Thomas Frank — Off with their heads! Eric Cantor, the Tea Party guillotine, and the certainty of conservative sell-out

Why is it that Republicans are uniquely prone to this cycle of idealism and betrayal? I think the answer is simple: Because free-market idealism is a philosophy that automatically leads to betrayal—and also to misgovernment, and cronyism, and even corruption, as we saw in the DeLay era. The movement’s greatest idealists often turn out to be its greatest scoundrels—think of Jack Abramoff, or of Oliver North, or (as Rick Perlstein has pointed out) the gang of hard-right purists who signed up to do dirty tricks for Richard Nixon. In truth, there seems to be no real contradiction between conservative morality and following the money; to be a capitalist true-believer is to sell yourself.

Free-market idealism, after all, is about applying market forces to the state. This is what everything from Citizens United to toll-road privatization is all about. To be true to such a principle means respecting incentives, answering the call of money. And it ain’t small business who has the money in Washington these days.

A number of years ago I wrote about the market-minded men of the Bush era who did the bidding of lobbyists and who filled the federal agencies with hacks and fools, and I think my verdict on them still applies: “They did not do these awful things because they were bad conservatives; they did them because they were good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds followed naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.”

Salon
Off with their heads! Eric Cantor, the Tea Party guillotine, and the certainty of conservative sell-out
Thomas Frank