Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive biology, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
DP Etiquette
First rule: Don't be a jackass. Most people are good.
Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.
The following is a very long assertation, so I won't post it all on here, suffice it to say, it gives a somewhat biased, but not totally inaccurate breakdown of what is wrong with libertarianism.
Apparently someone's curse worked: we live in interesting times, and among other consequences, for no good reason we have a surplus of libertarians. With this article I hope to help keep the demand low, or at least to explain to libertarian correspondents why they don't impress me with comments like "You sure love letting people steal your money!"
The Spoils: Plundering Congress is chapter 11 of Jane Mayer’s 2017 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Mayer has been an investigative reporter at New York Magazine since 1995. Chapter 11 is in part three of her book which is entitled, Privatizing Politics: Total Combat, 2011-2014. Given titles like that, one can imagine where this little review is going to go.
This chapter details several important things. One is the rise of tax cuts for the top 0.1% and cuts in domestic spending that billionaire Republican donors demanded. Another traces the loss of power by the Republican Party and its purchase by billionaires who bought Republican candidates for congress.
Chapter 11, like the rest of the book is reasonably readable for general audiences. But it is dense with details and facts, which are backed up by 51 pages of citations to information sources. The content is based on work that Mayer did as a journalist over about a 30 year period, starting in the 1980s. A post on part of the book is here.
Mayer’s other book
Mayer starts the chapter with this accurate quote by billionaire Warren Buffett: There’s class warfare all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
Some key facts and points:
Republican billionaire donors, like the Koch brothers (only Charles is still alive, David died in 2019), usually operate in as much secrecy as they can, but their power and reach are staggering. They have taken control of the Republican Party and ruthlessly use their power to enrich themselves and increase their power, while claiming that what they do is for our good. They hate government and government regulations. They hate domestic spending programs and want to eliminate all Medicare, Medicaid and other major safety net spending. The donors literally see this as a necessary and moral thing to do.
In an apparently unguarded moment in 2011, just before John Boehner was sworn in as House Speaker for the 112th Congress, David Koch answered a reporter’s questions. In response to a question about what he wanted from Boehner and the new Republican House, David said: “Well, cut the hell out of spending, balance the budget, reduce regulations, and uh, support business!” He and the rest of his donor class saw it the same way.
Some of the billionaire donor class propaganda claimed that the GOP favored personal charity over government spending on safety nets, because individual people should be free to spend on charity. Charles Koch, saw it a bit differently, arguing in a speech that, like Maimonides (a influential medieval Sephardic Jewish Torah philosopher, 1138-1204) he saw the highest form of charity as paying no taxes to government and no charity to anyone. Charles commented: “I agree with the 12th century philosopher, Maimonides, who defined the highest form of charity as dispensing with charity altogether, by enabling your fellow humans to have the wherewithal to earn their own living.” One expert on Maimonides, a university professor who taught classes on him, commented “This is false and tendentious and idiotic.” He argued that Maimonides wrote that “he who averts his eyes from the obligation of charity is regarded as a villain.” For whatever reason, the billionaires seem to feel a need to try justify themselves and their policies, which invariably adds to their own power and wealth. Maybe this mental gymnastics gives them a fig leaf to hide the social, governmental and environmental wreckage their core policies leave behind. Regardless they are either just bad liars or blind motivated reasoners. At best, Republican billionaire moral philosophy and morality sucks.
The Kochs were radical libertarians and that is what their money bought and still buys. Hate of government and regulation were at the core of their scared laissez-faire capitalist ideology. In an essay, Charles wrote: “Morally, lowering taxes is simply defending property rights.” He argued that it was a moral imperative for the wealthy to cut their own taxes. Money is property and taxes take some if it. Another billionaire, Foster Friess (a Christian nationalist who claimed ownership of a business with $15 billion in 2020, he died in 2021), tried to be a bit more nuanced about the morality of not paying taxes. He argued that “wealthy people self-tax” by contributing to charities, commenting “It's that top 1% that probably contributes more to making the world a better place than the 99%.” (Some data helps put that in context. In 2017, total contributions to charities by all Americans were about $390 billion. Over their lifetimes, the top 25 billionaires gave $149 billion as of 2019, but getting accurate numbers is hard because of complexities in how billionaires do charity, some of which is self-serving and some of which is to political action committees and political campaigns, etc. Maybe billionaires aren’t better than the 99% at making the world a better place, especially since some of their charity spending is offset by the damage social and environmental their policies inflict -- they ignore that part.)
