Rand had not done it by herself—as we shall see, there were other, far more systematic thinkers working the same ground, and far more diligent and effective political organizers—but she had told a story that made enough emotional sense to enough people at the top of the heap that it helped reshape the workings of her adopted nation.
And the reason it made enough sense was because it was rooted in something very real: that moment when the Red Guard seized her father’s drugstore “in the name of the people.” I visited the Soviet Union only when it was on its last legs, but that was enough for me to see that it had been a failure in every sense: its environment wrecked because people couldn’t protest pollution, its people demoralized because they were told what to do with their lives, its official art and literature a dim-witted joke. Even the economy, whose success was supposed to justify all the repression, didn’t work, because central planning on that scale turns out to be a stupendously bad idea. I remember standing with my wife outside Moscow’s most prestigious retail outlet, the vast GUM department store. There were two long lines of people waiting, one outside the left door and one outside the right. When the left door opened first, everyone on the right side simply went home: they’d guessed wrong and knew that whatever was for sale would be long gone before they made it inside. Meanwhile, the lucky shoppers surged through the left door and past various empty departments and up the stairs into the one busy section, which was selling winter coats for children. You had to show your residence certificate even to have a chance of buying one. An industrial society that can’t produce enough children’s coats for the Russian winter—that’s failure on a grand scale.
The great advantage of the twenty-first century should be that we can learn from having lived through the failures of the twentieth. We’re able, as people were not a hundred years ago, to scratch some ideas off the list. It’s very useful to know, for example, that state communism is a really terrible idea. And it’s not as if we have nothing any longer to fear from a powerful central government; as Edward Snowden demonstrated, nation-states are still in the surveillance business. Also, Alexa.
But overlearning the lessons of the past is just as dangerous as ignoring them. If you can’t distinguish between national health insurance and indentured servitude, if Denmark reminds you of North Korea, then you damage the present in the name of the past. If you must resist the Clean Air Act because of your visceral fear that it might lead to so much government that your drugstore gets taken away, then the twentieth century has become not a teacher but an irrational barrier.
Unless, of course, you make a fortune violating the Clean Air Act.
10
Ayn Rand’s father had his door kicked down by the Red Guard in 1918.
Ninety-six years later, in the fall of 2014, Tom Perkins feared he might be the next victim of a purge—a “Kristallnacht,” he called it, in a letter to the Wall Street Journal. Perkins was one of the richest men on the planet. He had literally built one of the largest yachts on earth, the 289-foot Maltese Falcon (which carried its own submarine, which he named the Dr. No). But Perkins had noticed that the poorer people of San Francisco were demonstrating against the real estate takeover of their city by tech barons and venture capitalists like him—indeed, some unruly hooligans had dared to smash a piñata in the shape of one of the swank buses Google uses to ferry its workers from their urban lofts out to Silicon Valley. And so, Perkins thoughtfully wrote to the Journal to “call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany in its war on the ‘one percent’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’” On television the next day, he explained that he simply wanted to make sure that Americans didn’t “demonize the most creative part of society.” After explaining that the watch he was wearing was worth “a six-pack of Rolexes,” he added, “We are beginning to engage in class warfare. The rich as a class are threatened through higher taxes, more regulation.”1
It’s easy to ridicule Tom Perkins. (In fact, it’s so easy that one can’t resist. Among other things, he once wrote a novel called Sex and the Single Zillionaire, about a wealthy widower named Steven Hudson who is asked to be on a reality show where “a gaggle of gold-digging bimbos” compete for his love. Many of them eventually end up back in his marvelous Manhattan penthouse, “a sleek ultra-modern, minimalist yet somehow very comfortable, glassed and terraced condominium.” And once they get there, well: “Heather’s body was glistening with perspiration as she moaned in anticipation of the whiplash.…”)2 As I was saying, it’s easy to make fun of Tom Perkins, but in fact, the tiny group of men who are his economic peers have come to dominate our political life, making precisely the choices that may cut short the human game. And their language is always the same: the “producers,” the “creators,” the “people of value” are threatened by the mob. And so, they must organize and fight. Most of them aren’t quite as blatant or as public as Perkins, who a month after his “Kristallnacht” letter told an audience that, in his ideal world, “you don’t get the vote if you don’t pay a dollar in taxes. But what I really think is it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars, you get a million votes.”3 Still, in essence, they’re thinking just like him.
Just to be clear: I’m arguing that a systematic idea about the world emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century, an idea as potent in its way as Leninism had been in the first half. This idea (that government was bad, and that productive individuals and their corporations needed to be freed from its clutches) changed the politics of America, changed it enough that even liberals couldn’t or wouldn’t stand up to it: Bill Clinton, swimming with this current, managed to force through Congress both NAFTA and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, enshrining unrestricted global trade as the obvious goal. He also ended “welfare as we know it,” helping build the each-to-his-own-devices nation we now inhabit. This is what happens when someone manages to change the zeitgeist; this is why Rand and Reagan were so crucially important.
