a longtime are going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture it's friday which means it's time for conversations and great minds and i'm joined by author and historian thomas frank has written some such books as the wrecking crew and what's the matter with kansas discuss the evolution of american culture and its effects on our politics vice versa plus president obama warns khadafi to stop the bloodshed in libya is he too late one of the many issues will tackle the big picture rumbles and

usually ladies come first but they'll lead to conservatives i'll tell you how the rights of women are being cut down across the nation and why this isn't anything new and today it's a nice feeling to. personalize conversations a great minds i'm joined by american author journalist and historian who may know more about american culture its effect on politics than anybody else wrote his book the wrecking crew of conservatives rule outlines the evolution of the republican party during the past two centuries and identifies republican party as the source of everything struck with this country it is a book what's the matter with kansas documents the rise of conservative populism and what it means for the future of america the rise of the tea party and the tumult and in american politics today his writings are more important than. everett

joining me now in the studio thomas frank thomas welcome it is good to be here well thank you the republican party has been around for two so i don't know that's not. you know i wouldn't blame everything on them i come from kansas everyone's a republican i help used to be a republican you know and there's a lot of good republicans in the world and yeah yeah we're going to robert we'll follow up with a republican. the guy that i swiped the title of what's mayor of kansas from was a republican there's a lot of good republicans that is stevens was you know he was the head of the radical republicans faction and preach in sixty eight and wrote the fourteenth amendment and lincoln lest we come was now so it's the conservative movement but there was there was an interesting moment in the eight hundred eighty s. when grover cleveland was eight hundred. eighty eight in his annual speech to congress where he said you know the rise of corporate powers become so great that the american worker now feels that he has the iron heel on his on his neck growth president grover grover cleveland city annual yes he's usually thought of as being

in a very conservative but he was the only democrat who served in that entire you know but in any case you you've been writing about culture history politics for a lot of years and i'm curious first of all as a writer myself and i think you know a lot of people have vicarious curiosity about writers what brought you to writing and then what brought you to these oh my god i think it was probably a film strip i saw about ernest hemingway at the public library in prairie village kansas you know in the in the seventy's i don't know i like books i like writing but i always have i don't know what to tell you and then i decided i would become a well i mean how i got to where and today you know i went through i went through the crowd was going to become a historian i was going to go to graduate school and get a ph d. in history i actually did that but i came out in the worst job market for historians in like you know forever i mean it's dreadful and so what's the alternative. it turns out and this is this is actually kind of funny when i got out

of graduate school in the mid ninety's becoming a journalist looked like a good practical alternative a practical way to earn a living you know today it's journalism is falling apart even faster than academia back then you know it made sense but it's really interesting to be the. connection to writing and become action to politics how you know you were you as an historian first and then you started writing what what. political event set you off and what i think you know i mostly don't hear all the most is really about culture culture i start i want to be a cultural historian you know i was i wrote my first book is about the advertising industry in the one nine hundred sixty s. and should your viewers be curious about the advertising industry in the one nine hundred sixty s. don't watch that one t.v. show read my book i'm telling ok and the book title as

a result of the conquest of cool and the idea of the book is how america went from being so square in the one nine hundred fifty s. to being so hip in the one nine hundred sixty s. and i don't just mean the counterculture you know the kids the hippies i mean the entire culture the commercial culture everything about america became just massively cool and so i was like how did that happen what what explains that shift and that was that was the idea and you know i was interested in culture and it was in one thousand nine hundred four i i got interested in a strike that was going on in central illinois and it was in decatur it wasn't just one strike it was three it was every like the entire blue collar population of the city in central illinois was either locked out or out on strike and it was the whole city had essentially ben this is not a good word to use is not the right word but they've been radicalized their way of looking at the world had completely changed because of this event and i went down there i was covering it for a newspaper chicano called the chicago reader alternative news weekly and i got

