WHAT DARK MONEY BUYS THESE DAYS
In the Renaissance, as in some other times and places, wealthy patrons supported philosophers and scientists and writers; they endowed schools, funded scientific expeditions, paid for books to be published. Often there was a fairly clear quid pro quo—the struggling scholars and artists were expected to glorify and flatter their patrons, indulge their pet ideas, tutor their children. In return they had the opportunity to work on what they considered important. We may imagine the scholars had the better of the deal; they got the princes to support all manner of new ideas that ended up subverting the old order and leaving the prince-oligarchs in the dust. But what if the oligarchs want revenge?
This is something I’ve been thinking about because I recently finished reading Dark Money, Jane Mayer’s new book about the Koch Brothers and the network of rich politically active conservatives that they exemplify. The most important point I took away away from Dark Money is the importance the Kochs and their allies place on ideas. Their strategy started with trying to change the way American elites think about government, the private sector, individual liberty, and so on by making neoliberal or libertarian ideas—which when they started in earnest in the 1970s were viewed with scorn by policy experts and politicians, in both parties—acceptable and mainstream. They have largely succeeded. Today large numbers of people accept that government is inherently dysfunctional, taxes should always be lower, wealthy businessmen are heroic job creators, regulation stifles the economy, unions are the work of the devil, climate change is a left-wing conspiracy, and more. The Republican Party has been captured lock, stock and barrel by Kochean ideology. How did they do it?
As Dark Money (and another equally good account, Invisible Hands: The Businessman’s Crusade Against the New Deal, by Kim Phillips-Fein) tells us in detail, they did it through philanthropy. It was philanthropy that was sometimes scattered around, sometimes wasted, but with a strategic focus of supporting organizations and individuals that shared at least some Kochean views. One of the central goals was to insert neoliberal thinking into the most influential organizations in order to move it from the fringe to the mainstream. This meant into Washington DC think tanks, into major universities, and into the mass media.
So for instance, one of their first steps was to build up the Cato Institute in Washington. Though it is hardly a secret that it was founded and funded by the Koch Brothers (its original name was the Charles Koch Institute) to further their libertarian agenda, Cato has over time become seen as a valued voice in policy debates. Instead of being dismissed as the mouthpiece for a narrow, extremist ideology it is now one of the boys. Washington insiders tend to say “I don’t agree with them, but it’s a valid point of view. It adds to the debate.” Media outlets regularly use Cato analysts to give ‘balance’ to discussions. Cato papers and studies are quoted and taken seriously.
In short, build it and they will come. When you have jobs and grants to offer, leading to media exposure and policy influence, you can be sure to find eager takers. Some will be true believers; others will choose to believe to get on the gravy train. And from the Koch’s perspective, even if sometimes Cato doesn’t say exactly what they might want and a few voices go off the reservation, on balance it’s well worth it. The appearance of independence actually makes Cato more credible. While Cato is closest to the Kochean worldview, they and their allies support other DC think tanks like Heritage and AEI, organizations that reliably support conservative positions and together make up a network that creates, amplifies, and legitimates an overlapping set of ideas and policies.
Implanting game-changing ideas into the larger society requires more than just think tanks; it needs the imprimatur of academia. The largest single recipient of Koch money has been George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, just outside Washington. Thirty years ago GMU was a 3rd-tier state commuter school; today it is a well-endowed, fast-growing powerhouse that keeps getting bigger and gaining stature. People in the DC area are frequently amazed at GMU’s transformation—“I remember when it was just another glorified junior college. How did they get so big?” How indeed. GMU had an ambitious and entrepreneurial President who wanted to up GMU’s academic game, but Kochean money has played a big part. The Kochs have given $30 million to GMU, much of it to the Mercatus Center, a prolific advocate for libertarian views and Austrian Economics. Other parts of the Koch’s “donor consortium” have added substantially more.
Though not on the Mercatus scale, similar centers and think-tanks associated with major universities have blossomed with infusions of Kochean money. You can find them at Princeton and Brown, Florida State and West Virginia. In many cases the Koch network supports individual professors and graduate students to conduct research expounding free market ideology. It’s not just the Kochs, either: Western Carolina University is discussing a new Koch-funded $2 million “Center for the Study of Free Enterprise,” proposed by its very own “BB&T Distinguished Professor of Capitalism.” The retired head of BB&T, a major regional bank in the Southeast, has made it his life mission to use his considerable fortune to teach America’s youth the virtues of the free enterprise system, having had his own eyes opened by reading Ayn Rand.
