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Are we forever to be at the mercy of thieves and ruffians?" cries Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, the socialite protagonist of Henry Adams' Democracy. "Is a respectable government impossible in a democracy?" An ill-mannered Red might have asked Mrs. Lee how she thought her inheritance was acquired and protected. Alas, such people aren't invited to Washington dinner parties, and so an answer comes from Senator Silas P. Ratcliffe, a thief and ruffian with presidential ambitions. Hoping to seduce the earnest Mrs. Lee with philosophical charm, Ratcliffe opines on the state of democracy like an Aristotle on the Potomac. "No representative government can long be much better or much worse than the society it represents."

The Big Con, The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics Jonathan Chait Houghton Mifflin, 2007 294 pp., $25

Unlike Mrs. Lee, Jonathan Chait is no naïf. Senior editor at The New Republic and author of its venerable "TRB" column, he's had a front-row seat at the spectacle of decadence that's been running in the Beltway. In lucid, brisk, and wonderfully sardonic prose, Chait relates the history of the Second Gilded Age, during which a new generation of rogues and knaves has purchased the rights to the republic. Wacked-out eggheads, legislator-lobbyists, shilling pundits: the imperial city is a pestilent bedlam of chicanery, avarice, and fraud. In the finest tradition of progressive dudgeon, Chait recites the roster of corruption and shame and calls on a vigilant and outraged people to reclaim the halls of self-government.

It's an infuriating tale and a noble call, but as Ratcliffe shows, there's wisdom if not honor among thieves. Like so many wizened scoundrels, the senator exhibits the detachment that comes from a lifetime of successful malfeasance. Chait's research is impeccable, and his umbrage is justified, but Ratcliffe may have the final word: the government can't be any better than the society it represents. By all means, throw out the rascals, but it's the world outside the Beltway echo chamber that truly needs to be transformed.

So how did Washington get so loony? Once upon a time, Chait tells us, sanity reigned in the capital city. In the two decades after World War II, American politics was leavened by "an ethos of accommodation between business and government." (Among historians, this has been dubbed "the New Deal order" or "the postwar social contract.") With a favorable international economic climate and a gray-flannelled business culture, corporate business accepted progressive taxation, strong unions, and pesky but not onerous regulations. Committed to the Cold War, needful of social stability, and dependent on steady economic growth, both political parties superintended a tax-and-regulation regime that gently bridled the rage to accumulate and kept inequality within bounds. Liberals restrained their reformist impulses, while conservatives assumed a measure of "social responsibility." Under the aegis of "consensus," Republicans and Democrats presided over a corporate commonwealth.

But in the 1970s, Chait argues, this tranquil political landscape was battered by a perfect storm of stagflation, higher oil prices, and a shameless hunger for riches, legitimized in the 1980s by Reaganism. The consensus eroded as corporations busted unions and demanded lower taxes and faster deregulation. At the same time, a rising cohort of the right-wing intelligentsia grew impatient with their elders' concessions to the New Deal. Through the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years (that's both Bushes, by the way), the Beltway political culture steadily acquired its current ambience of unbridled powerlust and mendacity. In painful detail, Chait demonstrates that the nation's political institutions, and especially the Republican Party, have been commandeered by a right-wing cabal of laissez-faire extremists whose sole purpose—pursued with all the fervor of a religious mission—is to enrich the already stupendously wealthy. Worse than mere "malefactors of great wealth," as FDR once railed, they comprise, in Chait's words, "a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, some quite possibly insane."

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