The Sunday edition of The New York Times has the
latest from 1980 for you, today: David Koch (of those Koch Brothers
we’re pretty sure you are kind of scared of and hate, for some
reason you might not be sure of) is
running for vice president with an obscure third party, the
Libertarian Party!
Author Nicholas Confessore brings up little that would
even have been particularly interesting in 1980, much less now,
past his opening paragraph that explains aspects of libertarianism
that might confuse people who see the Kochs strictly as sinister
right-wing oligarchs:
[David Koch as L.P. vice presidential candidate] backed the full
legalization of abortion and the repeal of laws that criminalized
drug use, prostitution and homosexuality. He attacked campaign
donation limits and assailed the Republican star Ronald Reagan as a
hypocrite who represented “no change whatsoever from Jimmy Carter
and the Democrats.”
Times researchers were trying to dig up footage of
a David Koch speech from an L.P. event in 1979 for this story,
saying the story was about the L.P., though it is really about the
Kochs. The story does little to contextualize what that campaign
meant, either then or now, has few voices to help either reporter
or reader understand this strange world they are uncomfortable
with, other than the blank voices of documents, among “thousands,”
that the Times rather fruitlessly dug through from
the L.P.’s archives at the University of Virginia. (Deep
historical reporting from from an actual archive! Sort of hidden,
in a way! That they were “alerted” to, as the story itself honestly
admits, by “American Bridge, a liberal political
organization that has been
critical of the Kochs” who must be very
disappointed in the results.)
The headline is “Quixotic ’80 Campaign Gave Birth to Kochs’
Powerful Network.” More accurate headlines might have been
“Quixotic 80 Campaign Caused Kochs to Completely Shift Their
Political Change Strategy” or “All-Powerful Political
Manipulator Koch Brothers Couldn’t Even Bend Tiny Third Party to
Their Will for Long,” as the Kochs and their lieutenants failed to
get their man Earl Ravenal the L.P. nomination for 1984, and left
the Party in a huff. More depth—any depth— about the ways in which
the Clark/Koch campaign was perceived at the time by some on the
right as a left-wing takeover of the L.P., and by many of the more
radical in the L.P. as a wan mainstreaming of a radical message as
merely Kennedy-style “low-tax liberalism,” might have
educated their readers about this whole “Libertarian Party” thing a
bit better.
To be fair to Confessore, it is true that that David
Koch’s run with the L.P. was at least the zenith in the Koch
brothers first foray into electoral politics after earlier
ideological activism more of the Institute for Humane Studies
variety in the early to mid-70s—supporting scholarship and seminars
on things like Austrian economics and the possibilities of
anarchism, before Ed Crane (who co-founded the Cato Institute with
Charles and helped run the Clark/Koch L.P. campaign) helped
convince Charles Koch that electoral politics could be fruitful for
libertarian change. After all, the Kochs’ earliest mentor in
libertarianism was the stridently apolitical Robert LeFevre of the
Freedom School who thought any sort of political action both
immoral and useless.
I spent a week in that University of Virginia L.P. archive
myself back in 1998 when I was researching my book
Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern
American Libertarian Movement. I dug back through my old
notes today after reading the Times‘s story and felt a bit
of pity for them: it isn’t like they missed much interesting, but I
suppose upon hearing there was this “unknown” archive with
thousands of potentially Koch-damning documents in it, they had to
keep going, and to dutifully write up the results, however
unilluminating to fans or foes of the Kochs or the ideas they
support.
I was however reminded today, going back through those notes of
mine, of a couple of things I found amusing then: that the
Times itself in writing on September 10, 1979, about
the nominating convention for Koch and presidential candidate Ed
Clark seemed to have no idea at all who the Koch family was,
referring to David as not part of any petrochemical or engineering
company or as superwealthy, but merely as a New York lawyer. Also,
that David seemed to scrupulously expense back many of his personal
costs on the road to the Party. (Although he was often in effect
merely roundrobin paying for them himself, with $2.1 million of the
$3.5 million the campaign raised coming from him. Of course, the
ability for him to self-finance his own campaign without running
afoul of campaign finance law was entirely the reason Koch became
the vice presidential candidate.)
If one was trying to really study interesting shifts in the
thoughts of the Kochs from their more explicitly libertarian
movement days to their current role as power brokers in the
Republican Party (rather than pretend in a headline as if they are
all of a piece, as if those L.P. days “gave birth” to their current
“powerful network”), you might look to another part of my book
Radicals for Capitalism, in which I quoted from a
roundtable in the May 1978 issue of none other than Reason
magazine, where David’s older brother Charles Koch said:
“Our greatest strength is that our philosophy is a consistent
world view and will appeal to the brightest, most enthusiastic,
most capable people, particularly young people. But to realize that
strength, we have to state it in a radical, pure form…the other
side of that is our greatest weakness: that is, because we have a
radical philosophy we don’t appeal to people who are in positions
of influence, people with status or wealth….So the temptation is,
let’s compromise…let’s be much more gradual than we should be. As
a result, we could destroy the appeal to the comers of hte world,
and therefore we destroy the movement.”
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