Thomas Frank’s The Wrecking Crew was published in 2008. It covers the ideology and praxis of post-Powell Memo conservatism, with particular attention to Bush the Younger — the “maladministration,” we used to call it — ending at the beginning of the Obama Era. Since I got on the Frank train only with 2016’s Listen, Liberal!, I hadn’t read it until I got the bright idea of writing this post.
Reviews back in the day were favorable but didn’t add a lot of value to the book itself, of which you are about to see several pages. Two caught my eye. The first is from an interview of Frank by the great Bill Moyers on PBS. In it, Frank puts the thesis of Wrecking Crew on a postcard:
Missing from “The Wrecking Crew” is any acknowledgment of what, from a left perspective, should be considered good news: the defeat of the antigovernment right in most major policy battles, from Social Security privatization to private school vouchers. Bush’s plan for Social Security was so unpopular it never came to a vote in the Republican Congress, which enacted (to be sure, with payoffs to pharmaceutical companies) the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the biggest increase in government involvement in the health care industry in the United States since Medicare’s creation. Incapable of overthrowing big government, even when they controlled all three branches, the right has been limited to tinkering with it.
Indeed, one might argue that the defeat of the attempted libertarian revolution puts the money-making schemes of Frank’s villains in a different light. Former young conservative firebrands…. settled for enriching themselves precisely because they were unable to repeal the New Deal.
