07.26.08
Frank on right-wing con men
The Wrecking Crew
How a gang of right-wing con men destroyed Washington and made a
killing
By Thomas Frank
Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it
violates the system’s first principle, which we all learned back in
the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exists to
serve the public, not particular individuals. We Are the Government,
insisted the title of a civics primer published in the earnest year of
1945. “The White House belongs to you,” its dust jacket told us. “So
do all the other splendid buildings in Washington, D.C.” This idea
runs so deep in the American grain that many of us can’t bring
ourselves to question it, even in this disillusioned age. Republicans
and Democrats may fight over how big government should be and exactly
what it should do, we tell ourselves, but surely everyone shares those
baseline good intentions, that simple devotion to the public interest.
We continue to believe this despite such massive evidence to the
contrary as the career of Jack Abramoff, the conservative lobbyist
whose feats of corruption have been unreeling in newspaper and
congressional investigations for years. On January 3, 2006, Abramoff
pled guilty to bribing a member of Congress, evading taxes, and
defrauding his clients, but what made his case memorable were the
incredible details: the millions of dollars Abramoff and his
confederates casually squeezed out of clients, the luxury restaurant
he opened in order to hand out the goodies more efficiently, the golf
trips to Scotland, the gleeful contempt he expressed for nearly
everyone in his voluminous emails, and, later, the desperate wriggling
of prominent Republicans as they tried to deny their old pal.
Journalistic coverage of the Abramoff affair has clung reliably to the
“bad apple” thesis, in which the lobbyist’s sins are carefully
separated from the movement of which he was once a prominent part.
What Abramoff represented, we read, was “greed gone wild.” He “went
native.” He was “sui generis,” a one-of-a-kind con man, “engaged in
bizarre antics that your average Zegna-clad Washington lobbyist would
never have dreamed of.”
In which case, we can all relax: Jack Abramoff is in jail. The system
worked; the bad apple has been plucked; the wild greed and
undreamed-of antics have ceased. But the truth is almost exactly the
opposite, whether we are discussing Abramoff or the wider tsunami of
corruption that has washed over the capital in recent years. It is
just this: Fantastic misgovernment is not an accident, nor is it the
work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a
particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands
the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal
nexus of human society. This movement is ‘friendly to industry not
just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes
in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the
inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the
state by business and, second, what follows from that: incompetence,
graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we’ve come to expect
from Washington.
The correct diagnosis is the “bad apple” thesis turned upside down.
There are plenty of good conservative individuals, honorable folks who
would never participate in the sort of corruption we have watched
unfold over the past few years. Hang around with grassroots
conservative voters in Kansas, and in the main you will find them to
be honest, hardworking people.
But put conservatism in charge of the state, and it behaves very
differently. Now the “values” that rightist politicians eulogize on
the stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely
different set of priorities-priorities that reveal more about the
unchanging historical essence of American conservatism than do its
fleeting campaigns against gay marriage or secular humanism. The
conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is
institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned
about in elementary school: Its leaders laugh off the idea of the
public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing
topnotch talent into government service; they declare war on public
workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they
have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with
them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order
to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought
has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will
require years of political action.
Let us start with conservatives’ sense of their own exclusion. This
idea may strike you as peculiar, but to conservatives it is
fundamental; it predicates everything they do, say, and enact. The
government is never theirs, they believe, no matter how much of it
they happen to control. “Even when conservatives are in power they
refuse to adopt the psychology of an establishment,” marveled the
journalist Sidney Blumenthal during the Reagan years. George W. Bush,
who has grabbed more power for the executive branch than anyone since
Nixon, actually sees himself as a “dissident in Washington.” One of
his more worshipful biographers calls him the nation’s Rebel-in-Chief
he “operates in Washington like the head of a small occupying army of
insurgents …. He’s an alien in the realm of the governing class,
given a green card by voters.”
The hallucination is dazzling, awesome. For most of the past three
decades these insurgents have controlled at least one branch of
government; they were underwritten in their rule by the biggest of
businesses; they were backed by a robust social movement with chapters
across the radio dial. Still they remain the victims, the outsiders;
they fight the power, the establishment, the snobs, the corrupt. John
McCain rails against Washington as the “city of Satan”-which in any
sober theology would make him Lucifer’s lieutenant. Fred Barnes, the
author of Rebel-in-Chief, is such a well-known Washington fixture that
he hosts a TV show called The Beltway Boys. Karl Zinsmeister, the
editor of a magazine published by the ultra-insiders at the American
Enterprise Institute, reviled the people of the capital in 2004 as
“morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human beings.” Soon afterward he
was rewarded for his adherence to the fantasy by -being appointed
chief domestic-policy adviser to President Bush.
