This week we have made a lot of progress in getting at the underlying logic of the conservative state. We have discussed the massive differences between the way conservatives talk and the way they rule, the damage they have wreaked in those branches of the state they dislike, and the means by which they have handed off public responsibilities to private companies.

We have also expressed a lot of frustration with the powerlessness of journalists or bloggers to get these things into the debate all on our own. The points we have been raising need to be made, not just by cranky scribblers like me, and not even by expert observers like Dean and Danielle, but by social movements and ultimately by political leaders. The public desperately needs to know why it is that the government built to protect them has been transformed into a mechanism for their exploitation--why government repeatedly failed during the Bush years at projects both great and small--why industry has been able to capture government so easily.

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The kind of Democratic corruption I was referring to in my earlier blog post was not the Monica Lewinsky BS, but the unwillingness by Clinton's Department of Interior to collect oil and gas royalties and here and here (yes that was a problem under Clinton too), and the gutting of all Pentagon oversight offices because they created too much "red tape" (and here), and the repeal of Glass-Steagall to benefit Wall St. financiers at the behest of Clinton friend and donor Sandy Weill. Many of these were anti-government initiatives to make the government utilize free market strategies. The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) (www.pogo.org) has seen it all.

Don't get me wrong, much of what Obama is saying about his plans for the government looks good on the surface , albeit still a little vague.

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I don't want to pick fights that are not really there. I know that Tom sees the right as pushing class biased policies, and agree completely that this is the issue.

However, I don't think the point is always clear to readers that the right is not anti-government, they are just against government policies that help the vast majority of middle class and poor people. I think it is important to emphasize the distinction perhaps a bit more than Tom does.

[My book on this topic seems to have been left off the great book list down below, but you can get a free download of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer.]

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Tom Frank's The Wrecking Crew is a devastating account of the massive damage that the conservative movement, its ideology, and its leaders have inflicted on the country. The same exact blurb applies as well to other excellent books published within the past year or so by such authors as James Galbraith, Robert Kuttner, Paul Krugman, Jane Mayer, Rick Perlstein, Charlie Savage, Kevin Phillips, Ron Suskind, Jared Bernstein, Steven Greenhouse, Charles Morris, Jeff Madrick, Naomi Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald, Sidney Blumenthal and Greg Anrig. All of those books make the unambiguous case, from a variety of angles in a variety of styles, that conservatism produced failed government because conservatives disdain government and put self-interest above other values.

But while Republicans seem destined to be clobbered on November 4, the conservative movement will no doubt climb out of its coffin after a nap of unknown duration to bite the country in the neck again. Polls show that the share of the population self-identifying as "conservative" continues to hold steady at around the same level as it has for years. In the latest New York Times poll, for example, 36 percent self-identified as conservative, 38 percent as moderate, and 22 percent as liberal; the reading for conservative is toward the high end of the fairly narrow range the Times poll has measured since the early 1990s. Don't these people read books!?

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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.

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Dean Baker makes the important point that while conservatives talk free markets, they act persistently in the interests of a particular class. This is undeniably so, and Dean has many excellent examples to illustrate. It is strange that he thinks I'm unaware of it, however. The grand theme of The Wrecking Crew is that conservatives don't want small government; they want captured government, government run in the service of industry. In particular, their faithlessness to free-market theory is also a theme that runs throughout my discussion of Jack Abramoff's apartheid-backed thinktank, the International Freedom Foundation, which shifted its arguments all about (it was anti-communist, it was libertarian, it was whatever) but consistently labored in the service of money.

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The old saying goes: "You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your enemies." But my inner dialectician likes to ignore this saying. I like to imagine a dominant conservative movement emerging in the 1950's that was different from the one we eventually saw. A movement that focused on intelligent and selective restraint of statism, seeking to apply market power creatively and harmoniously with the government, and dedicated to its conservative rhetoric of equal opportunity, to the point where it took responsibility for its actual occurrence. A movement without the nativism, dogma, and racist undertones of the Nixon era and beyond. And one in which, had it been around in the 1960's, could actually challenge and improve the Great Society in a productive and synthetic way.

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Okay, we need to take a deep breath. Do readers really believe corruption is owned by either side of the aisle? The anti-government and pro-big business philosophy was alive and well during the Clinton Administration, as best illustrated by its Reinventing Government catastrophe (and here), and of course embraced with both arms and legs by the Bush Administration.

In The Wrecking Crew, Tom does a terrific job unraveling the insidious impact of the cynical conservative anti-government movement, most clearly seen in political appointees who do not believe in the mission of their agency. He also shows that this disease really infects both parties, although a more virulent strain has inflamed the Republican party. But in his blog, Tom is, I think, letting the Dems off too easily. On the Wall St. collapse, for example, the Center for Responsive Politics' analysis showed the biggest Senate recipients of Wall St. money were Democrats, after all.

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Tom has written a great book that should help drive more nails into the coffin of the conservative movement. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that he doesn't quite put the stake through the heart, which is really what we have to do with this monster.

The problem is that Tom still accepts too much conservative rhetoric at face value. Conservatives do not dislike government or want small government. They just dislike government policies that are designed to help the bulk of the population. They want the government to redistribute income upward and they are happy to have a government that is as big as necessary to accomplish this task. The stuff about small government and leaving things to the market is just pretty rhetoric they use to fool the kids (i.e. us).

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Everyone's a change-bringer this year. Everyone's a reformer. Even the improbable Sarah Palin tells us she intends to clean up not only Washington but to "stop the greed and corruption on Wall Street" itself. What's more, she wants to do it on behalf of--her own term--the "working class."

There are several reasons to cheer for this development. With the Republican standard-bearers now tacitly acknowledging that the Bush administration and the Republican congress were episodes of unexampled misgovernment, much of the right's exculpatory rhetoric can now be dispensed with. The verdict has hereby been reached on Bush, DeLay, Gingrich, and maybe even on Ronald Reagan himself. The case is closed. All that remains is to understand the causes of the catastrophe.

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Happy Monday Caférs,

With 106 days of the current debacle administration to go, Tom Frank joins us for book club this week to talk The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule.

The book takes a long hard look at the conservative revolution-- deregulation, lobbying, and institutionalized incompetence-- and the considerable aftermath. Joining Frank to talk shop will be Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), Dean Baker, the economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Chris Hayes, Washington editor for The Nation, and Greg Anrig, vice president of policy at The Century Foundation and writer.

We have yet to have a more timely discussion at Café-- please join us.