Coordinated campaign contributions and a relentless public propaganda campaign got the Republican Party in congress to oppose efforts to deal with climate change. Republicans in congress who wanted to act on the climate issue, were threatened with being primaried by a well-funded opponent. One happy donor operative commented that the tactic of threatening to primary a reluctant congressman was so effective it caused them to “pee their pants.” Republican climate polluting efforts the billionaire-tamed House put forward included proposed legislation to (i) block all legislation to deal with climate change, and (ii) requiring the EPA to consider costs of regulations, while ignoring the science about pollutants and any health impacts on humans. The billionaires hate the government trying to protect the environment. One billionaire operative, Tim Phillips (president of Americans for Prosperity, an influential Koch-funded political advocacy organization) was tickled pink at how effective billionaire cash was in setting the GOP straight about climate change. He commented to the National Journal: “Most of these candidates have figured out that the science has become political. We’ve made great headway. The vast majority of people who are involved in the [Republican] nominating process -- the conventions and the primaries -- are suspect of the science. Groups like Americans for Prosperity have done it.” Koch industries was one of America's top polluters and Koch money was hell bent on keeping the the pollution freely flowing, regardless of who or what it killed.
The billionaires like to operate quietly in public, while they and their lobbyists exert pressure behind closed doors. A former associate claimed that Koch family patriarch, Fred had a saying he liked to use: “The whale that spouts is the one that gets harpooned.” That sums it up nicely. Billionaires really are whales, but they just need to breathe quietly in the dark.
The Republican billionaires play hardball politics. They rely on lies and slanders when they think they can get away with it, and sometimes even when they know they can’t. For example, in August 2010, Mayer wrote, and New York Magazine published, a long article about Koch brother influence on the GOP. The Kochs were enraged and caught flat footed. They thought they and their billionaire peers could buy a major American political party and no one would notice or comment on it. In response the Kochs hired a new team of public relations propagandists who specialized in aggressive, hard ball tactics. One of them, Michael Goldfarb, had worked on Sarah Palin's vice presidential campaign. He had founded the Washington Free Beacon, a radical right propaganda and lies source whose motto was “do unto them.” He described his job as “attack the press” using “combat journalism” against “liberal gasbags.” The Kochs’ tactics included hiring a private investigator to find dirt on Mayer to smear her with. That failed so the propagandists made up a potentially career-ending lie that Mayer had plagiarized four journalists in various stories she wrote and had published. She found out about the impending story that the radical right propaganda and lies source The Daily Caller (one of seven big conservative politics sites that banned me from commenting in 2016), edited by Tucker Carlson (at the radical right CATO institute at the time), was planning to publish. Mayer realized that if the Koch slanders published, her career would be seriously damaged, even if it was later disproven. People remember juicy lies against evil journalists much better than they remember the later truth, assuming they even hear the truth in their echo chambers, which they usually don’t. (Hence the dangers of lies and smears in hyper-partisan echo chambers.) Once she understood the danger her career was in, Mayer contacted the journalists she would be falsely accused of plagiarizing and asked them to look at the allegations and comment. Three of the four asserted in writing she had not plagiarized their work. Later the fourth said they were not plagiarized. Mayer found out that The Daily Caller had not even bothered to contact any of the journalists it had planned to cite as Mayer’s victims. Mayer then sent the real facts to The Daily Caller, which then confirmed them and dropped the story before they published it. Another reporter who was aware of all of this sleaze asked the Kochs if they were behind it, but their spokesman refused to answer any questions. He then contacted Carlson (a self-confessed (under oath in court) professional liar, now lying to audiences at Fox News) and asked who the source of the Mayer smears was. Carlson responded with, “I have no clue where we got it.” Good old plausible deniability -- the best friend of liars, crooks, tax cheats, traitors and thugs the world over.