“Philanthropy” has a nice ring to it, but it isn’t just donations to art museums and hospital wings. It can be a dangerous vehicle for oligarchs to use their enormous wealth to distort the public square (at the public’s expense, too, given the way our tax system turns these programs into tax write-offs) and further their private interests. In a recent paper (“The Koch Effect: The Impact of a Cadre-Led Network on American Politics,” Jan. 2016) one of our foremost students of the American Right, Theda Skocpol at Harvard, examines the Koch network in detail to try and understand why the Republican Party has moved so inexorably to the right, even when this runs against the interests of Republican voters and mainstream business interests. She concludes the Koch network has acted like a ‘force field’ pulling the Republican Party to more extreme positions. Its success has rested on the ideological networks built up over 40 years to create the illusion that there is a genuine constituency for libertarianism and for policies like slashing social programs, giving the rich more tax breaks, and ignoring global warming. There isn’t, but it’s hard to separate the signals from the constant noise generated by Koch-funded ideamongers.
It takes two to tango, and of course the Kochs would have no influence if so many university boards, ambitious administrators, and grant-hungry graduate students weren’t ready to be bought. Like politicians, none admit that the money will influence their research or conclusions (even though in private you can find multiple cases of alarmed academics complaining about Koch attempts to set ideological requirements for faculty, or mandate what is in the curriculum, often including Charles Koch’s peculiar management theories). We should note that the drying up of public funding for higher education—a policy zealously approved by free market enthusiasts—has greatly increased the vulnerability of colleges and universities to anyone with an open checkbook.
Other cases. Lest we think this is the only case where money is used to distort and influence, I mention several other scandalous influence-buying operations that have long operated in plain sight. In a recent Atlantic article on President Obama’s foreign policy, his national security staff was quoted as describing Massachusetts Avenue in DC (the K Street of think-tanks) as “Arab-occupied territory.” A VOX piece (“How Saudi Arabia Captured Washington,” March 2016) concluded that
“Many say a sort of taboo has developed against needlessly antagonizing Gulf states by criticizing them or by taking policy positions that those states consider red lines, for fear of upsetting a current donor or alienating a future donor. Even the money itself has become a taboo subject. Everybody knows about it, but no one likes to talk about it, because they all want the money too. ‘ Nobody wants to risk that their institution won’t get their share of the pie,’ one said.”
The Gulfies aren’t the only culprits here—the VOX article has examples of Japanese and Norwegian (??) influence—but they are by far the biggest donors (donations from the Gulf have risen sharply in the past few years) and have the most at stake in trying to influence an Administration that has been noticeably less enamored of the US-Saudi alliance than its predecessors.
One could draw a fascinating parallel between the Koch network and its 40 year effort to spread neoliberalism, and the Saudis and their 50-year effort to spread Wahhabism. Both actors leveraged massive wealth to take what at the beginning were marginal views held by a few zealots, and make them pervasive and influential. In both cases the results have been disastrous, and in both cases the perpetrators remain active, powerful, and unbowed.
Politicians and those who bankroll them dance a similar minuet. We all know that today’s politicians take money, mostly from companies and wealthy interest groups, but also from unions, rich individuals and so on. And we all know what they say if they’re accused of doing anything in return, of being bought and paid for: “Of course not! I have NEVER changed a vote or introduced a bill or (fill in the blank) in return for any donations from anybody!” Why then do organizations do this? If you believe the politicians, it’s all because the money-givers just think he/she is a swell person and they see eye to eye on the issues.
Of course if you do believe the politicians, you are a sap, and hardly anyone does. But it’s hard to nail down exactly how the system works. Politicians are right that only very rarely is there an explicit quid pro quo—a bag of money here, a favor there, clearly linked. Maybe that’s what happened in the bad old days, but not now. But clearly donors and lobbyists get a good return on their political investments, and careful analysts have explained it in detail. Lawrence Lessig, for instance, in Republic, Lost gives us chapter and verse in how money buys access, gets particular views a seat at the table, and builds up personal relationships that end up affecting the views and actions of politicians and people around them. The donors end up shaping the agenda, defining the options, setting the terms of the debate. Politicians know exactly what they need to do to keep the money coming. It’s still corruption, but it’s subtle.
