The Problem of Neoliberalism

Von Hayek published his seminal work, The Road to Serfdom, in 1944. He argued that political and economic freedom were two sides of the same coin, because any government that sought to control the national economy would necessarily need to control important aspects of its citizens’ lives, such as where to work and where to live, and this would, in time, slide into more egregious assaults on liberty.

Von Hayek was an economist but his most influential argument was not primarily economic, but political. He argued that capitalism and freedom are linked, so if we wish to preserve political freedom we must preserve economic freedom as well.⁶ The crux of the argument is that a free market is a form of distributed power: various individuals making free choices, every day, hold power in their hands and prevent its concentration in centralized government. Conversely, centrally planned economies entail not just the concentration of economic power, but of political power as well. Thus, the free market is a bulwark against totalitarianism, and against tyranny. Conversely, centralized economies threaten freedom by concentrating power.

As Bruce Caldwell put it in the introduction to the 2007 edition of The Road to Serfdom: “[Hayek believed that] full scale planning requires that the planning authorities take over all production decisions; to be able to make any decisions at all, they would need to exercise more and more political control. If one tries to create a truly planned economy, one will not be able to separate control of the economy from political control.”⁷ In Hayek’s own words: “ … the unforeseen but inevitable consequences of socialist planning create a state of affairs in which, if the policy is to be pursued, totalitarian forces will get the upper hand.” Thus, von Hayek opposed even modest forms of social democracy, such as the British National Health Service, believing that such modest interventions in the marketplace would pave the way for more immodest ones.⁸

These views became framing propositions for the influential Mont Pelerin Society, created in 1947 to promote neoliberal thinking, whose founding statement declares: “without the diffused power and initiative associated [with private property and the competitive market] it is difficult to imagine a society in which freedom is effectively preserved.”⁹ We see here the foundations for historian David Harvey’s observation that “the assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market … is a cardinal feature of neoliberal thinking.”¹⁰

In the context of the end of World War II and the beginnings of the Cold War, we can fathom the credibility of some of these concerns. Right-wing totalitarianism had been defeated in Germany, but left-wing totalitarianism was ascendant in the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, where many citizens had been stripped of political and religious liberty. Behind the Iron Curtain – as the boundary between eastern and western Europe soon came to be called – there was a strong association between centralized economic planning and the suppression of individual liberty.

On the other hand, the basic premise of neoliberal philosophy – that political and economic liberty are inseparable – was more an axiom than an empirically demonstrated truth, and even at the time there were reasons to doubt its veracity, or at least its generality. The most obvious was the history of the United States. In the nineteenth century, the country pursued a largely capitalist, market-based economic system, but this offered no guarantee of freedom: for the first half of its existence, the “land of the free” permitted chattel slavery to exist side-by-side with market capitalism. And in the second half of its history, the United States allowed the de facto refusal of liberty to former slaves and their descendants. Nor did women share the political freedoms that male citizens enjoyed, either in the United States or in Europe. Liberty in these market economies was substantially curtailed in ways to which neoliberals turned a blind eye.

Further evidence that capitalism and freedom did not necessarily go hand-in-hand emerged in the mid-twentieth century in Chile, where General Augusto Pinochet (with the help of the American CIA) overthrew a democratically elected socialist government to install a violent and brutal capitalist dictatorship that ruled for seventeen years. Meanwhile in China, when the government embarked on a program of economic liberalization following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, many observers assumed that political liberalization would follow in its wake. That expectation was not fulfilled, and economists had to coin a new term to describe the emerging Chinese system: “market authoritarianism.”¹¹

Moreover, contra Hayek, social democracy in Europe did not lead to serfdom. On the contrary, various studies and opinion polls suggest that the world’s healthiest democracies are the European social democracies, which are also home to many of the happiest and healthiest citizens. In contrast, the United States, which has far less in the way of social welfare than most Western European countries, was rated twenty-fifth in the world by The Economist’s Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, behind, for example, all the Scandinavian countries.¹²

Or consider Iraq, where, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the US attempted to impose a strict market logic (including the immediate sale of state-owned enterprises and abolition of unions) on the theory that it would support the emergence of democracy; the result was anything but democratic. The Iraqi trade minister, Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi, criticized the thinking that motivated US actions as characterized by a “flawed logic that ignores history.”¹³ A similar pattern emerged in Russia, where US economists advised a rapid transition to a market economy, believing it would support the emergence of democratic institutions.¹⁴ What emerged instead was a corrupt oligarchy, which subsequently attempted to undermine electoral democracy in the United States.¹⁵

Yet, ironically, while western Europe had already disproved that social democracy must necessarily lead to full-blown socialist planning, and even as the examples of Chile, China, Iraq, and Russia were disproving the assumption that economic and political freedom went hand in hand, neoliberal ideas were ascendant in Europe and the United States. Ronald Reagan is remembered for his efforts to cut taxes, decrease the size of the federal government, roll back environmental regulations, and promote the idea that economic growth was best achieved by trusting to the “magic of the marketplace,” but in the United States deregulatory enthusiasm began before Reagan, in the administration of President Carter (who fostered the deregulation of the aviation industry, of trucking, and of a number of other things). It continued under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and in some ways, even Barack Obama. Clinton, working closely with the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, promoted the idea of a “Washington Consensus,” framed by the neoliberal principles of low taxation, trade liberalization, deregulation, the protection of property rights, and the promotion of competitive markets. The use of the term “consensus” was clearly intended to signify that all reasonable people recognized the validity of these positions, even as the “consensus” paid little (if any) attention to the need for appropriate regulation to protect workers, consumers, and the natural environment, or to prevent or redress uncompetitive practices and remedy market failure.¹⁶

