You may think the Koch Brothers had nothing to do with the rise of Donald Trump, but one of their key funding partners did. The reclusive Robert Mercer emerged as a key backer of both the anti-immigrant scream of the Trump campaign as well as Trump’s new libertarian-friendly tax regime and opposition to federal regulation. Like the Koch Brothers, Robert Mercer is a libertarian on steroids. He is supporting Donald Trump with money and counsel, such as Trump’s recent decision to hire the Alt-Right bomb-thrower, Steve Bannon, as CEO of his campaign. Like so many Republican stories these days, this one began long, long ago, and far, far away. In a place called “Dixie”.
The present Republican dystopia has deep roots tapping into America's slave era. A time when Southern Democrats held a stranglehold on national politics and the Republican Party was outlawed in ten of the States that would become the Confederacy. Politics have certainly taken a strange turn these last 150 years.
It's not an easy story to understand, or tell. But a long time ago I saw a t-shirt worn by an older, sour looking man that put the thing into one succinct logo.
On the breast of his white shirt was an elephant painted with a rebel flag – a Republican elephant with a twist. The elephant bore this warning: ”Lincoln's Worst NIGHTMARE!”.
The year was 2000, it was Jackson, Mississippi and we were about to vote on a new flag to replace the 1894 Neo-Confederate version. I was there documenting a pro-flag rally on the steps of the State Capitol, part of a 25 year effort – still ongoing – to make a documentary about race, history and culture and how it affects politics in the South and the nation. The pro-flag organizers of this particular demonstration didn't want to just keep the old flag, they were full-blown Southern Nationalists who might have voted for secession too if it had been on the ballot.
They preached Jesus and traditional values and railed against liberals and political correctness and went on and on about how the establishment was destroying their world. Sound familiar? But it was ten years before the Tea Party and sixteen years before Trump. The disaster that is now the Republican Party has been in the making for a very long time and the South is a big part of it.
The sour man with the Lincoln hating elephant wasn't just touting a divisive and racist flag, he was also making a political statement about Lincoln's Republican Party and the Confederacy. But what exactly?
I've long been troubled by that elephant and what it means. I've since taken a deep dive into southern history, economics and the politics of slavery, before, during and after the Civil War.
And one other thing about me. I grew up in Mississippi in the 50s and 60s and that was its own education, but one I am only now coming to understand.
Part I: Dixie Economics.
The Confederacy was founded on the principle of slavery and that's what it stood for. The Mississippi Secession Ordinance of 1861 was clear about it:
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world.
The signers of that document only referenced States Rights in an oblique criticism of that principle when they attacked Northern States for refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, in violation of federal law.
Now many defenders of the rebel flag claim that the war had nothing to do with slavery, that it was only about States Rights and economics. They are of course wrong – all reputable historians believe that slavery was the central cause of the war.
But having said that, there was a very significant difference between the economic beliefs of the Slave South and the North, and it's worth looking at because these views live on with many of the conservatives – and Trump supporters – who defend the Rebel Flag today. The most important principle was Laissez-faire economics.
Free trade and an opposition to tariffs was part of this, but it went much deeper than that. The Confederate Constitution forbade their federal government from making internal improvements of any sort, with only a narrow exception for clearing rivers and harbors for navigation. But even in this narrow exception, the cost had to be paid by the users. Their Post Office was to become entirely self-supporting by 1863. The Confederates went even further down this libertarian road, striking all references to ”promoting the general welfare” from the their document, despite copying the U.S. Constitution in most other respects.
The Confederates also made it very difficult to spend money, requiring a 2/3 super-majority in both houses of their congress. And they gave their President the line item veto. Southern slave holders not only opposed government financed infrastructure, they also opposed public education, with the exception of colleges for the sons of the elite. The slave south was a true economic-libertarian society built for the 1%.
Lincoln, on the other hand didn't just oppose slavery. He also wanted a new kind of economics, the ”American system” championed by his mentor Henry Clay. During the war, Lincoln's Republicans created the Homestead Act that gave land to landless small farmers and they built the land grant colleges of America. They constructed a transcontinental railroad and regulated the banking system. They introduced a national paper currency and the progressive income tax, all of which stablized and greatly expanded the northern economy while avoiding the extreme inflation that swept the Confederacy.