Over time, the billionaires got their money’s worth from their corrupted, captured and radicalized Republican Party. Yes indeed, the billionaires really did radicalize the GOP. Politicians who hesitated to radicalize and tow the line were either RINO hunted out of the party into retirement or primaried out in the next election. The tax rate on billionaires dropped to levels below average taxpayers making less than $50,000 per year. In the past, they paid much higher tax rates to pay for things like wars and safety net programs. They fixed that problem by forcing government into creating endless new debt. That allowed themselves to keep their loot mostly intact. Some of the tax breaks they bought were potentially worth tens of billions to the 16 wealthiest families in America, e.g., estate tax reductions. Campaign contributions, a/k/a/ free speech, really does have great value. Of course, that assumes you have enough cash to make your free speech heard above all the other free speech out there. Given how pay-to-play politics works, all the other speech is just white noise that Republican politicians can and do safely ignore.
The Center for Politics at the university of Virginia has collected interesting data on the divide. The research was intended to look for common ground and a basis for compromise. The researchers looked for insight about political and social-psychological motivations that drive both sides of the divide. The study comments:
In the study, the idea that the “government should work for people” surfaces as a potential compromise corridor for starting a conversation and finding common ground. The opportunity is to leverage this consensus to realize the positive change and action many Trump and Biden voters want.
But these positives are offset by the fact that Biden and Trump voters do not see how working with the other side fits into a bigger picture or translates into benefits for them. If anything, they view compromise as contrary their own priorities. They are convinced that the other side is pursuing an agenda that is contrary to their interests, principles, and values. They are convinced they will suffer personally if the other side has their way, despite the fact that many Biden and Trump voters want many of the same things from government.
Widespread disillusionment with the other side, and perceptions of a system that is rigged to favor the wealthy and powerful, has undermined faith in our representative democracy:
On one hand, roughly 80% of Trump and Biden voters view democracy as preferable to any non-democratic kind of government.
On the other hand, more than 6 in 10 Trump and Biden voters see America as less a representative democracy and more a system that is run by and rigged for the benefit of the wealthy.
For the foreseeable future, major compromise will be limited or nearly non-existent in view of deep distrust that decades of radical right anti-government and anti-democracy propaganda has fomented in the minds of tens of millions of Americans. Fomenting distrust is the point of that propaganda. It has worked especially well in the last ~5 years. The result will be more power and money flowing to elites at the top, while rights and wealth will ebb away from the rest of us.
Are perceptions of a system that is rigged to favor the wealthy and powerful mostly real, mostly false or mostly ambiguous?
A few weeks ago I posted as discussion about an ongoing effort to get two-thirds (34) of state legislatures to call for an article 5 Constitutional Convention. Amendments would need to be ratified by three-fourths (38) of states to take effect. That effort is mostly driven by liberals and moderates. The purpose is to amend the US Constitution to make corruption illegal in politics again. Special interest corruption had been significantly outlawed by laws that congress passed. But over the years radical conservative Republicans on the Supreme Courts have neutered those laws, often on grounds of free speech and a belief that corporations are people with constitutional rights. American politics has returned to a high level corruption by modern day neo-fascist Republicans. They are hell-bent on corrupting and subverting the federal government for their own neo-fascist ends, mainly power and wealth.
At present, Republican Christian nationalists on the Supreme Courts are busily and happily in the process of neutering laws that keep state and church separated, often on grounds of free speech and free exercise, but that is a different, complicated topic. This post is about the broad vision of what Republican laissez-faire capitalists and fundamentalist Christian nationalists want to do to America. This vision is not new to the last 5 years or so. At least parts of the modern radical right vision of America has been brewing at least since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that desegregated public schools. Conservative elites hated that decision and most of them seem to have been seething with rage ever since.
