WILLIAM H. GASS ON HENRY JAMES +------ THE WRECKING CREW I How a Gang of Right-Wing Con Men Destroyed Washington and Made a Killing By Thomas Frank THE MANDARINS American Foreign Policy, Brought to You by China By Ken Silverstein $6.95US 08> JACK A story by Marilynne Robinson I ________________ + 0 7148603052 2 E S SAY THE WRECKING CREW How a gang of right-wing can men destroyed Washington and made a killing By Thomas Frank Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a the golf trips to Scotland, the gleeful contempt democracy because it violates the system's first he expressed for nearly everyone in his voluminous principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny emails, and, later, the desperate wriggling of promi- days of elementary school: that the government nent Republicans as they tried to deny their old pal. exists to serve the public, not par- , Journalistic coverage of the ticular individuals. We Are the Gov- Abramoff affair has clung reliably ernment, insisted the title of a civics to the "bad apple" thesis, in which primer published in the earnest the lobbyist's sins are carefully sep- year of 1945. "The White House arated from the movement of belongs to you," its dust jacket told which he was once a prominent us. "So do all the other splendid part. What Abramoff represent- buildings in Washington, D.C." ed, we read, was "greed gone wild." This idea runs so deep in the He "went native." He was "sui American grain that many of us generis," a one-of-a-kind con man, can't bring ourselves to question "engaged in bizarre antics that your it, even in this disillusioned age. average Zegna-clad Washington Republicans and Democrats may lobbyist would never have fight over how big government dreamed of." should be and exactly what it In which case, we can all relax: should do, we tellourselves, but Jack Abramoff is in jail. The sys- surely everyone shares those baseline good inten- tem worked; the bad apple has been plucked; the tions, that simple devotion to the public interest. wild greed and undreamed-of antics have ceased. We continue to believe this despite such mas- But the truth is almost exactly the opposite, siveevidence to the contrary as the career of jack whether we are discussing Abramoff or the wider Abramoff, the conservative lobbyist whose feats of tsunami of corruption that has washed over the cap- corruption have been unreeling in newspaper and ital in recent years. It is just this: Fantastic mis- congressional investigations for years. On Janu- government is not an accident, nor is it the work ary 3, 2006, Abramoff pled guilty to bribing a of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of member of Congress, evading taxes, and defraud- triumph by a particular philosophy of government, ing his clients, but what made his case memorable by a movement that understands the liberal state were the incredible details: the millions of dollars as a perversion and considers the market the ide- Abramoff and his confederates casually squeezed al nexus of human society. This movement is out of clients, the luxury restaurant he opened in 'friendly to industry not just by force of campaign order to hand out the goodies more efficiently, , contributions but by conviction; it believes in Thomas Frank is the author offour books, including What's the Matter with Kansas?and the forthcoming The Wrecking Crew (Metropolitan Books), from which this essay is adapted, Illustration (detail) by Jeremy Traum ESSAY 35 entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in head of a small occupying army of insurgents .... politics; and the inevitable results of its ascen- He's an alien in the realm of the governing class, dance are, first, the capture of the state by business given a green card by voters." and, second, what follows from that: incompe- The hallucination is dazzling, awesome. For tence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam most of the past three decades these insurgents that we've come to expect from Washington. have controlled at least one branch of govern- The correct diagnosis is the "bad apple" thesis ment; they were underwritten in their rule by the turned upside down. There are plenty of good biggest of businesses; they were backed by a robust conservative individuals, honorable folks who social movement with chapters across the radio would never participate in the sort of corruption dial. Still they remain the victims, the outsiders; we have watched unfold over the past few years. they fight the power, the establishment, the snobs, Hang around with grassroots conservative voters the corrupt. John McCain rails against Washing- in Kansas, and in the main you will find them to ton as the "city of Satan"-which in any sober the- be honest, hardworking people. ology would make him Lucifer's lieutenant. Fred But put conservatism in charge of the state, and Barnes, the author of Rebel-in-Chief, is such a it behaves very differently. Now the "values" that well-known Washington fixture that he hosts a TV rightist politicians eulogize on the stump disap- show called The Beltway Boys. Karl Zinsmeister, pear, and in their place we can discern an entirely the editor of a magazine published by the ultra- different set of insiders at the American Enterprise Institute, re- priorities-priorities viled the people of the capital in 2004 as "moral- THE GOVERNMENT IS NEVER that reveal more ly repugnant, cheating, shifty human beings." about the unchang- Soon afterward he was rewarded for his adher- THEIRS, SAY THE CONSERVATIVES, ing historical essence ence to the fantasy by -being appointed chief of American conser- domestic-policy adviser to President Bush. NO MATTER HOW MUCH OF IT vatism than do its Conservatism-as-revolution was' not always THEY HAPPEN TO CONTROL fleeting campaigns such a ridiculous idea. In the Fifties and Sixties, against gay marriage conservatism was widely regarded as a deluded rel- or secular human- ic of an earlier age. The Republican Party itself ism. The conservatism that speaks to us through was dominated at that time by its moderate fac- its actions in Washington is institutionally op- tion, which conservatives defeated only after a ti- posed to those baseline good intentions we tanic struggle spanning many years. Then, in the learned about in elementary school: Its leaders Seventies, right-wing insurgencies spread across laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy the country: conservative cliques took control nonsense; they caution against bringing top- of the Southern Baptists and the National Rifle notch talent into government service; they de- Association, and in 1978 the first of a wave of tax clare war on public workers. They hav.e made a revolts shook California. In 1981 came the tum cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have of the College Republicans, where the right-wing wrecked established federal operations because takeover was led by none other than the future they disagree with them, and they have deliber- supercorruptionist Jack Abramoff. This uprising ately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force holds special significance for the historian, since the government into crisis. The ruination they it not only introduces us to the cast of characters have wrought has been thorough; it has been a who went on to dominate Washington during professional job. Repairing it will the Gingrich and Bush eras but also provides a require years of political action. window into the conservative soul. The story begins in 1980, the year of the "Rea- Let us start with conservatives' sense of their gan Revolution," when there appeared on the na- own exclusion. This idea may strike you as pecu- tional scene a phenomenon that bewildered po- liar, but to conservatives it is fundamental; it litical observers: legions of politicized, energetic predicates everything they do, say, and enact. college students who were conservatives rather The government is never theirs, they believe, no than liberals or radicals, as had been typical in the matter how much of it they happen to control. two decades previous. And not only were their pol- "Even when conservatives are in power they refuse itics deeply square but the idol of this unlikely - to adopt the psychology of an establishment," youth craze was the oldest president ever. Reagan's marveled the journalist Sidney Blumenthal dur- entire Pennsylvania campaign, for example, was ing the Reagan years. George W. Bush, who has run by a lad of twenty. In 1984, the aged actor won grabbed more power for the executive branch 60 percent of the college-student vote. The his- than anyone since Nixon, actually sees himself as torical turnabout was irresistible, and Reagan a "dissident in Washington." One of his more Youth became one of the great journalistic cliches worshipful biographers calls him the nation's of the period, powering hundreds of newspaper Rebel-in-Chief he "operates in Washington like the columns and at least one beloved TV sitcom. 36 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / AUGUST 2008 These sons of Reagan had a strong sense of gen- What the rising conservative sensibility of erational self-awareness, and they loudly told the - those years treasured above-all else was "con- world how they had come by it. In the midst of the frontation" with the left. It called for a quasi- interminable Iran hostage crisis, a crowd of them military victory over liberalism; it would have at one college campus were supposedly so moved no truck with 'civility or fair play; and it made he- by a showing of Patton that they demonstrated roes out of outrage-courting lib-fighters like Rea- spontaneously in favor of a nuclear attack on that gan's communications director Pat Buchanan, country, shaking the ivory tower with chants of the organizer Howard Phillips, and the young "First strike now!" Another well-known story of the Jack Abramoff.