Lincoln's economics also helped win the war while the South’s approach greatly contributed to their loss. Yet many libertarians, especially those of the Austrian school of Ludwig von Mises are venomous toward Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln and look back fondly at the Confederacy as the epitome of small government, capitalist economics. This from a scholar writing for the Mises Intitute. The article is from 2001, but it is currently available on their website.
The so-called American System of mercantilism could only be implemented by a highly centralized government of the sort that the U.S. Constitution attempted to deter. That’s why it could only be put into place by force of arms, which it was. As soon as Lincoln maneuvered the South Carolinians into firing the first shot (at a customs house, Fort Sumter) tariff rates were immediately raised to an average of 47 percent and higher, and remained historically high for decades after the war.
Or consider this view of Lincoln in a blog post by Jack Hunter, who later became the co-author of Senator Rand Paul's 2010 book, The Tea Party Goes to Washington.
Lincoln’s war empowered the federal government beyond the wildest imaginations of any of the Founders and modern Americans can thank Abe Lincoln for laying the groundwork that led to the bloated Federal bureaucracy that taxes us to death today. The fact that April 15th is both the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination and tax day makes perfect sense. We might not even have had a federal income tax if it weren’t for him. And I imagine somewhere in hell Abe Lincoln is probably having the last laugh.
So the rebel elephant is actually saying quite a lot. Or in the words of my hometown author William Faulkner:
The Past Isn't Dead. It Isn't Even Past.
But how did the slave-supporting Democratic Party come to take on the issues of Lincoln's Republicans, while the Republicans swapped out to became the party of the Old South?
The Laissez-faire-libertarianism of the old Democratic Party Slavocracy (as it was known by abolitionists) never died out, even though it was often superseded by other economic philosophies, including a racist progressive populism that supported the New Deal and FDR. It’s also worth pointing out the cozy relationship that developed after Reconstruction between the former Confederates and the Robber Barons, which resulted in Supreme Court justices deciding to twist the interpretation of the 14th Amendment to mean that it did not protect the rights protect African Americans in the South, but rather said that corporations should be treated as “legal persons”. Scalia did not invent that one, he simply returned to the interpretation established by the Gilded Age justices who also enabled the Jim Crow South.
One of those who kept the old-school libertarianism alive in the South was a Dutch immigrant named Harry Koch who settled in North Texas in the 1890s and ran a newspaper, the Quanah Tribune-Chief. He absorbed the local ethos — marrying a Texas woman whose family had come from the deep South — and he became a fierce proponent of monopoly capitalism. When the New Deal arrived, he was one of its biggest opponents, slamming all attempts to “spread the wealth” as Bolshevikism. He preferred society with as little law as possible, which he saw as an impediment to capitalism. Or as he wrote in his paper:
If we depended upon laws to make us perfect the United States should be a near Utopia and Texas would be the most heavenly spot on earth.
He did this at the same time that his son, Fred Koch, was in the Soviet Union making his fortune by establishing oil refineries for Joseph Stalin. The same Fred Koch who founded the John Birch Society together with Robert Welch in the late 1950s. Welch also had southern roots in North Carolina.
This statement from “The Blue Book” of John Birch founding principles, sums up their libertarian argument:
Naturally we have faced extensive and malicious attacks from both the open and the disguised Left. Nothing more is required today to bring down on any man's head a torrent of smears from the Liberal Establishment than: (a) to deny the beauties of the welfare state; or (b), to seek to preserve the opportunities and responsibilities of the individual; or (c), to suspect the venality of any of the Establishments painstakingly manufactured but clay-footed gods, with their synthetic haloes. And we have done all three.
Fred’s son Charles Koch joined him in the John Birch Society and became a lifetime member. But he resigned from the Society in 1968 and along with his brother David became involved involved in libertarian politics. In a 1974 speech to businessmen and libertarians Charles Koch said:
The development of a well-financed cadre of sound proponents of the free enterprise philosophy is the most critical need facing us today.
He also helped found the Cato Institute in the same year. In 1980 David Koch ran for Vice-President on the Libertarian Party ticket, while Charles provided funding for the campaign. The Libertarians lost that election of course. And the Koch Brothers soon left the party and began working to bring their version of libertarianism into the Republican Party. in 1985 they founded the organization that would eventually become Americans for Prosperity. I highly recommend the New York Times account of this early libertarian development of the Koch Brothers politics.