The Republican plan for America
There is another effort to force an Article 5 convention by states. This one is by conservatives with some non-conservatives also supporting it. The point of that convention would be to force a balanced budget amendment into the US Constitution. Although the radical right is not uniform in what it wants, the general contours of what they want to do to America is clear. Among other bad things, the neo-fascists want to neuter democracy, respect for inconvenient truth and a government that effectively defends the public interest. Those things have got to go. The radical right movement has already seriously damaged democracy and government defense of the public interest defense. It has almost completely obliterated respect for inconvenient truth. Just listen to some Fox News or go to major radical right propaganda and lies sites like Gateway Pundit to get a feel for how Republican neo-fascists mistreat truth.
One vision of what the Republicans want is encapsulated in the something it calls the Liberty Amendments. The neo-fascist author and pundit Mark Levin articulated the Liberty Amendments in his widely read book, The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic. Levin is a real hard core and prominent in the modern neo-fascist Republican movement. His rhetoric makes his poisonous feelings about Democrats and liberalism clear, e.g., this recent blast at Biden on Fox News. Wikipedia summarized the Liberty Amendments that radical right Republicans want put in the US Constitution:
In those amendments, on can clearly see the influence of laissez-faire capitalism and hostility to voters having power and easy access to voting. These amendments weaken the federal government’s ability to protect people and their civil liberties and they transfer enormous power from the federal government to businesses and the states. For example, by narrowing the definition of the Commerce Clause, the federal government would lose power to regulate much, maybe most, interstate commerce, freeing companies from all associated regulations.
Depending on how it is worded, an amendment(s) that restricts the scope of judicial review could neuter the ability of federal courts to decide what is constitutional and what isn’t and what kind of lawsuits the court could even hear. There are disputes that federal courts dislike even accepting, e.g., political disputes, and the scope of what courts could take could be narrowed enormously. In essence, federal courts could be rendered almost powerless, leaving the newly unleashed power free to flow to congress, the president, the states and/or businesses. The laissez-faire capitalists in the Republican crowd want that power to flow to themselves, where they will be free to quietly kill it to empower businesses, while pretending to do so in service to the public interest.
Limiting government eminent domain power transfers power from federal, state and local governments to property owners. That has been a libertarian and hard core capitalist dream for years. Subjecting federal departments and bureaucratic regulations to periodic reauthorization is a great way to slowly get rid of federal departments and bureaucratic regulations, one at a time. First cut off regulations, then when not much is left to do, eliminate the federal agency. Neo-fascist Republicans are dead serious about shrinking most pro-consumer and pro-environment aspect of government into insignificance. What would be left mostly untouched would be our gigantic military and its budget and federal courts and law enforcement. The latter would be used to vigorously persecute political opposition and dissent.
What may not appear to be a major presence in the Liberty Amendments is gifts to Christian nationalism. Nonetheless, Christian nationalism can be well served by amendments like these. For example, if the scope of what federal courts can even consider is neutered, church-state disputes could disappear or be left for religion to decide what is legal and what isn’t. We all know what that would lead to, i.e., massive flows of tax dollars from the US Treasury to churches and religious elites. Religion would be mostly free to rape and plunder the American people at will, while openly and legally discriminating against groups that fundamentalist Christianity hates, e.g., non-heterosexuals, atheists and other non-Christians, and racial and ethnic minorities. Christian elites would get their tons of flesh.
As far as an Article 5 Convention goes, there is much to fear as a long-term plan supported by as many as 28 Republican state legislatures awaits the right moment to trigger just that in the name of a Balanced Budget Amendment. That, in turn, would open the floor to tinkering with the Constitution in any number of possible ways. Republicans know this and many of them would be coming well-prepared with 11 “Liberty Amendments” that would lock anti-democratic governance in place with ominous finality.