very interested in this in the these people's the way they understood the world had changed a lot a lot of them had been what we used to call reagan democrats you know they were blue collar people that had voted for ronald reagan because they want to see america be respected in the world you know that sort of thing and look at what's happening to them now this was and they you know they recognized the contradiction and it was a. sort of moment of awful and light in it for them you know it was a disastrous event in their lives but it was also a moment of enlightenment and it was a moment of enlightenment for me as well because i suddenly went from you know everything being about culture everything being about the media about the rhetoric that we use to being a ha. about manufacturing about work about trade you know this is this is what so much of american life is really about is merely it's about the money you know it's about the money power and politics if you had to boil it down to one word yes and in fact i mean you know facing a four hundred ninety three million dollars budget shortfall in kansas senator sam

brownback the new governor republican has called to eliminate the corporate income tax are proposing fifty million bucks in cuts to education. he also wants to eliminate the federal the earned income tax credit that will throw another sixty five hundred families in his state below the poverty line and that's that so what's still the matter with can't so it's this this thing's got much have gone from bad to worse there i mean and what's good is that i'm around back is sam brownback you know is in congress for many years so he's one of the freshman he was first elected the house of the game which is freshman year ninety four then went to the senate and he was always regarded as the kind of conscience of the conservative movement and what you just described those are things that i wouldn't even think that he would think that that surprises me that he would do that that he would go that far because you know as republicans go i disagree with the man's politics i mean i disagree with him profoundly but i always thought that he was still he was still

a real man it was an upright you know it's really fast and sort of rural progress did a good analysis of this couple of days ago and just laid out a lunch with you know it was thirteen states of the public and governors and in every single case the budget crisis to a large extent was created by tax breaks for billionaires tax cuts for millionaires your catch not actually ration which brings us to it i'd like to start with the wrecking crew yeah i miss your books up in one of them and maybe it's what was the matter with kansas you really kind of got it but i thought i thought that i think it was written you get into this notion that it all began with nixon and not so much in like he was this evil guy. that was the moment when american said oh wait a minute our government is corrupt government is you know we can't trust our government and the creepy thing is that that paid off for for the party of nixon for you know for the republican party that this perception this massive cynicism towards government that was spawned by mainly by watergate but also by the vietnam

war you know there daniel ellsberg was on a just just before here a man from from that era who could told you think you know about this and it is the the that's where the cynicism cynicism began and what's really creepy about it is that cynicism first chased nixon out of office then elected this sort of massive democratic wave in one nine hundred seventy four and then it sort of congealed into this you know the into the conservatism that we noticed today in elected ronald reagan and it's just gone on from there cynicism pays massive dividends to conservatives and what's creepy about this is that it's sort of self-fulfilling so conservatives tend to deal in very bad government the government very poorly well is that not everything they don't i mean they tend to run the military very well ok to do certain things. arguably would even challenge that it ok to go but it seems there are certain things where there are there outsourcing right there if you think

outsourcing is a good idea they do it really really well but if the but if you will you know if it's the liberal state that you're concerned about they run it into the ground there so you're talking about things like reagan putting bill bennett who who at one point campaigned for president on the platform of destroying the department of education in charge of the department of education that's that's what he did that's actually that's sort of the classic example but the it goes it's much worse than that it's also involves appointing cronies incompetence intentionally well because they don't really care you know because they don't believe in government that's right its government is not important or going to outsource all the all the work anyway there's all this money has been laid around for moyes to exactly it so it's a it's a place where people. go to get rich it here in d.c. this is the wrecking crew starts off with a little known for it was a little known fact at the time maybe it's better known now washington d.c. is essentially the richest city in america the washington metro area and then i did a sort of historical you know rundown of that when did that happen how did that

happen that it happened because of liberals and the really creepy thing is that you notice washington shoots up i'm not in the ranks of american cities in terms of wealth during the reagan years where the president is like i was at war with government when reagan came into office went there only like three hundred seventy registered lobbyists and this was i was going to. change massively it's and it's theirs and then it was just to finish the story and then it shot up again in the bush years and then the financial crisis sort of sealed the fate of new york in san francisco which was a complete comparable cities d.c. is totally had shoulders of the richest city in america right now because there's been no downturn here and the industry is number one lobbying a number to outsource all the you know all the government contractors if you know someone a tourist comes on vacation here to see the smithsonian i always suggest you know governors in virginia look at the towers in arlington and see where your tax money really goes you know to the contrary contractors and and that's.

