most improbable circumstances. Take the worst apple of them all, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose astonishing career as a corruptionist has been unreeling in newspaper and congressional investigations since I came to Washington. Abramoff started out as a great political success story, a protege and then a confidant of the leaders of the conservative faction of the Republican Party. But his career disintegrated on news of the inventive ways he ripped off his clients and the luxury meals and lavish trips with which he bribed legislators.

Journalistic coverage of the Abramoff affair has stuck closely to the "bad apple" thesis, always taking pains to separate the conservative movement from its one-time superstar. What Abramoff represented was "greed gone wild", asserts the most authoritative account on the subject. He "went native", say others. Above all, 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's in jail. The system worked; the bad apple has been plucked; the wild greed and the undreamed-of antics have ceased.

Misgovernment by ideology

But the truth is almost exactly the opposite, whether we are discussing Abramoff or the wider tsunami of corruption. The truth is as obvious as a slab of sirloin and yet so obscured by decades of pettifoggery that we find it almost impossible to apprehend clearly. The truth slaps your face in every hotel lobby in town, but we still don't get the message.

It is just this: fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen 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, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington.

The correct diagnosis is the "bad apple" thesis turned upside down. There are plenty of good conservative individuals, honorable folks who would never participate in the sort of corruption we have watched unfold over the last few years. Hang around with grassroots conservative voters in Kansas, and in the main you will find them to be honest, hardworking people. Even our story's worst villains can be personally virtuous. Jack Abramoff, for example, is known to his friends as a pious, polite, and generous fellow.

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 top-notch 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.

Conservatism-in-power is a very different beast from the conservatism we meet on the streets of Wichita or the conservatism we overhear talking to itself on the pages of Free Republic. For one thing, what conservatism has done in its decades at the seat of power is fundamentally unpopular, and a large percentage of its leaders have been men of eccentric ideas. While they believe things that would get them laughed out of the American Sociological Association, that only makes them more typical of the movement. And for all their peculiarity, these people - Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Newt Gingrich, and the whole troupe of activists, lobbyists, and corpora-trons who got their start back in the Reagan years - have for the last three decades been among the most powerful individuals in America. This wave of misgovernment has been brought to you by ideology, not incompetence.

Yes, today's conservatives have disgraced themselves, but they have not strayed from the teaching of their forefathers or the great ideas of their movement. When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to the purveyor of the most lavish "golf weekend"; when they mulct millions from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns - in short, when they treat government with contempt - they are running true to form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.

And, yes, there has been greed involved in the effort - a great deal of greed. Every tax cut, every cleverly engineered regulatory snafu saves industry millions and perhaps even billions of dollars, and so naturally securing those tax cuts and engineering those snafus has become a booming business here in Washington. Conservative rule has made the capital region rich, a showplace of the new plutocratic order. But this greed cannot be dismissed as some personal failing of lobbyist or congressman, some badness-of-apple that can be easily contained. Conservatism, as we know it, is a movement that is about greed, about the "virtue of selfishness" when it acts in the marketplace. In right-wing Washington, you can be a man of principle and a boodler at the same time.

The wrecking crew in full swing

One of the instructive stories We Are the Government brought before generations of schoolkids was the tale of a smiling dime whose wanderings were meant to introduce us to the government and all that it does for us: the miner who digs the ore for the dime has his "health and safety" supervised by one branch of the government; the bank in which the dime is stored enjoys the protection of a different branch, which "sees that [banks] are safe places for people to keep their money"; the dime gets paid in tax on a gasoline sale; it then lands in the pocket of a Coast Guard lieutenant, who takes it overseas and spends it on a parrot, which is "quarantined for ninety days" when the lieutenant brings it home. All of which is related with the blithest innocence, as though taxes on gasoline and quarantines on parrots were so obviously beneficial that they required little further explanation.

Clearly, a more up-to-date version is required. So let us follow the dime as it wends its way through our present-day capital. Its story, we will find, is the reverse of what it was in 1945. That old dime was all about service, about the things government could do for us. But the new dime is about profit - about the superiority of private enterprise, about the huge sums that can be squeezed out of federal operations. Instead of symbolizing good government, the dime now shows us the wrecking crew in full swing.

