Ever since Jane Meyer put the Koch brothers’ political empire on display in the Aug. 30 New Yorker, there has been a vibrant debate over the propriety of the owners of the second-largest private company in the U.S. using their personal fortune (spawned from an enterprise that they inherited) to fund a variety of libertarian and anti-government causes, and not always in the most transparent ways.
For those on the left, that Koch-controlled foundations have doled out almost $200 million to conservative foundations over the past 10 years — including $12 million to Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, a major force behind the Tea Party movements — offers the allure of an explanation for a disappointing political turn of events.
Why else would so many people be throwing in their lot with the foolish Tea Party? How else could someone be motivated to travel hundreds of miles to attend a Glenn Beck rally on the National Mall, let alone watch the guy’s television program? Surely, this movement must be manufactured anti-government populism, as fabricated as Koch Industries’ industrial polymers.
Here’s The New York Times’s Frank Rich, casting the attendees of the recent Glenn Beck rally in Washington as little more than the unwitting puppets of the so-called “Kochtopus”: “There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it.” Meanwhile, Obama adviser David Axelrod puts it this way in The New Yorker: “What they don’t say is that, in part, this is a grassroots movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.” (If only the people knew! Then surely they’d come around to the side of common sense!)
Yes, there is a lot of money behind this right-wing populist uprising. But regardless of funding, one still has to contend with the fact that the Tea Party movement has tapped a powerful nerve in the collective psyche of mostly older, almost entirely white voters suffering a lot of anxiety about their future and wanting a simple explanation for their troubles and a villain to blame for it.
Given the underlying demographics and socio-economic forces at work here, it’s unclear how much Obama and the Democrats could have done to make inroads here, but certainly they could have done more. At the very least, it’s largely defeatist to think that the masses are being thoroughly manipulated by wealthy industrialists.
Rather, it makes more sense to say they are being enabled. The problem for Obama and the Democrats is that after the election, the energy that put Obama in the White House simply evaporated, and nobody on the political left was there to enable alternative path. Into the void came the Tea Party and its generous benefactors.
As for transparency: Could and should the Koch brothers be more open about what they are doing? Absolutely. Slate’s David Wiegel has argued that “The Kochs should come out of the closet” — that is, that they should be loud and proud about their support of libertarian and anti-government causes. Indeed.
After all, if they believe in a true free market, they should also believe in a true free market for ideas. And as any economist will tell you, markets always work best when they are transparent and all parties have full information.
If the case for limited government can’t withstand full disclosure of its sustainers and messengers, it’s probably not much of a case. Understandably, there is a certain discomfiting hypocrisy when you have populist uprisings against corporate power funded by wealthy industrialists, and some valid concern that many of the Koch-funded causes conveniently advocate the kind of light regulation that would benefit Koch Industries’ empire, much of which is in the fossil-fuel sector.
One of the challenges of the marketplace of ideas is, as Matt Kibbe, the president of Tea Party promoter FreedomWorks (which is funded by the Kochs) and a former Republican operative, told The New Yorker: “Ideas don’t happen on their own. Throughout history, ideas need patrons.” This is the reality we live in. Ideas do need patrons.
But for the marketplace of ideas to function properly, it also needs patrons not ashamed to stand publicly behind the ideas that they advocate. The Koch brothers should do this. But the marketplace of ideas also needs participants on both sides who can and do engage fully and confidently — not defeatists who assume that the only reason somebody might support an alternate idea is because the proponents of that alternate idea are backed by more money.
This article was originally published in the Providence Journal
Photo credit: HA! Designs – Artbyheather