In fact, it’s so subtle that the practitioners on both sides of the transaction can easily convince themselves that they’re doing nothing questionable. The recipient of the money and favors, like the Renaissance-era patronizer, can even go further and say—“Let them think they’re manipulating me! I’m my own man/woman, and I’ll use their resources as I see fit. I’m using them, not the other way around. If they want to throw $600,000 at me to give a speech, well, why not?”
It’s not hard to see that this is usually a dangerous fantasy, a justification for doing something politicians desperately want to do without admitting that there is a price.
Liberal Shortcomings. The manipulative and cynical attitude towards political ideas taken by the Kochs is unfortunately matched by the indifference and dismissiveness of the liberal establishment. While conservatives seek to appropriate the American founding, Christianity, and Western Civilization generally as one long march towards free markets, liberals by contrast often seem indifferent, or worse, determined to deconstruct these traditions into oblivion. Intellectual and religious traditions of great power and meaning are too easily dismissed as outdated, insufficiently enlightened, racist, sexist and irreparable. This leaves the field to the terrible simplifiers.
Part of the reason for conservative success has been because Americans, like all people, have an appetite for a coherent account of things. What is our country all about? What does its history tell us? What is its government for? Neoliberal dogma, honed to a fine edge by the Kochean idea factory, presents a seamless story that offers followers clarity and principle: Government is bad, so the less the better. Markets should decide, not governments. Most importantly, we are all about individual liberty; the other guys are all about restricting it.
There is no real liberal equivalent. It is not enough for liberals to say that liberalism is undogmatic, or pragmatic, or that it avoids either-or dichotomies and recognizes ambiguity and grey areas. True, but also a flag of surrender. Most damaging, liberals have largely ceded the ideal of liberty to the libertarians. Liberals have been good at explaining specific benefits voters will get from liberal programs, but not how these programs add up and how they will make us more free.
Even though in the aggregate liberal and progressive-leaning think tanks have a lot more money, and liberals seem permanently embedded in many parts of academia, they are constitutionally unable to focus their efforts. According to a 2005 study, “The War of Ideas,” by Andrew Rich:
“Nonconservative foundations – what might be labeled “middle of the road,” “mainline,” or “liberal foundations” – have devoted far more resources than conservatives to influencing thinking about public policy. This spending simply has not been as deliberate or effective. Conservative think tanks have quite successfully provided political leaders, journalists, and the public with concrete ideas about shrinking the role of the federal government, deregulation, and privatization. They are succeeding by aggressively promoting their ideas. By contrast, liberal and mainstream foundations back policy research that is of interest to liberals. But these funders remain reluctant to make explicit financial commitment to the war of ideas, and they do relatively little to support the marketing of liberal ideas.”
Rich concludes that while liberals and progressives support objective research that they hope will influence public policy, without knowing in advance what the research will show, conservatives support the propagation of ideas in support of what they already know to be true. Conservative think tanks tend to spend much more on communications and hire people with business backgrounds to run focused influence campaigns aimed at politicians; liberals hire academics and prioritize links to non-profits and government bureaucrats. Liberals tend to be foxes who look for solutions to an array of particular problems, while Kochean conservatives are hedgehogs who fight for One Big Idea.
Conclusion. I am frightened at the ease with which today’s versions of the old Renaissance patrons have been able to use their money to have their way with our democracy. We have become the Koch’s science project. Like Russian hackers, the Kochs and their cadre of well-paid professionals circle our democracy, probing ceaselessly for vulnerabilities, ways to take control of the operating system without alerting the clueless owners. Here is how Jane Mayer summarizes their plan:
During the 1970s, a handful of the nation’s wealthiest corporate captains felt overtaxed and overregulated and decided to fight back. Disenchanted with the direction of modern America, they launched an ambitious, privately financed war of ideas to radically change the country. They didn’t want to merely win elections; they wanted to change how Americans thought. Their ambitions were grandiose—to “save” America as they saw it, at every level, by turning the clock back to the Gilded Age before the advent of the Progressive Era.
I suspect that in their annual get-togethers with their billionaire peers the Kochs share a hearty guffaw at the stupidity of the people, for whom libertarians generally feel contempt; and at the many useful idiots in the intelligentsia who are willing to be bought. So far, unfortunately, the defenders of democracy have not been able to prove to them that these low opinions are not deserved.