Radical Right Takeover of Conservatives

Good article on Conservative far right by Claire Jones in the West England ByLine Times; ByLine Times is worth subscribing to.

The ‘new Conservative far right’ may not be ‘new’ when one recognises the themes, talking points, media dynamics and ideology hiding behind; nor is it unique to the U.K., but transnational, even if the roots were centuries ago in the U.K..

Underpinning the right’s strategy and tactics are ageing demographics whereby above median age vote, more likely to be conservative, especially in regions, and dominates the above median age, but often low info or not educated, angry or narcissistic, and less diverse than urban centres as demographic change rolls on. 

Firstly several US fossil fueled Atlas Koch Network think tanks or outlets at Tufton Street, behind media and Tory used in lobbying and PR on preferred policies, are cited especially ‘climate science denial’, low taxes and small government; also behind Brexit and in the US the GOP, FoxNews etc., Donald Trump, and also Argentina, Australia, New Zealand etc..

Further, U.K. media landscape, has been complicated like elsewhere by digital and social media, which was preceded by hollowing out and dilution of regulatory constraints by Murdoch led media, leading to now pro-Brexit and pro-Putin Legatum’s GB News adding to curation of content and promotion of talking points for a more substantive or dominant right wing media landscape.

Many of the nativist, Brexit and anti-immigrant talking points are also imported, though originated with Malthus and Galton, from the network of dec. white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton of ZPG Zero Population Growth and groups lobbying previous GOP leaders, up to advising on Donald Trump’s immigration and border policies.

Although Tanton’s network flies under the radar, their talking points do not, and are personified by Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson, UKIP now Reform, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Marie Le Pen, Hungarian PM Orban, UK Trade Advisor Tony Abbott, Migration Watch etc.

From West England ByLine Times:

Mad, bad and dangerous – the new Conservative far-right

A post-election far-right power grab is looming. In 2024 we have a unique, possibly last, opportunity to prevent it

By Claire Jones 28 February 2024

With a Labour win now allegedly ‘baked in’, it’s fashionable to mock the Conservative Right (or ‘far-right’). But should we?  

The Conservative Right is a loose alliance that includes the Institute for Economic Affairs, (IEA) European Research Group ,  Popular Conservativism, (PopCon), The New Conservatives, The Common Sense Group and National Conservativism.

Notable members are Liz Truss, Jacob Rees Mogg, Suella Braverman, Lee Anderson, Andrea Jenkyns, Miriam Cates and Robert Jenrick. Common alliance themes are euroscepticism, climate scepticism, cultural conservativism, anti-immigration and economic neo-liberalism.

Some use these themes selectively, strategically even, to woo voters. But many, like Jenrick, eraser of children’s murals, are ‘full believers’, wholeheartedly committed to the entire box of ideological tricks.

‘Putting nanny to bed’

Two broad principles underpinning the alliance are libertarianism and  suppression. High on the ideological bucket list for the IEA and PopCon is economic libertarianism: financial deregulation and low taxation in free markets operating unfettered by the ‘nanny state’. 

Undeterred by her cataclysmic experiment with this idea during her brief tenure as PM, Truss recently returned, without shame, to re-present it at PopCon’s inaugural conference.

PopCon and other groups extend libertarianism to individual freedoms. We must be free to make our own choices, unconstrained by the state, they say. Measures to reduce air pollution and increase road safety are deemed an affront to driver freedom. Paying green levies, driving petrol cars, vaping, and overdosing on sugar, etc should all be matters of individual choice. Some regard the Covid lockdowns as a particularly invidious example of state control. Freedom from the nanny state apparently equates with freedom to kill oneself, others and the planet. But libertarians are seemingly untroubled by the ‘death wis’

 accompanying their vision.

Jiggery wokery

While individual liberty is celebrated, wokery requires suppression. ‘Woke’ is an elastic term applied to a diversity of groups:  “left-wing extremists”, “environmentalists”, lawyers (for criticising the Rwanda scheme), civil servants (for ignoring “the peoples’ bidding”), the RNLI (for providing ‘migrant taxis’), the Premier League (for ‘taking a knee’), and the National Trust (for giving imperialism a bad name by providing honest histories of their artefacts). In line with Georgia Meloni, Truss and others also include “supporters of LGBT people”.

But there’s a tension here between libertarianism and repression. Isn’t there a flagrant double-standard in saying we should be free to e.g. pollute the environment, but not to protest about it? That we should unshackle ourselves from the European Court of Human Rights, but tighten government control over our own supreme court?

Truss ‘fixes’ this conundrum by explaining that citizens are made to feel prohibited from speaking out. Militant, purist wokerati are trying to “drown us out” and must therefore be silenced. This ‘solution’ is buttressed by appeal to ‘the will of the people’, a fantasy consensus, concocted to justify populist policies (such as the Rwanda plan). Wokery must be suppressed because it obstructs the freedoms of ‘the majority’.

Getting bolder

The UK Conservative Right echoes the far-right thinking stealing across Europe (the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Spain, Greece, Sweden and elsewhere). Opposition to immigration is a shared theme and was the hand, dressed in racist rhetoric, that guided Brexit.

Our mainstream press is traditionally coy about describing Conservative factions as ‘far-right’. But last week, Lee Anderson claimed that “Islamists have got control of Kahn and London”. Oliver Dowden, deputy prime minister, failed to condemn this bald-faced Islamophobia. Instead, he insisted an apology would be sufficient to avoid a penalty, thus neatly priming the political airspace for further racism. Here Anderson and Dowden displayed a striking new boldness that crashed straight past our media barriers, laying bare the Right’s true colours.

With equal verve, Truss, the US far-right’s latest useful idiot, gave a presentation last week at CPAC in which the mask of Conservative moderation vapourised in the heat of MAGA enthusiasm. With cult-grade paranoia, she railed against “agents of the left”, including trans activists, whom she accused of infiltrating the civil service. On she ploughed, attacking the deep state “wokeonomics” that had thwarted her premiership, and calling for anti-woke Conservatives to unite globally.

And this is happening. The UK Conservative Right is strengthening its links with global far-right networks via mediators such as Truss, Farage and Steve Bannon, via the party’s numerous other Trump apologists, who deploy tactics straight from the Trump playbook, and via an increase in new far-right press and media channels. GB news founder, Sir Paul Marshall, a ‘liker’ of tweets supporting the ‘great replacement theory’ and expulsions of “fake refugee invaders”, is now a prospective purchaser of the Daily Telegraph. Our centre-ground commentariat expresses its revulsion but the network-building continues.

Mad as a box of frogs?

The Conservative Party is in for a hammering at the next election, with many of its right-wing MPs poised to lose their seats. So, why worry? Can’t we just sit back and enjoy the spectacle of a bunch of crackpot cultists shouting into the wind? Labour is coming, so ‘what’s to fear’?

But the question is: how good would we actually be at defending ourselves from the extremist ideologies menacing Europe?

The Conservative centre-ground is losing influence just as the party is trying to re-absorb ReformUK interest. So, in line with Europe, as the party re-assembles during Labour’s difficult first term, it is likely to morph rightwards on immigration, anti-woke cultural conservativism, the suppression of judicial independence, and our right to protest. If Trump is re-elected this will give further succour to fledgling UK ideological variants. And if these new iterations decide that it’s expedient to pose as ‘centre-ground’, voters (and Ofcom) may be slow to notice.

Labour travail

The good news is that the UK has a progressive majority, concealed by first-past-the-post (FPTP), but clearly there in attitude surveys. Our progressive values ought to protect us from a far-right incursion.

The less good news is that we thought the same, until recently, of parts of Europe. Wilders’ Freedom Party seeded in a famously egalitarian, socially innovative, ‘high trust’ society with “low corruption, press freedom and moderation”. But he ramped up anti-immigration rhetoric whilst tapping into feelings of economic and cultural neglect and, like Meloni, attracted strong youth support.

In broken Britain, we share many ailments that have driven European countries into the arms of the far-right. Every aspect of our well-being has been ravaged by 14 years of Conservative decimation: our physical environment, economic prospects, health and social services, trading relationships, and cultural life. The Office For Budget Responsibility forecasts that continuing falls in average household disposable incomes will profoundly impact living standards for many years.