Today, in light of the increasing problem of income inequality and the existential threat of climate change, many scholars and citizens have begun to challenge the dominant neoliberal logic.¹⁷ Nevertheless, economists and politicians still routinely invoke the “magic of the marketplace” to suggest that most problems are best left to the private sector to solve, and public opinion polls show that a large percentage of the American people trust business more than government.¹⁸

How did this state of affairs come to be? How did a set of views that were considered quite marginal when first proposed, and which were then shown to be empirically inadequate (as well as arguably amoral), come to be so influential? As is usually the case, historical evidence suggests a complex story, and we do not suggest that we could satisfactorily answer this question in a single chapter. However, one part of the answer, we suggest, is the role of organized efforts over the course of many decades to convince the American people of the virtues of neoliberal principles, in particular the political and social merits of the free enterprise system and its inextricable link to freedom and democracy. And one part of this effort – the focus of this chapter – was an organized propaganda campaign, which began in the 1930s as a reaction to the New Deal, and relied heavily on the use of radio, the dominant electronic media of the time.

Even before the publication of The Road to Serfdom or the founding of the Mont Pelerin society, the idea that government intervention in the marketplace was not just economically misguided, but also threatened American freedom, was promoted by a network of American businessmen centered around the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). For nearly a century, and supported by and allied with other trade associations, conservative thinkers, political and religious leaders, and libertarian think-tanks, NAM constructed, nurtured, and promoted a narrative in which the protagonist was “free enterprise,” and the antagonist was, variously, socialists, unions, and “the government.” This narrative has been used to justify tax cuts, roll back regulation, and deny the reality of market failure. A key tenet of the narrative is that political and economic freedom are indivisible – what NAM leaders called the “indivisibility thesis,” a thesis they were already promoting in the United States several years before the publication of The Road to Serfdom.¹⁹ This paper focuses on one part of that story: the NAM propaganda campaign of 1935–1940 and the use of radio in that campaign.

NAM and the Origins of the Indivisibility Thesis

By the late nineteenth century, it had become widely accepted that capitalism could not be left entirely to its own devices: the marketplace required government oversight to protect workers, to protect consumers, and even to protect capitalism from itself. While some of this oversight could be done on the state level, increasingly the demand was for the federal government to become involved. The 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act, for example, was designed to protect competition in the face of monopolistic practices. The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act was intended to protect consumers from misbranded, adulterated, contaminated, or otherwise dangerous food and drugs. (In 1938 it was amended to include cosmetics.) And the 1916 Keating-Owen Act attempted to protect children from dangerous labor.

However, as the twentieth century unfolded, leaders of American business and industry, organized under the umbrellas of the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Liberty League, fought back against these government initiatives. In response to unionization and the pressure to ameliorate working conditions – particularly the effort to implement workmen’s compensation and limit child labor – they promulgated the idea that unregulated capitalism was “the American way.” They also insisted that taxation – including the federal income tax – would damage business and industry by draining funds that would otherwise be used for investment. Thus, they offered both a positive vision – support individual enterprise – and a negative prescription — limit government involvement and taxation.

Their narrative drew heavily on the metaphor of a “tripod of freedom.” This was the claim that American democracy rested on three legs – representative government, civic and religious liberty, and free enterprise. Like a tripod, it would only stand if all three legs were intact and strong. This became the basis for arguing against any weakening of economic freedom – by which they meant the freedom of businessmen to run their operations as they saw fit – such as, for example, the enforcement by either unions or law of an eight-hour work day or a minimum age for child labor. Closely linked to this metaphor was the idea that political and economic freedom were indivisible, inseparable, and inextricable. Therefore, even modest regulations, if mandated by law, threatened American liberty.

We call this the “indivisibility thesis,” drawing on the use of that term by NAM board member J. Howard Pew.²⁰ In December 1948, Pew wrote to Rose Wilder Lane, the libertarian daughter of writer Laura Ingalls Wilder, who had influenced her mother to tell the story of her childhood as a libertarian morality tale.²¹ Lane had explained to Pew her view that there “existed in fact no need for regulation or control of industry.”²² Pew agreed, but his arguments had a sharper focus. They hinged on the rights of businessmen, buttressed by the philosophical position that freedom was indivisible.

Pew’s example of industrial freedom was neither random nor incidental. From the early-twentieth-century defense of child labor, to the mid-century attacks on the New Deal, American business leaders had argued that any compromise to business freedom threatened the fabric of American social and political freedom and with it the American way of life.

The argument had taken a number of forms. In its 1939 Declaration of Principles, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) had asserted their faith in the principle of “inseparability”: arguing that constitutional representative democracy, free enterprise, and civil and religious liberty were “inseparable fundamentals of freedom to be cherished and preserved.”²⁴ A few years later, NAM developed and promoted the tripod of freedom metaphor: 1) free speech, free press, free religion; 2) representative government; and 3) Free Enterprise (the latter often made into a proper noun). NAM insisted that if any leg were compromised, the entire tripod would fall.

Note the use of the word “strategy”: these arguments were not simply the beliefs of a group of leading American businessmen, they were the core of a political strategy, which included a propaganda campaign to persuade the American people of the veracity of these beliefs. NAM promoted the indivisibility thesis and the tripod of freedom narrative via a variety of “educational” and propagandistic activities, including advertising campaigns, leaflets and brochures distributed to schools, libraries, religious leaders and women’s clubs, and even a nationally syndicated radio program. The materials often included versions of American history that insisted (counterfactually) that American was built by “individuals,” with government playing little if any role.²⁶

As historian Kim Phillips-Fein has shown, in the 1930s the “free enterprise” campaign was linked to business opposition to the New Deal and, more broadly, to Republican opposition to FDR.²⁷ Through its Advisory Committee on Public Relations and its National Industrial Information Council (NIIC), NAM promoted the tripod of freedom theme through newsletters, billboards, short films, feature films, lecture series, a textbook campaign, and more. A particularly important element of their propaganda campaign was a radio program entitled The American Family Robinson.

