Books

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
By Thomas Frank, Metropolitan Books, 384 pp.

In 2005, Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? worked through a question vital to understanding the Republican Party: Why do working-class class voters support a political party that largely governs against their economic interests?

The result was brilliant and insightful, brimming with the struggles of real-life people caught up in the culture war. This year Frank follows up with The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule.

Trouble is, Frank didn't write one book; he wrote the introductions to several, all backward-looking.

In one treatment, Frank looks back at the roots of this era's muscular conservatism, a brand, he claims, that is adept at winning elections and incompetent at governing.

Another story follows the lobbying excesses of Republicans in the 1990s and early part of this decade.

Still another takes us on an excursion through suburban Washington's palaces dedicated to espousing everything from defense contracting to free-market ideology.

Then there's the movement from which the book gets its title. Conservatives who despise government, Frank writes, are doing what they can to weaken trust in it by stocking it with incompetents like "Heckuva Job" Brownie and the rest.

All these stories are worth telling. Still, this reviewer was hoping for something else that explained how Kansas and the rest of the nation can move forward.