Truly, Labour will inherit a ‘very sick patient’. The challenge posed by the Conservative legacy is so huge and Labour’s approach so timid and so hard to distinguish from its predecessors, that it’s difficult to avoid the prospect of voters falling out of love with Labour fast.

Here’s a realistic scenario: at the next general election, the country makes a final leap of faith to Labour, only to find that (through inexperience, narrowness of vision, impossible fiscal constraints, or global events) Labour cannot repair Blighty sufficiently (or fast enough) to retain support.

The message will, at this point, be the same as elsewhere, that centre ground politics (right and left) has failed. And it’s in such desperate times that countries lean towards extreme solutions. The toxic cocktail of poor living standards, widening inequality and political cynicism creates a vacuum where extremism steps in.

Other drivers

In the UK, currently just one in five under 40s trust their MPs. Also, despite our prized progressive majority, we are increasingly polarised. Note to the complacent: polarising anti-immigration rhetoric worked its magic sufficiently to land us with Brexit.

Other potential drivers are global events: climate change will keep migration, and hence anti-immigration anxiety, alive. The Ukraine war is driving voter disenchantment with progressive government and high energy prices which hinder prosperity. If destabilising wars in the Middle East and Ukraine escalate, the UK could retreat to a Blitz mindset that’s super-receptive to the Churchillian call for strong, authoritarian leadership. Another Trump apologist, Paul Goodman, editor of Conservative Home, reassures us that Trump is “able to project strength and be prepared to wield it if necessary in a perilous world”.

Lastly, FPTP traps UK politics in a duopolistic cycle of power, endlessly relayed between the two main parties and in which the Conservative Right:

 “…will be incentivised to take back the keys fast from a disorientated Labour party … Left and Right parties conduct a dance of disappointment as, in turn, one fails to meet the challenges of a poly-crisis world, leaving the other to fill the void. But the direction of travel points to the populist Right and the triumph of strong leaders over weakening democracies.”

Lawson on Radical Pragmatism

A precious moment

Let’s hope Labour can overcome these vulnerabilities. But rather than waiting with fingers crossed, isn’t it wiser to act now to head off a future far-right power-grab?

Regardless of the size of Labour’s win, the immediate imperative is to maximize a Conservative defeat at the general election by voting tactically. Tactical voting is a crucial insurance policy. We insure things we value by rating, not just the statistical likelihood, but also the seriousness, of potential damage. We need tactical voting to cut the Conservative Right’s blood supply now because their future return could be catastrophic.  This year we have a unique (possibly last) opportunity to step in, use our progressive muscle, and seize the narrative.’

For more blogs and articles on Ageing Democracy, Climate Change, EU European Union, Koch Network, Nativism, Political Strategy, Populist Policies and Tanton Network, click through:

British Young People Thrown Under a Bus for Votes in Ageing Demographics

Posted on September 21, 2023

Relevant article from John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde on how age determines divides in British politics, and not class in Conversation article ‘Age, not class, is now the biggest divide in British politics, new research confirms’.

Climate Change Science Attitudes Australia and Koch in USA

Posted on July 7, 2020

Climate science or climate change denialism have been apparent for some decades since the 1970s with Koch Industries being central along with ‘big oil’ of Exxon Mobil etc. in funding through ‘Dark Money’ academia, research, think tanks, media, politicians and PR techniques to influence society.  Now we see the results including wide-spread climate denialism, avoidance of environmental protections and negative media PR campaigns; meanwhile the roots of this strategy have become more transparent with legal action following.

Brexit, Conservatives, Nativism, Libertarian Strategy, Single Market and the European Union

Posted on June 9, 2022

US or Anglo led nativism operates in a parallel universe with the, often fossil fueled, libertarian socio economic ideology promoted by The Republican or GOP, UK Conservatives or Tories and Australian LNP Liberal National Conservative Parties, along with many others in media and/or have influence e.g. climate science denial and blaming ‘immigrants’ for environmental ‘hygiene’ issues.

Radical Right in the West – Fossil Fuel Atlas Koch Network – Nativist Tanton Network – Murdoch Media – Putin’s Russia – Brexit – Trump

Posted on March 6, 2024

Radical right in Anglosphere and Europe is cited here by Scott in Politico, including the ‘great replacement’ and Renaud Camus, climate science and Covid 19 scepticism. 

Symptoms of fossil fuels, oligarchs and <1% supporting corrupt nativist authoritarianism found around (mostly) right wing parties with ageing and low info constituents, informed by talking points prompted by mainstream media, social media and influencers

CPAC Conservative Political Action Conference and the John Birch Society

Posted on March 14, 2024

CPAC US has been in the news for falling audiences and fallings out between different groups and players, while CPAC Hungary will be held 25-26th April in Budapest.  

Recently both The Atlantic and SPLC Southern Poverty Law Center have highlighted the links between CPAC and the anti-communist John Birch Society, founded by Robert Welch, with assistance from others including Fred Koch.

Fred Koch was the father of Charles Koch who in turn helped create the Atlas – Koch Network of global think tanks, along with Tanton Network nativism or eugenics from the old Rockefeller supported ZPG Zero Population Growth; underpins the threat of the ‘great replacement’ of the WASP 1% by lower orders and ‘other types’.

Heritage Foundation – Danube Institute – Trump – Hungarian PM Orban – Atlas – Koch Network – Conservatives

Posted on March 18, 2024

The Heritage Foundation has attracted attention of writer Michel in a The New Republic article below for Trump’s admiration of Hungarian PM Orban and how it has become more far right and extreme e.g. anti-Ukraine sentiments.

Additionally, the linked Danube Institute in Hungary is led by former Thatcher aide John O’Sullivan and European contributor for Australian conservative journal Quadrant. 

Brexit and UK Political Interference by Putin, Russia and Anglo Conservative Allies

Posted on March 12, 2024

Still, there is discussion and analysis of Brexit versus the EU and Trump versus Biden’s Democrat administration, with accusations and allegations being made against Conservative MPs, Ministers, some Labour, media, Anglo right wing grifters, US fossil fueled Atlas – Koch Network think tanks at Tufton, related nativist Tanton Network and Russians, including FSB, diplomats, media and oligarch types.

Immigration Restriction – Population Control – Tanton Network

Posted on September 1, 2022

Excerpts from an article by Brooke Binkowski in Unicorn Riot outlining the history of the population control movement of Tanton Network which informs immigration in the Anglosphere and parts of Europe.

Anglosphere Oligarchs – Koch Atlas Network Think Tanks

We have heard much of supposed ‘libertarian’ think tanks or PR outfits in the Anglosphere influencing policy, especially of the right, via media and lobbying, euphemistically known as ‘Koch Network’ or the ‘Kochtopus’ with a fondness for fossil fuels and climate science denial.

New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer investigated several years ago for her book ‘Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right’ (2017) which included insight into oligarch donors Mellon-Scaife, Olin, Bradley, DeVos and Coors. 

Further, historian Nancy MacLean in researching her book ‘Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America’ (2017) she stumbled across the economic muse of Kochs, ‘segregation economist’ James Buchanan.

Not only does this network exist in the US, it’s global via the ‘Atlas Network’ of think tanks especially influential in Canada, UK and Australia. On the latter ‘charity’  i.e. IPA Institute of Public Affairs Australia, both US Bradley & Olin Foundations had been funders in the ‘80s and ‘90s, while a key funder now is mining magnate & heiress Gina Rhinehart.

Further, in the UK journalists have researched similar links centred near and around Tufton St. think tanks influencing Conservative Party policies and behind Brexit, including Taxpayers’ Alliance, IEA Institute of Economics Affairs, Global Warming Policy Foundation or Net Zero Watch, Policy Exchange etc. and a ‘Tanton Network’ anti-immigrant NGO Migration Watch. The ByLine Times published an article several years ago describing ‘Brexit & Climate Science Denial: The Tufton Street Network’ (2019)

Following are key excerpts from an excellent DeSmog article outlining not just Kochs, but the invisible donors in the background: 

‘Beyond Koch: Meet the Other Right-Wing Oligarchs Featured in Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money”’

By Steve Horn on Jan 21, 2016 @ 03:58 PST

The shenanigans of the “Kochtopus” have garnered most of the headlines — including here — pertaining to reviews of New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer’s new book, Dark Money.