The American Family Robinson

Most NAM propaganda materials were intended to reach employees in their workplaces, children in their schools, or citizens in their clubs and churches, but one component of the campaign reached directly into American homes and drew on the electronic media of the era: a radio show entitled The American Family Robinson. Launched in 1935, the long-running series was the single most expensive item in the NAM public relations budget, and likely the one that reached the most people. It was also the element of the campaign that reached outside a business community already in agreement with its message, and into the homes of ordinary Americans. In doing so, it would have reached many Americans who might not have otherwise harbored strong views about American business or free enterprise, who might even have belonged to unions, or been sympathetic to socialism or other non-individualistic philosophies.²⁸

The American Family Robinson was the brainchild of Harry A. Bullis, vice president of General Mills and the chairman of the NAM’s public relations committee. Each episode was fifteen minutes long and distributed free of charge to interested radio stations. NAM described it as emphasizing “the countless benefits which derive from living in a free country, with civil and religious liberty, representative democracy, [and] free private enterprise,” – in other words, promoting the tripod of freedom message.²⁹ The association’s goal for The American Family Robinson was to “sell the ‘American way of life’ to the American people” – to claim faith in the free market as a defining dimension of the American identity.³⁰ By NAM’s own reckoning, it was a central component of their declared mission to help industry “tell its story.”³¹ From 1934 to 1940, it was syndicated by the World Broadcasting System, and by the late 1930s nearly 300 independent stations were broadcasting it.³²

The show followed the adventures of the Robinson family in the aptly named manufacturing town of Centerville. We meet Luke Robinson, the family patriarch and editor of the Centerville Herald; his wife Myra, a radio host; their children Betty and Bob; Betty’s husband Dick Collins; assorted relatives and friends; and other Centerville citizens. Like the rest of America, Centerville is feeling the effects of the Depression.

In one plotline, even the Herald – a “sound business” if there ever was one, Myra declares proudly – verges on collapse. This creates the opportunity for the program to show how, despite the challenges of the Depression, market capitalism is still the best option for the American people.

In a move perhaps unintentionally parodic of George Eliot’s Middlemarch the town claims to represent the “center”: its name emphasizes its purported ordinariness, and by implication that of the Robinsons, a quintessential “middle” American family. The show’s politics, however, are firmly to the right of center. Each fifteen-minute episode of the folksy drama has sustained stretches of dialogue arguing against “foreign,” “visionary,” “experimental,” or “utopian” theories, particularly ones that involve tax increases or deficit spending. The program was so blatantly anti-Roosevelt that no network would touch it; when James P. Selvage, the NAM’s vice president for public relations, attempted to pitch the series to NBC, an NBC script editor wrote of the show: “the definite intention and implication of each episode is to conduct certain propaganda against the New Deal and all its work.”³³ The program nevertheless gained a large following.³⁴

NAM was of course not unique in using radio to spread its message: radio was the dominant form of electronic mass communication in the 1930s, reaching 83 percent of American families by the end of the decade.³⁵ Certainly, the Roosevelt administration was not shy about using radio for its messaging. One series produced by the Department of the Interior with assistance from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was “Americans All, Immigrants All,” broadcast from November 1938 to May 1939 on CBS, which highlighted the contributions of the many ethnic and cultural groups who helped build America with episodes dedicated to such topics as “The Negro,” “The Irish,” “The Germans,” and “The Jews.”³⁶ More influential still were Roosevelt’s famous fireside chats. In this context, NAM saw its radio efforts as self-defense, as well as a method for warding off the political anger of people who resented business and the large incomes of business leaders.

The American Family Robinson lifted its title from the Swiss pastor Johan David Wyss’s 1812 novel The Swiss Family Robinson, which in turn borrowed its central idea from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Wyss’s novel tells the story of a Swiss family, en route to Australia, which finds itself shipwrecked on a tropical island in the Pacific. Their new home (unlike Crusoe’s) turns out to be Edenic, filled with succulent fruits and magnificent creatures. The family grows prosperous. During ten years in isolation, they build something resembling a Swiss farm, complete with farm houses, fields, gardens, a fishery, and domesticated animals. The industrious family colonizes the island: they turn its previously untouched wildness into a microcosm of successful and efficient European civilization.

The Swiss Family Robinson began as a series of bedtime stories told by Wyss to his four young sons to arouse their curiosity about the natural world and instill Protestant values.³⁷ From its inception, then, the radio program was like the novel: episodic and didactic. In particular, both sets of Robinsons cherish the work ethic. But whereas the characters in The Swiss Family Robinson perform their labor by hand – spinning flax, making candles, salting fish – which is its own source of pleasure and sensory delight, in the world of The American Family Robinson work takes place mostly in factories and is an index of character and patriotism.³⁸ In short, where The Swiss Family Robinson preaches Protestant piety, the American reboot takes as its religion free-market fundamentalism.

