 An Interview with Thomas Frank on his new book “The Wrecking Crew” Valentina Pasquali – Washington Prism Thomas Frank is the author of best selling “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” and recently became a weekly columnist for the Wall Street Journal. In his newly published book, “The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule,” Mr. Frank describes what he believes to be the principles of conservative politics as a philosophy of laissez-faire. He lays out how Republican Presidents and Congresses in the last twenty-eight years have, little by little, undermined the foundations of the liberal state and dismembered the U.S. Government, making it the inefficient and corrupt machine voters think it is today. “The Wrecking Crew” begins with a witty portray of Washington DC in the new millennium. In Frank’s account, the national capital has become a city solely dominated by glass high-rises sprawling up in Rosslyn, across the Potomac in Virginia, inhabited by lobbyists in designer suits, and subjugated to the encompassing presence of private consulting firms and government contractors. Mr. Frank wonders how metropolitan DC became one of the wealthiest regions in the country and the destination of choice for young ivy-leaguers seeking high paying jobs in the private sector, when it was once the place for passionate young men and women wanting to dedicate their lives to public service. The answer, according to Frank, lies in the takeover of Washington DC by conservatives that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and went into full force with the Newt Gingrich’s Congress in 1994. Despising the liberal state while worshipping the Market, the conservative revolution, slowly but methodically, proceeded to disrupt the government from within: “Believing effective government to be somewhere between impossible and undesirable, conservatism takes steps to ensure its impotence,” writes Frank. To achieve their goals, conservatives used a variety of means. They shrank the role of government agencies they deeply distrusted by appointing some of those agencies’ staunchest opponents to run them. Instead of letting government attend to the tasks it had always been responsible for, conservatives preferred handing over many of those tasks to private companies. Conservatives also understood, before and better than anyone else, the business potential of politics and successfully turned it into a lucrative enterprise with the help of industries such as lobbying. They also pushed for unconstrained deregulation to favor big corporations, and reduced public oversight of the private sector. As a result, Frank believes that conservatives created a fertile ground for corruption, wasteful spending and inefficiencies, and that they weakened the state to the point it had to give in to the power of money. Thomas Frank’s tale of the conservative self-fulfilling prophecy on the futility of government is carefully researched and offers a wealth of details. The line-up of interviews, the historical analysis and the data presented are impressive and provide depth to Mr. 
Thomas Frank It makes the reader wonder what liberal Americans in the national capital and across the country were doing while the GOP was taking the US Government apart. Do they bear any responsibility for the ballooning deficit and the uncontrolled growth of the budget? Have they also mistakenly relied on tools so damaging to transparency in politics, such as lobbying? And what can Americans do today to get their country back on track? In this interview with Washington Prism, Thomas Frank talks about “The Wrecking Crew,” Conservatism, and what it all means for the ongoing Presidential campaign. Washington Prism (WP): In your book you portray the take-over of Washington DC by conservatives and their distaste for the liberal state. How would you describe their mission with regard to reforming the role of government? Thomas Frank (TF): Conservative tradition doesn’t have a problem with government per se; they just want to be able to control it. Think of John Jay, for example. He once said: “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” What they really dislike is the liberal state. However, it’s hard even for conservatives to simply do away with all the agencies that that they dislike, such as the Department of Labor or the Environmental Protection Agency, because the public expects these agencies to exist. Conservatives can’t simply abolish them, and so they decided to capture them from the inside and then use them for goals different from those that they were originally set up with.
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