Tom Frank makes the point that we've been making, but it's worth repeating:
And for all their peculiarity, these people — Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Newt Gingrich, and the whole troupe of activists, lobbyists, and corpora-trons who got their start back in the Reagan years — have for the last three decades been among the most powerful individuals in America. This wave of misgovernment has been brought to you by ideology, not incompetence.
Yes, today's conservatives have disgraced themselves, but they have not strayed from the teaching of their forefathers or the great ideas of their movement. When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to the purveyor of the most lavish "golf weekend"; when they mulct millions from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns — in short, when they treat government with contempt — they are running true to form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.
And, yes, there has been greed involved in the effort — a great deal of greed. Every tax cut, every cleverly engineered regulatory snafu saves industry millions and perhaps even billions of dollars, and so naturally securing those tax cuts and engineering those snafus has become a booming business here in Washington. Conservative rule has made the capital region rich, a showplace of the new plutocratic order. But this greed cannot be dismissed as some personal failing of lobbyist or congressman, some badness-of-apple that can be easily contained. Conservatism, as we know it, is a movement that is about greed, about the "virtue of selfishness" when it acts in the marketplace. In rightwing Washington, you can be a man of principle and a boodler at the same time.
Corruption and ugliness have always been a part of our political culture, but there are degrees of ugliness. When Republicans are in charge it gets particularly ugly because the philosophical constraints against ugliness are so weak. When the primary role of government is believed to be to serve the interests of a buccaneering business class, what constraints are there to define what is appropriate or inappropriate? In this buccaneering culture, the challenge is to subvert the rules, to find the loopholes, to see how far you can push things without getting caught. When the buccaneers put their own people in government offices that are designed to constrain the excesses of their buccaneering, there simply are no constraints, and the buccaneers run riot. We've seen the results in the last eight years.
People can argue that the Dems are just as bad–and maybe locally in places like Chicago and New York they are. But at the federal level a measure of the difference in their governing philosophy is the relative competence with which Dem governments are run–and the significantly greater number of indictments and convictions of government officials when the GOP is in charge. The Bush administration would set records for indictments and convictions if there was any hope that the Dems would hold them accountable. But the Dems seem now to have acquiesced to the governing culture shaped by the GOP since Reagan. And that's what makes the system broken beyond any realistically imaginable remedy.
There is no counterbalance to the buccaneering; there is no constituency potent enough to effect a counterbalance–certainly not Labor or the netroots. All the Dem leadership cares about is increasing its majorities, and apparently it doesn't see holding Republicans accountable as a necessary element in advancing that cause. And the Dem leaders know they are deeply implicated in this rotten system and how vulnerable they are, and they fear reprisals when that day comes when the GOP takes over again.
Clinton didn't go after Bush regarding his role in the October surprise and Iran/Contra when he took office. He didn't want to appear as though he was looking for political reprisals or to criminalize policy differences. The GOP showed its gratitude with an impeachment. The Dems don't stand on principle and neither do they have the killer instinct that the GOP has. That's why there's little reason to think things are going to change in any fundamental way. There might be a temporary lull in the buccaneering, but the buccaneers will simply have retreated to their island hideaways to plot their next moves.
The best we can realistically hope for in the short run is for things to be run with a little more competence and a little less corruption. Even if Obama were to become far more assertive than he has so far shown a willingness to do, he will have little support in Congress. Even the best people can't do it on their own. Maybe Obama will surprise us. But if it turns out that DLCer Bayh is his VP, it's another piece of evidence that he is neither willing or capable to change the fundamentals that currently structure the way Washington works.
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