For those not on Gail Lightfoot's list. I found this a pretty good article. Interesting to me that Libertarians (Big L) have been trying to spread the word on both social and economic freedoms since the 70's, but now it is "news" because libertarians (small l) are trying it. Interesting too that the Koch Brothers would rather fight an uphill battle getting Republicans to accept a semblance of social liberty, than work with Big L Libertarians, who already have a tradition of supporting those issues. Not that they did not try in the past. I guess they soon found out that when we Libertarians talk about the impossibility of "herding cats," we mean it.
Marcy
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/30/charles-and-david-
koch-the-minds-behind-libertarianism-3-0.html
The Daily Beast
May 30, 2014
Nick Gillespie
Libertarianism 3.0: Koch And A Smile
The visionary brothers’ new paradigm will frustrate the left and alter
the right by fusing social tolerance with fiscal responsibility.
By Nick Gillespie
As a libertarian, I’m always slow to tell people what they should do.
But if you care about politics and the ultimately far more powerful
cultural direction of these United States, the new book by Daniel
Schulman, Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most
Powerful and Private Dynasty, is mandatory reading.
Written by a senior editor for the lefty magazine Mother Jones, the
book is hugely revelatory, though not in a way that will please or
flatter the conspiracy theories of Democrats, liberals, and
progressives who vilify the Kansas-raised billionaires Charles and
David Koch for fun and profit. Sons of Wichita chronicles the
post-World War II transformation of a mid-size oil-and-ranching family
business into the second-largest privately held company in the United
States. From a straight business angle, it’s riveting and illuminating
not just about how Koch Industries—makers of “energy, food, building
and agricultural materials…and…products [that] intersect every day with
the lives of every American”—evolved over the past 60 years but also
how the larger U.S. economy changed and globalized.
But what’s far more interesting—and important to contemporary
America—is the way in which Schulman documents the absolute seriousness
with which Charles and David have always taken specifically libertarian
ideas and their signal role in helping to create a “freedom movement”
to counter what they have long seen as a more effective mix of
educational, activist, and intellectual groups on the broadly defined
left. By treating the Koch brothers’ activities in critical but fair
terms, Sons of Wichita points to what I like to think of as
Libertarianism 3.0, a political and cultural development that, if
successful, will not only frustrate the left but fundamentally alter
the right by creating fusion between forces of social tolerance and
fiscal responsibility.
“One misconception that’s out there,” Schulman told me in an interview,
“is that these guys are merely out there to line their pockets. If you
look at their beliefs in a consistent framework, Charles Koch has been
talking about a lot of this [libertarian] stuff since the 1960s and
1970s. This didn’t just happen during the Obama era. And if you look at
it that way, you have to start to see these guys as outside the
political villain-robber baron caricature.”
In the interests of disclosure, I should note that David Koch is a
trustee of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that
publishes Reason.com and Reason.tv, of which I’m editor in chief. Back
in 1993, I received a fellowship for around $3,500 from the Institute
for Humane Studies, of which Charles Koch is a major benefactor; the
grant helped me complete my Ph.D. in American literature at the State
University of New York at Buffalo.
At the 1969 YAF convention, the libertarian protesters burned their
draft cards and were expelled as “lazy fairies,” a play
on laissez-faire.
Imagine, if you will, a country in which government at every level
spends less money and does fewer things (but does them more
effectively), doles out fewer perks to special interests (from Wall
Street banks to sports teams to homeowners), regulates fewer things
across the board, engages in fewer wars and less domestic spying, and
embraces things such as gay marriage, drug legalization, and
immigration. If surveys showing record levels of Americans are worried
that government is too powerful are accurate, libertarianism may well
be on its way to becoming the new civic religion. That’s partly out of
necessity (no country can spend money it doesn’t have forever) and
partly out of intellectual shifts borne out of argumentation and world
events.
In a recent piece for The Washington Post, Schulman reminds readers
that while the Koch brothers remain staunch opponents of Obamacare and
government spending, “they are at odds with the conservative
mainstream” and “were no fans of the Iraq war.” As a young man, Charles
was booted from the John Birch Society (which his father had helped to
found) after publishing an anti-Vietnam War newspaper ad, and David
told Politico of his support for gay marriage from the floor of the
2012 Republican National Convention. In the past year, the Charles Koch
Institute cosponsored events with Buzzfeed about immigration
reform (which angered many on the right) and with
Mediaite about criminal justice reform.
