From the author of What's the Matter with America?, here is a jaw-dropping investigation into decades of deliberate and lucrative right-wing misrule in America.
In his previous book, Thomas Frank explained why working America votes for politicians who reserve their favours for the rich. Now, in The Wrecking Crew, Frank examines the blundering and corrupt Washington those politicians have given us.
Casting back to the early days of the conservative revolution, Frank describes the rise of a ruling coalition dedicated to dismantling government. But rather than cutting down the big government they claim to hate, conservatives have simply sold it off, turning public policy into a private-sector bidding war. Washington itself has been remade into a golden landscape of super-wealthy suburbs and gleaming lobbyist headquarters - the wages of government-by-entrepreneurship.
It is no coincidence, Frank argues, that the same politicians who guffaw at the idea of effective government have installed a regime in which incompetence is the rule. Nor will the country easily shake off the consequences of deliberate misgovernment through the usual democratic remedies. Obsessed with achieving a lasting victory, conservatives have taken pains to enshrine the free market as the permanent creed of state.
Stamped with Frank's audacity, analytic brilliance, and wit, The Wrecking Crew is his most revelatory work yet - and his most important.