it's not just an ideology that or is it is a just i mean when did this begin in the republican party this whole notion this certainly wasn't the republican party of eisenhower this was an idea as you are with the nut is this this this is a this is a whole new if in fact it's not of that over the next either how is the one that initially criticized that remember the military industrial complex he was so sixty woods concerned about. and this this you know there's always been government contracting obviously the government doesn't build its own battleships and stuff like that with a few exceptions. but the under president reagan they appoint something called the grace commission and by the way this all comes from the concept you are that race yeah that's right. he was the chairman of it and this all incidentally goes back to the concept of the government being broke this is always the trump card in conservative in conservative governments is that we're broke we have to do something about it and here's what we're going to do about it which is basically

eliminate your programs but at the same time do these wonderful things for our constituents you know for billionaires for the military contractors that kind of thing so it's the grace commission suggested outsourcing in privatizing government get this as a way of saving money this is going to this is going to be more official that's the way it's always been. you know isn't any was it of course is this is a. it's most protective a boondoggle with ever been invented and the companies you get on the list the companies that work is outsourced to the they essentially it's like the k. street project he ties to the republican party you know it's actually very easy to trace now that a lot of the records are open and do they hire the right lobbying firms you can you can track all this stuff and i do in the wrecking crew it's isn't fair isn't it isn't to a certain extent the democratic party also jumping on this bandwagon like or at least the conservative wing of it and and and isn't there or wasn't there an obligation when president obama came into office. that was implied in his campaign

and arguably should be simply implied in his office to say no government isn't bad reagan's rhetoric was wrong and i'll show you how we can make government actually work you know and. i don't recall over the last two years much of that kind of trial and error in the opposite that's one of the big disappointments of obama but let me go back to the conservatives real quick and there's one of there's one line from the wrecking crew that i always like to repeat because it can never get out there enough and it's from a it's from a guy who is the president of the u.s. chamber of commerce back in one thousand twenty s and he said in an interview that i found a very popular magazine from the late one nine hundred twenty s. the best public servant is the worst one ok this is this is this was the business attitude of the time in it still is the best public service is the roaring twenty's the roaring twenty's and all that so you can focus as you were you enjoyed it nobody's ever said it quite that bluntly since then but you can find echoes and i

do in the book i find echoes of this remark right up to the present day i mean conservatives say this sort of thing all the time you don't want competent people in government you don't want because if you if government works if you have smart people in government people who know what they're doing in government works with the public will trust government then you won't have the cynicism you won't you know things things will work and then you go off the democrats will be looked at you know it's it will be death for in they thought you know a slippery slope to communism or something like that and but anyhow you know obama has been a real disappointment along these lines when he was running from when he was running for president i was writing a column for the wall street journal and i used to talk about doing that kind of reverse grace commission let's do a commission that investigates the history of outsourcing and privatizing and did it work was it more efficient you know or was it just this kind of so i thank you i think we kind of have that commission in your book but let's work let's cover see more of this is what happened i mean there was a lot of other things into the financial crisis all that stuff got got wiped out

more of this in just a second here it's after a break more with thomas frank in our conversations with great minds. let's not forget that we have an apartheid regime right. i think. he'd want to well. we never got that says the infamous safe get ready because of the freedom.

a telemarketer broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture.

