If You Can’t Ante Up, You’re Not In The Game

Pottersville has posted a Thomas Frank article that offers fair recap of the neocon esthetic. As lived by Jack Abramoff, it’s a winner-take-all kind of thing:

… What the young conservatives of those days understood was that slogans are cheap, but institutions are not. Once broken or bankrupted, they do not snap back to fight another day. Cut off PIRG’s supply lines and the groups must dedicate their resources to justifying their existence, making it that much harder for them to agitate against nuclear power. It’s the political equivalent of strategic bombing, in which you systematically blast the rail junctions and ball-bearing factories of the other side.

Examples of such B-52 politics are all around us today. There are “paycheck protection” and school voucher campaigns, which are sold as rights issues but which are actually megaton devices to vaporize the flow of funds from labor unions to Democratic candidates. Social Security privatization, promoted as a way to make our retirements cushier, will also divert billions of dollars away from the welfare state and into the coffers of the G.O.P.’s allies on Wall Street.

Then there is the K Street Project. Almost as soon as they took control of Congress in 1995, Republican leaders began leveraging their newfound power to transform the corporate lobbying industry into a patronage fiefdom of the G.O.P. Lobbying firms were urged to hire true-believing Republicans or lose their “access”; once the personnel were Republican, the money followed. The result for the other side was also predictable: less money flowing to Democrats and a severe devaluation of a career in progressive politics. If Democrats have no place in Washington’s private sector, then the attractiveness of being a liberal is diminished by just that much more. …

Exactly how the founding fathers wanted it.

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