The libertarian or “freedom movement” is a loose and baggy monster that
includes the Libertarian Party; Ron Paul fans of all ages; Reason
magazine subscribers; glad-handers at Cato Institute’s free-lunch
events in D.C.; Ayn Rand obsessives and Robert Heinlein buffs; the
curmudgeons at Antiwar.com; most of the economics department at George
Mason University and up to about one-third of all Nobel Prize winners
in economics; the beautiful mad dreamers at The Free State Project; and
many others. As with all movements, there’s never a single nerve center
or brain that controls everything. There’s an endless amount of
infighting among factions and Schulman does an excellent and evenhanded
job of reporting on all that. (For the definitive history of the
movement, read my Reason colleague Brian Doherty’s Radicals for
Capitalism.) On issues such as economic regulation, public spending,
and taxes, libertarians tend to roll with the conservative right. On
other issues—such as civil liberties, gay marriage, and drug
legalization, we find more common ground with the progressive left.
Libertarianism 1.0 spans the 1960s and ’70s. It was a time of building
groups and having arguments that hammered out what it meant to be
a libertarian as opposed to a liberal who grokked free trade or a
conservative who was against the warfare state. The Institute for
Humane Studies was founded in the early 1960s by a former Cornell
economics professor to nurture libertarian-minded college students and
would-be academics. The founder, F.A. Harper, was an important
intellectual mentor to Charles Koch, who became a major donor to the
group. Reason magazine started publishing in 1968, created by a Boston
University student who disliked cops and hippies in equal measure and
wanted to create a conversation pit for libertarian ideas, news, and
commentary. The Age of Aquarius didn’t end before The New York Times
magazine declared libertarianism to be “the new right credo” and the
next big thing among students in a cover story co-written by future
Wired magazine founder Louis Rossetto. The article described John
Kennedy and Richard Nixon as differing types of statist “reactionaries.”
By the early 1980s, the libertarian movement had established a distinct
ideological identity, albeit one often ignored.
The always-rumbling fault line between equally anti-communist
conservatives and libertarians in Bill Buckley’s student group, Young
Americans for Freedom, ruptured irrevocably over the Vietnam War at the
1969 YAF national convention (PDF), when the libertarian protesters
burned their draft cards and were expelled as “lazy fairies,” a play
on laissez-faire. That was one of the events that gave rise to the
Libertarian Party in 1971, whose platform called not only for an end to
gender discrimination but equality for gays (virtually unthinkable
among Democrats and Republicans at the time).
In 1977, Charles Koch was one of the co-founders of the Cato
Institute—and, as Schulman puts it, “the organization’s wallet.” In a
1978 issue of Libertarian Review, Schulman writes, Charles “decried
corporate leaders who preached ‘freedom in voluntary economic
activities,’ but simultaneously called for ‘the full force of the law
against voluntary sexual or other personal activities.’” He didn’t have
patience for businessmen who railed against welfare for the poor while
lobbying for subsidies and protectionist policies for their own bottom
lines, either.
In 1980, David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party
ticket, which pulled 1 percent of the popular vote on a platform that
assailed Carter and Reagan in equal measures while calling for
massively lower taxes and spending, the legalization of drugs and
prostitution, and the abolition of virtually all government programs
and agencies, including the FDA and the EPA along with the CIA and FBI.
The campaign was explicitly informational and intended to preach the
gospel of less interference in the boardroom and the bedroom. “The
ideas are so persuasive,” David said at the start of the campaign,
“that once people hear about them they will be willing to accept them.”
Schulman notes that David listed “his vice presidential candidacy years
later under ‘proudest achievement’ on an MIT alumni questionnaire.”
Libertarianism 2.0 covers the past 30 years or so. By the early 1980s,
the libertarian movement had established a distinct ideological
identity, albeit one often ignored or put down by an older, square
conservative movement that still considered libertarianism as a punky
younger brother. On the left, libertarians were routinely dismissed as
“Republicans who smoke pot.” As they gained strength and
acknowledgement, libertarians started more actively engaging in
mainstream politics, especially by working within the Republican Party,
which at least espoused similar rhetoric about limiting the size,
scope, and spending of government (that Reagan and the GOP did nothing
of the sort remains a sore point for libertarians). Bill Clinton’s tax
hikes, his attempt to put government-accessible “backdoors” into all
computer and telecom equipment, his bid to regulate the fledgling
Internet via The Communications Decency Act, and of course his proposed
health-care plan in the early 1990s galvanized many libertarians
against him. The occasional pro-freedom and futurist pronouncements by
characters such as Newt Gingrich (who graced the cover of Wired in 1995
with the tagline “Friend and Foe”) seemed to offer serious common
ground between libertarians and the Republican Party.