Our modern dime first comes to Washington as part of some good citizen's taxes, and it leaves the US Treasury in a payment to a company that has been hired to do work on the nation's ports. Back in 1945, the government would have done the work itself, but now it uses contractors for such things. This particular contractor knows how to win a bid, but it doesn't know how to do the work, so it subcontracts the job to another outfit. The dime follows, and it eventually makes up a worker's salary, who incorporates it into his monthly car payment. From there it travels into the coffers of an auto industry trade association, which happens to be very upset about a rule proposed by a federal agency that would require cars to notify drivers when their tire pressure is low.

So the trade association 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 in the tire-pressure matter. 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.

But this is only the beginning of the story. As we make our rounds of conservative Washington, we glimpse something much greater than single acts of incompetence or obstruction. We see a vast machinery built for our protection re-engineered into a device for our exploitation. We behold the majestic workings of the free market itself, boring ever deeper into the tissues of the state. Ultimately, we gaze upon one of the true marvels of history: democracy buried beneath an avalanche of money.

Thomas Frank, the author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, is the founding editor of The Baffler, a contributing editor at Harper's, and, most recently, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. His WSJ columns can be read at his website. He lives in Washington DC and this essay has been adapted from his new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (Metropolitan Books, 2008).

(From the book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank, Copyright 2008 by Thomas Frank. Reprinted by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an Imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All Rights Reserved.)

Franks did flesh it out just a bit. But more or less.)

Thanks for that link...and to tartuffe...yes you have been saying these things for some months now...I have indeed noticed.

jo

admitting it actually happened. It won't be our generation that does it. Here's a companion piece, an interview (also lifted quite illegally)...

Thomas Frank on the Bush administration: Sabotage by design

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.

By Rick Perlstein

Aug. 07, 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.

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.

I interviewed Frank by e-mail the weekend before his book debuted. The conversation ranged from the manicured lawns of academe to South Africa; one of the things you learn in the book is that for American conservatives, the two worlds intersect in a rather perverse way. I began the interview by asking him about one of the most successful conservative activist groups of the 1980s, the United Students of America Foundation, an offshoot of the college Republicans. He has located a curious smoking gun in the receipts of their tax-deductible donations that shows the conservative youth movement as rather less idealistic than today's Reaganauts like to remember. You wouldn't be surprised to learn that a conservative youth group was funded by business. You might be surprised, however, to learn that it was largely funded by certain apparently random businesses like bottling companies.

Why did, of all things, bottling companies become diehard funders of the conservative youth movement?

It's an interesting story. According to a report I unearthed from the mid-1980s, bottlers funded a certain right-wing student group because it was doing battle on campus with Public Interest Research Groups [PIRGs]. The PIRGs were then funded by student activity fees, and what they did was push for things like bottle bills in various states. Bottle bills raise the price of soda pop; bottlers were hence natural foes of PIRG.

The fascinating thing about this is the entrepreneurial angle. Campus conservatives had been trying to cut off the PIRGs' funding for years; at some point, though, they started approaching bottlers and other companies to, essentially, hire them to defund the left. They were proselytizing for the political war.

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. It was a predecessor of the conservative lobbying industry and the Gingrich/DeLay Congress generally.

Just incidentally, the group that raised money to fight the PIRGs was headed by Jack Abramoff.

The next jump in the story would seem like a pretty big leap. But you show that the next stop in Abramoff's political adventure was, of all places, South Africa.

He surfaced as the chairman of something called the International Freedom Foundation -- the IFF -- which had branches in Washington and in Johannesburg. They published a magazine and a bunch of newsletters, they sent out direct mail, sponsored conferences, gave out awards, the usual. Above all, though, they fought the critics of apartheid, in particular the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela's group. Naturally they did this by accusing the critics of apartheid of being secretly pink, if not flaming red.

It's uncomfortable to remember now, but the American right was pretty fond of the apartheid regime. Yeah, they made all the correct noises about how South Africa was moving in the right direction, how apartheid was not as bad as everyone said, but the bottom line for them was that we had to take South Africa as it was. It was too valuable an ally in the Cold War. Of course, they also shared a conspiratorial worldview with the apartheid government, making them soul mates in a larger sense.

