I'm glad Tom raised his reporting on Jack Abramoff's time running a think tank that served as a front for the Apartheid government of South Africa. For my money, it's the best chapter in the book and one of the most damning indictments of the moral turpitude of the modern conservative movement. It's worth the price of admission alone. (For a longer exchange between Tom and I about his book, you can read this interview.)

I think Tom and Dean are onto something that really gets at the heart of where we find ourselves right now, in terms of the end of an entire era of global political economy. In the past year, there are three books I've read, Tom's, Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and Jamie Gailbraith's The Predator State that each highlight a different side of the right-wing cube, but all come to a similar fundamental conclusion . (I should add Dean's excellent The Conservative Nanny State to this list as well, though it was published a few years ago.) That is, the actual real-world result of the ascendancy of a putative "free-market" philosophy has resulted in a larger, more coercive state, one that uses the power of Big Government to benefit the interests of Big Capital.

What to make of this contradiction? Tom says it's woven into the right's DNA. That the only way to understand why it isn't, in fact, a contradiction is to understand conservatism as a class project that dons different intellectual disguises in attempting to get it's way. There's certainly quite a bit to that.

But I do wonder what we make of the intellectual apparatuses of the conservative movement that truly do advocate for a vision of a radically stripped down state. There's a sense in which, as Rick Perlstein has written, in the right's catechism, "conservatism never fails, it is always failed." There's a sense in which this recalls the doddering Marxist's refusal to admit that after dozens of iterations in the real world, with disastrous results, perhaps the problem really was the theory after all. Similarly you will hear many a conservative decry Bush as a Big Government liberal, a traitor to the Hayekian vision, just as Stalin was denounced for betraying the pristine vision of Marx.

But if, in the actual lived world of politics, Hayek has mostly been honored in the breach, then what to make of that rump caucus of the right that still clings to him? That is: how seriously should we take the intellectual tradition of the free-market right? Was it all just a convenient front for capital all along? And is there anything morally and intellectually salvageable from the wreckage what it has wrought?