11-08-08, 10:03 am
The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank New York, Metropolitan Books, 2008
Original source: Morning Star
Thomas Frank is one of the best political writers in the US, but this is not his best book.
His previous books What's the Matter With America and One Market Under God established Frank's reputation as a thinking person's Michael Moore, moving beyond standard liberal howls of anguish to explore the underlying causes of the rise of the Republican right.
The Wrecking Crew sees him mutate into a thinking person writing a Michael Moore book, with simplistic, repetitive and often humorous arguments that make it very clear who the bad guys are but not much else.
Not that The Wrecking Crew is bad from a political point of view. It's an eloquent and heartfelt plea for a lost world of New Deal and Great Society liberalism.
While few on the left in Britain have ever stuck posters of Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson on their bedroom walls, anyone with a basic notion of the material interests of humanity will recognize how much better the liberal Democrats' American dream was when compared to the market and religious fundamentalist wackery that's held sway in Washington since liberalism left the building.
The problem with The Wrecking Crew is that it's just another book about really crazy right-wingers being really crazy and right-wing.
Frank reveals, in great detail, the links between disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the government of apartheid South Africa. This is darkly hilarious knockabout stuff, particularly the section on Jamba, a sort of hard-right Woodstock organized by Abramoff, then the leader of the College Republicans, in 1985.
The incredible selection of rogues presented included 'a Nicaraguan Contra' and 'some Afghan mujahideen' who joined with Abramoff to sign a declaration written by neocon guru-in-waiting Grover Norquist.
By 1986, the apartheid regime was paying for Abramoff to have his own Washington think-tank, the perversely named International Freedom Federation, which was primarily focused on discrediting opponents of the apartheid regime in the US.
This is all good fun, but there seems to be limited political value in discrediting a bloke who's currently serving four years in jail for corruption. It's highly unlikely that anyone who still supported Abramoff before publication would have The Wrecking Crew high on their reading list.
Frank's point, and the point of the book as a whole, is that Abramoff, jailed Congressman Duke Cunningham and redistricting champion Tom DeLay are not just bad eggs but they are the embodiment of political philosophy that has delivered bad government deliberately because it believes that government is bad.
He explains that the catastrophic federal incompetence that began partially under Nixon, was prosecuted vigorously under Reagan and reached its glorious nadir under Dubya was actually part of a systematic campaign to shatter the US people's naive belief that government should and could act in their interests and protect them from the unfettered whims of big business.
This central argument is convincing and also not widely recognized. The problem is that it's like reading a really interesting 10,000 word essay written up as a 90,000 word book.
What's missing is both in-depth discussion with federal workers about the real-life effects of this destructive approach to government and also interviews with US people about their changing perceptions of the state.
Not that this makes The Wrecking Crew a bad book. It's both an enjoyable read and a powerful chronicle of the baleful influence of big money and free market ideology on US politics, but it's also a partially missed opportunity.