The show imparts its lessons about the value of private enterprise and the benevolence of business through long stretches of dialogue or monologue, or in the form of debates between the commonsensical editor, Luke Robinson, and his trouble-making socialist brother-in-law, “Windy” Bill. Bill is emblematic of the lazy and hypocritical socialist: a sponger living off the generosity of the hard-working Robinson family. Instead of working at an honest living, Bill pursues get-rich-quick schemes and utopian dreams; in one episode he runs for mayor representing the “Sociological-Economical Reform and Golden Age Reincarnationist Party.” His vocal support for “visionary wealth-sharing programs” annoys Luke and others in the town: one Centerville judge pronounces him a “pompous windbag” (hence the nickname Windy) before throwing him in jail.³⁹

Bill always loses his arguments with Luke, Myra, Dick, and the other voices of “sound business principles” who, in Luke’s words, “seek to maintain our economic structure rather than sacrificing it to radical theories.” Bill offers superficial versions of liberal criticisms of free markets, which are readily refuted. In one early episode, for example, we hear this exchange between a fluty-voiced Bill and the sonorous boom of the show’s pro-business hero:

These arguments are repeated through dozens of episodes. Luke’s characterization of the anti-business position as juvenile or “childish” predates the British concept of the “nanny state,” but anticipates its likening of governmental intervention to parental or maternal protection. And whereas big government is bad, big business is good.

Luke assures the listener that rich business leaders enable, rather than impede, social mobility in America, because men like Henry Ford started out as mere workers, just like you and me. “Every big company was a small company once,” one character points out (with no acknowledgement of the government contracts that made some of those companies, such as railroads, big). Reforms that involve government spending or tax increases are “theories,” “experiments,” and “loose talk.” By contrast, the claim that the path to recovery is the stimulation of business through lower taxes is taken as fact.

The program inserts editorial commentary through Myra’s radio show and Luke’s newspaper. Myra’s program, for example, hosts a letter-writing contest inviting listeners to respond to the question: “What will speed recovery?” Most of the letters read aloud on the show are endorsements of private industry. Then Bill, writing under a false name (and of course hoping to win the cash prize) offers a preposterous suggestion: “With all the money that is stored in our beautiful Treasury building, we could all make a new start. The government could divide it up. A home, a car, a swimming pool for everyone … big grown-up children singing happily.” This obviously ridiculous proposition encapsulates the (allegedly) infantilizing effects of government intervention and, in particular, the utopian recklessness of New Deal policies. And the program makes clear that windy Bill claims to want socialism for the people, but what he really wants is money for himself.

Direct appeals to the listener break in on the program’s storylines, sometimes with little relation to the events of the episodes in which they are embedded. On occasion the show’s writer seems slyly aware of this. In one episode, Betty rushes weeping to her mother (Myra): Dick, Betty’s husband, has rushed off to Chicago without explanation and Betty is worried the marriage is in trouble. (The radio listener knows that Dick has gone to pursue one of “Windy” Bill’s schemes.) In response, Myra launches into a long speech about how the manufacturing industry can “take care of its own.” Betty asks, hiccupping with sobs: “What does this have to do with Dick?”

Ironically, the program’s peripheral characters tend to be more colorful than the blandly pro-business Luke and Myra. “Windy” Bill, the show’s token socialist, is the most entertaining major character and the one who most consistently advances the plot through his harebrained business schemes, his meddling, his political ambitions, and his romantic pursuit of a histrionic – but rich – Centerville woman. Bill was originally conceived as an incidental character; letters from fans convinced NAM to make him a regular.⁴⁰ Some of the show’s strongest moments are comic stretches featuring Bill with a lampshade stuck on his head, or Bill’s wealthy love interest shuttling farcically between Bill knocking at her back door and a rival knocking at the front – scenes that no doubt delighted the show’s listeners but did little to instruct them in the virtues of private enterprise. They did, however, contribute to the message that socialists were preposterous (and women untrustworthy).

Alongside its idealization of capitalism, the show also idealized the nuclear family and the domestic home. The Robinsons celebrate, in Luke’s words, the “ideals of American home life,” guarded by wives and daughters.⁴¹ Just as the show depicts the Centerville Herald as a microcosm of American business and Centerville as a microcosm of American life, the Robinson is a microcosm of the ideal American family. The family’s struggles are America’s struggles. And the Robinsons weather their challenges, the show’s narrator tells us, “like the true Americans they are.”⁴²

In its didactic appeals to listeners, The American Family Robinson cycled through a variety of anti-New Deal and anti-socialist tropes. One idea, however, is consistently presented with peculiar and repetitive force: that reform efforts are “foreign theories” that threaten the American way of life. In various episodes, “foreign theories” are likened to a hostile invasion. “If this country’s gonna switch from Americanism to socialism or totalitarianism or some other kind of foreign government,” one character insists, we all might find ourselves working for a dictator, “instead of doing business the American way.” This fearmongering moves quickly from socialism to totalitarianism to foreign tyranny, eliding any distinctions among them. At times the language veers into a militaristic register: Myra declares in one episode that the country is waging “a battle between the fundamental system we built up and a whole host of foreign invaders, all bringing every kind of artillery.” Whatever the New Deal economic reforms are – socialist, totalitarian, or simply dangerously unrealistic – they are, above all, un-American.

What listeners would not have known was that, at the same time they were listening to Luke and Myra rail against foreign theories, the program’s sponsors were literally importing foreign theorists and their theories – the Austrian economists F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises – as a key part of their efforts to convince Americans that economic and political freedoms were inextricably bound. Listeners might also not have realized that while Luke insisted that not a single European country has “a system that works better than ours,” and that Europeans suffered low wages with “none of our American conveniences,” one could well have argued at the time that in several ways, the European economy served ordinary people better. European farmers, for example, had the convenience of electricity before American farmers did.⁴³

One additional point was important to NAM, particularly after 1939: the role of American industry in the war effort. In one episode, Luke complains to another man in a diner, telling him the United States lost billions during World War I because of too much government control over the production of weapons, planes, and other military materials. The moral: manufacturers, not politicians, know how to produce military equipment. Our industrialists, Luke sighs, “are the best in the world”; they can’t afford to make mistakes, because if they did, “they’d have been out of business long ago.” Myra, too, swoons over the captains of industry. Moving from a reflection on the security of her home to the security of her country (the first a stand-in for the second), Myra pronounces: “I know the businessmen are doing everything possible for national defense: we’ll be secure, all right.” The path toward national security is simple: the government needs to let the industrial system get to work with as little regulation as possible.