Conservatism-as-revolution was not always such a ridiculous idea. In
the Fifties and Sixties, conservatism was widely regarded as a deluded
relic of an earlier age. The Republican Party itself was dominated at
that time by its moderate faction, which conservatives defeated only
after a titanic struggle spanning many years. Then, in the Seventies,
right-wing insurgencies spread across the country: conservative
cliques took control of the Southern Baptists and the National Rifle
Association, and in 1978 the first of a wave of tax revolts shook
California. In 1981 came the turn of the College Republicans, where
the right-wing takeover was led by none other than the future
supercorruptionist Jack Abramoff. This uprising holds special
significance for the historian, since it not only introduces us to the
cast of characters who went on to dominate Washington during the
Gingrich and Bush eras but also provides a window into the
conservative soul.
The story begins in 1980, the year of the “Reagan Revolution,” when
there appeared on the national scene a phenomenon that bewildered
political observers: legions of politicized, energetic college
students who were conservatives rather than liberals or radicals, as
had been typical in the two decades previous. And not only were their
politics deeply square but the idol of this unlikely - youth craze was
the oldest president ever. Reagan’s entire Pennsylvania campaign, for
example, was run by a lad of twenty. In 1984, the aged actor won 60
percent of the college-student vote. The historical turnabout was
irresistible, and Reagan Youth became one of the great journalistic
cliches of the period, powering hundreds of newspaper columns and at
least one beloved TV sitcom.
These sons of Reagan had a strong sense of generational
self-awareness, and they loudly told the - world how they had come by
it. In the midst of the interminable Iran hostage crisis, a crowd of
them at one college campus were supposedly so moved by a showing of
Patton that they demonstrated spontaneously in favor of a nuclear
attack on that country, shaking the ivory tower with chants of “First
strike now!” Another well-known story of the era was how a bunch of
privileged kids at Dartmouth College, a traditional fortress of
privilege, decided that embracing the traditional politics of
privilege and mimicking the traditional manners of the privileged were
actually acts of great daring, exposing them to persecution by
tyrannical liberals. Then there was Jack Abramoff, a College
Republican leader in the Boston area who gained, according to the John
Birch Society’s Review of the News, a “reputation as one of the most
innovative of the national Conservative youth leaders” after he
mounted such a massive grassroots push for Reagan in 1980 that he
almost single-handedly shifted Massachusetts into the Republican
column.
Abramoff, a burly fellow from Beverly Hills, came to Washington in
1981 to assume the chairmanship of the College Republican National
Committee. Back in the Vietnam days it had been leftists who fought
the power, he explained to reporters. But “now we’re the campus
radicals.” His newly energized College Republicans (CRs) fanned out
across the nation, instructing clean-cut kids on how to use the
tactics of the Sixties left for their own causes. A snapshot of
Abramoff using a bullhorn to rally a conservative throng was proudly
reproduced in the CRs’ Annual Report for 1983, just across the page
from a photo of Ralph Reed, who was then Abramoff’s right-hand man,
pumping his fist at the head of a swarm of angry, sign-waving
conservatives. In both instances the young men had gone into action
wearing neckties.
It was Abramoff’s friend Grover Norquist, then a recent graduate of
Harvard Business School, who came up with a plan for changing the very
nature of the College Republicans. Norquist made a study of the CRs,
developing- a scheme to transform them from “a resume-padding social
club,” as one account puts it, into “an ideological, grassroots
organization.” Abramoff made Norquist the College Republicans’
executive director, and the two put Norquist’s theory into action.
They purged the “old guard.” They amended the group’s constitution,
establishing a structure that made the Washington office more
powerful, and rewarded proselytizing on campus.
What the rising conservative sensibility of those years treasured
above all else was “confrontation” with the left. It called for a
quasi-military victory over liberalism; it would have no truck with
‘civility or fair play; and it made heroes out of outrage-courting
lib-fighters like Reagan’s communications director Pat Buchanan, the
organizer Howard Phillips, and the young Jack Abramoff.
The first and most noticeable characteristic of this new militancy was
an air of swaggering truculence. There are, of course, bullies from
every walk of life and every political persuasion, but on the right
bullying holds a special, exalted position. It is no accident that two
of the movement’s greatest heroes-Tom Delay and Oliver North-had the
same nickname: “the Hammer.”
Jack Abramoff filled this bill perfectly. He had reportedly been
something of a bully in high school and had now grown into a
“hard-charging” and “dynamic” leader, in the assessment of
conservative magazines, an ass-kicking weight lifter who could quiet
the commies with his fists if they got out of line. The gangster
fetish of his later years is by now familiar to the whole world-his
constant references to The Godfather, his black trench coat and
fedora, his Meyer Lansky memorabilia, the murderer argot that will no
doubt serve him and his friends well during their prison years.