But the Koch Brothers and Koch Industries’ right-wing family foundation network are far from the only big money influencers featured in the must-read book which has jumped to #4 on the Best Sellers list at Amazon.com.

Enter the Scaife, Olin and Bradley family fortunes, all three of which have served as key nodes through which the right-wing have tried to reshape the public policy landscape within (and beyond) the U.S. in the years following the Cold War until present day. If those family names sound familiar to DeSmog readers, they should: we have a profile in our database for Scaife and have written fairly extensively about Olin and Bradley…..

Scaife, “League to Save Carthage” and ALEC

In 1964, Richard Scaife — namesake of the Scaife Family Foundations, whose money came largely from the Gulf Oil fortune — helped create a group called the League to Save Carthage, harkening back to the city conquered and colonized by the Roman Empire now situated as a suburb of Tunis, Tunisia. 

“This little-heralded group was just the first small step in what would become an improbably successful effort by one of the richest men in the country, along with a few other extraordinarily wealthy conservative benefactors, to cast themselves as field generals…in a strategic war of ideas aimed at sacking American politics,” Mayer wrote. 

Eventually, the Scaifes would call one tentacle of their Scaife Family Foundations the Carthage Foundation. But its origins in the League to Save Carthage are crucial if, for no other reason, than how one of its members, Lewis Powell, became a future U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

Before joining the Supreme Court bench, Powell penned the so-called Powell Memo which, at the time, was marked confidential. Written on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and officially titled, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” Powell’s treatise called for Big Business to pour money into universities, the media, think-tanks, the conventional political apparatus and other key institutions as a means to fend off what Powell described as the ongoing onslaught against the free enterprise system.

Among other key pieces of political infrastructure funded by Scaife, he was one of the first major foundation funders of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Mayer cites a historical letter by ALEC founder Paul Weyrich’s aide in her book, in which the aide thanks Scaife for his support of the corporate bill mill for the statehouses.

“ALEC is well on its way to fulfilling the dream of those who started the organization thanks wholly to your confidence and the tremendous generosity of the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts,” wrote the aide in 1976, a few years after ALEC got off the ground in 1973, according to the letter cited by Mayer. 

Olin & Law and Economics

Another influential family fortune featured in “Dark Money” is that of the Olins and in particular John M. Olin.

Jaded by his experience as a student at Cornell University, Olin believed universities served as brainwashing centers for liberals and the Left. So, Olin made it his life mission to spread conservative ideology onto U.S. college campuses.

Like Scaife and Gulf Oil, Olin made his bucks in part from the fossil fuel industry via the Olin Corporation, which manufactured blasting powder for coal mining companies. Olin Corporation found itself embroiled in a DDT production pollution scandal in the 1970’s, culminating in the federal government forcing the company to shut down its DDT unit.

In documenting several other environmental catastrophes that Olin Corporation perpetrated, Mayer suggests that the regulatory crackdown that occurred due to these incidents may have influenced the self-interested anti-regulatory posture taken by Olin and the foundation he created, , from a business point of view. Former Olin officials denied to Mayer this was the case.

Olin would move to endow the still-influential “Law and Economics” curriculum in law schools nationwide, which calls for a system of jurisprudence in which judges and lawyers incorporate free market economic analysis into their legal decisions and arguments.

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

Though covered in less depth than other families, the Bradley Foundation also earned a section in “Dark Money.” Just as Olin Foundation shuttered its operations, its Executive Director, Michael Joyce, was hired by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which had enjoyed a huge financial boost resulting from a corporate merger that catapulted the Bradley Foundation into the top 20 largest foundations in the U.S. 

The foundation also gives big donations to a fellow midwest-headquartered climate change denial organization: the Chicago-based Heartland Institute. 

Harry Bradley, was one of the founding members of the John Birch Society alongside the Koch Brothers’ father, Fred Koch. According to a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel investigation, between 2001 and 2009 the Bradley Foundation “doled out nearly as much money as the seven Koch and Scaife foundations combined.”

A recently published paper titled “The Koch Effect”, by Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol and Harvard government and social policy PhD student Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, describes the impact these family foundations, and in the case of their paper, the Kochs in particular have had on public policy in the U.S.

“In a disciplined way, the Koch network operates as a force field to the right of the Republican Party, exerting a strong gravitational pull on many GOP candidates and officeholders,” they wrote. “The overall effect is to re-set the range of issues and policy alternatives to which candidates and officeholders are responsive.”

Another case in point: the Kochs formerly funded (and some of its executives served on the Board of Trustees of) the Democratic Leadership Council, a think-tank and advocacy group pinpointed as pushing the Democratic Party rightward under President Bill Clinton.

Clinton formerly served as chairman of the DLC, and those who agree with the DLC‘s free market ideology, such as President Barack Obama, now call themselves New Democrats.

If anything, this rightward “force field” created by the influence of big money, serves as the genius and long-lasting impact of the Koch-Scaife-Olin-Bradley oligarch network’s donations and advocacy.’

For more related blogs and articles on Economics, Environment, Koch Network, Libertarian Economics, Political Strategy and Tanton Network, click through

Radical Libertarian Disinformation Machine – Koch Network by Nancy MacLean

James Buchanan – Economist – Koch Influencer – Radical Right Libertarian – Anglo Conservatives

Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Socioeconomics and Authoritarianism

Brexit, Conservatives, Nativism, Libertarian Strategy, Single Market and the European Union

Anglosphere Nativist Libertarian Social Economic Policies or Return of Eugenics?

Radical Libertarian Disinformation Machine – Koch Network by Nancy MacLean

Many nations, at least in the Anglosphere, have experienced disinformation whether related to climate science or fossil fuels, Covid science, education or democracy, and of late witnessed ‘Trussonomics’ in the UK, another version of Buchanan’s ‘Kochonomics’ or ‘radical right libertarian’ ideology.

However, where does this disinformation come from?

According to historian Nancy Maclean it’s a ‘deny and delay’ strategy of Koch Bros. or Koch Network which includes astroturfing, ‘Dark Money’, creating research, gerrymandering, SLAPPs, universities, Christians and conservatives.

‘What is driving it, in the Koch network’s case, is a new ruthlessness from a particularly ideological and threatened fraction of the capitalist class: an extremist minority, anchored in fossil fuels, that is breathtakingly well-funded and determined to win at any cost—and to make the transformation it seeks permanent’

The following article (excerpts) highlight the history, strategy and key moments from Orion Magazine: 

‘The Disinformation Machine – The strategy behind the Koch network’s climate denial campaign

This story is part two of Deny and Delay: Inside the Climate Disinformation Machine, a series on the effects of climate misinformation on democracy. Read part one here. Co-produced with Columbia Journalism Review and guest edited by Sandra Steingraber, Deny and Delay will continue with two more stories in early 2023.

Even in an era of surging inequality and wealth concentration in the top 0.01 percent, the Koch fortune stands out. The climate journalist George Monbiot has calculated that if the wealth of the multi-billionaire brothers Charles and the now-deceased David Koch were held by a single individual, that individual would be the wealthiest on the planet. More arresting, though, are the political ambitions of Charles Koch to transform American governance though the step-by-step imposition of a radical libertarian agenda that is taking aim at a century’s worth of public policy in domains from environmental protection and climate action to public education, social insurance, regulation, and taxation.

From the ground-breaking journalism of Jane Mayer, among others, we know the sheer scale of the Koch network’s operations and how they have used “dark money” to distort public debate and democratic governance alike. The Koch donor network funds an infrastructure of literally hundreds of organizations. It includes dozens of ostensibly separate national bodies: the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the American Legislative Exchange Council, as well as over 150 state level organizations whose work is aligned through the State Policy Network. The organizing enterprises include Americans for Prosperity, Concerned Veterans for America, the LIBRE Initiative, and Generation Opportunity; and includes bases at colleges and universities—George Mason University being the flagship enterprise, but faculty at over 300 campuses now receive funding. We know also, from the research of the political scientists Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, that, in its engagement of the political process, the Koch network is well-resourced enough to rival and sometimes surpass the Republican Party in spending, and has transformed that party in order to further its own agenda nationally and in the majority of state governments.