By century’s end, Al Gore’s increasingly strident environmentalism had
for libertarians fully trumped his full-throated early ’90s defense of
free trade while debating H. Ross Perot on Larry King Live. His leading
role in giving his wife Tipper’s Parents Music Resource Council a
platform to push music labeling in Senate hearings was a real problem
too. By contrast, George W. Bush’s low-tax record in Texas and belief
in a “humble” foreign policy sounded pretty good.
Yet Bush’s subsequent record on spending, civil liberties, foreign
policy, and bailouts underscored the longstanding libertarian
conviction that most differences between the two major parties were
cosmetic. Not only did Bush—who had six years with a Republican House
and Senate—grow federal spending by more than 50 percent in real
dollars, he massively increased the regulatory state like no one else
had since the days of Richard Nixon. Consider this damning January 2009
summary of his record compiled by economist Veronique de Rugy of the
Mercatus Center (a Koch-supported outfit, by the way):
The Bush team has spent more taxpayer money on issuing and enforcing
regulations than any previous administration in U.S. history. Between
fiscal year 2001 and fiscal year 2009, outlays on regulatory
activities, adjusted for inflation, increased from $26.4 billion to an
estimated $42.7 billion, or 62 percent. By contrast, President Clinton
increased real spending on regulatory activities by 31 percent, from
$20.1 billion in 1993 to $26.4 billion in 2001.
About the only thing that could seem worse to libertarians was the
prospect of a President Obama who not only readily signed on to Bush’s
TARP and auto bailouts but pledged to expand them, spend hundreds of
billions of additional dollars on “stimulus,” and then top it off with
a nationalized health-care plan.
As Schulman writes, the Kochs already started organizing invite-only,
heavily attacked (by the progressive blogosphere), and fully
compliant-with-campaign-law meetings to raise money for political
action starting in the Bush years, with an eye toward funding
candidates and causes that would push for freer markets and less
regulation, defeat Obama, sink his health-care reform plan, and push
back against other aspects of the progressive Democratic economic and
regulatory agenda.
Libertarianism 3.0 will be a phase in which libertarians insist that
their economic and social views not only get taken seriously but start
driving the agenda.
Despite some electoral successes, these efforts have largely come a
cropper, especially with the defeat of Mitt Romney in 2012. Schulman
writes that although David Koch ultimately became a major supporter of
Romney, he withheld his “formal support” until New Jersey Gov. Chris
Christie declined to run and Romney had dispatched his GOP rivals. He
quotes a friend of Charles saying, “Charles loved the governor from New
Mexico, Gary Johnson,” who ran on the Libertarian ticket (and pulled
more than 1 million votes and around 1 percent of the popular vote, the
party’s best showing since the 1980 ticket that featured David).
The Kochs’ political network spent more than $400 million trying to
unseat Barack Obama—the weakest, most vulnerable incumbent president in
decades to win re-election. Their failure to do so didn’t just create a
dark night of the soul for the Republican Party, which pledged to do an
official post-mortem and organizational reboot. It also, says Schulman,
has energized the Koch brothers and their political operation to figure
out where they failed to connect with the American people. And unlike
the GOP, whose dedication to fundamental change went missing the minute
Obama’s popularity dipped after his second term began, the Kochs,
Schulman told me, “really do learn from their mistakes. What you see
right now is kind of the overhaul of their political operation.”
Which brings me to Libertarianism 3.0. The first iteration of the
modern libertarian movement was focused on figuring out who we were and
what sorts of institutions and outreach were necessary for the
movement. The second was about working within existing power
structures, sometimes even to the point of keeping mum on matters of
serious disagreement. I’d argue that Libertarianism 3.0 will be a phase
in which libertarians pursue two parallel political paths.
The first is outlined in The Declaration of Independents, the book I
co-authored with Matt Welch: As increasing numbers of Americans flee
affiliation with either major party, libertarians and others will form
ad hoc coalitions that focus on specific issues and then disband after
a threat has been stared down. That happened in 2012, when a rag-tag
group of people from all over the political spectrum teamed up to
defeat The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate counterpart The
Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Ralph Nader is calling for
something similar in his new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Right-Left
Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. In a recent interview,
Nader—no fan of major parties, he—told me that libertarians and
progressives could get a “hell of a lot done if they would band
together on specific issues” such as cronyism and corporate subsidies.
(The problem, he said, is that “everyone wants to win every argument on
the things they disagree about.”)
The second strategy is relevant to those trying to work within the
Republican Party (and possibly the Democratic Party in time). They will
start insisting that their economic and social views not only get taken
seriously but start driving the agenda. That’s the strategy that Matt
Kibbe, head of FreedomWorks, champions in books such as 2011’s Hostile
Takeover and this year’s Don’t Hurt People and Take Their Stuff.
