Conservative Opposition Strategy to HR1: Winning is the Only Moral Imperative

Charles Koch, not trying to influence anyone or anything?

Hardly

The leaked GOP anti-voting rights conference call

A leaked conference call provides a precious and rare glimpse at how expert conservative propagandists see issues in politics and tell conservatives to talk about them. This call was never intended for the public to hear. From the call, it is crystal clear that what the public wants is of no concern other than something to be flipped to support what the fascist GOP and its billionaire dark money donors want. The only concern is winning and how to do that in the face of opposed majority public opinion. The call was about public support for HR1, the bill the democratic party wants to pass to protect voting rights. Conservative dark money donors, especially Charles Koch, hate HR1 because they hate political opposition. They really and truly are fascists.

The New Yorker posted the 10-minute call here. It is well worth 10 minutes to get a feel for just how ice cold and self-centered these people are. They are intelligent, ruthless and sophisticated. They are acutely aware of the crucial importance of lies, refusal to step into losing frames (discussed here before) and spinning to lead people to false conclusions about HR1. One can reasonably believe that this cynical, anti-democratic reasoning applies to all other contested issues for most or nearly all radical right conservatives.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For people who don't want to listen to the call. A couple of points merit mention:

1. The propagandists' poll research indicates that one of the most effective tactics for weakening public support, including majority conservative voter support, for HR1 is to claim that now is not the time because there are more urgent things to deal with. 

2. The host of the call, Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-funded radical right advocacy group Stand Together (maybe better named Divide and Conquer), pointed out to the conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that the bottom line was unfavorable. “When presented with a very neutral description [of HR1], people were generally supportive. .... The most worrisome part is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description.” McKenzie warned the audience that “there’s a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts.” Clearly, neutral descriptions of HR1 are not going to be forthcoming from the fascist GOP or its propaganda outlets.

3. HR1’s opponents would have to rely on Senate Republicans to use “under-the-dome-type strategies,” which legislative maneuvers under Congress’s roof, such as the filibuster to stop the bill. The GOP research McKenzie relied indicates that turning public opinion against HR1 would be “incredibly difficult.” He warned that the worst thing conservatives could do would be to try to “engage with the other side [against the argument that the legislation] stops billionaires from buying elections.” That is an example of a politician or advocate refusing to step into a losing frame. The framing of billionaires buying elections generated the most support by people for HR1 because it was the argument that was the “most convincing, and it riled them up the most.”

4. McKenzie said that the Koch-founded group had invested substantial money “to see if we could find any message that would activate and persuade conservatives on this issue.” The research indicated that “an A.O.C. message we tested,” claiming that the bill would help Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez achieve her goal of holding “people in the Trump Administration accountable” by identifying big donors helped undermine conservative support for HR1 somewhat. The research indicated that attaching the phrase “cancel culture” to the bill, by portraying it as silencing conservative voices, was not effective in undermining support for HR1. 

This call shows how money can buy sophisticated research to identify what spin (partisan motivated reasoning), lies and calculated silences in the face of loser frames (~lies of omission?) are best to win support for what the big donors want despite contrary public opinion and despite what is good for democracy or the public interest. 

The morality clearly reflected in this leaked conference call is basically the same as mainstream business morality, or immorality. Specifically, there is no morality other than winning, wealth and power. For most corporations, the public interest, democracy and most everything else are not particularly important considerations, maybe unless people strike back.[2]   

Footnotes:

1. Koch periodically claims he does not want to be involved in politics. He has claimed he is not looking for more profit from political influence. Those are blatant lies. Koch is one of the most influential conservative influencers in America today, probably the most influential. Koch is a stone-cold pathological liar, just like the ex-president. Last November, Fortune magazine wrote this: 

“Boy, did we screw up!,” wrote Koch, now 85, in his new book, Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World. “What a mess!” 

Koch and his brother were also largely involved in shaping the country’s response to climate change. Through Americans for Prosperity, they got over 400 members of Congress to sign a pledge to vote against climate change legislation that does not include equivalent tax cuts. In California, they were influential in rolling back emission regulations, and between 1997 and 2018 they spent $145,555,197 financing nearly 100 groups that attacked climate change science.

Note that. The Kochs spent over $145 million between 1997 and 2018 to oppose environmental regulations. It is fair to say that Charles Koch is an enemy of the people and the public interest.

2. The New York Times writes today: 

As Black Lives Matter protesters filled the streets last summer, many of the country’s largest corporations expressed solidarity and pledged support for racial justice. But now, with lawmakers around the country advancing restrictive voting rights bills that would have a disproportionate impact on Black voters, corporate America has gone quiet.

Last week, as Georgia Republicans rushed to pass a sweeping law restricting voter access, Atlanta’s biggest corporations, including Delta, Coca-Cola and Home Depot, declined to weigh in, offering only broad support for voting rights. The muted response — coming from companies that last year promised to support social justice — infuriated activists, who are now calling for boycotts.

Offering vague broad support for matters of social conscience, e.g., voting rights, is how businesses weasel out of moral values other than profit and power, a point that has been discussed here before.