Abramoff himself derided the moderates he had ousted from control of
the CRs as “wishy-washy country-clubbers” and insisted that he had
transformed the organization into an “ideological, well-trained,
aggressive, conservative” outfit. “Fighting the Left with a goal of
victory” became the official, stated purpose of his College Republican
cadres, according to an essay Abramoff wrote for the group’s 1983
Annual Report. The CRs were “fighting America’s last stand,” he
blustered; they would “defund the enemy wherever possible,” one of his
lieutenants added. According to the journalist Nina Easton, CR
officers had their underlings memorize the gory opening monologue from
the movie Patton, only with the word “Democrat” standing in for the
word “Nazi.” Other young rightists of the period went a step further.
J. Michael Waller, the editor of the Sequent, a student paper at
George Washington University, actually took breaks from red-baiting
professors in order to zip down to Central America and hang out with
the Nicaraguan Contras and the death-squad faction in EI Salvador.
War was the order of the day, from President Reagan’s fight with the
air-traffic controllers right down to the college campus, where
Abramoff became famous for his declaration: “It is not our job to seek
peaceful coexistence with the Left, Our job is to remove them from
power permanently.” War plus revolution, actually. Abramoff liked to
describe his CRs as “the sword and shield of the Reagan Revolution,”
and in 1984 the young firebrand used his moment at the rostrum of the
G.O.P. convention in Dallas to lecture the assembled small-business
types on revolutionary theory. Whether the small-business types
grasped it or not, a revolution was indeed under way. Conservative
politicians had long served business interests, and so businesspeople
had long tended to be conservatives, but now would come a new turn:
conservatism as business, conservatism as a source of profit for the
people Jack Abramoff once referred to as “political entrepreneurs.”
In its embryonic form, conservatism-as-industry consisted mainly in
peddling right-wing grievances to the like-minded. In those days there
were dealers in precious metals who used a towering contempt for
liberalism as a sales pitch for gold coins. There were outfits raising
money to help beleaguered conservative politicians who were in fact
not beleaguered and had not asked for the help. There were anti-union
charities and even fake anti-union charities, all of them capitalizing
on the keen hatred for labor shared by so many businessmen. “There was
so much money ready for conservative organizations in the United
States,” said Spitz Channell, a freelance conservative fund-raiser
later involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, that the problem was
finding “ways to spend that money.”
Abramoff quickly established himself as an entrepreneur with promise.
When the “campus radical” took over as the CRs’ chairman in 1981, the
group’s budget came directly from the Republican National Committee.
That had been sufficient for the old CRs, who liked to party and aimed
to anger nobody. But Abramoff started to complain about the
arrangement in his first year. And he schemed to achieve autonomy. He
didn’t want “to be the youth arm of the Republican National
Committee,” his onetime lieutenant David Miner remembers. He wanted a
very strong, viable organization. And instead of once a year sitting
down with the budget director and the political director of the RNC
and making a twenty-minute case about why they should donate $100,000a
year to the College Republicans, Jack decided he was going to run the
College Republicans just like the Republican National Committee was
run: he was going to have his own direct mail list, he was going to
have prominent members of Congress sign letters for him, and he was
going to raise his own money. That’s a pretty bold statement for
someone to do at twenty-two years old.
It was so bold, in fact, that it infuriated the RNC officials charged
with supervising the college auxiliary. They kicked the CRs out of
their building.
No matter. Under Abramoff’s leadership, enthusiasm was high,
membership soared, and revenues quintupled; what’s more, fully 70
percent of that income came from individual donors, dwarfing
contributions from the RNC itself. “Jack was a very creative, smart
executive,” Miner told me. He was “a hell of a CEO.” 1
As entrepreneurs are supposed to do, Abramoff and Norquist opened
themselves to the market, setting up incentives for growth and looking
for investors outside the parent organization. And what did the
College Republicans have to offer these investors, these donors?
Outrage. Activism. The right-wing position rammed home with force. To
see college kids in the street, chanting the slogans of the hard
right-this was a spectacle for which older Republicans, angered by
what they had seen in the Sixties, were willing to pay a great price.
And Abramoff’s CRs delivered, with constant protests in Washington and
a series of insulting posters, the most famous of which slyly implied
that liberals were communist dupes.
I have managed to unearth a single specimen of direct mail from the
CRs’ Abramoff period, and it is typical of the genre circa 1983: by
turns chummy, frightening, confiding, and apocalyptic. As was common
in those days, the letter is signed by an elected official-in this
case by New York Representative Jack Kemp, then the best-known
conservative in Congress. (Today Kemp advises John McCain on economic
policy.) It pleads with the recipient to “dig down deep” for the
College Republicans, led by “my good friend Jack Abramoff.” And why
should Mr. and Mrs. America give to Jack Abramoff’s CRs, of all
groups? Because, according to Kemp, they are “the most important
Republican organization in America today,” prepared to do all manner
of grassroots electioneering in the upcoming 1984 contest. And why
should the reader care about that? Because “our nation is in grave
danger of sliding into another depression” should liberals be
permitted to resume their tax-and-spend ways. “That’s right,” Kemp
warned. “A depression worse than the so-called Great Depression.”