The Koch brothers, Charles and David, are the classic exemplars of this worldview, and arguably the most powerful men in the Western world. They’re not as blustering as Donald Trump, and they’re uninterested in his flashiest hatreds and crusades, but they’re both the most important architects, and among the biggest beneficiaries, of his rule. On everything from tax cuts to environmental regulation, the Trump years, for the Kochs, have been what their biographer Jane Mayer calls “their dream come true.”4
The Koch brothers have become such a shorthand for plutocratic excess that it’s important to remind ourselves that they are real men with real stories, also rooted in the twentieth century (and told most ably by Mayer in her book Dark Money). Not unlike some Ayn Rand hero, their father, Fred Koch, had invented an improved process for refining crude oil into gasoline. The Soviet Union sought his expertise as it set up its own refineries after the Bolshevik Revolution. At first, Fred said he didn’t want to work for Communists, but because they were willing to pay in advance, he overcame his scruples and helped Stalin meet his first five-year plan by building fifteen refineries and then advising on a hundred more. Next, Fred turned to another autocrat with busy expansion plans, Adolf Hitler, traveling frequently to Germany, where he “provided the engineering plans and began overseeing the construction of a massive oil refinery owned by a company on the Elbe River in Hamburg,” in Mayer’s description. It turned into a crucial part of the Reich’s military might, “one of the few refineries in Germany” that could produce “the high-octane gasoline needed to fuel fighter planes.”5 And it turned the elder Koch into an admirer of the regime, one who, as late as 1938, was writing to a friend that “the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard.” Comparing the scenes he saw in Hamburg to FDR’s New Deal, Fred Koch said it gave him hope that “perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is
not permanent and can be overcome.”6
Fred met his wife, Mary, at a polo match in 1932, when his “work for Stalin had put him well on his way to becoming exceedingly wealthy.” They built a Gothic-style stone mansion on the outskirts of Wichita, Kansas, with stables, a kennel for hunting dogs, and the other paraphernalia required for pretend gentry, and in the first eight years of their marriage, they had four sons: Frederick, Charles, and a pair of twins, David and William. The first two were raised by a German nanny, who “enforced a rigid toilet-training regimen requiring the boys to produce morning bowel movements precisely on schedule or be force-fed castor oil and subjected to enemas.” Luckily for the twins, she left for home when they were born, apparently because “she was so overcome with joy when Hitler invaded France she felt she had to go back to the fatherland in order to join the führer in celebration.”7
Of those four sons, Charles became the dominant force, and David his close colleague. Eventually, by Mayer’s account, they tried to blackmail the eldest brother, Frederick, out of his share of the family business by threatening to tell their father that he was gay. Bill, too, later parted ways with his brothers, parlaying his share of the inheritance into a lucrative oil business and then using some of the proceeds to fund opposition to wind turbines off his Cape Cod beach. But Charles was always the crucial Koch, the one who followed most closely in their father’s wake.
Fred, despite the original source of his fortune, had become a fervent anticommunist and one of the eleven founding members of the John Birch Society. One of the figures in that orbit, Robert LeFevre, became Charles’s original guru, opening a “Freedom School” in Colorado Springs in 1957, where he preached not just the Birchers’ anticommunism but also an adamant opposition to America’s government. “Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure,” LeFevre insisted, and by 1966, Charles was a trustee of the school, where he celebrated the work of the Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek and, through them, the world of a libertarianism more orthodox (and less melodramatic) than Rand’s. Many of the disciples of that so-called Mont Pelerin movement (named for the Swiss resort where the libertarian luminaries first gathered in 1947) would go on to hold high office, constructing the basic neoliberal economic framework we’ve lived under since Reagan.
But Charles Koch was younger and fiercer still, intent on truly revolutionary change. By the mid-1970s, he’d founded the Center for Libertarian Studies in New York and written a paper “on how the fringe movement could obtain genuine power.” His essay was notable for, among other things, its endorsement of secrecy. “In order to avoid undesirable criticism,” he wrote, the details of “how the organization is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised.”8 At first, he worked through the Libertarian Party, persuading his brother David to be its vice-presidential candidate in 1980 because, that way, they could use their own money and avoid campaign finance laws. But the ticket’s poor showing (only 1 percent of the vote) convinced him they needed to work behind the scenes, using the Republican Party as their vehicle. Reagan had started the Earth moving in a new direction, but after decades of the New Deal and the Great Society, he could only begin the job. The Kochs wanted to go much farther; they wanted a full-on quake.
