video on demand. omissions from the palm of your. 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 with great minds but i drove by author and historian thomas frank has written some such books as the wrecking crew and what's the matter with kansas was just the evolution of american culture and its effects on our politics and vice versa plus president obama warns could offer to stop the bloodshed in libya but is he too late one of the many asians will tackle the big picture rumbles and usually ladies come first but don't tell that 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 into the insights. birdseye's conversations are great minds i'm joined by american author journalist and historian who may know more about american culture its effects on politics than anybody else around 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 a 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 ever joining me now in the studio thomas frank to. as welcome it is good to be here well

thank you the republican party has been going around for two so i don't know that's the. idea i wouldn't blame everything on them i come from kansas everyone's a republican i help i used to be a republican you know and there's a lot of good republicans in the world right now is. robert a follow up with a republican. the guy that i swiped the title of with matter of kansas for it was a republican there's a lot of good republican values stevens was you know he was the head of the radical republicans faction and eight hundred sixty eight and wrote the fourteenth amendment and and lincoln lest we should be coming up 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 becomes so great that the american worker now feels that he has the. heel is on his neck. president clinton's tenure well yes he's usually thought of as being in

a very conservative but he was the only democrat who served in that entire era you know but in any case 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 a lot of people have my curious curiosity about writers brought you to writing and then what brought you to stop us 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 it was 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 i am today is you know i went through i went through the problem 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 nineties 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 but back then you know it made sense that that's really interesting that the the. the connection to writing and the connection to politics how you know you were you and the story and first and then you started writing what what. political event set you off and what's a good you know i mostly want to 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 you ok and the book is high level results the conquests 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 would explain 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 and central illinois was either locked out or out on strike and it was the whole city had essentially been 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 was covering it for a newspaper chicago called the chicago reader turning to news weekly and i got very

interested in this in that these peoples were 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 wanted to see america be respected in the world you know that sort of thing and and look what was happening to them now this was and they you know they recognized the contradiction and it was this sort of moment of awful enlightenment 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 with the rhetoric that we use to being a hot. about manufacturing about work about trade you know this is this is what so much of american life is really about as millions of other 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 by proposing fifty million bucks in cuts to education. 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 law center that's that's so what's still matter with can't so that's that's the things you've got much have gone from bad to worse there i mean what's what is it on brownback is sam brownback you know he's in congress for many years to study one of the freshman he was first elected the house from the gingrich's freshman 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 put 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 he was an upright you know well it's really fast and sort of rolled progress did a good analysis of this couple of days ago and just laid out a one sheet with you know it was thirteen states and republican governors and in every single case the budget crisis to a large extent was created by tax breaks for billionaires back hurts from the. regime which brings us to and i'd like to start with the wrecking crew yeah i mix 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 that if it was regular 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 all women are government is corrupt or 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 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 we are daniel ellsberg was just just before here a man from from that era you could told you think about this and that 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 know it is today and then 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 at least not everything they don't i mean they tend to run the military very well ok to do certain things i've argued i would challenge that. it seems there are certain things where they're where they're outsourcing 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 they run it into the ground there so when you're talking about things like reagan putting bill bennett who who at one point campaigned for president on the on the platform of destroying that are in charge of the department yes 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 in the ranks of american cities in terms of wealth during the reagan years where the president is like a one or with government when reagan came into office went there only like three hundred seventy register lobbyists and that's how the sum was very glad that there was change so these changes massively it's and it's theirs and then it is 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 and san francisco which are the complete comparable cities d.c. is totally had shoulders the richest city in america right now because there's been no downturn here and the industry is number one lobbying and number two outsourcing 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 go over to northern virginia and look at the towers in arlington and see where your tax money really goes you know to go to the conduit 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 wasn't identify with the night it this is this this is a this is a whole new if in fact it's not of the order it's either now or the want to initially criticize it remember the military industrial complex he was so concerned about. 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 it's not that you are 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 and 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 the grease commission suggested outsourcing in privatizing government get this as a way of saving money this is going going to be more efficient was the way it's always been. you know it's been a bit of courses it's this i mean it's there's those that have it's most spectacular boondoggle that's 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 case street project they tied to the republican party you know it's actually very easy to trace now that a lot of the records are open and 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 there isn't it isn't to a certain extent the democratic party also jumping on this bandwagon lead 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. it 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 talk going better in the office or 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 the one nine hundred twenty s. and he said in an interview that i found in 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 best public service is the roaring twenty's the roaring twenty's all that so you can fight was educated me 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 the public will trust government then you won't have the cynicism you won't you know things things will work and then you have the democrats will be elected you know it's it will be death for in and they thought you know a slippery slope to communism or something like that and but anyhow yeah 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 a kind of reverse grace commission's 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 calculated boondoggle i think we kind of have that commission in your book but let's let's cover some more of these what happened i mean there is a lot of other things that have the financial crisis on. all that stuff got got

