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July 18 - July 25, 2020
James McGill Buchanan, who had founded what some called the Virginia school of political economy.
contained confidential letters from 1997 and 1998 concerning Charles Koch’s investment of millions of dollars in Buchanan’s Center for Study of Public Choice and a flare-up that followed. Catching my breath, I pulled up an empty chair and set to work.
it was training operatives to staff the far-flung and purportedly separate, yet intricately connected, institutions funded by the Koch brothers and their now large network of fellow wealthy donors. These included the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth, the State Policy Network, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Tax Foundation, the Reason Foundation, the Leadership Institute, and more, to say nothing of the Charles Koch Foundation and Koch Industries itself.
From then on, Koch contributed generously to turning those ideas into his personal operational strategy to, as the team saw it, save capitalism from democracy—permanently.
American people would not support their plans, so to win they had to work behind the scenes, using a covert strategy instead of open declaration of what they really wanted.
Passionate about ideas to the point of obsession, Charles Koch had worked for three decades to identify and groom the most promising libertarian thinkers in hopes of somehow finding a way to break the impasse.
The focus must shift from who rules to changing the rules.
the cause must figure out how to put legal—indeed, constitutional—shackles on public officials, shackles so powerful that no matter how sympathetic these officials might be to the will of majorities, no matter how concerned they were with their own reelections, they would no longer have the ability to respond to those who used their numbers to get government to do their bidding.
Koch dutifully cultivated a trusted “cadre” of high-level operatives, just as Lenin had done, to build a movement that refused compromise as it devised savvy maneuvers to alter the political math in its favor.
cadre more and more adopted the mantle of conservatism, knowing full well that the last thing they wanted was to conserve, but seeing advantages in doing so.
similar cynicism ruled Koch’s decision to make peace—at least in the short term—with the religious right, despite the fact that so many libertarian thinkers, Buchanan included, were atheists who looked down on those who believed in God.
Orrin Hatch of Utah exploded after being targeted by a challenger from his own party in 2012:
“These people are not conservatives. They’re not Republicans. They’re radical libertarians.
We don’t understand that the old Republican Party, the one my own father voted for during most of his life, exists no more.
That hostile takeover maneuvers very much like a fifth column, operating in a highly calculated fashion, more akin to an occupying force than to an open group engaged in the usual give-and-take of politics. The size of this force is enormous. The social scientists who have led scholars in researching the Koch network write that it “operates on the scale of a national U.S. political party” and employs more than three times as many people as the Republican committees had on their payrolls in 2015.
For all its fine phrases, what this cause really seeks is a return to oligarchy, to a world in which both economic and effective political power are to be concentrated in the hands of a few.
Their intellectual lodestar is John C. Calhoun. He developed his radical critique of democracy a generation after the nation’s founding, as the brutal economy of chattel slavery became entrenched in the South—and his vision horrified Madison.
By 1860, two of every three of the relatively few Americans whose wealth surpassed $100,000 lived below the Mason-Dixon Line. New York at that time had fewer millionaires per capita than Mississippi. South Carolina was the richest state in the Union.
Calhoun conducted ideological warfare against the political liberalism of his day.
Calhoun and his modern understudies are not wrong: there is a conflict between their vision of economic liberty and political
The American people have used their power to do many significant things that required tax revenues: provide public education, develop manufacturing, build roads and bridges, create land-grant universities, protect the safety of food and drugs, enable workers to speak as one through unions, prevent old-age poverty, fight discrimination, assure the right to vote, and clean up our air and water, to name a few. These are achievements in which most citizens have taken pride.
Outraged southern planters dubbed the 1828 federal tariff on imported manufactured goods the Tariff of Abominations. Designed to help the infant industries of the United States grow after the War of 1812 with Britain, a war that had exposed America’s grave economic weakness, the protective tariff most benefited the region interested in nurturing manufacturing: the free states of the Northeast.
Calhoun and like-minded large slave owners found themselves to be very much alone in their questioning of the legitimacy of taxation to advance public purposes. Such concerns did not arise where slavery was absent,
did not shackle the people’s power sufficiently—even though one of the main goals of the U.S. Constitution’s famed checks and balances was precisely to keep sudden swings of public opinion from undermining political institutions, particularly those that protected property. But the Constitution no longer seemed enough.
bears remembering that neither Madison nor his colleagues had been fans of pure democracy.