Thankfully, though, Jack Abramoff and his “dedicated group of young
leaders … understand what must be done to return economic prosperity
to America.”
The larger mechanism CEO Abramoff used to break free from his stodgy,
moderate Republican elders was a tax-exempt fund-raising group called
the United Students of America Foundation (a.k.a. the USA Foundation,
or sometimes just USAF), which was technically non-partisan but in
reality simply added its voice to whatever cause the CRs happened to
be pushing. While direct mail solicited funds from individual
conservatives, the USA Foundation allowed Abramoff and his crew to go
after hefty contributions from the real powers of American
conservatism: corporations. And with the support of corporate money
came, wouldn’t you know it, support for corporate-friendly causes in
the world at large.
Going freelance, as Abramoff did with the USA Foundation, soon became
a popular career move among the sons of Reagan. Ralph Reed launched a
group called Students for America, a Southern outfit designed to bring
evangelicals into the conservative mix. Students for a Better America,
which warred on liberal professors, was set up by Steve Baldwin, also
a onetime Abramoff lieutenant. The Conservative Youth Federation of
America was launched by Amy Moritz, yet another Abramoff associate.
And let us not forget the Conservative Action Foundation, the
Conservative Student Support Foundation, and the mysterious Young
Conservative Foundation, “America’s premier Human Rights
organization.”
It was through the USA Foundation that Abramoff seems to have
discovered the profitable side of politics. The occasion for this
discovery was the College Republicans’ ongoing war with Ralph Nader’s
Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), student-activist outfits that
were set up in the Seventies and funded at most colleges by “activity
fees” that all students were required to pay unless they checked a box
on a form. This was the point on which the CRs challenged them,
insisting on campus after campus that it was “sinful and tyrannical”
to compel students to fund an obviously political organization.
Like other Nader groups, the student PIRGs were something of a
nuisance for business, and at some point it apparently occurred to
Abramoff or Norquist that defunding and thus “killing” campus PIRG
chapters was a service for which the targeted businesses ought to be
paying. So the young entrepreneurs of the USA Foundation got out there
and sold themselves as political hit men. According to one 1986 study,
by the journalist Allan Nairn, the group managed to collect tribute
from canning and bottling companies, two oil companies, an electric
company (PIRGs were then working to set up utility watchdog groups),
Amway, Coors, an assortment of San Francisco landlords worried about
the possibility of rent control, and the Campbell Soup Company, which
paid the USA Foundation to undermine a campus support group for a
migrant farmworkers’ union. It was pugnacity for pay.
The USA Foundation’s motto was “Promoting a free market of ideas on
the nation’s campuses,” and here we encounter yet another of the
Washington right’s signature lines. Like so many conservative
ideas-anticommunism, for example-it sounds fine at first. A “free
market of ideas” sounds like “free inquiry” or a “free exchange of
ideas,” an environment in which hypotheses are tested and bad ones are
weeded out while good ones go on to earn the respect of the community
of scholars. But this is not what the phrase means at all. Markets do
not determine the objective merit of things, only their price, which
is to say, their merit in the eyes of large corporations and the very
wealthy.
The point, and the profit, was in getting the people with money to
understand which ideas served their common interests, which ones
didn’t, and then to act together as a class–supporting the good ideas
and crushing the liberal ones. This was a plan with legs: When I spoke
to Grover Norquist in 2006, he was still insisting that businesses had
to be instructed on big-picture thinking, on the amazing returns to be
realized through funding conservatism, By then, of course, Grover
Norquist was no longer some campus activist; he was the architect of
the most effective defund-the-left program Washington has ever seen.
And his old friend Jack Abramoff was on his way to jail.
Side by side with the Entrepreneur in those days stood another great
conservative hero: the Freedom Fighter, a ragged warrior who had,
according to myth, spontaneously taken up arms against communism in
Third World countries around the globe. American conservatives came to
love these freedom fighters intensely, and for a simple reason. These
tough anticommunists in faraway lands validated the conservatives’
most cherished fantasies of the Sixties turned right-side up. The
freedom fighters proved it: Reagan’s revolution was for real.
Traditional conservatives had generally regarded anticommunist
guerrilla movements as necessary evils, doing important if ugly work.
The transforming fire of Reaganism, however, turned all such
cutthroats and mercenaries into patriots. It was our guys who were the
heroic underdogs now, disrespected and ill-supplied, going up against
the high-tech, organization-men monsters of the Soviet Union-and, of
course, its liberal proxies here in the United States.