wiped out cover so far this in just a second here it's like after our great war with thomas frank in our conversations with great minds. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime. i think. even one well. whatever government says they are safe get ready because their freedom.

when you're broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture.

well go back to conversations of great minds i'm joined by author and cultural historian thomas frank 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 i'm 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 just 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'll go for another republican you know what's how how is this shift is not envisioned in your book what's the matter with kansas is that 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 all of that 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 the e-mail and called in very similar to what i was talking about and that decatur story were these are people that voted republican you know b. because they're it's like it's like you buy a consumer product you never think it's going to hurt you if you think it's always ninety three the decatur gathered ninety three ninety four yeah and but it's the same sort of awful enlightment that i'm talking about are 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 they were the you know the the the bone in the sand 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 you're supposed to 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 you for being murdered they never thought in a million years that it would come home and the part of the agenda was to ruin the lives of people like them that never would have occurred to them this sort of awful moment and that is what's happening in wisconsin today if we're saying that out it sounds almost. construes conspiracy theorist. alex jones which to say the the the agenda of the republican party is to destroy the middle class and transfer that wealth i don't 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 that is the best and upshot of what's happening with 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 know we shouldn't tar all republicans in the same brush. the agenda of the conservative movement is to destroy organized labor or at least to you know to really as it is to take on the rich the democrats party is not exactly

that's not from the center of the book was you know the industry bill 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 incredibly 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 but are those two things connected they are and you know we're finding out in america today but we didn't know that you know are these people don't don't know that they know that ten years ago. bill

siegman. pointed out that there was there was that a point of disconnect he was he was the guy that reagan brought in as the resolution trust corporation to to to be true 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 first took thirty years or twenty years. but he point out that there was this substantial change in in the in the thinking of the conservative movement somewhere in the eighty's and and will pat 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 one as opposed to a i'm a man i really respect as a writer and i mean i did too in fact 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 died a year ago 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 have it there were 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 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 in politics and the wrecking crew i used to use jack aber moffett's my as my character as a sort of what would you say to virgil to guide us through hugo through the inferno and studying his life his life story and here's a guy who i think that there's

a 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 a 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 he was that he was lobbying for i mean the marianas islands where they basically wanted the government to allow them to you know run sweatshops because you can 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 you know that 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 for example 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 financial times today. thirty percent of their revenues are produced offshore and g.e. last year fifty percent you know it's this is an american company even any 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 d.c. 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 that 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 bill if i was mad about the bailouts here were these people doing it and they sort of had me at the very very first lighting agree with everything they were saying but they said they also they they had the nation i mean they they won they did a good job so my listeners go to go to a cheaper the rally with the sciences get out of nafta bring our jobs home i mean you know there's a serious what exactly you know that you just let's get for a second here consider the kind of of of just politike. blundering that allows democrats to not figure that out ok they could win a lot of these voters over if only they would drop after it's right for all to thank goodness it would out of the media pen could and should 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 of arizona democrat the democrats they would have 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 renegotiate nafta oh my god why don't always know what you are korean and they will ride that right intil intill the last democrat was finally beaten in our in our last minute or two here you have a new piece in harper's the confessions of glenn beck is here father coughlin 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 lot on hoglan yeah that's how he pronounced it that he cobbled moved from left to right in the course of the one nine hundred thirty s. 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 in the way glenn beck talks the things that the

gospel that he said was 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 believe it's the old kind of populist radicals that's now that's a subject i know a lot about somebody will be along here will you vote eighteen million we have thirty seconds like you're welcome because you know you know i wish we had those years back and sockless jury simpson that would be so. it would it really would any any final thoughts on where america's going for it is you know. it is the things are so up in the air right now you know what's. going on wisconsin is inspiring but at the same time the republicans are playing the they're playing their cards very well they're defunding the left which you know i talked about at length in the wrecking crew they're playing out there their 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 thomas frank thanks so much for being with us on.