Madison thought long and hard about how to protect minority rights in a government based on sovereignty of the people, a people then understood to be white men of property.
their invocations of the Bible and the era’s pseudoscience of race, Calhoun and his peers knew the cold reality was that they were practicing a type of capitalism that would not pass democratic scrutiny much longer if majority opinion was allowed to prevail in Washington.
increasingly inclined to see the institution as an affront to the nation’s founding principles—and a mortal threat to their own economic and political future.
Calhoun’s ideas went into abeyance for almost a century after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox in April 1865.
The South as Calhoun and such admirers imagined it was not the actual South, with its biracial population and millions of low-income and middle-class whites who have benefited greatly from the public resources that taxes enable in democracies.
refusal to acknowledge the danger of extreme wealth and inequality went hand in hand with antidemocratic and racist strategies of rule.
In no other part of America has the divergence been starker between the affirmations of the Declaration of Independence and the realities of economic and political power.
Central to their efforts was a self-serving yet astute interpretation of the Constitution that emphasized states’ rights, buttressed by a battery of other rules to subdue the people, black and white.
But winning upgrades was another matter, because Virginia’s poll tax made it hard for low-income parents to hold elected officials accountable for neglect of their children.
The lawsuit astounded the white elite. Its members could not believe that “their” Negroes would show such ingratitude.
In the end, no vigilante violence occurred. Virginia was not Georgia or Mississippi or Alabama, where politicians placated lawbreakers; this was a place where gentlemen ruled, and applauded themselves for well-managed race relations.20 But they would not concede. And the state court backed them, forcing the aggrieved to appeal.
In May 1954, the justices announced their verdict in Brown v. Board of Education. Lost to all but the scholarly literature is the fact that most of Virginia’s white citizens were inclined to accept it. Hardly any liked it, but it was the unanimous decision of the highest court in the land, after all.
“Of all the American states, Virginia can lay claim to the most thorough control by an oligarchy,”
Virginia was among the first states in the nation to outlaw the closed shop—that is, to outlaw contracts that required union membership of employees.
Hayek’s book, not surprisingly, spoke powerfully to right-wing American businessmen still smarting from the loss of time-honored prerogatives of the propertied class, who now were told that they had to negotiate with unions and meet new regulatory agency rules and standards.
The private mission statement for the Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy and Social Philosophy that Buchanan submitted to university president Colgate Darden in December 1956 made a lot of promises.
“radicals” of the right. Others understandably feared that any name with the word “radical” in it might turn off the wealthy men of affairs who would be needed to fund the cause, and so opted for “conservative” as interchangeable with “libertarian.”
African Americans endured the brunt of such attitudes. Not until the fall of 1950 was the first black student admitted, and then only because of litigation by the NAACP
They ignored the overt racism and turned a blind eye to the chronic violations of black citizens’ liberty and constitutional rights that led to the federal intervention, true. But the voices of 1958 and early 1959 defied even their narrow and exclusionary framing of the conflict, because they came from white, middle-class Virginians, from parents, in particular, who were shocked at the actions of their state officials and determined to resist.
“It is a monstrous, uncivilized thing to close a public school—to lock the door and turn children and teachers away, to halt the process of education in the modern world.”
Goldwater next took on the most popular New Deal program—Social Security—and in a state with one of the nation’s largest ratios of retired voters.
Goldwater was not done educating the American people on the principles of freedom. Medicare, he then argued, was nothing but “socialized medicine.” Alas, “the idea of medical insurance for the aged” was a federal initiative that even “most South Carolinians liked,” one history of the campaign notes.
This Congress would pass everything from work-study programs to help students work their way through college to Medicare and Medicaid, a War on Poverty, and laws to ensure clean air and water. Its crowning achievement was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, designed to allow every American citizen, at last, to participate in the political process.
Elected president of the Southern Economic Association in 1964, he used his bully pulpit to prescribe “what economists should do.”
was not, in fact, liberal, let alone hostile to right-wing ideas. Its members were pragmatic conservatives; Buchanan’s men were zealous libertarians. And the administrators had realized that the difference mattered. They were practical men who wanted more investment by the state government in Virginia’s future.