Enter a Southern academic named James McGill Buchanan, who provided Charles Koch and others with, in the words of historian Nancy MacLean, “an operational strategy to vanquish the model of government they had been criticizing for decades.” Buchanan was a fairly obscure economist who, in the late 1950s, began setting up a series of (well-funded) university research centers to “train a new line of thinkers” who would counter those seeking to impose “an increasing role of government in economic and social life” and would, instead, stand for a “social order … built on individual liberty.”9 Buchanan’s particular contribution, which won him a Nobel Prize, was an economic thesis that came to be called public choice theory. It held that “allocating resources by majority decision-making invited voters to group together as ‘special interests’ or ‘pressure groups’ in collective pursuit of ‘profits’ from government programs.” That is to say, Buchanan thought that majorities wanted “free stuff” from governments and would vote for politicians who obliged them, and that those politicians would, in turn, tax the rich to pay for it all. The result was “an overinvestment in the public sector” because this powerful coalition of voters, politicians, and bureaucrats (who liked the government jobs that resulted) could foist the cost on to the billionaire “victims” of excess taxation. This overinvestment, in turn, held down capital accumulation, and hence investment, and hence economic growth.10
All that sounds, at first blush, like fairly standard Republican boilerplate, the familiar attack on “big government.” It’s suspect in purely economic terms, as many analysts have pointed out: economies actually do well when we invest in things such as education and roads. But if you think about it carefully, as both Buchanan and the Kochs did, you realize there’s another reason the analysis is unlikely to prevail. And that reason is … democracy.
Mitt Romney discovered this particular flaw on the day in 2012 when he told attendees at a high-dollar fund-raising event that roughly half of Americans would vote to reelect Obama simply because they were moochers. A waiter with a hidden camera captured his words: “Here are 47 percent who are with [Obama], who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.” Americans were shocked to hear the Republican presidential nominee state it so bluntly—this was the day Romney definitively lost the election—but only because they hadn’t been paying much attention to what the libertarian right really believed. When Romney went on to say, “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” he was merely echoing the rhetoric that men and women such as Buchanan, Koch, and Rand had been developing for decades. This belief, that they were being unfairly taxed to support the lazy, was at the core not just of their politics but of their emotional worldview. When Charles Koch decided to get married, he insisted that his wife be “indoctrinated with these ideas, lest their marriage lack harmony of purpose.” The wedding couldn’t take place until this “intense training” had succeeded, which apparently didn’t take too long: Elizabeth Koch was soon complaining that America had become “a country of non-risk-takers,” the sort of people “who just want to be coddled and taken care of.”11
However appealing that logic sounds to the very rich, it offends far more people. In a fair fight—that is, in a working democracy—billionaires won’t win most of their battles because most people will vote for their own interests. So, the billionaire conclusion was, in essence, that democracy couldn’t be allowed to really work—that’s what Tom “Biggest Yacht” Perkins meant when he suggested the rich should get more votes. Such straightforward remarks were better confined to private talks and obscure journals, but this was the central premise of what became a concerted effort to undermine democratic institutions. Buchanan once asked, “Why must the rich be made to suffer” as a result of “simple majority voting”? A citizen “who finds that he must, on fear of punishment, pay taxes for public goods in excess of the amount that he might voluntarily contribute” is no different from someone mugged by a “thug who takes his wallet in Central Park.” He advocated a “generalized rewriting of the social contract,” giving America “a new set of checks and balances,” changes that would be “sufficiently dramatic to warrant the label ‘revolutionary.’”12
And so, they went to work, quietly building the networks and the institutions that could deliver that change. The Kochs set up a web of political operatives in groups such as Americans for Prosperity. They and their allies also erected think tanks and academic centers around
the nation that churned out policy papers to back up their plans and to produce “messaging” to convince people to vote against their own interests. (The classic examples included recasting the inheritance tax, paid by a tiny slice of the 1 percent, as a “death tax” that all should fear.) Groups such as the Federalist Society concentrated on the judicial branch, vetting candidates who would uphold libertarian ideas. Fox News, America’s first partisan television network, emerged to amplify the stream of messages. Much of the work was done at the state and local level, where local billionaires—junior Kochs, as it were—concentrated on winning statehouses, gerrymandering districts, and enacting the voter-suppression laws that reduced the size of the “mob” they’d need to vanquish.
Most of all, they used the main thing billionaires possess in surplus: money. As Karl Rove said shortly after the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United, “people call us a vast right-wing conspiracy, but we’re really a half-assed right-wing conspiracy. Now it’s time to get serious.” In 2010, “Republican-aligned independent groups” spent a completely unprecedented $200 million on midterm elections, gaining 63 seats in the House. In 2012, more than 60 percent of all campaign contributions came from less than one-half of 1 percent of the population. In 2016, the Koch networks vowed to spend a completely absurd $889 million on the election. “We’ve had money in the past, but this is so far beyond what anyone has thought of it’s mind-boggling,” the head of Common Cause said. “This is unheard of in the history of the country. There has never been anything that approaches this.”13 As it turns out, the Koch operation spent “only” about three quarters of a billion dollars, mostly on congressional and state races, because, for a moment, Trump seemed to be upending their calculations. For all his love of Ayn Rand, he ran what sounded more like a Democratic campaign: on health care, for instance, he said, “We’re going to have insurance for everybody.… There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.” In fact, he promised, “everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.” But as we now know, Trump was simply bringing something new to the game: not clever messaging, but brazen lying.
Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Page 11