Now that the smoke of the election campaign has cleared, it is clear that one of the many victims of Obama’s victory has been the image of the frightening and secretive power of conservatives to harness racist votes and manipulate from Washington the anti-Washington vote. If we extend the economic metaphor – Warren Buffet’s homily about those swimming naked being found out once the tide goes out – to politics, surely the conservatives are shivering now. In truth, the menace of the Christian fundamentalist right and the corporate ‘wrecking crew’ was always less a force in American politics than a rallying cry for liberal opposition to the Republican administration.

Perhaps the most important problem with this book is that it has been overtaken by events. Not only the election but the recession exposed the hollowness of supposed economic libertarianism. Bush’s half-hearted attempt to privatise social security looks even more ridiculous in light of the fall of the stock market. Like the anxious pronouncements of fellow liberals before Obama’s election, this book now appears shrill and off-target.

That is not to say that Thomas Frank does not make some salient points, or that the conservative targets do not deserve the savaging given to them here and elsewhere. The book is engaging and often deadly accurate and hilarious at the same time. But the book shows that the conservative ‘attack machine’ has been matched by an anti-conservative attack machine that has, if anything, even less of a positive vision behind it. Frank, author of the influential What’s the Matter with Kansas, is part of a newer generation of liberals who, while hating them, could only look admiringly back at the dubious tactics of young Reaganites in the 1980s, the Moral Majority in the 1970s and even Goldwater fanatics of the 1960s. Whereas the right formed in opposition to liberal politics of the 1960s, this new liberal generation formed in opposition to the ostensibly conservative Reagan and Bush years.

But who are the conservatives here? Frank’s vision extends back in time to the comforting figure of Franklin Roosevelt. The golden age, he tells us, was the era when government was not a dirty word, when public service was reward enough. Whereas the conservatives often point to the 1950s as the years before excessive liberalism wrecked the country, Frank goes back a generation further. We get the ‘gosh-darnit’ earnestness of Jimmy Stuart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington as an alternative to, umm, conservatism. Mr Frank’s spectacles view the past with, if anything, a deeper tint of rose than those beloning any of his intended targets.

Frank, in the midst of his ‘prose tantrums’, to use one of his many memorable terms, shows that the privatisation of government enslaves us to monetary logic; no longer do government agencies have purpose other than to clear their debts and achieve maximum efficiency. However, he misses the fact that the inexorable logic of ‘there is no alternative’ extends to liberal cultural as well as conservative economic ‘truths’. What happened to the ‘culture war’ declared by Patrick Buchanan in 1992? We are all cultural liberals now – but Frank misses this paradox. Management theorist Tom Peters, ‘the mastermind of the new-model corporation’ who Franks says ‘built a career describing his dramatic schemes for smashing the liberal era corporations’ was also one of the foremost defenders of ethnic and cultural diversity, a decidedly liberal idea, but one on which liberals and conservatives coalesced against the Reaganite attempts to dismantle affirmative action.

Well-researched and often incisive, Franks is at his strongest when indicting corrupt officials such as Jack Abramoff, who pops up like a pantomime villain throughout the book. Those liberals seeking catharsis through watching their enemies getting a verbal kicking will enjoy this book. They will excuse its one-sidedness. Powerful and corrupt Democrats such as Tommy Corcoran (‘Tommy the Cork’), a former Roosevelt aide whose power in the late 1940s was legendary, and Dan Rostenkowski, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee in the late 1980s and 1990s, who preceded Abramoff into prison, do not make it into this book. Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich should serve to remind that corruption is not simply a Republican problem.

Though a useful chronicler and muck-raker, Frank will disappoint those seeking analysis of the right in the post-Cold War years. In fact, he appears bent on recreating the antipathies of the Cold War between left and right, and ignoring the many complicating factors that cloud the picture.

1) For elaboration of Peters’ role, see Christopher Newfield, ‘Corporate Culture Wars’ in George E Marcus, ed., Corporate Futures: The Diffusion of the Culturally Sensitive Corporate Form (London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp23-62.