The peerless darling of the freedom-fighter fan club was Jonas
Savimbi, the charismatic Angolan guerrilla leader whose every
utterance seemed to strike young Eighties conservatives as a timeless
profundity. Angola had been one of the very last countries in Africa
to be freed from colonial domination, but, unlike seemingly every
other “national liberator” in the preceding decades, Savimbi was not a
communist. In Angola, the communists were the ones who grabbed power
in the capital as soon as the Europeans left; Savimbi, who fought them
with the backing of the apartheid government in South Africa,
supposedly believed in free enterprise and balanced budgets.
Conservatives were smitten with this self-titled general who struggled
for free markets in his remote land. They fell for Savimbi as
romantically, and as guilelessly, as Sixties radicals once did for
Che, Ho, and Huey. Savimbi was “one of the few authentic heroes of our
time,” roared Jeane Kirkpatrick, queen of the neocons, when she
introduced him at the 1986 Conservative Political Action Conference.
Grover Norquist followed the great man around his camp in Angola,
preparing magazine articles for Savimbi’s signature. Jack Abramoff
made a movie about Savimbi, depicting him as a tougher, African
version of Gandhi. Even Savimbi’s capital-the remote camp called
“Jamba”-was described in conservative literature with elevated
language such as “Savimbi’s Kingdom.”
In truth, Savimbi’s main achievement was to keep going, for nearly
thirty years, a civil war that made Angola one of the worst places on
earth-its population impoverished, its railroads and highways and dams
in ruins, its countryside strewn with land mines by the millions, even
its elephant herds wiped out, their tusks hacked off to raise funds
for his army.
This was the man the rebel right chose for the starring role in one of
the strangest spectacles in American political history, a media event
designed to cement conservatism’s identification with revolution. The
organizer was Jack Abramoff; the place was Jamba; the model, I am
told, was Woodstock-only a right-wing version, with guerrillas instead
of rock bands. Every kind of freedom fighter was there, joining hands
in territory liberated by arms from a Soviet client regime. There were
Nicaraguan Contras, some Afghan mujahedeen, an American tycoon-and
they all got together at Savimbi’s hideout.
This “rumble in the jungle,” as skeptics called it, came to pass in
June of 1985. Of course, bringing it off required considerable
assistance from Savimbi’s South African patrons. Nobody else even knew
how to find Jamba.
Since these freedom fighters had no actual issues to discuss-no trade
agreements or mutual defense plans or anything-they signed the Jamba
Declaration, a bit of high-flown folderol written by Grover Norquist
that aimed for solemnity but sounded more like the work of a
fifth-grader who has been forced to memorize the Gettysburg Address
and the Declaration of Independence and has got them all jumbled up
somehow.
Jamba was meant as a celebration of freedom, a word revered by
Americans generally and a term of enormous significance to
conservatives in particular. Yet as freedom’s embodiment Abramoff had
chosen a terrorist: Jonas Savimbi, the leader of an armed cult. To
fill the main supporting role in this great freedom-fest, meanwhile,
the organizers turned to apartheid South Africa, a place where only a
small, correctly complexioned percentage of the population possessed A
even the most basic democratic rights.
And here we encounter one of the right’s great lost causes. You don’t
have to dig very deep into the conservative literature of the Eighties
before you hit apartheid South Africa. Today the issue makes
conservatives uncomfortable, naturally, and few of them will own up to
the passion with which they once worked to rationalize that government
or to vilify its foes. But in those days, South Africa’s agonizing
racial problems, its prosperous but beleaguered business community,
and its stout defiance of all things communist made it a potent symbol
for American conservatives: South Africa was essentially like us, and
yet the liberals, with their sanctions and divestment strategies, with
their airy do-gooder moralism, were prepared to sell out this loyal
friend, just as they had sold out so many others.
As it happened, Jack Abramoff had visited South Africa in 1983 to meet
with student leaders, presumably including Russel Crystal, who headed
an energetic right-wing outfit on that nation’s campuses. Crystal was
a sort of South African doppelganger to Abramoff, echoing not only the
American’s tactical thinking but his combative style as well. In the
early Eighties, Crystal’s group declared “all-out war” on its campus
adversaries, who, he said, were “undermining the will of the Western
world”; on one occasion his followers reportedly threatened a peaceful
left-wing demonstration with baseball bats. Just like the College
Republicans, Crystal’s student organization spent heavily, and Crystal
boasted about its financial “support from the business community.”
