It is welcome to have libertarians converging with liberals on these issues, as their common approach can emancipate people-including the poor and minorities-from bad policies. Today, Charles Koch is distancing himself from his increasingly toxic public image, and promising to fund a broader array of causes, including longstanding agendas of social liberalism such as education, immigrants’ rights and prison reform. But without the shift in America’s political terrain so persistently engineered by the Koch’s, his candidacy would likely never have happened. The Koch brothers quietly declined to endorse Donald Trump in 2016 and again in 2018, probably because they feared that his vulgar populism imperiled their agenda. Their legacies include the Tea Party and the Trump presidency. Over the decades, the Koch brothers and their network of wealthy donors played a crucial role in shifting the Republican Party towards the libertarian far right, and thus paved the way for the election of candidates who espouse positions that would have been considered off the political spectrum in a previous generation. The transformation of democracy into oligarchy, of elections into auctions, means that those opposing the radical right agenda need to find their own ultra-wealthy financial patrons-a bargain that comes with its own perils. But even if there were a “balance” between the plutocratic political spending on each side of the political aisle (and there isn’t), the resulting high cost of conducting politics serves as a huge barrier to the entry of the less wealthy into the political arena. There are many other political financiers, including ardent Democrats. The Koch brothers are not the only culprits in turning American democracy into a political marketplace. Utilizing a network of private donors to promote their favored causes, they have marketized America’s political sphere like no others. Charles and David Koch each have a personal net worth of over $50 billion-making them among the richest people in America-but their influence has far exceeded their personal wealth.
The Koch brothers are paragons of the new American feudalism, who turned pillaging the commons for personal enrichment into a doctrine for societal misgovernment and planetary recklessness under the banner of libertarianism and free markets. Our March 2019 Employee of the Month is Charles Koch-the Koch brother who remains politically active following the retirement of his younger brother David last year.
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