The funny thing is, the IFF later turned out to be a project of South African military intelligence. For all its constant attacks on the left for being closet tools of the Soviet Union, the conservatives were the ones who were on the payroll of a foreign power -- discreetly, of course. Abramoff and Company were, once again, fighting liberalism for pay. This was pretty big news in South Africa when it came out during the Truth and Reconciliation hearings. Not so big here.

So the IFF folded shop when apartheid ended?

Actually, just a little bit before. The apartheid government was floundering by 1992 and at some point it pulled the plug on the group's funding. The IFF tried to struggle on for a short time on its own, but somehow that didn't work out. As with so many right-wing groups preaching the free-market gospel, this one couldn't make it without subsidies.

What was really fascinating about the IFF was the transformation it went through as the Cold War ended. Where once it had been a conspiracy-spotting organ of the hard right, it became libertarian. By 1991 or so it was obvious that apartheid was doomed. So the IFF's new task, strange as it might seem, was to try to depict the apartheid system as having been an offense against markets. The IFF -- a bought-and-paid-for front group of the apartheid regime, remember -- declared that the only true way to post-apartheid freedom was through complete privatization and deregulation of everything. Free trade was also essential. So their magazine puffed for NAFTA. It announced state-run electric utilities to be Stalinist. It called for the privatization of oceans.

There were other groups in South Africa taking the same line, and the idea was to set the stage for a post-apartheid future in which money and business would be safe from nationalization. And they got what they wanted.

How does this all relate to the scams that landed Jack Abramoff in jail?

There are a lot of parallels between what Abramoff did for South Africa and what he did for his clients as a lobbyist, but most of them weren't criminal. The key similarity is the concept of political entrepreneurship, of bringing market forces to bear on politics. Abramoff eventually became a lobbyist, sort of the ultimate political entrepreneur. Lobbying generally puts our relationship to our government on a paying basis, and Abramoff was one of its ablest practitioners.

Along the way, he and his pal Michael Scanlon set up a whole bunch of hollow nonprofit corporations, at least one of which called itself a "think tank." And Abramoff continued to direct an army of pundits, particularly libertarian ones, although that's hardly a crime. He also steered his clients' money into the by-now-enormous conservative industry in Washington, essentially directing all sorts of advocacy groups in the war on liberalism. It's like he had stepped into the role of the Pretoria regime, running and subsidizing a whole army of American ideologues.

It's a striking story, even a breathtaking one, and yet it's not one we've heard much about before. The media seems to shrink from confronting the outright venality of the conservative movement. You told me you did one recent interview in which the interviewer seemed to think you wrote too much like an angry blogger, and thought you were too hard on convicted bribe-taker Duke Cunningham, the former congressman. Why this discomfort with the story you're telling?

Well, conservatives have been screaming for decades about how disrespected and downtrodden they are, and the media has finally learned the lesson. They are terrified of the famous "liberal bias" critique, and the tidal waves of criticism that will crash down on them if they examine conservatism straightforwardly. So they don't.

What they prefer instead is to talk about "both parties," and always to assume that everything in American politics is done simultaneously and in precisely equal measure by both sides. Believing this closes off all kinds of inquiry to you, blinds you to all sorts of not-so-subtle nuances and imbalances in the system.

There's also the problem that the things I focus on -- for example, that conservatism tends to be an organic product of business interests -- are things that disturb them. Journalists might be social liberals, but there are damned few of them who are ready to scrutinize the power of business or the benevolence of markets. Or the motives of entrepreneurs, even when they call themselves "political entrepreneurs."

My own observation, though, is that we have been living through a conservative era, that conservatives regard the state and corruption and political activity in a particular way, and that therefore these things need to be investigated. Yes, I know, the liberal era of 30 years ago had huge flaws, too, and its own pattern of corruption, its own favored groups, all of which are very, very well known. I know those things. Everyone knows them. But they happened a long time ago.

I think we need to talk about the people who are ruling us now -- how they think, what they have done with the state, and why it is that a new scandal seems to erupt every goddamned week.

-- By Rick Perlstein

Gotta hand it to you Americans. You've turned into your own little Banana Republic. And this is what your McCains and your Liebermans offer as a gift to the poor benighted Iraqis and Afghans?