Charles Koch and ALEC (among others) have been nurturing this plan for decades, and it is highly organized unlike the much more inchoate progressive versions of A5 attempts aimed at overturning Citizens United, and other ideas. These don’t have the support of nearly enough states to kick off an A5 convention, and even if they did such amendments would almost certainly fail to gain the approval of 3/4th of the states. In a much more possible future, though, the GOP just might pull such a thing off, as the BBA has gotten as close as 29 states recently (it’s now down to 28 of the needed 34). Among other reasons, they have support from some
“Blue Dog Democrats” (see NCPSSM link below).
So what are some of the troubling Liberty Amendments that are lined up and ready for discussion should a convention be called? First articulated in the 2013 book, The Liberty Amendments, by the now-Trump-supporting lawyer, far right radio host and Fox pundit, Mike Levin, they include (among others):
- The Balanced Budget Amendment, which is much more than a
“fiscally conservative” matter. It might sound good to center-right budget hawks until it becomes clear that to balance the budget they would be kissing social security and medicare, along with various other social programs goodbye.
- Repeal the 17th Amendment of 1913, which gives us the right to elect senators rather than having them appointed by state legislatures as was the case (though few know this) until the 1918 election. That is, Republicans would now appoint their own Senators eliminating that irritating thing called democratic elections, reverting to the elitism of the 1787 Constitution in a 21st C context. Of course, the long-term Republican stealth plan of people such as Charles Koch has been to make sure that at the state level, the GOP has racked up victory after victory, so that right now 30 state legislatures are Republican to 17 which are Democratic. The same care has been given for decades to using these legislatures to appoint far right judges in these states.
-Amend the constitution to make it easier for States to amend the constitution in the future in a way that circumvents Congress. (Is this what State-Rights has come to mean?)
-Limit mail-in and early voting and require photo IDs, thus suppressing the vote while this effort is complemented by gerrymandering well under way.
- Require Fed Depts. and their regulations to be periodically reviewed and reauthorizied: That is, amend the constitution in such a way that Federal Departments like the EPA, Health and Human Services, Dept. of Ed., Housing and Urban Develop., and others, would require periodic “reauthorization and review,” along with the regulations they establish.
- Amend Constitution so that 2/3 of states can nullify federal laws (states rights to nullify desegregation laws after Brown v Board, and more recently to nullify Affordable Care Act have been rejected by the Supreme Ct., so this would help to get around that).
While right now the GOP is short of 2/3rd (34) of the states signing on to the Balanced Budget Amendment (which would kick off the convention opening it to discuss these widely supported Liberty Amendments), it is a long term stealth-plan that has paid dividends in shifting the balance of state legislatures decisively to the Right. Who can say it won’t succeed given what we’ve seen in recent years? And it would lock in much of the anti-democratic policy already being put in place as I write and in recent years. Meanwhile, Dems are much less united (heck, some of them even support this BBA triggering an A5 Convention). Progressive proposals to call a constitution, like the one calling for an Am. to overturn Citizens United.
Here is a link to the Watchdog group Common Cause on this topic, revised 4/21. And a NYT article from 2016. Finally, a short clip of an interview with Nancy MacClean (author of Democracy in Chains) on this topic taken from Bill Maher Show. It’s short but to the point.
What stands between the neo-fascist Republican vision for America and those constitutional amendments is the requirement that 38 (three-fourths) states ratify the amendments. At present, there aren’t 38 states that would go that far. But what that means is that the Republican Party, its major capitalist donors, and its Christian nationalist cadres will all keep working to get more states on board with as much of the radical right agenda as they can. This Republican Party political movement is well-funded, professional, disciplined, patient, and persistent.
If the elites behind this awful threat cannot get what they want this year, they will try for next year. If not this decade, then next decade. This war will not end. The elite capitalists, authoritarians, bigots and Christian zealots will not give up and they will not settle for compromise. They want it all. Specifically, they want essentially as much power and wealth as they can get without people rising up and rebelling.
What most average people will get from the neo-fascist Republican Party vision for America is a kick in the pants and oppression. Few will be rewarded and most those few will be hard core neo-fascist Republicans.
