E-mail a friendThomas Frank
airdate September 23, 2008
Writer and social critic Thomas Frank is the author of three nonfiction books, including the best-selling analysis of conservatism, What's the Matter with Kansas? He founded The Baffler, a magazine devoted to cultural criticism, and has contributed to several publications, including Harper's and The Nation. A Kansas native, Frank earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. His latest book, The Wrecking Crew, describes what he says is the rise of a ruling coalition dedicated to dismantling government.
Social critic explains what conservatism in power looks like and why it's not the same thing as conservative rhetoric. (2:51)
Full interview. (11:17)
Thomas Frank
Tavis: Thomas Frank is a contributing editor at "Harper's" and also a regular columnist for "The Wall Street Journal." His previous books include "What's the Matter with Kansas," one of the most popular books about politics in recent years. His latest is called "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule." Thomas Frank, nice to have you on the program, sir.
Thomas Frank: How you doing, Tavis?
Tavis: I'm well, and yourself?
Frank: I am dandy.
Tavis: (Laughs) "The Wrecking Crew?"
Frank: That's right.
Tavis: That's not nice.
Frank: (Laughs) You think it's a little harsh?
Tavis: It's not nice, man; you can't say things like that about conservatives.
Frank: You know what I was thinking about calling it?
Tavis: What?
Frank: "Idealism of Thieves."
Tavis: (Laughs) Okay, "The Wrecking Crew" ain't so bad.
Frank: You know what else I was thinking about - you want to hear some of the other idea titles?
Tavis: Yeah, I want to hear it, tell me.
Frank: Ideas for the title - I wanted to call it "The Gravy Masters." (Laughter) Okay, I had some really bad ideas.
Tavis: No, no, no. So okay, I take that back - maybe "The Wrecking Crew" isn't so bad after all.
Frank: (Laughs) Yeah, yeah.
Tavis: But we mean to suggest by this title, "The Wrecking Crew," what?
Frank: Well, it's about conservatives actually manage the government as opposed to remember "What's the Matter with Kansas" was about the way they - you meet them on the street in Wichita, the grassroots. Totally different sets of people, completely different mindset, as though they were unrelated.
Tavis: The primary differences are?
Frank: Well, in Washington you never hear about the culture wars. They just roll that out at election time. That has nothing to do with it. It's about the way they manage the federal government, and the way they manage the federal government is very, very poorly, let's say.
Tavis: Why is that? Because in this campaign and every campaign, to your point, what we get all the time from the conservatives, from the Republicans, is that Democrats mismanage government; that they overspend, that they're tax and spend. So when you say that they mismanage government, what do you mean by that?
Frank: Well, when people complain about liberals taxing and spending, I always say, "If you don't like high taxes, you shouldn't go invading countries that didn't attack us." You shouldn't be just blowing all the federal budget on contracting out federal work when it can be done much more cheaply by the federal workforce itself.
You go down the line and you look at the - also, look, you and I know, or we think we know who Republicans are and what Republicans stand for - balanced budget, right? Sensible spending levels, all these things. This is who - their identity going back for 50 years.
Tavis: Government out of our lives.
Frank: Off our backs, yeah. They leave us alone, they stop regulating us, they get out of our financial markets - I'm sure we'll come to that later.
Tavis: I'm sure we will.
Frank: But when they get in power, they act very, very differently. The rhetoric disappears. You look at the Reagan administration, which ran up the biggest deficit since World War II, and then as soon as - Clinton ran it back to a balanced budget, and he was a Democrat, you'll recall. And then Bush Jr. gets in and immediately ramps it right back up to deficit again. So I'm looking at this and I'm saying to myself, "They say one thing in their rhetoric, but when they're in power they behave very, very differently."
Look at John McCain right now traveling around the country on the stump, railing against lobbyists, railing against corruption - as well he should. He ought to be railing against that. But look at the way these people rule. And it's not just lobbyists. It doesn't just stop with a guy like Jack Abramoff. We're talking about taking entire federal bureaucracies and essentially handing them over to the industries that they're supposed to be regulating. Let industry run it.
We're talking about running agencies in reverse. We're talking about handing out their work to the private sector, where it's not accountable to you and me. It's not just individual acts of corruption. The entire way that they've managed the state is to - is, well, I guess you'd say to wreck it, sabotage it.
Tavis: You said a moment ago that you thought we would get to this later. Well, it's later, so we'll -
Frank: (Laughs) All right, let's do it.
Tavis: We'll get to it now. I've been waiting to ask you, given what you write in this book, how - maybe irony's the right word - how ironic you think it is that a party, certainly under Ronald Reagan, that built its infrastructure, political infrastructure, on the notion of deregulation is now crying for, begging for, saying to us that what's wrong with our industry, the banking industry and our economies of scale is that there is not enough regulation.
Frank: That's right. Not enough oversight, that's right.
Tavis: Not enough oversight, yeah.
Frank: Instantly - this is just in the last two weeks that they've come around to this position - you're looking at the last remaining large investment banks just the other day change their status so they could be more regulated, because that's what the market is demanding now. And these are people who for years were screaming to get government off our backs, let our - the whole ideology of this movement is laissez-faire, the markets can self-regulate, that markets will find an equilibrium, that you don't need to interfere.
And in fact, as you know, over the last 28 years since President Reagan first came into office, they've rolled back the regulatory state, the supervisory role of the state in all sorts of different aspects of life, whether it's inspecting food, inspecting toys for children, but especially - or like electricity deregulation, but especially - and you know about that out here in California; that one was a real winner.