So, too, the intrepid research of UnKoch My Campus, picked up by top newspapers and online media outlets, has shown how universities became a central node of this project. Koch foundations fund campus centers to obtain vital resources: a talent pipeline of young people to staff operations; intellectual legitimacy for the ideas and affiliates of the Koch infrastructure; and defensive capacity when the network faces exposure and criticism. 

Numerous investigations have shown how Koch investments lead to violations of academic integrity, including donor-influenced faculty appointments and student research topic selection; secrecy in place of transparency; and, in the case of George Mason University, administrators who have deliberately misinformed faculty and students to protect donor interests. So, when speaking of the Koch network, then, I am referring not to two brothers, but to this exceedingly well-endowed and interconnected set of hundreds of operations and a growing stable of academic grantees.

These days, the Koch project sails under the false flag of “conservatism” so it can move large numbers of voters, but in the 1970s Charles Koch and his grantees were more honest about that endgame. They proclaimed themselves root-and-branch radicals, albeit radicals of the right, who spurned conservatives. They particularly disdained Cold War nationalists and religious right conservatives. Back then, Koch’s favored thinker was Murray Rothbard, who suggested that his patron read Lenin to appreciate the necessity of cultivating a “cadre.” Koch did, and the Cato Institute became their joint effort to develop one.

What kind of policies did Charles Koch back in that more honest past? In 1980, he funded his brother David to run against Ronald Reagan as the candidate of a Libertarian Party that called for an end to government coercion in any form, including minimum wages, child labor laws, taxation, and prosecution for drug use or voluntary prostitution. In the view of the cadre of libertarians Koch had built up in the 1970s, the whole “establishment” had to be overthrown, its conservative wing as much as its liberal one. The future, said Ed Crane, the head of Cato, belonged to the only “truly radical vision”: “repudiating state power altogether.” The libertarians proudly proclaimed themselves “the party of revolution.”

Koch grantees are not, needless to say, the only source of calculated disinformation today. We know that Donald Trump, for one, lied literally tens of thousands of times while president. Less noticed, because his have been such whoppers, is that disinformation has become a core tool of the contemporary American right. Trump is the strange fruit, but not the sower of the seed. For that, we can look back at least to southern segregationist editors and spokespeople, who developed the trope of the not-to-be-trusted “liberal media” to combat honest reportage on the civil rights struggle from the mid 1950s forward. As it happens, that is where I picked up the trail that led me, in time, to the Koch network.

I am a historian of social movements and their impact on public life, with a particular interest in the U.S. South. In 2006, on a chance visit to an archive, I came across the tragic tale of Prince Edward County, Virginia, whose white officials answered the U.S. Supreme Court’s call to desegregate their public schools without further delay by, as the county leaders put it, “going out of the public school business entirely.” They shuttered every public school in the community, leaving Black children with no formal education whatsoever while their white counterparts were sent off to a private, segregated academy, their parents secure in the knowledge that they would have state-subsidized tuition grants in the form of vouchers. The county officials kept the public schools shut for five years, taking pride in their defiance, until the courts compelled them to reinstate a public school system.

Shocked, I started to research this history and learned that, without tax-funded school vouchers, this kind of “massive resistance” to Brown v. Board of Education would have collapsed. I also discovered that the University of Chicago libertarian economist Milton Friedman had issued his first manifesto calling for such vouchers to break up the “government monopoly” of education in 1955, the year after the Brown decision, in full knowledge of how it would aid segregationists. I also learned of a subsequent 1959 report, as this Prince Edward County plan to close the schools that fall pended, by two other economists, both trained at the University of Chicago: James McGill Buchanan and G. Warren Nutter. Their report aimed to undercut a movement of moderate whites—led by mothers and liberal clergy—who were trying to save Virginia’s public education system from segregationists. How did the economists fight? 

By making a case that moderates had the math wrong: that if the state sold off its facilities to private operators, it could break up the “government monopoly” in schooling and provide better education at less cost. The economists’ report, in effect, called for privatizing the South’s schools, before that verb even existed. And they did so in the full knowledge that the schools thus funded would be white segregation academies because those were the only private schools in question. Black parents and their organizations opposed the vouchers to a person, seeing them for what they were: a tool to perpetuate racial injustice.

It stunned me, as a professor myself, to see two university faculty members making a case for what their state’s most arch segregationists were seeking. (Two cosmopolitan faculty, I might add, not racists from central casting: Buchanan read in five languages and had just returned from a fellowship in Italy; Nutter, a student of the USSR’s economy who challenged Cold War verities about its strength, would go on to work for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department.). It also intrigued me that they advocated the diehard whites’ policy not in racial terms, but, in economic terms, self-consciously leveraging the authority of their discipline to back up the state’s right-wing elite.

Buchanan and Nutter knew they were exploiting the rage of white supremacists to move their libertarian economic agenda, one they referred to as “the free society” even as they showed no sympathy whatsoever for the civil rights activists whose mantra was “Freedom Now.” Their cover letter to legislators with their report said that they were speaking out, “letting the chips fall where they may.” The professors were fully aware, in other words, of the harm these actions would inflict. As an educator myself, I wondered how anyone could do such a thing—not in irrational frenzy, but in cold-eyed calculation, to move an otherwise unpopular neoliberal agenda.

Curious, I began seeking more information about Buchanan. I learned that he had gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986 for having pioneered a new way of thinking called public choice economics, which also became influential in political science and law. Also, I later learned, among activists and elected officials on the Right. What Buchanan did that was new was, in his phrase, the economic analysis of politics.

As a thinker who specialised in public finance and who identified with the political right, Buchanan made it his mission to find ways to reduce taxes, curb regulation, and shrink the expanding public sector, then in its heyday of expansion. In 1963, he and another colleague, Gordon Tullock, founded what became the Public Choice Society (a society to which Charles Koch now contributes, by the way, and whose journal has been edited by many Koch-funded academics since its founding). With public choice economics, Buchanan turned new attention to what he liked to call “the rules of the game of politics”: the taxing and spending incentives of the political process.

To a libertarian like Buchanan (and his later patron Charles Koch), there is no common good. Any such notion of shared purpose will lead the government to coerce those who do not agree with the majority. Democracy, Buchanan argued, violates the individual liberty of the minority—by which he meant wealthy taxpayers; the government all but steals their property if it taxes them for purposes they do not share. In what he viewed as his magnum opus, The Limits of Liberty, written during the 1970s crime panic, Buchanan compared government “coercion” of the unwilling taxpayer to “the thug who steals his wallet in Central Park.”

We should not be our brothers’ keeper, Buchanan insisted—or at least, we should not be able to use government to transfer tax revenues from one citizen to another. In a 1975 article called “The Samaritan’s Dilemma,” he argued that the ethics of Jesus produced perverse results in the modern world. “We may simply be too compassionate for our own well-being or for that of an orderly and productive free society,” Buchanan argued. To make his case, he presented a game theory thought experiment (never empirical research, which he spurned), the “hypothesis” for which was that “modern man has become incapable of making the choices that are required to prevent his exploitation by predators of his own species, whether the predation be conscious or unconscious.”

It was a perverse revision of the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which a kind resident of Samaria comes to the aid of a Jewish traveller who has been stripped, robbed, beaten, and left to die—a victim, in other words. Jesus told the story to teach his followers that one should love every person as himself, even when the person was a member of a despised out-group, as Samaritans and Jews were. But in the view of the libertarian economist, Jesus was a sop for weak minds. What society needed (and Charles Koch would ultimately supply) was the “strategic courage” to turn a deaf ear to the suffering and arguments to act for social justice.

