From the bestselling author of What’s The Matter With Kansas?, an exposé of the Washington conservatism has built: how it works, how it doesn’t, and why it’s here to stay
In his previous book, Thomas Frank explained why working America votes for politicians who reserve their favors for the rich. Now, in Wrecking Crew, Frank examines the Washington those politicians have given us, showing why, no matter what happens in November 2008, we’re stuck with it for the foreseeable future.
Casting back to the early days of the conservative revolution, Frank describes the rise of a ruling coalition dedicated to dismantling government. But rather than cutting down the big government they claim to hate, conservatives have simply sold it off, deregulating some industries, defunding others, but always turning public policy into a private-sector bidding war. Washington itself has been remade into a golden landscape of super-wealthy suburbs and gleaming lobbyist headquarters. And though arch-lobbyist Jack Abramoff has crashed and burned, the government-by-entrepreneurship he pioneered so outrageously has become the law of the land.
It is no coincidence, Frank argues, that the same politicians who guffaw at the idea of effective government have installed a regime in which incompetence is the rule. Nor will the country easily shake off the consequences of deliberate misgovernment through the usual election remedies. Obsessed with achieving a lasting victory, conservatives have taken pains to enshrine the free market as the permanent creed of state.
Stamped with Frank’s audacity, analytic brilliance, and wit, Wrecking Crewis his most revelatory work yet—and his most important.
Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter With Kansas? and One Market Under God, is also the founding editor of The Baffler and a contributing editor at Harper’s. Recipient of a Lannan nonfiction prize, he has been a guest columnist for The New York Times and frequently writes for Harper’s, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books, among others. He lives, of course, in Washington, D.C.