One month after Jamba, Crystal’s student group hosted a second
right-wing Woodstock, bringing together conservative college students
from around the world. The event was called “Youth for Freedom,” and a
“Dear Delegate” letter given to each participant explained its
purpose: It was 1985, the U.N .’s “International Youth Year,” and
highminded youth congresses were happening all over the world-most of
them “under the leadership of ยท .. communist front organisations …
to propagate their own marxist/leninist agenda.” The duty of the
righteous was obvious.. “to gather the true defenders of liberty and
freedom”; to ponder “the security and prosperity of the free world”;
and to draft a statement to which “conservative students worldwide”
might rally. Norquist, Abramoff, 2 and a gaggle of College Republicans
made up the American contingent. Color was added by a representative
of the German extreme right. (Bonus points: he had been a U-boat
captain during World War II.) The delegates listened to a denunciation
of divestment. They received an expensively printed booklet about the
martial and philosophical achievements of Jonas Savimbi. After the
conference, the kids were given a treat: some of the “youth for
freedom” got to go to a military base to see a riot-control
demonstration.
Coverage of the conclave in the South African press focused on the
lavishness of the proceedings and the great expense involved in flying
everyone to Johannesburg. The participants stayed in the finest hotel
in the city, and the conference provided a squad of interpreters and a
video crew to document it all. Obviously, Russel Crystal’s tiny
student group couldn’t have paid for all of this by itself, and
Crystal himself kept mum about the financing. But other freedom youths
confirmed that the gathering had been at least partly funded by South
African corporate concerns, in the now-familiar political entrepreneur
pattern: “The business community in South Africa is very enthused
about any facelift possibility that they can gain,” one of the
organizers told Allan Nairn.
Out of the Youth for Freedom conference came an organization called
Liberty and Democracy International, which didn’t last long, perhaps
because of the neck-snapping contradiction between its dreamy title
and its South African reality. Out of that organization, in 1986, came
the International Freedom Foundation-the IFF-the strangest scheme
hatched to that point by the sons of Reagan for bringing the power of
money to bear on politics and the world of ideas.
Not one of the many former IFFers I contacted, either in the United
States or in South Africa, would consent to an interview, but we do
know the most basic facts about the group. According to the official
report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the
duties of the IFF included supporting Jonas Savimbi and fighting trade
sanctions against South Africa. The IFF’s head office was in
Washington, where Abramoff served as executive director. But the shots
were called by the organization’s South African branch, headed by
Russel Crystal. There was an office in London and, eventually, one in
West Germany. We also know that the IFF was an expensive proposition
and that the apartheid government spent millions of dollars propping
it up. The group hosted speakers, conferences, and presentations; it
published several magazines and a flock of newsletters; its principals
constantly traveled the globe, spreading their toxic trinity of
“Liberty, Security, Prosperity.”
The Washington branch of the IFF, it seems, was particularly
successful at courting politicians. The group’s “advisory board”
listed, among others, Senator Jesse Helms and Representatives Phil
Crane, “B-1 Bob” Dornan, James Inhofe (a stout family values
supporter), and “Buz” Lukens (an egregious family-values violator).
The group also tried their hand at influence-buying. In 1987, the
IFF’s Washington office requested $450,000 from South Africa in order
to buy a jet plane for the presidential campaign of lack Kemp, then
the idol of the conservative movement. According to internal IFF
documents, this bauble would be an investment sufficient to make
Abramoff’s gang “the ‘kitchen cabinet’ types of the Kemp
administration.” The South : Africans turned the proposal down,
realizing even then what a long shot Kemp was.
The IFF made no direct attempt to justify apartheid, for the simple
reason that racism as a philosophy of government was flatly
irredeemable in the West. Instead the IFF aimed to tarnish apartheid’s
enemies, “to paint the ANC as a project of the international
department of the Soviet Communist Party.” This was merely a
large-scale replay of the political entrepreneurship we saw at the USA
Foundation, with Jack and the gang yet again hiring themselves out to
a wealthy client to perform a hit on a troublesome left-wing group.
High points in this campaign included hearings by the House Republican
Study Committee in 1987 to blame “the plight of the children of South
Africa” on the commie-terrorist ANC; reports playing up the ANC’s
commie-derived taste for atrocities against kids; newspaper ads
designed to throw cold water on Nelson Mandela during his triumphant
visit to America in 1990; and an endless war on Ted Kennedy, a leading
proponent of the 1986 sanctions against South Africa.
The real, confessed eminence grise behind the IFF was South Africa’s
infamous “superspy” Craig Williamson, a man whose bloody escapades
deserve an entire volume in the annals of Cold War espionage.
Williamson infiltrated South Africa’s main leftist student group in
the Seventies and rose to its leadership; he used the connections thus
made to assist in the imprisonment and murder of the movement’s other
leaders. A respected South African historian, asked for his opinion of
the man, said simply, “Craig Williamson was the scum of the twentieth
century. He murdered friends of mine. I spit on the ground he walks
on.”
When the IFF’s true identity was exposed in 1995, the Americans
questioned by the media denied any knowledge of its ugly provenance.
