The Wrecking Crew, by Thomas Frank

Viewed from Europe, American Conservatism appears an odd if unpleasant beast. The hydra seems a good match, for this is a social movement and political discourse that embraces the Republican Party, multi-media evangelical Protestantism, anti-abortionists, the creepy shadowlands of think-tanks and foundations that brought us the neo-con nightmare, and those clever white men in suits who invented Enron and hedge funds and left us with the current meltdown of the banking system. This is a truly toxic brew from which the strangest creatures are distilled. Witness Sarah Palin, Republican nominee for the vice presidency, governor of Alaska, a rootin'-tootin'-shootin' ex-beauty queen whom shock-jock Russ Limbaugh described as "Guns, Babies and Jesus".

Conservatism in this part of the world was always about the preservation of institutions and the stabilisation of the social order. The oddness, then, of the American multi-headed monster is that it should be called conservative at all. Few social movements have managed to wreak so much global and domestic havoc as this one. Even more alien, those aspects of European conservatism that have modulated the embrace of market economics – noblesse oblige and a genuine if hierarchical collectivism – have no purchase in the US.

One of the many excellent things about Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew is that it provides a primer on who these people are; how they got into power and what they have done since. Above all, he helps us understand how this loathsome bestiary has managed to pull off the ideological conjuring trick of appearing as conservatives driven by patriotism, outsiders reforming the corrupt state – when in fact they are monomaniacal economic liberals driven by greed, insiders ransacking the public treasury.

As Deep Throat said, "Follow the money". The money is in the suburbs. The richest county in the US is not in Silicon Valley or Manhattan, it's Loudoun County, Virginia. In this microcosm, Frank describes the rise of the conservative state and its archipelago of lobbyists, to whom it has contracted out everything from social care to writing federal laws. In the process conservatives have made themselves unbelievably rich, reflected in ostentatious fortress housing.

The party began in the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan took the White House. A new generation of conservative student activists took the methods of their Sixties opponents and turned them to reactionary ends. In a gruesome mirror-image of Western Maoists, this generation made freedom fighters of the Contras in Nicaragua, while taking money from the South African secret service.

Armed with an ideological backpack of unwavering cynicism, paranoia, meanness and instrumentalism, the new conservative intellectuals and lobbyists learnt that there was an enormous market for their message. They positioned themselves as outsiders and insurgents taking on the irredeemably corrupt liberal state built by the New Deal in DC. Shock-jocks, talk radio and pliable journals and journalists have attempted to make this the default position of public debate. Their brilliant use of direct mail and access to immense corporate funding generated enough cash for work in Washington and sumptuous lifestyles.

Under George W Bush, the process has gone into overdrive as the conservatives remade the federal state in their own image. Apart from presiding over a gigantic transfer of wealth from the poor to the very rich, they have systematically undermined every federal agency. Known anti-union enthusiasts have been put in charge of the Department of Labor; polluters' friends and environmental sceptics staff the Environmental Protection Agency.

Federal wages are so low that staffing levels are at crisis point. Budget deficits are seen as the perfect hidden time-bomb for a Democratic administration. The exchange of money for power has been formalised to the point that corruption has become invisible to its architects.

Frank is by turns studied and polemical, exasperated and hysterical, incisive and witty. His account of Saipan, a tiny American territory in the Pacific that has served as a laboratory for the most extreme in free-market utopias, is coruscatingly funny and awful. But as he knows, these people aren't funny. They are what await the winner of this year's presidential election. They, and the economic interests they represent, are the axis of evil. Perhaps the most cost-effective way of reforming Washington will be to send the Marines into Loudoun county.

David Goldblatt's history of football, 'The Ball is Round', is published by Penguin