What seemed to be the ethical thing to do—help someone in need—was not necessarily the right thing to do, according to Buchanan, because the assistance would encourage the recipient to “exploit” the giver rather than to solve their own problems. Buchanan used as an analogy the spanking of children by parents: it taught “the fear of punishment that will inhibit future misbehavior.” “The potential parasite” needed harsh discipline, he explained, to prevent future efforts “to live parasitically off and/or deliberately exploit” society’s “producers.” 

This is the grim morality of libertarianism. This corrosive practice has poisoned our public life

Over the ensuing years, Buchanan came to talk about all this in very stark and foreboding terms, which are now widespread on the Right, owing to decades of inculcation by Buchanan’s students and the think tanks with which they worked. A case in point: when Mitt Romney, campaigning for the presidency in 2012 at a $50,000-a-plate dinner, spoke disdainfully of what he called “the 47 percent” of Americans whom he said would never vote for him because they were too “dependent” on government as net tax recipients, it was Buchanan who gave scholarly imprimatur to such thinking. Decades earlier, he spoke of net tax recipients as “parasites on the productive”; warned of “predators and prey.” His very vocabulary made fellow citizens appear as menaces, not even truly human. It is a vocabulary that is disinhibiting, one that licenses hostility. For those who think this way, social justice is a mirage, a contradiction in terms. As Walter E. Williams, Buchanan’s economics colleague at George Mason University, put it on the Conservative Political Action Conference circuit: “Let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn.”

It took me years to discover the connection between James Buchanan’s ideas and the Koch network’s operations—and another coincidence. I happened to move to North Carolina just as a radicalized Republican Party, dominated by Koch-backed Tea Party figures, won majorities in both houses of the state legislature. And suddenly, the prescriptions I was reading in Buchanan’s work that still seemed so abstract became frightfully concrete as the General Assembly’s lead donor, Art Pope (a Koch ally of such longstanding that some now call him the Koch Cousin), boasted of the “Big Bang” the beneficiaries of his political contributions were delivering to make this once-moderate state “a laboratory” for the cause, using measures derived from public choice thought.

To appreciate the nature of this big bang, a public policy variant of the “shock and awe” strategy of warfare, it helps to know that Buchanan had long urged his teammates on the Right to stop focusing on who rules, and instead study the rules. He explained to like thinkers and those who funded them—including Charles Koch—that if you did not like the outcome of public policy over a long period of time (as libertarians despised the policy outcomes of twentieth-century democracy) and wanted to achieve, instead, the kind of radical U-turn that libertarians did, you must focus laser-like on changing the rules of governance to get the outcomes you want within the law as written—as you also change the law. Forget candidates: the existing rules and incentives were what needed replacement.

What unfolded in North Carolina in 2010 was a stunning barrage of radical rule changes, including the most extreme and sophisticated gerrymandering in U.S. political history to misrepresent the will of the electorate; new measures to undermine workers’ ability to organize in unions; attacks on public education at all levels and radical cuts in funding for it; refusal to accept the Medicaid expansion of Affordable Care Act despite a crying need for health care subsidies in this low-wage state; and rolling back measures to protect the environment and reduce global warming.

The new majority also shattered norms. Its members broke with customary practices like public hearings before passing legislation and transparency about the process; instead, they worked with breakneck speed and often secrecy. And then, to cap it off, they passed what came to be known among critics as “the monster voter suppression bill.” In some fifteen different ways it tried to keep from the polls those least likely to support the corporate libertarian agenda—African Americans, Latinos, and young people. “Getting dramatic economic change at the federal level is very difficult,” Tim Phillips, then President of the Koch organizing enterprise Americans for Prosperity, later explained of the strategy. “The idea we had was to create model states.”

His very vocabulary made fellow citizens appear as menaces, not even truly human.

The new Republican majority, pushed to brinkmanship by big donors, was applying James Buchanan’s strategy to achieve what they otherwise could not, certainly not if they had campaigned openly for the policies they were rushing through. Indeed, at the very same time, Scott Walker, the Koch-allied Governor of Wisconsin (where, in yet another coincidence, I had attended graduate school), was running a similar operation. Under the false pretext of a “budget repair bill,” he took collective bargaining rights from public sector workers to destroy the labor movement there, saying privately to a prank caller he believed to be David Koch, “We dropped the bomb.”

Critics of all this—progressive activists and other good people who had helped make the once-poor state of North Carolina a beacon to the South—had no way of knowing the deep operational strategy that unified such far-flung measures. They could not see that the men (and occasional women) driving this agenda were not misinformed about the likely consequences of the agenda they were pushing: they fully understood that it would inflict harm on many of their fellow citizens. Critics also did not see that this agenda was backed by an ethical system that gave the new-style Republican elected officials confidence and let them feel heroic enough to weather criticism and opposition.

But it is an ethical system, one that has its own harsh coherence, which must be understood to deal with the crisis that Buchanan’s ideas and Koch’s money have created. To wit: the libertarian morality deems it better to have people die from lack of health care than receive it from the government, from taxes paid by others. This, really, is what they mean, ultimately, by personal responsibility: you should be on your own, for all your needs. And if you fail to anticipate and save for those future needs, you deserve your fate. Your suffering will have instructive value for others in the new world the libertarians are ushering into being: what happens to you will teach others that they must save. What they seek, in short, is a world in which we are kept from using the government to help ourselves and one another—let alone take action on the climate crisis—by ironclad new rules.

In 2013, James Buchanan died at the age of 93, and I was able to gain access to his unprocessed archive at George Mason University (GMU), his last institutional home. In his records going back to the 1940s, I found my developing understanding of all this confirmed—in a way that had me again and again reminding myself to breathe. Just one example: in his private office, I found a pile of documents stacked on a chair that exposed how Charles Koch and some of his most trusted operatives—GMU economics faculty, the dean of the law school, the president and provost, and a politically appointed Board of Visitors presided over by Ed Meese III, Ronald Reagan’s long-time ally—had collaborated to establish a basecamp for a political project at a public university, just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.

This was in 1997, when Koch gave his first $10 million gift to GMU to support a big new center for political economy. (He has since become the university’s top donor, having given well over $100 million to support individuals and units useful to his purposes.) Koch made it clear in the speech that accompanied his money that he wanted bold steps. Buchanan’s theory and implementation strategies were the right “technology,” to use the favorite phrase of this MIT-trained engineer. But the professor’s team had not employed the tools forcefully enough to “create winning strategies.”

The operatives Koch put in place on campus would. One of them was Buchanan’s former colleague, the aptly named Richard Fink, who by that point had become Koch’s chief political strategist. Fink made clear that establishing beachheads in higher education was crucial because, as he explained to donors: “It’s an integrated strategy that uses universities, think tanks, and political spending for the implementation of policy change.” With a respectable base secured at GMU, a short ride from the nation’s capital, Koch would turn to assembling what he said he sought when he gave that first multi-million-dollar 1997 gift, with the proclamation that he wanted “to build the kind of force that propelled Columbus to his discoveries.”

Why did Charles Koch feel the need to build such a force? 

Perhaps above all because of the existential crisis threatening the profitability of the fossil fuel industry as scientists and governments recognized that its products and practices were warming the planet and thus posing an imminent threat that demanded concerted action. Fossil fuel was, after all, the core of Koch Industries and its most reliable cash cow. Majority opinion was becoming a big problem for the industry and libertarian zealots by the 1990s, as Americans came to embrace the need for government action to protect the environment and endangered species. While oil corporations such as Exxon Mobil had withheld information to protect their investments and future profits, they could not hold the fort alone, with so many voters and elected officials awakening to their products’ impact upon the planet. Koch network operations would not be alone in aiding the fossil fuel industry, but they provided leadership with outsized—and continuing—impact.

In 1997, as the global climate negotiations got underway which would lead to the Kyoto Protocol of 1998, the Koch-founded front group Citizens for a Sound Economy warned corporate allies that 76 percent of Americans thought of themselves as environmentalists. Sixty-five percent told industry pollsters that they “do not trust business” to take action against pollution. And 79 percent believed “current regulations are about right or ‘not strict enough.’” That was a seemingly insuperable obstacle for a cause committed to radical deregulation. The lesson the cadre took from such findings was that they could not win majorities for their true goals.

