A Government Of The People, By The People, And For The People Has Perished From The Earth. Will It Be Reborn?

On this day in 1731, a group of young men in Philadelphia pooled their money to set up the first library in America.

Not a bad time to pose the question: What is the proper role of government?  What things belong in the public sector?  According to the billionaire libertarians, the answer is little or nothing.  When Charles Koch was asked, “What do you think is fair,” he replied, “I get to keep my money.  What do you think is fair?”

Let me take a stab at that, Charles. We live in an organized society. If you want, you could argue we don’t need public libraries.  But you’d be hard put to explain why we don’t need a criminal justice system, fire departments, national defense, airports, roads, and bridges.  You don’t get to “keep your money” and let the rest of us figure out how to keep the United States from looking like Uganda and feeling like North Korea.

On my reading list is the best-seller Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, written by the American investigative journalist Jane Mayer. She documents the workings of a “network of extremely wealthy conservative Republicans, foremost among them Charles and David Koch, who have together funded an array of organizations that work in tandem to influence academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses, Congress, and the American presidency for their own benefit. Mayer particularly discusses the Koch family and their political activities.”

From the New York Times book review:

Nineteen eighty was a year of hope for conservatives in America, but it was a hope diminished by decades of consistent failure at the grass roots. Republicans hadn’t controlled either chamber of Congress, or a majority in state legislatures, for a quarter-century. Most governors were Democrats, as had been true since 1970. Not only was the Republican Party overmatched at winning elections, but those with the strongest ideological convictions — “movement conservatives,” as they liked to call themselves — were a faint voice even within Republican ranks.

But at the end of that year two things happened. One, as we all know, was the election of Ronald Reagan as president. The other was an utterly private event whose significance would not be noticed for years. Charles and David Koch, the enormously rich proprietors of an oil company based in Kansas, decided that they would spend huge amounts of money to elect conservatives at all levels of American government.

David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket in 1980, but when the campaign was over, he resolved never to seek public office again. That wouldn’t be necessary, he and his brother concluded; they could invest in the campaigns of others, and essentially buy their way to political power.

Thirty years later, the midterm elections of 2010 ushered in the political system that the Kochs had spent so many years plotting to bring about. After the voting that year, Republicans dominated state legislatures; they controlled a clear majority of the governorships; they had taken one chamber of Congress and were on their way to winning the other. Perhaps most important, a good many of the Republicans who had won these offices were not middle-of-the-road pragmatists. They were antigovernment libertarians of the Kochs’ own political stripe. The brothers had spent or raised hundreds of millions of dollars to create majorities in their image. They had succeeded. And not merely at the polls: They had helped to finance and organize an interlocking network of think tanks, academic programs and news media outlets that far exceeded anything the liberal opposition could put together.

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Of course, now we have Donald Trump.  Yes, he’s mentally unstable and soon-to-be impeached, and the libertarians probably view that as worrisome, but while he’s in power, he’s certainly getting the job done in terms of dismantling the federal government and looting the U.S. Treasury on the billionaires’ behalf.  Moreover, unlimited bribery has become the organizing principle by which our law-making apparatus operates.

Even if the 2020 election represents a sea-change of American sentiment, it will take an enormous amount of time and effort if we are to restore any semblance of a government “of, by, and for the people.”  Our democracy lies in shambles until and unless that day comes along.