Book Review: The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank

The corporate media would have the US citizenry believe Donald Trump and his regime of destruction are an anomaly in the history of our government. Thomas Frank knows otherwise—Trump is merely the perhaps inevitable culmination of decades of conservative politics. That he is also a perfect stalking horse to keep the public distracted while the neoliberals in both parties gut the republic is serendipity at its finest.

“Believing effective government to be somewhere between impossible and undesirable, conservatism takes steps to ensure its impotence,” Franks writes on page 130. In other words, conservatives want government jobs held by people whose politics are right rather than by people who are competent and committed to doing those jobs well. By that standard, Donald Trump’s lack of experience in government is a feature for his GOP colleagues, not a bug. Nor should anyone be surprised that the first three months of the current administration has resulted in the elimination of many, many experienced people from all levels of government.

“Putting federal operations under the direction of people who are hostile to those operations’ existence is the second main tactic of conservative governance…Since the parts of government that conservatism most despises are often supported by the public, this strategy avoids the tactlessness of repealing or abolishing agencies while achieving the same result.” (p.156)

Of course, when Frank wrote that, there were still checks and balances in effect; those vanished with the wholesale takeover of all three branches of government by one party. And make no mistake, they and their real constituency—the plutocrats and corporations—have done just that.

If you didn’t know better, you would think (or like to think might be more to the point) that Frank’s analysis of how conservatism and neoliberalism are turning the US federal republic into a neo-feudal plutocratic oligarchy is dystopian fiction. That you do know better, reading it is the stuff of nightmares, especially given it seems they have achieved their goal. If you want to see what our new overlords have in mind for us, be sure to read chapter 9 carefully.

The first step in understanding libertarian conservatism, as with most things, is to learn the vocabulary.

“In 1990 [libertarian pundit Doug Bandow] published an entire book on the subject [of corruption], The Politics of Plunder, in which he attacked ‘legalized larceny’ (farm programs), ‘mass transit robbery’ (public transportation), and ‘consumer fraud’ (the FTC and FDA).”

One of my personal favorite favorites is when fossil fuel corporations demand the right to poison us on the grounds they are “creating jobs and contributing to the American economy.” That’s conservative-speak for “there are millions of dollars’-worth of X in the ground, and we don’t care who we kill to get it.”

There is plenty of blame to go around for the looming apocalypse we as a nation are facing, not least that we the voters have turned blind eyes and deaf ears to decades of corruption because (a) it didn’t really affect us and (b) we were busy with other, more important stuff. We also became brainwashed by media who kept telling us to trust them while they covered up the fact we were being sold down the river by those who were supposed to be working on our behalf. Anyone wishing to change that direction can definitely benefit from reading this book, because in addition to tracking the history we were all ignoring it makes clear just how badly we have been bamboozled.

I commented on a friend’s Facebook Timeline recently, based on this book and many of the others I’ve been reading and reviewing, that the goal of those currently running the US government is to replace the US Constitution with an updated version of the old Articles of Confederation. When you add what Frank has presented to a thorough grasp of the goals of neoliberal economics, that becomes clear. What makes this particular book more useful to beginners on the road to reawakening is Frank’s ironic voice and style, which will offend those who think “small government” is utopia and appeal to those who understand the alternative is the destruction of government by, of and for all the people.