Let them eat cake

Just finished Tom Frank's new book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, which hits the stores in a couple of weeks. Like his last book What's the Matter With Kansas? it's stunning: it gets to the guts of the conservative derangement better than just about anything I've ever read. Everyone's familiar with Grover Norquist's famous quote about getting government small enough to drown it in the bathtub. This one is even more revealing. It's in Tom's chapter "Win-Win Corruption," on why there are so many scandals every time the right rules Washington. It's not an accident; conservatives basically see it as their duty to loot the government—or, at the very least, they cannot help it:

The problem is that the federal government hands out billions of dollars, and people will lie, cheat, steal, or bribe to get it. If you have a big cake, and you put it under the sink and then you wonder why the cockroaches are in your kitchen, I don't think any sprays or blocking the holes in the walls are going to get rid of the cockroaches. You've got to throw the cake in the trash o that the cockroaches don't have something to come for.

Reflects Tom:

If you don't like what Norquist and his buddies are doing in Washington, your only alternative is to give up on economic justice altogether, to throw the whole thing in the trash. Although Norquist made this analogy back in 1997, it was the conservative movement's standard, all-purpose reaction to the scandals of 2005 and 2006. If you don't like corruption, you must do away with government.

He quotes Jack Abramoff saying much the same, and concludes:

When a free-market theorists says the answer to corruption is no government and is then seconded by the leading corruptionist of our time, a "free-marketeer" who says that no government is the only way you will stop people like him, we have come very close to a union of theory and practice.... Corruption has now become just another way to attack the liberal state, a sort of street theater in which the right-wing provocateur makes his point about government by demonstration. Give him what he wants, or he'll do it again.

As he puts it in his introduction: "They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives.... In right-wing Washington, you can be a man of principle and a boodler at the same time."

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