The Koch Brothers’ Remorse

Charles and David Koch have supported the Republicans with billions. Now the party is split, democracy is corrupted – and the Kochs are extremely disappointed.

Exactly one year ago the Republicans seemed to be unstoppable. In the 2014 elections, they extended their majority in the House of Representatives and additionally recovered the majority in the Senate and, on top of that, won the governor posts in 31 of 50 states. It was a historic victory. The only thing missing was a Republican in the White House.

But now that the conservatives have begun the race, victory is anything but guaranteed. The problem is the more than a dozen Republican presidential candidates who are jockeying for the primaries in the 2016 elections and their debates, which have turned into a reality TV spectacle. If that’s not enough, a bitter dispute has broken out in Washington between the tea party wing and the party establishment. It peaked recently when John Boehner, well known as a hard-line conservative, was edged out of his speaker position by the even more conservative members of the tea party. A power struggle ensued for his successor, a struggle which was unusually harsh even by Washington standards.

Self-destruction of the Republicans

Now David and Charles Koch of all people are complaining about the acute self-destruction of the party. The Koch brothers are, with around $41 billion in assets, in fifth place on the Forbes list of the top 400 richest Americans. “It’s mainly about the personalities, and ‘your mother sucked rotten eggs,’” Charles Koch recently complained to reporters at the Wall Street Journal. On the show “Morning Joe,” where the 80-year-old appeared for the first time with his brother David, 75, he explained, he has been “disappointed for quite some time” with the Republican Party.

Ultraconservative Goals

It was the Koch brothers who helped the tea party supporters and joined the march on institutions. The international oil and chemical empire Koch Industries has become synonymous for political influence by companies and billionaires. The Koch brothers’ political goals – a radical libertarian America, extensively free from state influence and regulation – have been pursued by the brothers for more than three decades.

They patiently built up a network of institutions that spread their ideology. Most prominent among them is the Cato Institute, the economically liberal think tank, which Charles Koch co-founded. The notoriously conservative Heritage Foundation has also enjoyed major support from the family. In the 1980s, the Kochs underwrote a multi-million dollar start-up fund for the Mercatus Center, which by its own description, bridges the gap between the academic ideas of free market economics and their application in practice. Although barely known, the institution is extremely influential. Some 14 of the 23 regulations, whose retraction had been pursued during George W. Bush’s time in office, had been previously suggested by the Mercatus experts, according to the Wall Street Journal. So extensive are the relationships of the brothers that one even speaks of the “Kochtopus” in Washington.

Money for the Tea Party

The Kochs’ most sweeping initiative is Americans for Prosperity, which provides the leaders of the tea party with active help in building their movement. David Koch at first denied having directly financed the tea party. But at an AFP event a few years ago, he declared, “Five years ago my brother Charles and I provided the funds to start Americans for Prosperity and it‘s beyond my wildest dreams how AFP has grown into this enormous organization.” He pointed to the hundreds of thousands of American citizens from “all walks of life,” standing up and fighting for the economic freedoms that have made American society the “most prosperous” in history. His speech was captured by a documentary filmmaker who had sneaked into the event.

Candidates No Longer Under Control

Since the financing of AFP, it has become easier for well-to-do donors like the Kochs to pump money into politics. At the beginning of 2010, the Supreme Court decided to lift the existing ban on direct donations from companies and unions in favor of the conservative non-profit organization, Citizens United. In a second case a few weeks later, an appeals court actually allowed unlimited donations, as long as they were made to independent organizations and not directly into the pockets of a candidate. Both decisions led to the so-called super political action committees, new election campaign funding committees which had already received $300 million during the election season at the time.

Two of the five judges who decided in favor of Citizens United in 2010 were honored guests at one of the Koch brothers’ private events at a luxury resort in Palm Springs, California, where the Kochs’ other like-minded allies were invited. And in January of this year, the brothers invited these supporters again to Palm Springs to develop a common strategy and to look at the most promising candidates. Although only a few hand-picked media representatives were admitted, a controversial number was leaked: The Kochs and their network of allies could have $900 million available for all election campaigns in the coming year.

Ten months later, Charles and David had to eat some unsatisfactory results. Their favored presidential candidate Scott Walker, Republican governor of Wisconsin, dropped out of the race after he said he considered the idea to build a wall on the border to Canada as “legitimate.” The careful calculations of the Kochs haven’t panned out, actually, quite the opposite. The patient preparation with which they pushed the Republican Party in their preferred direction actually laid the groundwork for candidates over whom they do not have control.

Uncontrollable Donald Trump

Even worse: Some candidates are pursuing opposing interests. Donald Trump has pleaded for more protectionism. The Kochs, with their international business, have no interest in isolating America. While the brothers want to win over more Hispanic votes, Trump has described Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals.

In order to recover their influence, the Kochs have publicly committed themselves to a radical transformation. Rather than acting mostly in the background as they have in the past, they are now appearing more often in public. “I always followed the mama whale’s advice to the baby whale: Son, the time you get harpooned is when you come up to spout off,” one of the Koch brothers told the Wall Street Journal about his former public reticence. He had to realize that he “was being harpooned already and spouting off would maybe lessen the harpoons, or at least it wouldn’t make ’em any worse.” The brothers have even told anecdotes from their childhood days. And to go with that, Koch Industries tweeted a picture of the 80-year-old Charles at his desk – dressed as Darth Vader from Star Wars.

Recently they have even attempted collaborating with the Obama administration, which they have aggressively fought. In the meantime, they belong among the active supporters of one of Obama’s campaigns to reduce the high number of prisoners in the United States. Charles Koch declared in the Wall Street Journal that he would gladly support the Democrats.