This message underscored the basic intent of the whole program: to convince the American people of the benevolence of both manufacturers and of the free enterprise system, and to link both to democratic governance. In a 1939 comment to the National Association of Broadcasters, NAM emphasized the pro-business and not “anti-anything” nature of this series. “It is the avowed purpose of the American Family Robinson program to present openly, and as effectively and attractively as radio will permit, the fundamental principle that freedom of speech and of the press, freedom of religion and freedom of enterprise are inseparable and must continue to be if the system of democratic government under which this country has flourished is to be preserved.”⁴⁴

From 1939 into the 1940s, this became the key idea of nearly all NAM arguments. Sometimes it was expressed as the “inseparability” of political freedom, religious freedom, and economic freedom, other times as their “indivisibility,” as in a 1937 NAM PR memo that declared that ‘‘free enterprise is as much an indivisible part of democracy and the source of as many blessings and benefits as are our other freedoms of speech, press and religion,” the same language that J. Howard Pew later used in writing to Rose Wilder Lane.⁴⁵ Either way, the concept was reinforced – and indeed, made the official, public position of NAM – in a press statement released on December 9, 1939, and adopted by the Congress of American Industry. It began:

These fundamentals were responsible for giving the American people the “greatest degree of personal freedom, the widest opportunity, and the highest standard of living in the world.”⁴⁷ In short, the goal of The American Family Robinson radio program, as a central part of the NAM propaganda campaign, was to establish free enterprise “as one of the three great elements (along with civil liberties … and the representative form of democratic governments) which go up to make the American way of life.”⁴⁸ Its goal was to persuade the American people that free enterprise was indivisible from the American way of life.

Conclusion: The Character and Import of Disinformation

Disinformation can take many forms. In our previous work we have focused on two forms that have been recently prominent in American culture and politics: the misrepresentation of scientific facts and the promotion of misleading narratives.⁴⁹ In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the denial of the harms of tobacco use, the risks of acid rain, the dangers of stratospheric ozone depletion, and the threat of anthropogenic climate change all involved the widespread and at times egregious misrepresentation of scientific facts. But behind these empirical misrepresentations was a misleading narrative: that if we were to admit and address these challenges, we would put our personal liberty in peril and threaten the American way of life. As President George H. W. Bush famously declared in the context of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: “The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period.”⁵⁰

This narrative, it turns out, is much older than the struggle to address climate change or the battle to regulate tobacco.⁵¹ Decades before the tobacco industry insisted that government restrictions on tobacco were the leading edge of tyranny, the National Association of Manufacturers promoted a sweeping narrative that placed free enterprise at the center of American democracy and American life, and insisted on its foundational equivalence to representative government and civic and religious liberty. The free-market system, NAM insisted through The American Family Robinson radio show and other propaganda materials, was no less central to the concept and creation of the American republic than were representative government and freedom of speech.

This narrative was at best incomplete. Among other things, by insisting that free enterprise was a founding ideal of the American republic, NAM elided not only the long and dark history of American slavery, but also a substantial history of government intervention in the marketplace through tariffs, infrastructure development, state-chartered enterprises, and many other intercessions.⁵² By insisting that broad-based American prosperity and leisure was the outcome of the free enterprise system, NAM elided the role of unions in insuring that prosperity was in fact broadly distributed – and not merely concentrated in the hands of a small number of industrialists – and that American workers had leisure time to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

In his 2018 book on neoliberalism, historian Quinn Slobodian stresses that many thinkers lumped under the label “neoliberal” did not, in fact, believe in unfettered markets. To the contrary, they were concerned with what sorts of institutions, methods of governance, and forms of global order would permit the proper functioning of markets.⁵³ He argues, therefore, that what these thinkers were most concerned with was the “insulation” of markets from politics as an institution-building project. And he insists that a significant portion of neoliberal thinking, particularly in Europe, did not conflate free-market capitalism with democracy.

This may be so, but if European neoliberals did not conflate democracy and free enterprise, many American captains of industry did, consciously and deliberately so. However, they did work to insulate business practices from the workings of democracy by attempting to persuade the American people that the best way to protect American freedom was by letting businessmen run their businesses as they saw fit, unrestrained by government regulations or unionization. In the NAM portrait of America, businessmen knew best. Or, to paraphrase what would later be said with regard to General Motors, what’s good for American business is good for America.

NAM largely lost the fight for the hearts and minds of Americans during the Depression and the New Deal, but they did not give up. After the war, J. Howard Pew would play a major role in funding a conservative Protestant network to shift the thinking of mainline and evangelical Protestants to be more favorable to free market arguments. These ideas were further promoted through outreach to conservative Christian groups, who later became part of the coalition that brought Ronald Reagan to power.⁵⁴

Whereas earlier proponents of market fundamentalism were primarily motivated by resistance to Progressive Era and New Deal reforms, Reagan offered a new, more positive prescription. Responding to the economic difficulties of the 1970s – low growth with high inflation, also known as “stagflation” – Reagan argued that Western economies were over-regulated and their citizens and businesses over-taxed. In 1983, he introduced the language of the “magic of the marketplace,” declaring, for example, that the “growing economic interdependence of our world is creating a ripple effect of good news for those countries committed to … policies which allow the magic of the marketplace to create opportunities for growth and progress, free from the dead weight of government interference …. ”⁵⁵ He also revived the indivisibility thesis, insisting in many speeches on economic freedom as inseparable from, and foundational to, political liberty.