well go back to conversations with great minds i'm joined by author and cultural historian thomas frank who wrote the books the wrecking crew how conservatives rule and what's the matter with kansas and thomas the i do a radio show from noon to three every day and today i got this email from this guy . it was titled from a conservative who's been mugged and he started out talking about how he'd been voting republican since the late seventy's and he always believed the old joke that a. conservative is a liberal who got mugged and he said the one in a word the mugging they caused him to wake up to what has happened to his

republican party. and why you'll never go back to it that word is wisconsin oh yeah it is there you know we saw the rise of the tea party it seems like. in fact i read his letter on the air and it provoked an avalanche of phone calls from self described conservative republicans saying one woman said i have voted republican i was there you know in madison always one woman said i have voted republican for over thirty years and that i will vote for a dead dog before i vote for another republican you know what's how how is this shift is not envisioned in your book what's the matter with kansas it's amazing what's happening and it's also you know it's also it's it doesn't fit the narrative of the last two years either where everything was going towards the right you know the tea party movement and all that sort of thing although the tea party movement had really captured you know public anger over the bailouts you know the financial crisis the you know catastrophe in the economy and now it's all going the other

direction and it's amazing i mean suddenly it's like the reverse of that it's well the people that contacted you know the e-mail of called in very similar to what i was talking about in that decatur story where these are people that voted republican you know being because they're it's like it's like you buy a consumer product you never think it's going to hurt you do you think it's always ninety three the decade you know the ninety three ninety four yeah but it's the same sort of awful enlightment that i'm talking about that these are these are these are by and large blue collar people who imagine that they were part of the middle class in this country why they measure because that's what they had always been told all their lives that they were the heart and soul of this country that they were they were the you know the the the bone in the send you of america they did the work you know they were out there labor day parades and fourth of july parades and waving the flag and volunteered for vietnam and they did all those things that they do and yes they voted for ronald reagan you know because you know

the iran. hostage crisis that kind of thing they have in their mind very good reason for that it from being other they never thought in a million years that it would come home and that part of the agenda was to ruin the lives of people like now that never would have occurred to them it told this sort of awful moment and that is what's happening in wisconsin today if we're saying that out it sounds almost. conspiracists conspiracy theorists. you know alex jones is to say the the agenda of the republican party is to destroy the middle class and transfer that wealth i don't know very very rich i don't think it i don't think they think of it that way nobody thinks of it that way though that's that is the heart of what's happening to the agenda of the republican party or i should say of the conservative movement like i said there's good republicans out there we should note we shouldn't tar all republicans of the same brush. the agenda of the conservative movement is to destroy organized labor or at least to you know to room as it is to take on the democrats party that's not exactly that's

not on the center of the class you know that you just are people could nobody wants to do that that's. look there's this is this is the classic problem with we live in a capitalist society and one of the great recurring problems in a capitalist society is short term thinking right companies make decisions based on you know who can credibly short term goals and they wind up doing these terrible things in the long term and you can't have a better example than the financial crisis and that's what this is to know but you know you talk to talk to a business owner for twenty minutes about organized labor and see what they say about it they hate it they want it to go away they want to die they want to never bother them again but ask them if they want the middle class to still be around and buying their products of course they want that are those two things connected they are and you know we're finding out america today but we didn't know that you know are these people don't don't know that you know that ten years ago. we'll see adman

. pointed out that there was there was that a point of disconnect he was that he was the guy that reagan brought in as the resolution trust corporation to to to dig through a thousand banks years in jail when the s n l's melted down and they end up actually making a profit on that government actually really after the resolution for the thirty years or twenty years. but he pointed out that there was this substantial change in in the in the thinking of the conservative movement somewhere in the eighty's and and with that change he was it has translated into changes in policy that look like people are sold out as opposed to just you know the old william buckley oh well you know let's think this through and this is the constitutional as opposed to a i'm a man i really respect as a writer and i mean i did too i could in fact they and i used to love watching