I have always maintained that modern conservatives rely on ignorance in order to sell their greedy ideas to a gullible public. When I first heard about this ideology, I was in college. I knew it was filled with bad ideas even back then. But the salesman was good, he had a lot of experience selling Borax on TV and bamboozled the country into thinking he was going to do them a favor by annihilating the middle class. Here we are, 38 years later and I sure hope we wake up to this madness soon. Great article.

"Death Valley Days?" I think. Wasn't "Wagon Train"?

Interesting that you mention college, because if nothing else, at least back in my day, those poly sci profs, if they accomplished nothing else, wanted their students to understand the rudiments of textbook authoritarianism, and the ideas of "absolute power corrupting absolutely."

Yet millions were still duped by conservative babble. I could never understand why people were so eager to hand over power to an idealogy that so clearly gutted them.

z

<link>

If Obama and the Dems are successful this election cycle,can we trust that Obama with a Dem majority will flip this dime.. or will we see the Dems use thier one party rule the same way?

You give away your age but you are dead right. I used to like that show, it was very interesting. As for the gist of the article, it can be summed up as follows:

"The reason it did not work is because we did not do it right."

The reasoning behind this is not to question the idea or strategy involved, that would be treasonous. The only explanation is that the strategy was right, the conclusion was perfect, the logic impeccable but dammit, they just did not execute it properly.

We have heard this excuse time and again from Reagan to Bush to Newt to Bush and now McCain. Guess what? The whole idea start to finish is wrong including the logic.

I was very young, in fact all I really remember is the Borax and Ronnie narrating in black and white.

Reminds me of cute scene in Stand by Me where the main little kid says, "Yeah, Wagon Train is neat and all, but..you know...they just keep on wagon training..on and on."

Other than pure greed, where did all these guys come from who were consciously dedicated to destroying the very system of government they claimed to love so much?

It nothing short of mass psycosis.

z

Frank's a pretty accurate observer of the scene, and he gets the big picture, too. There is something rotten about conservatism taken to extremes--something this country hasn't witnessed since the 1920s, and before that during the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. If we can say that both liberalism and conservatism when taken to extremes are corrupt, then Frank's paragraph:

Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system's first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exists to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials.

implies that Americans have repeatedly violated democracy's first principle--that of public service above all.

In Frank's final two sentences:

We behold the majestic workings of the free market itself, boring ever deeper into the tissues of the state. Ultimately, we gaze upon one of the true marvels of history: democracy buried beneath an avalanche of money.

He equates the anti-democratic, plutocratic extremist, neo-conservatist government with the "free market", but as recent developments have shown, the market is increasingly rigged. Certain sectors are propped up by government fiat, and others manipulated. This is a "free market" only in name.

Contemporary conservatism is so damaging today precisely because it has learned from liberalism how to get votes.

rick014:

<link>

If Obama and the Dems are successful this election cycle,can we trust that Obama with a Dem majority will flip this dime.. or will we see the Dems use thier one party rule the same way?

bingo.

I believe bad as the rabid right wing cons have been and they have been..I expect that the odds are far greater that the gutsy McCain would be far more likely to take on the assholes in his own party far more swiftly than the ever appesasing flip flopping Barack Obama.

couldnt be a member of my election team?

doubtful. MCain is not the maverick his PR team has painted.

in any case..is it your opinion that the Dems would be just as corrupt as the repubs over the last 10 yrs or so?

"far more liikely....more swiflty" doesnt sound conclusive.

"Yet millions were still duped by conservative babble. I could never understand why people were so eager to hand over power to an idealogy that so clearly gutted them."

I think because conservatives did at least one thing right. They made the conversation about turning the power back over to the middle class. How many times have we heard conservatives say something like "The people are better at handling their money than the government is." followed the usual lies about reducing the size of government and the democrats forming a welfare-state. That kind of message, which essentially says "We think you're great!" Is a powerful reinforcement tool. It's sometimes hard for people not to buy into propaganda that essentially tells them that they are fantastic people.

and couldn't put it down. It's hard to comprehend the amount of money everyone was throwing around, especially at Abramoff/Reed/Norquist: what an idea they had from the beginning. Absolutely dazzling. Evil, sure, but so perfect. And unusable by the left, because its corruption is through the bone.