Caught between citizen support for environmental action and its members’ own resolve to protect corporations from such interference, the Koch-funded libertarian cause began to deny the findings of science rather than concede the need for federal action. The problem is an inescapable one for their ideology: the pollution that produces planetary warming confirms the downside of capitalist enterprise—what economists call market failure. This is a conclusion the ideologues cannot tolerate, because it shows the value of government intervention. Donald J. Boudreaux, then the chair of the Economics Department at George Mason, thus proclaimed that “sound skepticism of government action to prevent global warming is itself based on science”—the science, that is, of public choice. “It might be hard to admit,” he said, but because a government cure would be worse than the disease, global warming “is best left alone.”

But that was not a persuasive proposition with the public, so Koch-funded organizations also sponsored climate change denial using donor funds to expand efforts to make the citizenry believe the science was inconclusive and controversial. These efforts have been directed at Republican voters—most of whom, even conservative ones, had wanted action on global warming. The Koch cause aims to ensure that they do not get it—indeed, that they are systematically deceived into not wanting it. The Cato Institute, which Buchanan helped Charles Koch launch, and the Independent Institute, on whose board of advisers the economist sat until his death in 2013, are among the circle of libertarian think tanks driving what Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, historians of science and co-authors of Merchants of Doubt, describe as systematic “misinformation campaigns.” Nearly all the ostensibly separate but connected nodes of the Koch apparatus have participated, from Citizens for a Sound Economy, to the Capital Research Center, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute, Americans for Prosperity, and affiliates of the State Policy Network.

Disinformation has become a core tool of the contemporary American right.

As on other issues, vastly wealthy people are paying operatives to prevent the political process from acting on the will of the majority. Just as it enlists the threat of primary challenges to force Republican elected officials to pledge not to support taxes that the majority approves, so does the cause use the same bludgeon to secure pledges of inaction in this area. And the coercion worked. Senator John McCain was but the best-known Republican to flip his position after a Tea Party primary challenge. By 2014, only 8 of 278 Republicans in Congress were willing to acknowledge that man-made climate change was a reality. Today, none would.

That pattern of Leninist-like discipline in denial of the scientifically indisputable has no counterpart elsewhere in the world—which makes sense, because no other nation yet has an apparatus like the Koch network in America. “We’re looking at a party,” Paul Krugman pointed out well before Donald Trump appeared on the political stage, “that has turned its back on science at a time when doing so puts the very future of civilization at risk.”

To say all this another way: if the Koch-funded scholars, institutions, and elected officials were not in the conversation, the public would know that the evidence of science is overwhelming and that government action to prevent further global warming is urgent. Stop the flow of libertarian corporate cash, and the nation might just turn overwhelmingly to an honest reckoning with the economic model and energy sources that have wrought such havoc.

So determined is the Koch network to stop action on climate change, however, that a cause which presents its subsidized scholars on university campuses as “classical liberals” has turned to schemes that defame and intimidate professional scientists, with efforts to discredit their findings, smear individuals’ reputations and bully them into silence. Invoking public choice thinking, Koch-subsidized organizations argue that climate scientists are seeking personal monetary rewards, and not doing honest research in the public interest. “All Aboard the Climate Gravy Train,” a typical headline read.

The amounts being spent are astronomical, it bears mention. According to Greenpeace research, “Koch Family Foundations have spent $145,555,197 directly financing 90 groups that have attacked climate science and policy action from 1997 to 2018.” And those contributions have continued. After even Exxon gave up denialism, Koch Industries persisted. Koch dominance in denialism and obstruction is so overwhelming that DeSmog, created in 2006 “to clear the PR pollution that is clouding the science and solutions to climate change,” now features a Koch Network Database with detailed information on the organizations and leading players involved, among them Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

This is not the first time in U.S. history that we have seen disinformation campaigns, nor are members of the Koch network the only practitioners on today’s right. But what we are seeing now is worse, I believe. This is partly true owing to changes in media and technology, including the Reagan administration’s termination of the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting and the subsequent surge in rightwing talk radio, the huge profitability of the Murdoch media empire with its misleadingly labeled Fox News, and the massive disinformation possibilities of the Internet.

What is driving it, in the Koch network’s case, is a new ruthlessness from a particularly ideological and threatened fraction of the capitalist class: an extremist minority, anchored in fossil fuels, that is breathtakingly well-funded and determined to win at any cost—and to make the transformation it seeks permanent. Through radical rule changes in law and governance, they aim to lock in the unpopular program of a tiny, messianic minority. And to stop action on the imminent climate catastrophe. They seek changes radical and encompassing enough to constitute a slow-motion revolution below the radar, changes they can only achieve through systematic disinformation to pollute public debate.’

This story is generously supported by The Fine Fund.

Nancy MacLean is the award-winning author of several books, including Democracy in Chains, which won the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is the William Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University and lives in Durham, North Carolina.

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We hear much about the influence of right wing or conservative economic ideology in political policies whether GOP Republicans, UK Tories, Australian Liberal conservatives etc., think tanks and related media calling for lower taxes or cuts, smaller government, fewer services, immigration restrictions, white nativism, climate science denial, less red tape and moving the Overton window to the far right. 

However, as witnessed recently in the UK, with ‘Trussonomics’, these policies are presumed to be native and grounded through good policy development, but are they? 

No, they represent the work of one ‘the most influential but unknown men in America’, segregation economist James Buchanan allied with Hayek, von Mises, Friedman and Rand, while being supportive of Pinochet’s coup in Chile; ‘radical right libertarian policies’ presented as economic but appear to be more social engineering, with eugenics (of class and race) in the background? 

These policies have been influenced by Buchanan et al. but the ‘trickle down effect’ or ‘immigrants put pressure on wages’ are social policies acting as barriers to social mobility, but are presented as grounded and credible economic policy….

From The Atlantic:

The Architect of the Radical Right – How the Nobel Prize – winning economist James M. Buchanan shaped today’s anti government politics

By Sam Tanenhaus

If you read the same newspapers and watch the same cable shows I do, you can be forgiven for not knowing that the most populous region in America, by far, is the South. Nearly four in 10 Americans live there, roughly 122 million people, by the latest official estimate. And the number is climbing. For that reason alone, the South deserves more attention than it seems to be getting in political discussion today.

But there is another reason: The South is the cradle of modern conservatism. This, too, may come as a surprise, so entrenched is the origin myth of the far-westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan as leaders of a Sun Belt realignment and forerunners of today’s polarizing GOP. But each of those politicians had his own “southern strategy,” playing to white backlash against the civil-rights revolution—“hunting where the ducks are,” as Goldwater explained—though it was encrypted in the states’-rights ideology that has been vital to southern politics since the days of John C. Calhoun.

Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains is part of a new wave of historiography that has been examining the southern roots of modern conservatism. That lineage features episodes like the third-party presidential ticket headed by the Virginian T. Coleman Andrews in 1956, with its double-barreled attack on the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the federal income tax. Further back lies the breakaway Dixiecrat candidacy of the South Carolinian Strom Thurmond in 1948, after the Democratic Party added a civil-rights plank to its platform. Earlier still was the quixotic insurrection in 1936 led by Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge, the front man for something called the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution. A Dixie offshoot of the more visible Liberty League, it shared that group’s conviction that “an ever spreading governmental bureaucracy” spelled “the end of democracy.”…

Why does all this matter today? Well, we might begin with the first New Yorker elected president since FDR, a man who has given new meaning to the term copperhead (originally applied to Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War). Lost amid the many 2016 postmortems, and the careful parsing of returns in Ohio swing counties, was Donald Trump’s prodigious conquest of the South: 60 percent or more of the vote in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia, with similar margins in Louisiana and Mississippi. And the message is still being missed. We’ve heard much about the “older white men” in the administration, but rather less about where they come from. No fewer than 10 Cabinet appointees are from the South, in key positions like attorney general (Alabama) and secretary of state (Texas), not to mention Trump’s top political adviser, Steve Bannon, who grew up in Virginia.

Buchanan always thought of himself as an embattled outsider.