In most cases this was plausible enough; after all, the basic
principle of a clandestine operation is secrecy. But Jack Abramoff
almost certainly knew. Still, he denied it-”categorically,” he
exclaimed-s-when the truth came out. Plus, he had an explanation for
all the bad press: “It’s pay-back time in South Africa.”
The single biggest scandal of the Eighties resulted from a confluence
of the two great conservative themes ‘I have been describing: the
“freedom fighter” mentality and the cult of political
entrepreneurship.
The outlines of the Iran-Contra story are well known. President
Reagan’s CIA was waging a “secret” war against the Sandinista
government of Nicaragua; the Democratic Congress understandably
objected, as we were technically at peace with that nation, and, in
1983, cut off funds to the CIA-backed Contras, Over at the National
Security Council, however, Marine Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North came
up with a scheme to get money to the Contras anyway, using a network
of private donors, weapons sales to Iran, and private supply
operations. He also organized behind-the-scenes efforts to lobby
Congress to change its mind.
Quite early on in the annals of Iran-Contra our pioneering political
entrepreneurs make their inevitable appearance. Jack Abramoff crops up
in North’s notebook for February 14, 1985, his name misspelled but the
beginnings of a great lobbyist unmistakable. On March 26, Abramoff
showed up on a list of people helping North to influence the upcoming
Contra-aid vote in Congress. Later that day, Abramoff phoned North and
told him that a number of “votes” were available in exchange for some
or other favor.
We do not ordinarily remember Iran-Contra for the business
opportunities it generated, but in the long, winding history of
conservatism-as-industry it remains a particularly instructive
chapter. The aforementioned political entrepreneur Spitz Channell, for
example, sensed the Contras’ potential early on and used them to
become the most successful fund-raiser in all of Washington’ circa
1985. Channell’s marks were conservative widows; he made his pitches
in person, often using a scary slide show put together by Oliver North
about the dangers of Nicaraguan communism. Not only did his donors
reap tax write-offs by giving to one of the “nonprofit” groups
Channell had set up but they sometimes got to meet President Reagan
too; a favor the fund-raiser arranged simply by throwing some change
to one of the president’s former aides.
None of this put much money into the pockets of the Contras, though.
On the right, the fund-raiser typically prospers, even if the cause
does not. And Channell was a professional; he later admitted that he
became interested in Nicaragua only after he noticed how the subject
ticked off rich folks. He proceeded to take the customary profiteering
to dizzy entrepreneurial heights. Of the $12 million raked in by
Channell’s empire of fund-raising organs in 1985 and 1986, it is
estimated that only $2.7 million actually made it to the Contras. Huge
sums were diverted to Channell’s friends, his lover, and his friends’
lovers. All the middlemen between here and Managua took a cut, too.
Iran-Contra was the scandal with the Midas touch, and it continued to
rain money on the faithful even after the whole rotten operation had
been rolled up. One day in July 1987, as the Democrats in Congress
screeched hysterically about the White House and its illegal foreign
policy, Ollie North put on his uniform, stood before the cameras,
raised his hand, and summoned up a backlash that ultimately crushed
the liberals and brought a flood of prosperity to the political
entrepreneurs’ of the right.
Jack Abramoff’s IFF, for example, started selling copies of an Ollie
North videotape made up of a slide show that was almost certainly the
one Spitz Channell had used to scare his dotards, advertising it with
a photo of the stern-faced Marine testifying before “the so-called
Iran/Contra congressional committee.” Oliver North videotapes
eventually became something of an industry unto themselves, but the
one made by Abramoff, titled Telling It Like It Is, is almost
certainly the only bit of filmed entertainment ever to be dedicated
“to the memory of William J. Casey,” the CIA director made famous by
his unabashed contempt for Congress.
The trade in Olliana boomed for years, as the persecuted patriot was
indicted for his crimes and came to require a legal-defense fund (and
also, apparently, a host of fake legal-defense funds). Jerry Falwell
compared Ollie to Jesus Christ. There were Oliver North keychains and
pocketknives and T-shirts and eventually even a TV show in which Ollie
told America the secrets of war. There was the usual round of plunder,
as funds raised to help Ollie stayed with the fund-raisers instead.
And inevitably there was “Ollie, Inc.,” as the man himself went into
the nonprofit direct-mail business. By 1994, when he ran for a Senate
seat in Virginia, Oliver North had become the most successful
political fund-raiser in the land, bringing in some $20 million over
the course of his campaign. Remarkably, he lost anyway.
Prodigious though they may seem, these acts of retail profiteering
were minuscule compared with the colossal entrepreneurial gambit that
the Iran-Contra investigation revealed. The insiders called it “the
Enterprise”: private money, raised through the sale of government
favors and property, would go to fund private armies of “freedom
fighters” operating overseas. The ultimate aim of the Enterprise, as
envisioned by CIA Director Casey, was privatization on the grandest
scale imaginable: the construction of a foreign-policy instrument that
was free from the meddling of Congress, financed by sales of weapons
and another precious commodity that government had in abundance but
had hitherto been reluctant to market-access.