The “Reagan Revolution” was thus less a revolution than a reversion to an older economic and political narrative. What was revolutionary was the way in which this narrative became mainstream: by the 1990s, both Republican and Democratic administrations were promoting deregulation and accepting the idea that market-based solutions were preferable to alternatives. Some market-based solutions to environmental problems worked: in 1990, for example, President George H. W. Bush signed the Clean Air Act Amendments that instituted an emissions trading system to reduce the pollution that was causing acid rain, and, as a result, acid emissions were greatly reduced.

But they didn’t all work. Or, rather, in most cases they weren’t even tried, as the conservative commitment to market fundamentalism led the Republican Party increasingly into overt denial of market failures, most conspicuously climate change. In the face of Republican opposition and even ridicule, President Clinton was unable to introduce a carbon pricing system into Congress. By the administration of George W. Bush, market fundamentalism was on full display, now firmly linked to the denial of climate change. Barack Obama pushed back against climate change denial, but was largely unable to act in the face of an uncooperative Congress. In 2016, President Donald Trump revived denial with a vengeance, declaring climate change to be a “hoax,” and rolling back environmental regulations of all kinds under the rubric of “making America great again.” Today, the greatness of America is again being equated with unregulated capitalism.

The history of the NAM propaganda campaign reminds us that both false factual claims and misleading narratives are pernicious. False factual claims confuse us about the character of a problem: whether climate change is real, whether smoking causes cancer, whether immigration is the cause of industrial unemployment, etc. The resulting confusion is pernicious, because it undermines our will to act, either by persuading us that an alleged problem is not in fact a problem or by diverting us from its true causes.⁵⁶

But misleading narratives may be even more damaging, because they are so much more difficult to correct. This is particularly the case, as in the example of The American Family Robinson, when they are presented as fictional accounts and therefore cannot be subject to the complaint that they are factually false.⁵⁷ Yet such fictional stories – such misleading narratives – can do profound damage, because they mislead us about who we are and how we came to our present situation.

Repackaging Social Security Privatization as “Reform”

Because the Koch project now sails under the false flag of “conservatism” so it can reach large numbers of voters, it is worth remembering that years ago Charles Koch and his grantees were more honest. They proclaimed themselves root-and-branch radicals, albeit radicals of the right, who spurned conservatives, and particularly disdained the kind of cold war and religious right conservatives on whom the project now relies for votes. Back then, Koch’s favored thinker was Murray Rothbard, the grantee who suggested that his patron read Lenin to appreciate the necessity of cultivating a revolutionary “cadre.” Koch did, and the Cato Institute became their joint project to launch the effort in the 1970s. After all, they sought revolutionary change: a world in which liberty was preserved by the total absence of government coercion in any form. No one could have mistaken Cato libertarianism with conservatism at time of the Institute’s founding. Indeed, Rothbard instructed readers of the first publication of the newly established think tank that the latter label should be “despised,” because “conservatism is a dying remnant of the ancien régime of the preindustrial era,” and thus at odds with the wholly free capitalism that libertarians sought. “In its contemporary American form,” Rothbard explained, conservatism “embodied the death throes of an ineluctably moribund, fundamentalist, rural, small-town white Anglo-Saxon America.”¹²

In a demonstration of the extremism of their position, Cato’s first leader, Edward Crane, never forgave Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee whose views proved too far right for the electorate, for “[running] away from the issue of privatizing Social Security.” Charles Koch funded his brother David to run against Ronald Reagan in 1980, 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 hardy cadre of libertarians Koch built up in the 1970s and 1980s, the whole “establishment” had to be overthrown, its conservative wing as much as its liberal one. The future, said Crane, belonged to the only “truly radical vision”: “repudiating state power altogether.” The libertarians proudly proclaimed themselves “the party of revolution.”¹³

What led the Koch cause to discard this initial, uncompromising candor? As near as I can tell, it was something that often sets off social movements: “the threatened loss of new possibility.”¹⁴ The program of neoliberal transformation pushed through after the 1973 coup in Chile by the Pinochet government thrilled advocates of economic liberty; their vision was no long utopian, but now instantiated in a modern nation. Thus invigorated, they then watched in despair as the new US President Ronald Reagan, who talked their talk, backed away in his very first year in office from carrying out the draconian program urged by his libertarian Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman. Why? Because the president realized how unpopular it would make him. The much-ballyhooed Reagan Revolution, Stockman concluded, could not succeed in “the world of democratic fact.” The coincidence of these contrasting experiences – success in a controlled environment and failure in the wider democracy – led the Koch cause to turn, more and more frequently in the ensuing decades, to stealth strategies reliant on misinformation.¹⁵

The year after the Pinochet regime crafted a new “Constitution of Liberty” to embed neoliberalism in the lasting rules of national governance, Charles Koch moved the Cato Institute from San Francisco to Washington, DC, in a display of his new interest in policy relevance. Having seen the Chilean junta’s success in imposing retirement pension privatization (and ending employer contributions), the Cato Institute made social security privatization its top policy goal. It invited James McGill Buchanan, a founder of “public choice” political economy and a deeply committed libertarian who had just relocated his operation to George Mason University, to advise on how it could be done. To make a long story short: not with honest persuasion.

