I’ve known Thomas Frank’s work since his cultural-commentary zine The Baffler and his first book The Conquest of Cool. As the Clinton era and the tech bubble gave way to Bush’s Reign of Error, Frank’s focus morphed from “hip” youth-marketing shticks to the early-oughts’ financial speculation mania, to the deepest darkest heart of conservative malevolence. This is the setting of his latest treatise, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule.

Frank’s premise in a nutshell: Many of your worst conspiracy theories about the right-wing sleaze machine are true, and he’s got the voluminous research to prove it. Legislation is sold to lobbyists for big money at golf courses and expensive restaurants. This lobbying industry’s made DC’s Virginia suburbs one of America’s wealthiest enclaves.

Among the results: tax and regulatory breaks for the rich and connected, the outsourcing and even offshoring of many government functions, the hiring of well-connected incompetents at business-unfriendly agencies such as FEMA and the Department of Labor, official support for overseas sweatshops and oil drilling in national parks, the decimation of consumer protection and endangered species listings, etc. etc.

Frank particularly enjoys tracking all this through the career of uber-influence peddler Jack Abramoff, who seems to have been everywhere graft and sanctioned bullying have been within our time. Abramoff’s depicted as helping turn the College Republicans into a gaggle of liberal-bashing shock troops, as coordinating apartheid South Africa’s US PR drives, and of turning the post-1994 Republican Congress into a highly organized machine for legal and quasi-legal bribery.

Like Naomi Klein (whom Frank qoutes and name-drops at one point), Frank’s current work covers a few sectors of the VRWC (vast right wing conspiracy) in excruciating, mind-numbing detail, but is silent almost to the point of nihilism about what progressives might do to reverse these plutocratic trends.

This is particularly ironic considering one of Frank’s chief argument points, that Republican corruption and mismanagement increase public cynicism toward government—an opinion Republicans actively want to promote. (Frank calls this situation “Win-Win Corruption.”)

At the opening of the Obama era, this everything-sucks attitude on the part of the left has simply got to give way to more practical (and, yes, hopeful) strategems.