...there's a fundamental conflict in Republican ideology. Essentially, Republicans say "we don't believe in the Federal government," but then they say "elect us to run the Federal government." Hurst pointed out that this is like someone coming to him and saying, "I don't like lawyers, I don't believe in the law, I think law firms should all be shut down or ruined, so please hire me to work at your law firm!" Ha. According to Hurst - and I agree with him - attempting to lead something you don't believe in is a recipe for disaster and for failing to take responsibility. Hurst: "And you know what, it shows..."In Hurst's view, incumbent Tom Davis - serving his 6th term despite a professed belief in term limits (from "Contract With America" days) - epitomizes the Republican attitude that nothing's ever their fault, since the government's not theirs anyway - despite the minor detail that they control all three branches. According to Hurst, Davis thinks it's ALWAYS someone else's fault ("theyism," as Hurst called it)...
The results of not taking responsibility or ownership, in Hurst's view? The ballooning Federal budget deficit. The Hurricane Katrina debacle. The culture of corruption...
All of which is exactly what Thomas Frank describes in excruciating detail in his new book. For those who believe that this particular Republican administration or that one is just a bad apple, maybe a particularly incompetent president or whatever, Thomas Frank has an answer:
This wave of misgovernment has been brought you by ideology, not incompetence....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.
...Conservatism, as we know it, is a movement that is about greed, about the "virtue of selfishness"...
The result of all this, after several decades of conservatives working to trash our government? According to Frank, it's nothing less than "democracy buried beneath an avalanche of money." Another way to put it is the way Justice Louis Brandeis did when he said, "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." Who's going to fight this? Unfortunately, I don't see too many Teddy "Trust Buster/Bull Moose" Roosevelts out there these days, nor do I see much "muckraking" going on in the corporate media (in part, this explains the rise of the netroots). That means it's up to us, apparently, if we care enough about our country and our government to defend it.
Another important theme that runs throughout the book: conservatives are supremely cynical, despite their protestations to ideals like free markets, free people, etc. To the contrary, what this REALLY is all about is simple, according to Frank: government of the big corporations (and the very wealthy), by the big corporations (and the very wealthy), for the big corporations (and the very wealthy). It is about trashing the very idea of a "common good" and outsourcing it (preferably via no-bid contract) the private sector, skimming off a nice chunk for yourself in the process, of course. It is about destroying the power of workers and replacing it with a system in which there is no effective counterweight to corporate power run amok. It is about systematically proving that government "can't work" by stocking government agencies with incompetents, ideologues who fundamentally disagree with the agency's mission (e.g., putting a forestry industry person in charge of the Forest Service, or a Big Oil guy in charge of protecting the environment). It is about corruption - the "revolving door" and "pay to play" politics. It is about, in the end, "capturing the state and using it to destroy liberalism as a practical alternative."
Is this hyperbole? Perhaps, but not by much as far as I can tell. Just look at what happened with Iraq war contracting, the Hurricane Katrina debacle, the politicization of our entire government the past 7 1/2 years, the rewriting of science to serve corporate interests, the skewing of the tax code in favor of the wealthiest and most powerful Americans, the screwing of the middle and working classes, Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay. If that's not enough evidence for you, then perhaps nothing will convince you. Personally, I was already convinced, and Thomas Frank's book was simply a confirmation of all my worst nightmares.
By the way, there's a fascinating Virginia angle in Chapter 1 of "The Wrecking Crew." Entitled "Golconda on the Potomac," the chapter focuses in particular on Loudoun County. I particularly love the description of Loudoun County board member Eugene Delgaudio and what his particular "wrecking crew" set out to do in their neck of America:
...Delgaudio first came to public attention as the zaniest of the Bill Clinton haters, sending out mass-mailings begging for money so he could track down the murderer of Vince Foster; later on, his morbid horror of Clinton morphed into a morbid horror of homosexuality. His trademark tactic is to dramatize these views with public speeches that are so juvenile and so thick-witted that one actually feels shame for the man...Delgaudio is a queer bird even by the standards of the American right, with its long tradition of eccentric people and peculiar ideas. But the operations of the Loudoun County ring - from its outraged rhetoric to its steamrolling of opponents to its sordid self-serving to its backing by business interests and its generous handouts to same - were not deviant or extraordinary in any way. What the county's government did may well land some of its principals in trouble, but it is precisely what we should expect governments to do when they are controlled by business...We might even call this richest of American counties a laboratory of democracy - in which all the experiments are designed to see just how much public stuff private interests can grab before democracy does something to stop them.
This is what all of America looks like when conservatives run the machinery of the state.
And just remember, this is not an aberration, it is part and parcel to what conservatism is all about - cynicism, greed, corruption, and corporate power uber alles. Which is exactly why we have to stop them everywhere we find them. In short, it's time to get to work stopping the Republican "wrecking crew" and rebuilding America from the rubble of what they have wrought.
I think it's important for progressives who truly believe in our system and government's power to check corporate power to remember that the cynical, greedy, blame others, conservative mindset infects both major parties. It just so happens that many more of them have ended up in the GOP today.
If the consequences haven't been even more horrible for innocent bystanders, I'd laugh at how the GOP have brought themselves to the brink of collapse by installing the quintessential mindless conservative that currently occupies the White House.
The Dems have a tremendous opportunity to ride the wave of discontent to power, but if they sell out and give too much power to their more conservative members, or those unprincipled GOPers who may switch parties the way a few Dems did after the '94 GOP wave, they'll be letting the foxes into the henhouse.
Let's hope Obama doesn't propagate the as-yet still fantasy that post-partisanship is possible by picking someone acceptable to conservatives as his running mate.
And, not to be a whiner, but I could have done without those prescient words from Andy Hurst. Am I bitter? Let me put it this way; I still haven't resubscribed to the WaPo after they endorsed Davis in '06. And speaking of Davis, what a perfect example of blame others. Anyone else notice how he started bad mouthing the GOP "brand" only after his wife got dumped by the smart and/or lucky voters who went with Chap and Davis himself got dumped by the VA GOP in favor of the convention format that chose Gilmore? No offense to Leslie Byrne who would have been great, but it's painful to think how much better off VA-11 would have been had Hurst won in '06.
Would you hire a vegetarian to be a butcher?
Not many people know also that the government is responsible for penicillin. No company would pay to figure out how to make it. So the government had to pay Merck so that there would be some for the troops in World War II.
FWIW, the lack of a drug pipeline for US Pharma is directly correlated to Bayh-Dole. Since then, companies began to spend more on TV ads than R&D, and touted their "entrepreneurial problem-solving" while they stopped funding their own R&D and sat on their hands to let the government do all the work. Yes, the same people that beg you to pay their taxes because they are supposedly going broke developing cures.