As Cato’s advisor on the Chilean constitution and an adjunct scholar, Buchanan launched the project with a lengthy 1983 article in the Cato Journal. He labeled the existing system a “Ponzi scheme,” a framing that as one critic pointed out, implied that the program was “fundamentally fraudulent,” indeed, “totally and fundamentally wrong.” But Buchanan’s main concern was the politics of social security: first, to explain why “support for the system [was] so universal” that it was treated as “sacrosanct,” and any questioning of it “political suicide” – as the Reagan administration had just learned the hard way. The answer was straightforward: the majority of voters wanted the system to continue as it was. “There is no widespread support for basic structural reform, among any membership group” in the American polity, he noted, the italics his own: “among the old or the young, the black, the brown, or the white, the female or the male, the rich or the poor, the Frost Belt or the Sunbelt.”¹⁶ The near-universal popularity of social security meant that any attempt to fight it on honest philosophical grounds was doomed.

Buchanan therefore suggested a more circuitous and sequential approach that obscured the truth. “Those who seek to undermine the existing structure,” he advised, must alter beneficiaries’ understanding of social security’s viability, because that would “make abandonment of the system look more attractive.” His counsel grew more cunning as it continued. “When short-run ‘reforms’ are needed,” he recommended, “those who seek to undermine the support of the system (over the longer term) would to do well to propose increases in the retirement age and increases in payroll taxes.” In other words, to make social security less well-liked, recipients had to pay more and work longer to retire. Another shrewd move would be to tax high earners at higher rates than others in order to sully the image of the program as an insurance contract. Making the wealthy pay more in the near term could also lead more of them to oppose the program. Taken together, such a “patchwork pattern of ‘reforms’” (the quotation marks around “reform” his own, to communicate the message that reform was not the true endgame) could pare off, one after another, groups that currently supported social security. Better still, the member groups of a once unified coalition that protected it might be induced by such changes to fight one another. When that happened, the broad phalanx that had upheld the system for a half century might finally fracture.¹⁷ The follow-up plan by two staff members at the Heritage Foundation was aptly titled “Achieving a ‘Leninist’ Strategy.”¹⁸

The Machiavellian advice Buchanan gave to his allies in Cato’s orbit pointed to a larger truth: that the goal was never to ensure social security’s long-term viability, as elected officials advised by the libertarian cadre would portray it to the wider public, but rather to defeat its inner essence. What the libertarian right depicted as “reform” was but a camouflaged step toward the destruction of the social insurance system, which depended on large pools of contributor-beneficiaries to balance actuarial risks. The libertarian thinkers and operatives acknowledged among themselves that privatization – wherever it was applied – was a strategy to weaken the collective organizational capacity of the people and discourage individual citizens’ tendency to look to government for solutions to their common problems. Along the way, privatization would also enrich the corporations that took over the former functions of government, and that, too, would alter power relations in ways that advanced the libertarian revolution.¹⁹

As the political scientist Jeffrey Henig noted, in the second half of the 1980s, privatization “moved from an intellectual fringe to become a centerpiece in contemporary public policy debates.” Buchanan’s so-called Virginia school of political economy (a subset of the broader field of public choice economics), helped effect “the intellectual de-legitimation of the welfare state” that prepared the way for such privatization and, with it, in the words of one enthusiast, advanced “the goal of fundamentally and irreversibly changing” the very nature of modern politics. Where the external advocacy focused on questions of cost, competition, and efficiency, the internal think tank discussions always involved long-term calculation about how best to alter the structure and incentives of political life in order to radically shrink what members of the public might decide to do collectively.²⁰ Privatization was thus a key element of the crab walk to the final, albeit gradual, revolution – the ends-justify-the-means way of thinking that allowed for the use of disingenuous claims.

Citizens for a Sound Economy and Tobacco Disinformation

While the turn to “discourse sabotage” (to borrow a phrase from Kathleen Hall Jamieson via Jane Mayer) as strategy seems to have begun with social security, it soon appeared in other arenas as well.²¹ It became apparent in the growing ties between Buchanan’s students and colleagues (often the same people, as he liked to hire his own advisees) and the tobacco industry, a leading corporate sector in Virginia, where they worked. He recommended “a fine publicist for applied economics” for one of the growing number of donor-created and ideologically defined faculty positions on US campuses, a tobacco-funded “Philip Morris Chair of Free Enterprise.”²²

Other Buchanan allies at George Mason University began publishing on contract to the Tobacco Institute, in a form of profitable academic entrepreneurship that made them, in the apt phrase of Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, “merchants of doubt.” Sample titles include Smoking and Society: Toward a More Balanced Assessment and Clearing the Air: Perspectives on Environmental Tobacco Smoke. Their stock-in-trade was the use of a patina of public choice economics to discredit promoters of public health as self-seeking actors, hiding their real interests beneath claims about a fictitious common good. The character assassination by insinuation was enlivened by a fillip of right-wing populism that branded regulators as elitist “paternalists” who used “coercion” in their social engineering.²³ Along with the academic books, came a larger and lucrative project run from George Mason’s Economics Department called “Cash for Comments” (C4C), which paid economics faculty to front for the ever more embattled tobacco corporations.²⁴

This work was a leading example of the new collaborations coming from an organization funded by Charles and David Koch in 1984, to lobby for market-fundamentalist policies such as deregulation and privatization – and to aid corporations that found themselves in trouble with government. Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) was a discourse-polluting enterprise from the outset. It was also, notes the former head of a strategic communications firm that took on the organization as its first client, “in effect, a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries.”²⁵ At the helm was Buchanan’s GMU colleague, Richard (Richie) Fink, a believer in Austrian economics and a peerless academic entrepreneur, who became Charles Koch’s chief political advisor in this period. Fink stocked the organization with GMU economics PhD alumni including Michael Becker, Wayne T. Brough, Jerry Ellig, Wayne Gable, and Wayne A. Leighton.²⁶

