Kansas City News Blog

As I spoke to Thomas Frank by phone on Saturday morning, a mob of conservative Tea Party activists were converging on the National Mall, ranting and raving about government oppression and hoisting placards of the President in creepy, Joker-style white face.

Thomas Frank

​While many were shocked at the boiling outrage that surfaced at town hall meetings this summer, Frank, a political journalist most famous for his 2004 book What's the Matter with Kansas?, saw it coming. In his latest work, The Wrecking Crew, he describes how conservatives have strategized to undermine government programs, privatize its essential parts and instill an almost maniacal distrust of Washington, D.C., at the grassroots.

"Conservatism never depicted itself as unruly protesters on the Capitol Mall or guys screaming at a congressman at a town hall meeting," he says.

Welcome to the post-Wrecking Crew era.

The Wrecking Crew is a primer on how the conservative movement has changed the game in Washington, D.C. In far more detailed and engaging prose than I can replicate, Frank takes us back in history -- Jack Abramoff's history, for the most part. He uses the disgraced lobbyist's evolution -- from director of the College Republicans to defending wage slavery on the island of Saipan -- to chart the course of government for corporations, by corporations.

In this political movement, the "free market" is God, even when it means taking money from and rationalizing South African apartheid. By this logic, government's main constituents aren't people, but CEOs, which spawns a bona fide army of lobbyists who ensure government and business become nearly synonymous. But influencing government isn't enough -- the Wrecking Crew wants to smash the system entirely.

Frank highlights how conservatives have taken the reigns of government only to willfully tear it apart from the inside -- wracking up debt to financially starve liberal social programs; slashing the ranks of government employees and privatizing every contract in sight; and appointing agency directors who don't give a damn about (or, better yet, are openly hostile toward) the people and resources they're charged to protect.

"It's hard for people to grasp, because grasping it is understanding that it was done deliberately, that one of the two main parties of our country set out to run agencies in the wrong way," he says.

So step one: Insisting that business is supreme and government can't do anything right. Step two: Proving you're right by making government suck for everyday Americans. Step three: Stand back and watch your minions freak out about anything run by the government.

And freak out they have. It's not just the Tea Partiers, either. The conservatives' disdain for government is growing so rank that a congressman -- Joe Wilson, a Republican from South Carolina -- can feel compelled to call the President a liar in the middle of a speech. It's an interesting reversal, Frank says.

"Civility is a thing conservatives thought they owned," he says. "That was their territory. In the '90s, there was this big bestselling book by Gary Aldrich about [President Bill] Clinton -- one of first anti-Clinton books -- and the argument was, not that Clinton's policies were bad, but that Clinton had really bad manners and you could read his bad politics off his bad manners."

Now, in Frank's opinion, the Democrats are being too timid. The moneyed system wrought by the Wrecking Crew didn't disappear with George W. Bush. Frank argues liberal ideals will need strong and persistent champions to reverse the path of destruction. But most of the Democrats, Frank worries, aren't cutting it. "Their hearts aren't in it," Frank says of the ideological war.

The evidence, he says, is in the Tea Party protests -- and the fact that they're succeeding to shift the debate on health-care reform.

"The Democrats are already backing down against this sort of pressure, herded and chased by these crazy ideas, like the death panel business," he says. "It's depressing to me to see them so completely spineless, beaten by rumors. Again the conservatives, in a short amount of time, have out-organized them, out-fund-raised them. They're out there in the streets shrieking and they've beat the liberals at their own game once again. It's very disheartening. The Democrats have to pass health-care bill and it has to be a very good one. If they can show the results to public, it will be a game changer. If they don't do that, conservatives will be back next year in Congress."

And the wrecking will begin anew.

Here more from Frank when he speaks at the Kansas City Public Library, Central branch, tonight at 6:30 p.m.