Thomas Frank's 'The Wrecking Crew' Explains the Right's All-Out Assault on Good Government

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 08/11/2008 - 2:01pm. Interviews A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

I think that what we're seeing now -- no-bid contracts -- is disgusting. ... That's the closest thing that you're ever going to get to government-backed business. At the end of the day, that's really what it's about. It's not about free market utopianism. It's about government by business.

-- Thomas Frank, author of The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule

* * *

One election cycle back, Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? helped Democrats understand the problem they had holding on to their erstwhile base of working middle America. Now in his latest book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, Frank nails the conservatives who have outsourced, privatized, shrunk, and absolved government of any impulse it might have to hold itself accountable to citizens.

As reviewer James Warren of the Chicago Tribune sums up Frank's expose of the conservatives now in charge of government: "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."