It may well be the path that the Kochs are pursuing. There are signs
that this is already happening. As Schulman writes, the Republican
establishment has always had reservations about the Kochs, “who often
aligned with the Republicans on free-market issues and downsizing
government… [but] Republicans [couldn’t] count on the Kochs to fall in
step on issues such as immigration, civil liberties, or defense, where
they held more liberal views. The brothers and their company also
opposed subsidies across the board, a position GOP members didn’t
always share. ‘The Republicans don’t trust us,’ said one Koch political
operative.”
But at this point, the GOP may need the Kochs—and the libertarian
vote—more than they need the GOP. You don’t have to be a savvy
businessman to know that spending $400 million to lose a very winnable
presidential election isn’t a good use of money. If the Republican
Party refuses to take libertarian ideas seriously, there’s really
nothing in it for libertarians to stick around.
There remains a serious question of whether or how far the Kochs will
push for unambiguously libertarian positions as the price for their
support. On economic issues, that will be daunting enough when you
think about the massive growth in the size, scope, and spending of
government under George W. Bush and a Republican Congress. Even now,
the House Republican budget plan calls for increasing annual spending
over the next decade from around $3.6 trillion to $5 trillion.
When it comes to the social issues the GOP refuses to stop talking
about despite declining levels of support among voters, the Kochs’
record of direct activism has never been strong. During the
Libertarianism 2.0 phase, they supported libertarian groups such as
Reason Foundation and Cato that call for drug legalization, marriage
equality, open borders, and the like, but there’s no question that they
focused most of their literal and figurative political capital on
economic issues that caused less stress among establishment Republicans.
“The brothers have traditionally avoided bankrolling advocacy on
controversial social issues,” Schulman writes in his Post op-ed, “but
they would certainly throw a curveball to their opponents on the left
(not to mention their supporters on the right) by actively backing the
causes of marriage equality or reproductive rights.”
The standard GOP response to unapologetic libertarianism is fear and
dismissal: It’s too whacked out, too radical, too scary. Yet the only
branch of the Republican Party that isn’t dead and withered is
precisely the libertarian one. Retired Rep. Ron Paul (who ran for
president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988) packed college
campuses with young kids and retirees with a vision of limited
government, fed audits, and restrained foreign policy. If he fired up
an enthusiasm that was never fully reflected in his vote totals, he
also inspired a new generation of candidates and activists who want to
be part of a major party. Whose heart flutters at the sight of John
Boehner or Eric Cantor? While not necessarily doctrinaire libertarians,
characters such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rep.
Justin Amash (R-Mich.), and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) are not only
pushing for defense spending and the NSA to be put on the chopping
block, they are increasingly pushing for marriage and drug issues to be
settled at the state level. Paul is consistently at the top of polls
for 2016 presidential contenders.
Consider, too, the re-election campaign of Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell (R-Ky.). McConnell is not running for another term like he
used to. In 2008, McConnell ran ads touting the billions of dollars of
pork he had brought home to Kentucky over the years. “That would never
fly today,” the former head of the Tea Party Express told Business
Insider. In 2010, McConnell did everything he could to keep Rand Paul
from becoming the junior senator from the Bluegrass State (Paul
defeated McConnell’s pick in the GOP primary). This time, McConnell
worked overtime to secure an early endorsement from Paul. He even hired
Paul’s former campaign manager and supported a state bill championed by
Rand Paul and Thomas Massie that legalized hemp production.
In a poll from last fall (the most recent on the topic), Gallup found
that “a majority, 53 percent, favor less government involvement in
addressing the nation’s problems in order to reduce taxes, while 13
percent favor more government involvement to address the nation’s
problems, and higher taxes.”
That’s a broadly libertarian point of view, and it’s certainly one that
comports with Schulman’s analysis of the Koch brothers’ political
vision. And it may speak to their influence on setting the terms of the
conversation as well. In this passage, Schulman is writing specifically
about Charles, but the idea applies to David as well: “He has arguably
done more than anyone else to promote free-market economics and the
broader ideology surrounding it. By mainstreaming libertarianism, he
helped to change the way people think.”
Of course, it’s far from clear whether the Republican Party—or the
larger country—will actually embrace anything resembling a principled
libertarian approach not only to economic matters but to foreign
policy, civil liberties, social issues, and more. Regardless of the
outcome, though, one of the reasons—not the only one, to be sure—we’re
even having this conversation is the Koch brothers. After eight
disastrous years under George W. Bush and six (so far) under Barack
Obama, it’s a conversation that’s been postponed long enough.
The BODDIE POLITIC