It was announced on Friday August 23 that David Koch, former Vice President of Koch Industries, had died. It is unknown which physical ailment ended up killing him, but apparently he had more than one. But David and his brother Charles were best known for applying their vast wealth, and influence with other wealthy people, towards the libertarian movement, which has had a broad degree of influence on right-wing politics without actually taking over the Republican wing of America’s duopoly. In particular, the Kochs fund Reason Magazine, which I’ve always considered to be a fair and useful information source, even if it is sometimes “glibertarian.”
He had donated hundreds of millions of dollars to public television, museums, and cancer research, especially after his own cancer diagnosis. Even Mother Jones had enough regard to mention this side of his public life.
The Reason obituary has an interesting little remark where Brian Doherty implies that Koch’s reason for his limited engagement with third-party politics was mostly practical: “In the 1980 presidential campaign, when recently imposed campaign finance restrictions hobbled third parties’ abilities to fundraise by severely limiting how much any single donor could give, David Koch took advantage of the fact that the rules allowed candidates themselves to self-finance as they wished: He became the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential nominee. He and running mate Ed Clark got more than 1 percent of the vote, a party record that would go unbroken until 2016. ”
In a certain respect, Koch was ahead of his time, preceding billionaire Ross Perot’s self-funded celebrity campaign for president 12 years later. Of course neither Koch nor Perot gamed the system as well as Donald Trump, who did the same thing with politics that he did with his private career: run up huge tabs and expect the creditors to pay for them.
Doherty had previously quoted Koch in his book Radicals for Capitalism, where he said that after the 1980 campaign, he saw politicians as “actors playing out of a script.” From that point, the Kochs took the conventional route for wealthy men in politics: hiring the actors to play out their scripts.
Not only had the Koch Brothers supported numerous rising conservative lights like Scott Walker and Ted Cruz, they had disavowed the rising populist Tea Party movement. David Koch had repeatedly said that while he had sympathy to the Tea Party movement, he’d never been approached by their people and had no involvement with it.
As Ron Howard might say, this is not entirely true. One of the more developed exposes of the Koch political network was Jane Mayer’s 2010 article for The New Yorker, and it pointed out, for one thing, that one of the organizations within Americans for Prosperity (a group founded by David Koch) had hosted an anti-Obama event in July 2010. Peggy Venable, an organizer for the July summit, was at the time an employee of Americans for Prosperity and had also been part of other Koch-funded groups. “And she noted that Americans for Prosperity had provided Tea Party activists with lists of elected officials to target. She said of the Kochs, “They’re certainly our people. David’s the chairman of our board. I’ve certainly met with them, and I’m very appreciative of what they do.” Mayer also quotes former Reaganite Bruce Bartlett as saying ““The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.” With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.”
This premise of control is a consistent theme with the Kochs. I’d already pointed out that as part of their need to preserve their fossil-fuel based industrial empire, the Kochs are among the primary deniers of anthropogenic climate change, to the extent of fighting both state and private initiatives for green energy. Their secrecy in regard to their activities includes their denial of interviews to most journalists, including Mayer. In the case of Doherty, Mayer quotes David Koch’s comment to him: ““If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent,” he told Doherty. “And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding.”
Anybody who actually read Atlas Shrugged knows that in that book, the government was not so much the main enemy as the enforcer for people like James Taggart who used their influence with government to preserve their privileges by force. In a certain respect, both libertarians and socialists are right: Big Government AND Big Business are the enemy, because Big Government usually acts at the behest of Big Business. Which is why I would count the Kochs as libertarian-sympathetic but not entirely a good for libertarianism: The premise of libertarianism is the release of controls on the individual – from public OR private authorities – and the mindset of the Kochs is the mindset of control freaks.
It is this need for control that undermines not only libertarianism in theory but libertarianism in practice and perception, as for all the genuine charity and socially progressive policies of the Kochs as individuals and as company representatives, they are far more exercised in harnessing government than restricting it, and their influence has been far more concentrated in removing restrictions on their business (regulations and ‘progressive’ taxes) than on individuals (with, say, the fact that one of our country’s main businesses is the prison industry). In their case at least, “liberty” primarily means the right of a corporation to do whatever it wants without consequences or concern for the environment (either the literal environment or the culture). And there is a reason why liberals always use the Koch Brothers as their go-to, Captain Planet-villain-caricature of what all libertarians really are, because the Koch Brothers are really like this.
It’s akin to the “Faustian bargain” that the Good Christians (TM) of the conservative movement made with Trump (and secular Republicans before him), except that they’re actually getting something out of it. They’ve got Mike Pence as Trump’s backup, they’ve got a whole new class of religious conservative judges on the bench, and they’re aligned with Trump’s policy to criminalize migration into this country, which most libertarians (including the Kochs) oppose. And while Paul Ryan did give the donor class that big tax cut, the benefits of that are being eaten by Trump’s trade war. This may be why Charles (whom I’d always regarded as the more sensible brother) started pulling his lobby away from active endorsement of the Administration.
In that regard, I posted this bit on my Facebook page from a Facebook site called Progressive Libertarianism –
which captioned it, “President Donald Trump, the central planning socialist.” And this got a slight amount of blowback from “progressive” friends who gave me the standard defense that socialism is something other than the authoritarian system that was implemented by every country that actually calls itself socialist or a “People’s” government. Which is ironic for two reasons: one, the Facebook page was quoting Judd Legum, a liberal journalist formerly at Think Progress. Which leads to the second point. Liberals, the issue is not whether you agree with the assertion that socialism equals authoritarianism. The post is challenging the assertion and acting on it. If you are a libertarian or conservative and you actually believe that authoritarianism, especially command of the private sector, is a characteristic of socialism, and you support Trump as the counter to socialism, you need to wake the fuck UP.
Just as the point of challenging libertarians is not whether I believe in the leftist assertion that libertarianism is just another wing of conservatism that seeks to ban abortions so that we can fill the maternity wards and the Koch Brothers can eat the babies. The point is whether libertarians should present a position that justifies that impression among people who aren’t on the Left.
There are at least two ironies in the Koch political trajectory: One, as Jane Mayer pointed out, the Kochs’ philanthropic and political roles created certain conflicts. “For example, at the same time that David Koch has been casting himself as a champion in the fight against cancer, Koch Industries has been lobbying to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde, which the company produces in great quantities, as a “known carcinogen” in humans.” In the same respect, the Kochs’ alleged respect for libertarianism not only discredited the movement politically, it actually worked at cross-purposes. The best way to create a libertarian movement would have been to divorce it from the patronage of either political party. The path the Kochs took, to entwine themselves that much more deeply with the rest of the Right, actually worked against liberty, especially in their support of a populist movement that led to the likes of Sarah Palin, and then Trump. If, as Bruce Bartlett says, libertarianism was never that popular anyway, how popular was racism before the astroturf grass-roots movement? Which movement is an actual danger to democracy and which is ascendant in the “conservative” party today?
The real punch line is that the closest thing you’ve got to a grass-roots concept in American politics nowadays started with Bernie Sanders’ small-donation network, creating a path for politicians to be less dependent on the donor class, and making it more likely that real change will occur through the leftist movements that the Kochs regarded as anathema.
The example of David Koch – and why he deserves neither unqualified hatred nor praise – is an example of someone who knew better. He and Charles Koch were part of the foundation of libertarianism as an organized political movement, and they had the choice to present an alternative to the two-party system. They chose to join it, and support it. We are living with the consequence of that choice today.