All of this, so plainly in view but so strangely ignored, makes MacLean’s vibrant intellectual history of the radical right especially relevant. Her book includes familiar villains—principally the Koch brothers—and devotes many pages to think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, whose ideological programs are hardly a secret. But what sets Democracy in Chains apart is that it begins in the South, and emphasizes a genuinely original and very influential political thinker, the economist James M. Buchanan. He is not so well remembered today as his fellow Nobel laureates Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Yet as MacLean convincingly shows, his effect on our politics is at least as great, in part because of the evangelical fervor he brought to spreading his ideas.

It helped that Buchanan, despite his many accomplishments, continued to think of himself as an embattled outsider and also as a revolutionary. In 1973, well before the term counter establishment was popularized, Buchanan was rallying like-minded allies to “create, support, and activate an effective counter intelligentsia” that could transform “the way people think about government.” Thirteen years later, when he won his Nobel Prize, he received the news as more than a validation of his work. His success represented a victory over the “Eastern academic elite,” achieved by someone who was, he said, “proud to be a member of the great unwashed.”

This is the language of a movement intellectual. But a movement isn’t the same thing as a conspiracy. One openly declares its intentions. The other keeps them secret. It’s not always clear that MacLean recognizes the difference. Nevertheless, she has dug deep into her material—not just Buchanan’s voluminous, unsorted papers, but other archives, too—and she has made powerful and disturbing use of it all. A historian at Duke who has written a good deal about the South, she comes at her subject from the inside, with a feel for the legends and stories that southerners have long told themselves and others about the kind of country America is supposed to be. The behind-the-scenes days and works of Buchanan show how much deliberation and persistence—in the face of formidable opposition—underlie the anti-government politics ascendant today. 

What we think of as dysfunction is the result of years of strategic effort.

Buchanan owed his tenacity to blood and soil and upbringing. Born in 1919 on a family farm in Tennessee, he came of age during the Great Depression. His grandfather had been an unpopular governor of that state, and Buchanan grew up in an atmosphere of half-remembered glory and bitterness, without either money or useful connections. His exceptional mind was his visa into the academy and then into the world of big ideas. “Better than plowing,” which he made the title of his 1992 memoir, was advice he got from his first mentor, the economist Frank Knight at the University of Chicago, where Buchanan received his doctorate in 1948. During the postwar years, other faculty included Hayek and Friedman, who were shaping a new pro-market economics, part of a growing backlash against the policies of the New Deal. Hayek initiated Buchanan into the Mont Pelerin Society, the select group of intellectuals who convened periodically to talk and plot libertarian doctrine.

Buchanan got his first plum teaching job at the University of Virginia, in 1956, during the single most crucial event in the birth of the modern conservative movement, the rise of the strategy of “massive resistance” to the Supreme Court’s mandate for school desegregation. Since the New Deal, conservatives like Herbert Hoover and Robert A. Taft had pushed back hard against the expanding federal government and its tentacular programs. But it was an uphill battle; the public was grateful for Social Security. Brown changed all that. More than the economic order was now under siege. So was a way of life, with its cherished “mores and folkways,” in the phrase favored by defenders of Jim Crow. A new postwar conservatism was born, mingling states’-rights doctrine with odes to the freedom-loving individual and resistance to the “social engineering” pursued by what conservative writers in the mid-1950s began to call the “liberal establishment.”…..

Buchanan played a part, MacLean writes, by teaming up with another new University of Virginia hire, G. Warren Nutter (who was later a close adviser to Barry Goldwater), on an influential paper. In it they argued that the crux of the desegregation problem was that “state run” schools had become a “monopoly,” which could be broken by privatization. If authorities sold off school buildings and equipment, and limited their own involvement in education to setting minimum standards, then all different kinds of schools might blossom. Each parent “would cast his vote in the marketplace and have it count.” The argument impressed Friedman, who a few years earlier had published his own critique of “government schools,” saying that “the denationalization of education would widen the range of choice available to parents.”

Why not see politicians as players in the marketplace, rather than as selfless public servants?

Far-fetched though these schemes were, they gave ammunition to southern policy makers looking to mount the nonracial case for maintaining Jim Crow in a new form. Friedman himself left race completely out of it. Buchanan did too at first, telling skeptical colleagues in the North that the “transcendent issue” had nothing to do with race; it came down to the question of “whether the federal government shall dictate the solutions.” But in their paper (initially a document submitted to a Virginia education commission and soon published in a Richmond newspaper), Buchanan and Nutter were more direct, stating their belief that “every individual should be free to associate with persons of his own choosing”—the sanitized phrasing of segregationists….

Yet race, MacLean acknowledges, was not ultimately a major issue for Buchanan. Fending off desegregation was only a skirmish in the long campaign to revive anti government ideas. That campaign dated back to the nation’s founding, gained new strength in the pre–Civil War nullification arguments of John Calhoun, and reached its modern apogee in debates over taxes and spending. Here the enemies were unions (“the labor monopoly movement,” in Buchanan’s phrase), leftish policy makers, and also Keynesian economists. Together these formed a “ruling class” that was waging war against the marketplace. This was not a new argument, but Buchanan gave it fresh rigor in his theory of “public choice,” set forth in his pioneering book, The Calculus of Consent (1962), written with Gordon Tullock. 

Governments, they argued, were being assessed in the wrong way. The error was a legacy of New Deal thinking, which glorified elected officials and career bureaucrats as disinterested servants of the public good, despite the obvious coercive effects of the programs they put into place. Why not instead see politicians and government administrators as self-interested players in the marketplace, trying to “maximize their utility”—that is, win the next election or enlarge their department’s budget?

Buchanan expertly maximized his own utility. Money was flowing into the Thomas Jefferson Center he established at the University of Virginia in 1957, enabling him to run it as an autonomous entity, with its own lecture series and fellowship programs. Free of oversight, Buchanan gathered disciples—he screened applicants according to ideology—and his semiprivate school of thought flourished. The obstacles lay in the body politic. The 1960s looked even worse than the ’50s. Not long after Buchanan’s big book was published, the War on Poverty began and then the Great Society—one lethal program after another.

The rules of government needed to be rewritten.

With Reagan, deliverance seemed possible. Buchanan’s political influence reached its zenith. By this time, he had left the University of Virginia. As early as 1963, there were concerns—on the part of the dean of the faculty, for one—that Buchananism, at least as practiced at his Thomas Jefferson Center, had petrified into dogma, with no room for dissenting voices. After a battle over a promotion for his co-author, Tullock, Buchanan left in a huff. He went first to UCLA, next to Virginia Tech, and in 1983, climactically, to George Mason University, not far outside the Beltway—and much nearer to the political action. The Wall Street Journal soon labeled George Mason “the Pentagon of conservative academia.” With its “stable of economists who have become an important resource for the Reagan administration,” it was now poised to undo Great Society programs. In 1986, Buchanan won the Nobel Prize for his public-choice theory….

That was Buchanan’s view, too. It wasn’t enough to elect true-believing politicians. The rules of government needed to be rewritten. But this required ideal conditions—a blank slate. This had happened once, in Chile, after Augusto Pinochet’s coup against the socialist Salvador Allende in 1973. A vogue for public choice had swept Pinochet’s administration. Buchanan’s books were translated, and some of his acolytes helped restructure Chile’s economy. Labor unions were banned, and social security and health care were both privatized. On a week-long visit in 1980, Buchanan gave formal lectures to “top representatives of a governing elite that melded the military and the corporate world,” MacLean reports, and he dispensed counsel in private conversations. But Buchanan said very little about his part in assisting Chile’s reformers—and he said very little, too, when the country’s economy cratered, and Pinochet at last fired the Buchananites.

At his death in 2013, Buchanan was hardly known outside the world of economists and libertarians, but his ideology remains much in force. His view of Social Security—a “Ponzi scheme”—is shared by privatizers like Paul Ryan. More broadly, Buchananism informs the conviction on the right that because the democratic majority can’t really be trusted, empowered minorities, like the Freedom Caucus, are the true guardians of our liberty and if necessary will resort to drastic measures: shutting down the government, defaulting on the national debt, and plying the techniques of what Francis Fukuyama calls our modern “vetocracy”—refusing, for example, to bring an immigration bill to a House vote lest it pass (as happened in the Obama years) or, in the Senate, defying tradition by not granting a confirmation hearing to a Supreme Court nominee.

