As we endure this campaign cycle, pundits on all sides are trying to explain why the public seems to be so angry and thus why “establishment” candidates are having trouble gaining momentum. The recent New York Times best seller by Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right, offers insight into the source of this upheaval.
She traces the rise of the radical right back to the Liberty League that opposed the New Deal in the 1930s through the John Birch Society prominent in the 1950s and the opposition to civil rights and the women’s movements of the 1960s. She finds common threads, not only in the family fortunes that fund the movement, but also in its goals, themes and methods.
From the 1930s the movement has had one overriding goal—“to tear government out at the root,” as Charles Koch puts it or to so reduce its power so that “we can drown it in the bathtub,” as Grover Norquist explains.
By the 1970s they recognized they had a problem: the popularity of the government programs they despised. For example, Social Security, Medicare, interstate highways, civil rights legislation, workplace safety guidelines, food safety standards, minimum wage requirements, financial aid for college students, support for public schools, public health research, the space program, national parks, environmental protection, etc. all enjoyed broad public support. Realizing that they probably could not turn the people against programs that enhanced their lives, they instead directed their billions into undermining the very basis of any democratic society—the people’s faith in their power to govern themselves. They must turn the people against their own democracy.
To accomplish this goal they poured money into creating “think tanks” that reversed the scientific method—that system we all learned in school as requiring conclusions to emerge from evidence. Instead wealthy donors funded research that begins with the conclusion and then finds evidence to “prove” it. Knowing that when public power is diminished private power triumphs, they set out to prove that government is the enemy and that taxes are a form of punishment. Using their money to buy media outlets and support candidates who despise government, they gridlock the process, foment anger, and thus prove democracy can’t work.
Meanwhile benefits flow to those whose money buys so much power. For example, the Koch brothers, major financiers of the radical right, pay minimal taxes while their industries are the nation’s top polluters. Dependent on their money, candidates who don’t play by their rules are challenged from even more rightwing extremists, who rig the system to favor their donors.
But the regime of the radical right has left the rest of us with diminished economic opportunities, a decaying infrastructure, an inaccessible higher education system, underfunded public schools, unsafe food and water, a deteriorating environment, and loss of political power. No wonder we are mad!
If you are interested in these issues, please join us (Cooke County Democrats) at 6:30 on Thursday, March 3 at 1100 Lawrence Street. I will briefly review Mayer’s book and then open the forum for ideas and discussions. Solutions always begin with awareness. People of all political persuasions, independents, and the politically alienated are welcome.
