The Koch Brothers’ Rorschach Test
Saturday afternoon at the Koch winter meeting, I was watching a panel of leaders from community-building and social-capital-building nonprofits: the Cara Program in Chicago, which helps workplace skills; Phoenix Multisport, a Boston-based peer-to-peer recovery organization for young addicts; Rising Tide Capital, which helps low-income individuals start businesses in Jersey City, New Jersey; and Chrysalis, which helps low-income and homeless individuals in Los Angeles prepare for, find, and retain employment.
The Koch network doesn’t single-handedly keep these organizations going, but their financial and operational assistance is considerable. Stand Together, part of the Koch network of organizations, provided Rising Tide $350,000 last year; the group’s annual budget is $5 million.
It struck me that the reaction to the Koch brothers is a pretty good example of how politics has gotten worse over the past two decades. (Alternatively, if you believe American politics has been getting worse for a long time, that worsening accelerated in just the past decade or so.) To hear Harry Reid and a lot of Democrats tell it, they’re “the shadowy Koch brothers.” David Axelrod called them “contract killers.” Liberal columnist Mark Morford once compared them to a combination of “a ruthless drug kingpin, a mafia crime lord, the willful blindness of the NRA, the combined CEOs of Monsanto, Exxon, and RJ Reynolds and a couple scared old wolverines with God complex and a penchant for contaminating the world.” A documentary labeled them “the one percent at its very worst.”
The very worst? They donate more to charity that most of us will ever earn in our entire lives. David Koch and his charitable foundation have pledged or contributed “more than $1.2 billion to cancer research, medical centers, educational institutions, arts and cultural institutions, and to assist public policy organizations.” The Charles Koch Foundation donates tens of millions of dollars to colleges and universities each year; in 2014, it gave $25 million to the United Negro College Fund.
Yes, the Kochs are libertarian-leaning, free-market advocates for limited government and a big supporter of a lot of Republicans. As noted last year, they’ve rolled up big wins in large part because they don’t just throw up a bunch of television ads. Their organizations like Americans for Prosperity and the Libre Initiative are established to operate 365 days a year, not just around election time. Their organizations pay attention to state legislatures and state attorney generals. They notice and get involved in local tax fights like a referendum on a light rail plan for Nashville.
One can argue about the merits of this policy or that one. But if our national political discourse were better, saner, and more accurate, the Kochs would be universally seen as generous guys who are completely convinced that private organizations, non-profits, and free enterprise can tackle the country’s biggest problems. Maybe they have too much faith in the free market; the nonprofits mentioned above said they get about ten percent of their funding from government grants. But they’re not evil, they’re not greedy, and you don’t invite two dozen reporters to your organization’s meeting if you’re “shadowy.”
Of course, they’re just one vivid example of a broader trend: the Kochs can’t just be wealthy guys with a clear philosophy on how to fix the world’s problems; they have to be monsters. The tax bill has to be “ARMAGEDDON!” A Republican president can’t just be bad; George W. Bush and Donald Trump, two very different men, both have to be the next Hitler. The White House proposal on immigration reform can’t be merely flawed, it has to be “a white supremacist ransom note.”
Who in their right mind would want to be involved in politics when people react like this?
Read more at:
http://www.nationalreview.com/jolt