To see all this as simple obstructionism, perversity for its own sake, is a mistake. A cause lies behind it: upholding the sanctity of an ideology against the sins of the majority. This is what drives House Republicans to scale back social programs, or to shift the tax burden from the 1 percent onto the parasitic mob, or to come up with a health-care plan that would leave Trump’s own voters out in the cold. To many of us, it might seem heartless. But far worse, Buchanan once explained in a famous essay, is misguided Good Samaritanism, which, by helping the unlucky, cushions them against the consequences of their bad choices. This is exactly the sentiment voiced by the House Republican who voted to strip away Obamacare and then explained that the new proposal, which punishes people with preexisting medical conditions, has the advantage of “reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives.”

With a researcher’s pride, MacLean confidently declares that Buchanan’s ideological journey, and the trail he left, contains the “true origin story of today’s well-heeled radical right.” Better to say that it is one story among many in the long narrative of conservative embattlement. The American right has always felt outnumbered, even in times of triumph. This is the source of both its strength and its weakness, just as it was for Buchanan, a faithful son of the South, with its legacy of defeats and lost causes. MacLean’s undisguised loathing of him and others she writes about will offend some readers. But that same intensity of feeling has inspired her to untangle important threads in American history—and to make us see how much of that history begins, and still lives, in the South.’

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Radical Right Libertarian Economics or Social Populism?

BBC: 55 Tufton Street London – Libertarian Think Tanks – Koch Network

The BBC has, finally, woken up to the influence of 55 Tufton Street think tanks, promoting ‘radical right libertarian’ socioeconomic policies, although presented in a purely domestic and native context (apart from a mention of Brexit) e.g. PM Truss’s ‘Trussonomics’ is also known as ‘Kochonomics’.

55 Tufton includes PR and lobbying organisations masquerading as (oxymoronic) ‘think tanks’ which are overpopulated by right wing pseudo-experts promoting old beliefs as economic theory, socio-economic policy, report topics and talking points for media and the government, preferably a Conservative one.

Further, although these anti-EU and Brexit supporting think tanks are nominally native or organic to the UK, most are in and influenced by Atlas Network (founded by IEA’s Fisher) and more generically known in the US as the libertarian #KochNetwork; there is also a migration NGO which can be linked to the US nativist #TantonNetwork. 

Below is a full article from the BBC which also has a podcast accompanying.

‘55 Tufton Street: The other black door shaping British politics

By Jack Fenwick

BBC Politics

On a rainy afternoon earlier this month, Liz Truss walked through the famous black door of No 10 Downing Street for the first time as prime minister.

But under a mile away, there’s another black door that’s had a lasting effect on the previous decade in British politics – and looks like being influential under this administration too – No 55 Tufton Street.

The building houses organisations including the TaxPayers’ Alliance and the Global Warming Policy Foundation – and is the former home of many others, such as Vote Leave and Brexit Central.

Just hours after Liz Truss made her first speech on the steps of Downing Street, she announced that her new economics adviser would be Matthew Sinclair, a former chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance.

And a couple of weeks later, the new chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, delivered the most consequential financial statement for a generation, ripping up decades of economic orthodoxy.

He was pictured celebrating with Mr Sinclair – a man who made his name working behind that other black door.

The influence of TaxPayers’ Alliance began in 2008, when the financial crash led to bank collapse around the world.

“If you didn’t want that to happen in the UK, you had to get growth higher,” says Andrew Lilico, chairman of Europe Economics and Matthew Sinclair’s former boss.

“One way you could get growth high was just to get spending down and it might not be a very pleasant way of getting growth higher, but needs must in these kinds of circumstances.

“There was a TaxPayers’ Alliance report called How to Save £50 billion, which to some extent breached the dike on where things were going. And very shortly after that, others all chimed in. So quite quickly there were proposals for cutting spending by £150bn and £200bn.”

In 2010, David Cameron became prime minister and ushered in a new age of austerity.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance was no longer a fringe group frustrated with the Conservatives’ approach to the economy. Instead, they became a key public backer of the government’s approach to the economy.

“The newspapers or the broadcast media would have a spokesperson from an organisation, it could be the TaxPayers’ Alliance, it could be another think tank,” says Nicky Morgan, a Treasury minister in the coalition government.

“As a minister, if you’re going to advance a difficult or a controversial idea, it’s no surprise that before you announce such a thing, what you try to aim for is that phrase ‘rolling the pitch’. You’ve got people outside saying, ‘this is what we need’. So when you announce it, one hopes that it’s going to be well received.”

Think tank donor anonymity

But the organisations at No 55 had started to attract controversy too.

Many of them have a long-standing policy of protecting the anonymity of their donors, something the Lib Dems wanted to change.

The coalition government did change the rules on lobbying. But the BBC understands the Lib Dems wanted those changes to go further – and to include think tanks, which do not come under lobbying rules.

Few would suggest that David Cameron and his chancellor George Osborne were Tufton Street’s natural allies – one senior member of Osborne’s Treasury team describes the TaxPayers’ Alliance as “a bit of a joke”. But they were useful in helping sell those austerity policies to the public.

After the 2015 election, David Cameron pledged to hold a referendum on EU membership – and that’s when the relationship changed.

Vote Leave, which would go on to become the official leave campaign, was originally based at No 55 as well. Andrew Lilico, who was Vote Leave’s chief economist in the latter days of the campaign, says the think tanks there were natural Brexiteers.

“I think that they are people who are quite optimistic about what the market can achieve. And they’re quite pessimistic about grand state projects.

“So the European Union, as a supranational, multinational body would be an iconic example of something that they would be sceptical about.

“Matthew Elliott, in particular, who’s the chief executive of Vote Leave, comes directly out of that that setting. He was the chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance.”

After the Leave campaign won the referendum, the fight shifted again. The battle over how exactly to define Brexit had begun.

“People thought that the referendum would be the end of it, and of course in many respects it was just the beginning of the argument,” says David Jones, minister for exiting the EU from 2016.

“Vote Leave wound itself up so there was nobody there. A number of other organisations did spring up to fill that vacuum.

“And Brexit Central was a very important one.”

Headed up by Jonathan Isaby, another former chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, Brexit Central also ended up being based at 55 Tufton Street.

“So it became almost required reading for those who were on the pro-Brexit side of the argument,” says Mr Jones. “Every day you’d check in at Brexit Central and see what they were reporting.”

Think tanks going mainstream

Boris Johnson’s victory in 2019 – and his pledge to take the UK out of the EU’s single market and customs union – was another huge moment for Tufton Street.

After the financial crash, once-fringe views on public spending had become mainstream – and now the same happened with Brexit.

The apparent influence made the argument around who funds these groups rear its head again.

But while privately critical of where the money comes from, the Labour Party hasn’t made it a public priority to reform the rules governing this area of politics. Until now.

“55 Tufton Street shouldn’t have any more influence than any other street in the UK,” says Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader.

“That street seems to dominate particular policy and what’s happening in government and legislation and it’s not transparent enough.

“Labour would consult on the wider definition of what lobby groups are – so that would include what is currently known as think tanks because we don’t believe that the definition is wide enough, but also around transparency around where their funding comes from as well.”

The BBC did ask representatives from the organisations mentioned for an interview, but no-one came forward.

Labour may want to change the rules – but for now, that’s not in their gift.

Instead, last week’s financial statement seemed to confirm that Liz Truss is more aligned with the ideas floating around No 55 than any of the previous recent occupants of No 10.

So what sort of new policies might the government start to enact?

The TaxPayers’ Alliance has had a long-running campaign to crack down on paid time off for trade union officials, including when Mr Sinclair was chief executive.

The new Business Secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg, met the TPA in March.  The BBC has used a freedom of information request to discover that the meeting was called to discuss paid time off for trade union officials – something Liz Truss has now pledged to crack down on.

Still, no one can be sure exactly what will take place behind the famous black door of No 10 over the next few years.

But perhaps by paying closer attention to what’s happening behind the other black door, we might get a good idea.’

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