firing line when did you know that. but the it has become basically a free for all. bill simmons has brought a year ago a brilliant guy but. isn't that the essence of at least the wrecking crew that this is just become a free for all that it's the thing is that you had it there was that there was in the air in the early reagan days especially yes there was a lot of principle the a lot of the people in the early reagan ministration were highly principled conservatives and what you saw happening in the by the way this is this is a parallel with the this summer same thing happen in the conservative movement is that people discover that there's a lot of money to be made in both in the movement and the end in politics and the wrecking crew you sort of jack abrams off as my as my character as a sort of what would you say to virgil to guide us through hugo through the inferno and study his life his life story and here's

a guy who i think that it is that there is this sort of in his career this amazing coming together of principle and profit and i think that even by the end you know what he was the sort of his name was synonymous with corruption that he's still regard himself as a man of principle but his principles were profit ok sure think of the people that he was that he was not being for i mean the marianas islands where they basically wanted the government to allow them to you know run sweatshops because you could say but that's your free market that's a free market tom and that's how he defended it he defended it on those grounds and on grounds of you know we shouldn't interfere in the you know the sovereignty of these people and that sort of thing. on very on highly principled grounds and yet there was there was a notion for a long time in the republican party and in the conservative movement even that we should have tariffs or that we should have a national or trade policy that we should defend not just the american worker but the american business and now we see the. american translators corporations are

going to have their best year in twenty years you know financial times today. thirty percent of total revenues are produced off shore and g.e. last year fifty percent you know it's. it's is this an american company even though you know. there's a profound change happening. and it is you know it's very distressing time and you're putting in a really great mood here. with those with those those those facts but i mean let's try to be let's try to be hopeful about this i like to think that what's going on in wisconsin might represent a kind of moment of enlightenment maybe people are starting to get it i mean it i'll tell you something i went to the very first tea party rally here in washington i wrote about it in the wall street journal february of two thousand and nine obama had been in the white house for less than a month and. i could tell it was concerned they were conservatives out there i mean it was it was people from all the different conservative you know magazines and

blogs and that sort of thing i mean joe the plumber was there with a megaphone but there was still something very seductive about that they were out there denouncing the bailouts they were screaming bloody murder about the bills i was mad about the bailouts here were these people doing it and they sorta had me at the very very first writing agree with everything they were saying but they say they also they say had the nation i mean they they won they did a good job so my listeners go to go to a cheaper way with the sciences get out of nafta bring our jobs home i mean you know is there a serious what exactly right you just the script for a second here consider the kind of of just political blundering that allows democrats to not figure that out ok they could win a lot of these voters over if only they would drop gas to drive for all of the road out i mean if ben could. just turn away from nafta it was a terrible idea in the first place it was a republican idea you know this is supposed to be the party of labor why can't they

walk there's again resulted in a democrat the democrats they were split the tea party movement into this disaster this electoral disaster in two thousand and ten wouldn't have happened if they had just an obama said in the campaign he wanted to read. go she'd now have to oh my god like don't always know what you are creating and they will write that right intil intill the last democrat was finally beaten you know in our in our last minute or two here you know you can see harper's the confessions of glenn beck is he our father cough but i don't think that's a he's coghlan was that fascinating man we don't understand how it is that you mean there is there is a sound hoglan yeah that's how he pronounced it that he coghlan moved from left to right in the course of the one nine hundred thirty s. a very you know very curious movement and glenn beck this is what i discovered and i wrote about it in harper's magazine there's all these really peculiar echoes of left wing rhetoric in glenn beck's the way glenn beck talks the things he's the

gospel the inside as it happens all the time but you also see this in the tea party movement in fact you see it across the board this is a project that i mean it's you know it's the old kind of populist radicals that's now that's a subject i know a lot about somebody a little longer well you've got the eighteen million we have thirty seconds left here because you know you know i wish we had those years back a good man sockless jury simply that would be so. it would it really would any any final thoughts on where america's going it is you know. it is that things are so up in the air right now you know what's going on in wisconsin is inspiring but at the same time the republicans are playing the they're playing their cards very well here defunding the left which you know i talked about at length in the wrecking crew they're playing out there they're string and they know that that's a kind of end game scenario they can crush the democratic party if they play it out so i don't know tom but it will.