In 2010 Americans for Prosperity started working with the newly formed Tea Party movement. While the Koch Brothers have denied that they funded the Tea Party, Peggy Venable, one of their staff members at Americans for Prosperity said this at a Koch Brothers 2010 summit in Austin Texas called “Defending the American Dream”:
We love what the Tea Parties are doing, because that’s how we’re going to take back America!
Someone else who popped up at the Texas summit was none other than Ted Cruz.
During a catered lunch, Venable introduced Ted Cruz, a former solicitor general of Texas, who told the crowd that Obama was “the most radical President ever to occupy the Oval Office,” and had hidden from voters a secret agenda—“the government taking over our economy and our lives.” Countering Obama, Cruz proclaimed, was “the epic fight of our generation!” As the crowd rose to its feet and cheered, he quoted the defiant words of a Texan at the Alamo: “Victory, or death!”
This reporting on the Tea Party was done by Jane Mayer of the New Yorker. This is one of the most signficant passages, given what we have seen in 2016.
The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to “educate,” fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, “The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.” With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.”
A Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch said of the Tea Party, “The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It’s like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud—and they’re our candidates!”
And then Ted Cruz crawled out of the mud.
He was one of four candidates, along with Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker that were sanctioned by the Koch Brothers for President and summoned to their exclusive 2015 summer conference to meet funders in the Koch Brothers network, Freedom Partners.
One of these wealthy men had already signed on to back Cruz — he was the secretive and extremely reactionary Robert Mercer.
So why did Trump win and not the more libertarian sounding Cruz?
Mercer wasn't just backing Cruz, he is also one of the funders of Breitbart.com — now infamous for becoming the go-to news sight for American's Alt-Right. Breitbart was backing two candidates: Cruz and Trump. It seemed like a strange pair since they only had three things in common. Hate for immigration reform. Both were disliked by the Republican establishment. And they were pitching to exactly the same base voter. It was Trump’s seemly non-libertarian message that prevailed, perhaps mainly because Trump was by far the loudest racist, and had the nastiest anti-immigration stance and it proved to be what the base wanted most. But more interestingly, it also turned out to be what Robert Mercer’s Breitbart News wanted, as they went all in for Trump. Conservatives started calling Breitbart.com: “Trump Pravda”.
I discovered Breitbart in August of 2015 and began to read them periodically as a way of tracking the Republican Primaries. I soon realized they were usually ahead of the curve in predicting (or causing) outcomes when it came to the departures of Trump’s opponents, as he steadily dispatched them one by one.
When Trump won, Robert Mercer openely switched sides. Soon Trump was vowing to appoint very strict judges to the Supreme Court. He softened his opposition to cutting social security. And Trump changed his tax policy to be more friendly to the rich. He also talked more about cutting government regulations. Then in August Breitbart.com’s head, Steve Bannon was brought in as CEO of the Trump Campaign in a staff shake-up. According to Politico, Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah were behind Trump’s decision to change the people running his campaign, yet again.
Breitbart and Trump effectively merged, which brought the Alt-Right — which was the base of both the Breitbart machine and the Trump campaign — out into the open for all America to see.
It’s important to note that Koch Brothers — that is Charles and David — are not supporting Trump, in fact they seem to loath him. But they were the ones that planted the seeds for Trump when they built the Tea Party into a national political movement.
There is one Koch Brother supporting Trump, however, David’s fraternal twin, William Koch, who is estranged from his more famous brothers.
Trump may look different than past Republican nominees, and his base certainly think he is different because of his anti-immigration and anti-free trade rhetoric. But in the few economic policy details Trump has been clear about, there is a clear committment to the libertarian traditions rooted in Dixie.
I’ll soon continue with another installment of this story that looks at the racist side of Trump’s campaign and traces Alt-Right extremism back to its Reconstruction roots in the Ku Klux Klan.
But until then I will leave you with the thoughts of a Neo-Nazi & Southern Nationalist who goes by the moniker “14words_of_truth” and blogs on Stormfront, a Neo-Nazi website. I’ll let him explain in his own words how he came to Trump:
White folks are fed up with the republican party, the democratic party, the federal government, political correctness, the lying mass media, compounded taxes . . .
The backlash against all of that began in the Ron Paul Revolution then in the Tea Party and now in the Trump campaign . . .
Get on the Trump Train!
To be continued . . .