The Enterprise eventually fell apart under congressional scrutiny, but
fifteen years later this very bad idea was back again in even more
grandiose form: a vast selling-off of government favors to those
willing to fund the conservative movement, a wholesale transfer of
government responsibilities to private-sector contractors, and even
private armies, unaccountable to Congress or to anyone else.
Today industry conservatism includes specialists in dozens of fields.
There are professionals and amateurs; those who do it because they’re
paid to do it and those who do it because their eyes have seen the
glory of the coming of the Entrepreneur. It includes establishment
firms and feisty startups, megacontractors taking billions to do work
that the government used to do itself for far less, young men with a
nice smile and a single client who just wants to do a little
clear-cutting out West somewhere. In conservative circles you
encounter entrepreneurs both formally and casually at carefully
programmed events laying out the opportunities for profit opened up by
Hurricane Katrina, or in conversation at a banquet celebrating some
right-wing anniversary or other. At one such event in 2004, waiting
for the presentation of a “Charlton Heston commemorative firearm,” I
made the backslapping acquaintance of a freelance motivational speaker
who, upon discovering that one of my tablemates was an officer of the
Transportation Security Administration, immediately sought his
confirmation that “we’re gonna privatize that, right?”
For some in winger Washington this is an idealistic business, but what
gives it power and longevity is that it is a profitable business. I
mean this not as polemic but as a statement of fact. Washington swarms
with conservative ideologues not because conservatives particularly
like the place but because there is an entire industry here that
supports these people-an industry subsidized by the nation’s largest
corporations and its richest families, and the government too. We are
all familiar with the flagship organizations- Cato, Heritage, AEI-but
the industry extends far beyond these, encompassing numerous magazines
and literally hundreds of lobbying firms. There is even a daily
newspaper-the Washington Times published strictly for the movement’s
benefit, a propaganda sheet whose distortions are so obvious and so
alien that it puts one in mind of those official party organs one
encounters when traveling in authoritarian countries.
There are political strategists, pollsters, campaign managers’,
trainers of youth, image consultants, makers of TV commercials,
revolutionaries-for-hire, and, of course, direct-mail specialists who
still launch their million-letter raids on the mailboxes of the
heartland. Remember the guy who wrote all those sputtering diatribes
for your college newspaper? Chances are he’s in D.C. now, thinking big
thoughts from an endowed chair, or churning out more of the brilliant
usual for one of the movement’s many blogs. The campus wingnut whose
fulminations on the Red Menace so amused my friends and me at the
University of Virginia, for example, resurfaced here as a columnist
for the Washington Times before transitioning inevitably into
consultancy. A friend of mine who went to Georgetown recently recalled
for me the capers of his campus wingnut, whom he had completely
forgotten until the guy made headlines as the lead culprit in a minor
2004 scandal called “Memogate.” Later he worked for the U.S. Embassy
in Baghdad, teaching democratic civics to Iraqi politicians.
There is so much money in conservatism these days that Karl Rove
rightly boasts, “We can now go to students at Harvard and say, ‘There
is now a secure retirement plan for Republican operatives.’” The young
people who, like Jack Abramoff before them, have answered
conservatism’s call over the past three decades were obeying their
conscience, perhaps, but they were also making a canny career move.
Canny career moves are just about all we can expect from conservative
government these days: tax breaks for wealthy benefactors, wars
started and maintained for the benefit of American industry, fat
contracts granted to the clients of the right consultant. Like Bush
and Reagan before him, John McCain is a self-proclaimed outsider, but
should he win in November he will merely bring us more of the same: an
executive branch fed by, if not actually made up of, lobbyists and
other angry, righteous profiteers. Washington itself will remain what
it has been-not a Babylon that corrupts our pure-hearted right-wingers
but the very seat of their Industry Conservatism, constantly seething
and effervescing, with tens of thousands of individuals coming and
going, each avidly piling up his own tidy pile but between them
engaged in an awesome common project.
Take a step back, reader, and see what they have wrought.
Notes
1 Before Abramoff s name became so poisonous, most College Republicans
regarded this era as their finest hour. In 2001, then-chairman Scott
Stewart introduced the lobbyist to the CRs’ convention as “probably
the best national chairman we’ve ‘ever had.”
2 Although Abramoff is listed as the very last speaker on the official
“Youth for Freedom” program, none of the attendees I talked to
remember seeing him there.
Harper’s Magazine / August 2008
Thomas Frank is the author of four books, including What’s the Matter
with Kansas? and the forthcoming The Wrecking Crew (Metropolitan
Books), from which this essay is adapted.