Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Follow this dime
By Thomas Frank
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.)
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