Thomas Frank Talks Tonight at Town Hall

Tonight, author and Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank, of What's the Matter With Kansas? fame, is giving a talk at Town Hall at 7:30, about the legacy of the Republicans' mismanagement of government. Tickets are $5 advance or at the door starting at 6:30.

Frank's last book, The Wrecking Crew, about Republican mismanagement of government, isn't as good as What's the Matter With Kansas?, but it's better than most critics gave it credit for. A historian by training, Frank drafts a history of the Republican Revolution from the 1980s to the present that's all tactics and no ideology. He follows dozens of little-known political organizations with important direct mail lists, which fueled public resentment of government while ensuring a steady revenue stream for dedicated Republican loyalists. He details the internal power struggles of the College Republicans, which, in the Eighties, produced some of the Right's most notable power brokers (Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff among them). And he traces how the right embraced the radical style of the Sixties left, concocting their own heroes of Third World Liberation and generating urgency on college campuses.

Critics tended to turn their noses up at the book when it came out last year. All the talk of direct mail seemed outdated in Internet era, and anyway, in 2008, tactics were done with—this was a battle of ideas, and the right was losing. The Bush administration was departing in disgrace and American was embracing a black liberal for president.

But today, Frank looks downright prescient. The means may have changed, direct mail having given way to email lists and Facebook, but the tactics are the same. Anyone who's read The Wrecking Crew is unlikely to be surprised by the manufactured populist outrage at health care reform, on display at Town Hall meetings last month. Critics who took issue with the fact that Frank's book seemed indifferent to ideas should be reconsidering. On health care, liberals enjoy something approaching overwhelming public support. The fact that reform is floundering has nothing to do with ideas and everything to do with the right's effective political tactics.