But especially in financial markets, they have been - there is no idea more closely connected, more closely associated with the conservative movement than deregulating financial markets, and look what we've got. We've got this market where things are being traded, there's an entire market in these credit default swaps. We don't even know what they are.
It's not only not regulated, there's no supervision of it at all. We don't know what it is, and this is one of the things that is dragging us down. And suddenly, this is what I always come back to in the book - I'm going to change up on you here a little bit - that conservatism in power, again, to distinguish from conservatism at the grassroots level, which is often - I know a lot of conservatives at the grassroots level, I like some of them.
They're good people - they're honest, hardworking, good people. Conservatism in power is a very different beast. It is profoundly opportunistic. And what I mean by that is that it will take allies and throw allies away. It'll build up parts of its coalition and toss members of its coalition away. It'll grab hold of ideas and it'll throw those ideas overboard once their usefulness has been - once they're done with it.
And it remains loyal to only one thing, and that's the business community and the business class. And right now what we're seeing is them tossing overboard the most fundamental idea of them all - laissez-faire, the idea of letting the market do its thing.
Tavis: Does that mean that we are then on the precipice, on the verge of seeing a new Republican party?
Frank: Well, no, because unfortunately they're - wouldn't it be nice of we were talking about - well, wouldn't it be nice from my perspective. You've got to remember, I'm very liberal. (Laughter) Had you figured that out?
Tavis: Hadn't figured that out yet.
Frank: Yeah, yeah. I'm always sort of pining for the days - there used to be liberal Republicans in this country. I liked them. They were good guys. Nelson Rockefeller - hey, let's bring them back. I'd love to see that. And I was watching Paulson and Bernanke for the first few days of the crisis, and they were energetically getting in there, rolling up their sleeves, and I was like wow, there's something like the Roosevelt administration in these guys.
Tavis: Of course what they were saying then was, "We're not going to bail you out, we're not going to bail you out, we're not going to bail you out, we bailed you out."
Frank: Yes, and then suddenly they changed and we saw what's really going to happen, which is some people are going to get bailed out and then the rest of the people, like our viewers, they're going to get the new bankruptcy bill. They're going to get cracked down on. That's what happens to you and me.
Tavis: Back to that point we were getting at, though - whether or not you think that we potentially could see a new kind of Republican Party, given the moves that they're making right about now on this regulations (inaudible).
Frank: Well, you could - what we're going to see is not - whether it's new Republican Party or not, what you're going to see is a - we are seeing a shifting of the tectonic plates of the way we think about government. This entire philosophy of government that we have followed in this country for 28 years, and I mean Democrats as well as Republicans - there's plenty of Democrats caught up in this deregulate, privatize, outsource, all that stuff - this all stands before us utterly discredited right now, and yes, it is hopefully going away.
Tavis: One of the things I've found - perhaps the thing I found most fascinating about your book, because the minute I saw it, it made perfect sense to me, but I never thought about it in the way - in the terms that you laid out in the text, which is what the Republicans - what the party and what conservatives have built their strategy around are really two things: being an outsider, and being a victim.
Outsider and victim, and as an African American, when I first came across it in the text I'm thinking well, that's the argument that so often gets used against African Americans - stop whining, stop acting like outsiders, stop acting like victims, be Americans, not African Americans - so this whole outsider / victim argument I've been hearing since I can recall, but to your point, that's the strategy they have used to grab a hold of power, portraying themselves as victims and outsiders.
Frank: And you've got to remember it's a very attractive thing to imagine yourself when you're these people, when you're a conservative leader or a follower of that particular philosophy, to understand yourself as being persecuted, essentially for your righteousness.
That is an attractive idea, and you see it even at the most absurd levels. I'll tell you what the most absurd expression of it is. There's expressions of it up and down the spectrum, whether it's Sarah Palin talking about how people like her from small towns are looked down upon, whether they're calling liberals elitists because - or whether they're railing against educated people, the intellectuals.
But the funniest one, there's a book that came out a few years ago called "Rebel-in-Chief," about George W. Bush. Okay, he's the president of the country, and at the time he had a Republican Congress. He was the most powerful man in the world, and they were saying, "No, no, he's an outsider; he's an outsider in Washington, D.C." (Laughter) But this is a very attractive idea to build a movement around.
Tavis: I got about 30 seconds left. Tell me to what extent this movement has been aided and abetted by media, by conservative media, by talk radio.
Frank: Oh, man, I don't have to tell you this - they have played you guys. You know that. The whole liberal bias critique - there's a reason that people like me are not frequently seen on television, and that is because to do that is to invite this avalanche of criticism from these guys. They have played the media. They're very good at that sort of thing, by the way - the sort of strategic game of politics.
Tavis: Well, you made it on tonight.
Frank: (Laughs) Thank you very kindly, sir.
Tavis: (Laughs) And you got to make your case. Of course, we invite everybody on around here. The new book by Thomas Frank is called "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule." He's done this pretty well a couple times in the past. The author of "What's the Matter with Kansas," again, his new one, "The Wrecking Crew." Thomas Frank, nice to have you on the program.
Frank: Thank you, Tavis, it's my pleasure, as always.
Tavis: Good to see you. We'll see how much trouble you've kicked up in the next 48 hours around here.
Frank: (Laughter) Yeah, that's right.
Back to September 23, 2008