What's the matter with Republicans?

Thomas Frank, who wrote that brilliant insta-classic "What's the Matter with Kansas?", has a new book coming out called "The Wrecking Crew." In it he examines the depth of Republican corruption and what it has done to Washington and our perception of self-government.  (Wait!  There's Democratic corruption, too -- it's just that the Republicans have been at it longer and Republicans have a more insane, skewed view of their own corruption.)  Frank points to the hallucination that Republicans harbor:  they still see themselves as insurgents, by god!, fighting corruption in big government! 

Frank has written an essay, adapted from the new book, for the latest Harper's.  It's as well to note that he uses the word "conservative" where I'd use "Republican."  Republicans like to call themselves "conservatives."  But that has to do with the language of the very corruption they're engaged in.  Genuine conservatives wouldn't do what they've done any more than real liberals would have enabled them -- signing onto the war, huffing uselessly at warrantless wiretapping and countless other appalling pieces of legislation passed over the past seven years.

Here's part of what Frank has to say:

Fantastic misgovernment is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals.  It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement tht understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the idea nexus of human society.  This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, what follows from that: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington.

The correct diagnosis is the "bad apple" thesis turned upside down.  There are plenty of good conservative individuals, honorable folks who would never participate in the sort of corruption we have watched unfold over the past few years.  Hang around with grassroots conservative voters in Kansas, and in the main you will find them to be honest, hardworking people.

But put conservatism in charge of the state, and it behaves very differently.  Now the "values" that rightist politicians eulogize on the stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely different set of priorities -- priorities that reveal more about the unchanging historical essence of American conservatism that do its fleeting campaigns against gay marriage or secular humanism.  The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school.  Its leaders laugh of 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 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.

Frank goes on to catalog the ascent and depredations of one particularly destructive Republican warrior:  Jack Abramoff.   There are plenty more Abramoff's out there, drawn into the "conservative" cause in part because it's what Frank calls a "canny career move."  He doesn't exempt that self-styled "maverick," John McCain, from association with the Abramoff group and its ethos.  (You only have to look at McCain's past, riddled with corruption and "canny" marital moves, to know that he's hardly a trustworthy, righteous maverick.)

Canny career moves are just about all we can expect from conservative government these days:  tax breaks for wealthy benefactors, wars started and maintained for the benefit of American industry, fat contracts granted to the clients of the right consultant.  Like Bush and Reagan before him, John McCain is a self-proclaimed outsider, but should he win in November, he will merely bring us more of the same: an executive branch fed by, if not actually made up of, lobbyists and other angry, righteous profiteers.  Washington itself will remain what it has been -- not a Babylon that corrupts our pure-hearted right-wingers but the very seat of the Industry Conservatism,  constantly seething and effervescing, with tends of thousands of individuals coming and going, each avidly piling up his own tidy pile but between them engaged in an awesome common project.

With, of course, plenty of help from the Republican's supine opposition.