At the summit, two republican senators, John Cornyn (R-TX) and Jim DeMint (R-SC), were invited to speak about what to do to oppose Obama and trends in government that threatened their wealth and power, especially the rise of civil liberties and environmental regulations. For the radical right, Obama's election was the last straw. It was time to fight all out war against the federal government and civil liberties by any means possible.
In her 2017 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, journalist Jane Mayer writes about two visions of how to proceed as argued by Cornyn and DeMint. Cornyn represented the republican establishment and DeMint represented an aggressive far right, non-compromising anti-government ideology that would not tolerate dissent or ideological diversity. Mayer writes:
"The highlight of the Koch summit in 2009 was an uninhibited debate about what conservatives should do next in the face of electoral defeat. As the donors and other guests dined [...] they watched a passionate argument unfold that encapsulated the stark choice ahead. . . . . Cornyn was rated the second most conservative republican in the Senate . . . . But he was also, as one former aide put it "very much a constitutionalist" who believed it was occasionally necessary to compromise in politics.
Poised on the other side of the moderator was the South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, a conservative provocateur who defined the outermost antiestablishment fringes of the republican party . . . . Before his election to congress, DeMint had run as advertising agency in South Carolina. He understood how to sell, and what he was pitching that night was an approach to politics that according to historian Sean Wilenz would have been recognizable to DeMint's forebears from the Palmetto state as akin to the radical nullification of federal power advocated in the 1820s by the slavery defender John C. Calhoun.
. . . . Cornyn spoke in favor of the Republican Party fighting its way back to victory by broadening its appeal to a broader swath of voters, including moderates. . . . . the former aide explained . . . . "He believes in making the party a big tent. You can't win unless you get more votes."
In contrast, DeMint portrayed compromise as surrender. He had little patience for the slow-moving process of constitutional government. He regarded many of his Senate colleagues as timid and self-serving. The federal government posed such a dire threat to the dynamism of the American economy, in his view, that anything less than all-out war on regulations and spending was a cop-out. . . . . Rather than compromising on their principles and working with the new administration, DeMint argued, Republicans needed to take a firm stand against Obama, waging a campaign of massive resistance and obstruction, regardless of the 2008 election outcome.
As the participants continued to cheer him on, in his folksy southern way, DeMint tore into Cornyn over one issue in particular. He accused Cornyn of turning his back on conservative free-market principles and capitulating to the worst kind of big government spending, with his vote earlier that fall in favor of the Treasury Department's massive bailout of failing banks. . . . . In hopes of staving off economic disaster, Bush's Treasury Department begged Congress to approve the massive $700 billion emergency bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.
Advisers to Obama later acknowledged that he had no idea of what he was up against. He had campaigned as a post-partisan politician who had idealistically taken issue with those who he said "like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states." He insisted, "We are one people," the United States of America. His vision, like his own blended racial and geographic heredity, was one of reconciliation, not division."
Obama's cluelessness: If one accepts that description of Obama's vision as accurate Obama was full of "wishful thinking" as Mayer put it. He was clueless about what happened to the GOP after his election. The radical right's propaganda and Trump supporters absolutely reject that as Obama's vision and they still hate Obama. To this day they still see him as racist and intentionally divisive while working to enslave the American people under the tyranny of big government.
Koch's raging hypocrisy: Mayer goes on to recount that no one at the summit defended Cornyn's plea for a big tent and cooperation with Obama. Cornyn was met with stony silence, while the billionaires cheered DeMint on. People at the summit assumed that the Kochs opposed the TARP bailout because of their hard core free market ideology. Their political machine, Americans For Prosperity, openly opposed TARP. As it turned out, the Kochs had quietly switched sides and supported the bailout after, as Mayer put it, "the bottom began to fall out of the stock market, threatening the Koch's vast investment portfolio." In this regard, the Kochs were perfectly willing to use government to defend their own interests, but vehemently opposed to government defending other interests if it presented a threat, real or imagined, to their wealth and power in any way.
Koch's hypocrisy ran even deeper than that. One former insider in the Koch machine saw Koch donor summits before Obama's election as a shrewd way to coax others into engaging in political battles that wound up boosting Koch company profits. The aide asserts that the seminars were an extension of the company's lobbying efforts. The summits were, as Mayer put it, "staffed and organized by Koch employees and largely treated as a corporate project." What the Kochs did not anticipate for that January 2009 summit, was overwhelming fear and animosity that Obama and his election generated among the billionaires. That summit morphed from a modest pro-Koch movement into a much bigger radical movement that pushed the Kochs into the leadership role. The meeting planners were overwhelmed. According to one the the planners, "Suddenly they were leading the parade. No one anticipated that."
Where we are today: Essentially no one on the right will accept Mayer's version of events or the authoritarian goal of the radical right to neuter the federal government, gut regulations, quash civil rights and install an oligarchy of billionaires with proclivities to kleptocracy and brass knuckles laissez-faire capitalism. The radical right sees very little room for government spending on social safety nets. Those things just increase their tax burden and they vehemently reject it. Whatever social good may come from that safety net spending, just like contrary public opinion, is of no concern whatever to the radical right. This is crowd has no compassion for anything except the oligarchs at the top.
The radical right propaganda machine has done its work superbly. Most rank and file republicans, populists and Trump supporters (~98%?) firmly believe that getting rid of government will free them and make them better off. They simply cannot see that freeing wealthy special interests from taxes and regulations is not going to free average people because those things do not directly impinge on average people. Most of the freed-up power and wealth (~90%?) will flow from government and the masses to the special interests. Under laissez-faire capitalism as little trickles down as the oligarchs can get away with. A corrupt oligarchy vision of reality is something that rank and file people on the right completely reject out of hand as pure leftist lies and propaganda.
Today, America is in a big mess. Whether the country can get itself back on track is an open question. If the oligarchs gain enough power, they will never let it go without a fight.
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