The ultimate mission of CSE was to solve a problem that had long plagued organized libertarianism: the cause was all officers and no troops. The idea was to build a lobbying apparatus beyond the capital, out in the districts, for the proposals its corporate members produced – and to use this apparatus to pressure legislators to carry out the donor agenda. As early as 1978, Charles Koch had preached that “we need a movement” for just this reason.²⁷ After all, an enterprise that numbered in the thousands, as libertarianism then did, could never realize its vast ambitions. That is why Fink and Koch created a mobilizing outfit that could expand the audience for their ideas and push policymakers to act on them. Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) thus billed itself as “a grass-roots organization with 200,000 members across the country” which aimed “to build support for market-oriented policy initiatives and reduce government interference in private decision making.”²⁸

Those at the helm showed few scruples about how they arrived at such numbers. Even the Wall Street Journal in time complained that CSE operated in a “secretive” manner and claimed as members organizations that had no idea they were listed as such, including the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.²⁹

With Fink as the group’s “Founder, President, Chief Executive Officer,” CSE reached out to corporations to recruit them to the cause and seek their monetary help. The organization’s astroturf membership was part of the lure: people who could be tapped to lean on their state legislators and congressional representatives. In fact, Patricia Schroeder, a liberal member of Congress, launched a formal ethics complaint that Fink was using his position on Reagan’s Commission on Privatization to solicit money for CSE, and that he had claimed to his marks that President Reagan backed CSE’s push for privatization. “It’s not often a President personally takes time to seek the support of a citizens’ group like us,” wrote Fink in fundraising for his “pro-taxpayer” and “deficit-reduction” group. Fink had indeed secured a letter from the president, which addressed him on a first-name basis and expressed appreciation for CSE’s work for a balanced budget, to include with his pitch. Duly chastised by a White House staff member, “Mr. Fink said he was sorry and would not do it again.” One overruled critic suggested, presciently, “Sanction would have been stronger.” But the apology was deemed adequate because CSE “does support many of the Administration’s programs.”³⁰

As Fink learned the need for more finesse, the group managed to block some popular measures while also laying groundwork for the future. All the strategies being used today by Americans for Prosperity, the much larger and more sophisticated organizing outfit that succeeded CSE, had their first trials here, above all the leveraging of corporate funding to sustain a nation-wide apparatus of engaged voters. Their mobilization could change the incentives for elected officials on matters from taxes to health care, energy policy, and corporate regulation.³¹

A case in point: with the vast monies Charles and David Koch and their allies provided, CSE tested its prowess in fights against government health care provision. When Senator Orrin Hatch, a conservative Republican from Utah, cosponsored a bill with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a liberal Democrat from Massachusetts, to provide health care coverage to about ten million children, CSE “launched a $35,000 a week radio blitz” in Hatch’s home state that upbraided him in what he rightly called a “false and misleading” fashion.³²

But that was nothing compared to the role CSE played in the fight against the Clinton administration’s health care plan. Described by one staff member as CSE’s “biggest single effort,” it included “organized demonstrations that shadowed the Clinton Administration’s pro-health care bus tour” – with, noted two journalists, “protesters far better organized than proponents of universal health care.”³³

Reaching out to corporations that faced challenges from government, CSE offered them support in order to demonstrate the value of political investment and win their leaders’ commitment for the long fight ahead. The tobacco company Philip Morris was one such convert. The Clinton health care plan floated the idea of new taxes on tobacco for part of its funding, which might also reduce cancer rates. This outraged the company’s management. One element of its multipronged shadow strategy to defeat “Hillarycare” was a $400,000 contribution to CSE for “a grassroots program aimed at ‘swing’ Democrats” on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, “a key battleground” for the plan in Congress. The Kochs were little known at the time, but the Washington Post reported that, while the protesters came from varied organizations, CSE was “the principle organizer” in many cities across the country. A flummoxed and furious President Clinton denounced the “demagoguery” of those “who disseminate false information,” pummelling the lectern at a press conference “so hard that he knocked the presidential seal to the ground.” In vain. “The [orchestrated] controversy emanating at the grassroots level” helped put the plan to death.³⁴

In light of the subsequent success of the Koch-funded attacks on the Obama administration and the Affordable Care Act, the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and so much else, it is enlightening to revisit the best single account of the campaign to defeat universal health care. In their book-length narrative, the veteran Washington reporters Haynes Johnson and David S. Broder tracked what was then “the most heavily financed and sophisticated lobbying in America ever.” And, lo, Citizens for a Sound Economy drove it from the start. Its Washington office sent out the first deceitful attacks – calling the Clinton proposal “government-run health care” that would force providers to “ration care.” The CSE office, three blocks from the White House, then “became the nerve center for strategy sessions” with ultimately some thirty organizations – from corporate interests to the Christian Coalition and the NRA – all determined “to kill what they derisively called ‘Hillarycare.’” In classic Koch style, they referred to themselves as “the No Name Coalition” and held their meetings “off the record” and “hidden from public scrutiny.” But CSE orchestrated the entire fight, which was “nothing less than a war without quarter, waged until one side thoroughly defeated the other,” by upending the normal rules of fair play and systematically misinforming the media and the public. “It’s as if you can’t debate substance” anymore, one despairing long-time staffer for Bob Dole said of the sudden change: “You’ve got to talk about personalities” and engage in “personal attack.” Thanks to the unrelenting, “pounding” efforts of the lobbying, compromise was no longer an option for Republicans.³⁵

“Nothing was left to chance” by Citizens for a Sound Economy. The pro-reform bus caravan found itself faced with opponents “lying in wait like a guerrilla army,” as the CSE team coordinated “closely—and secretly—with Newt Gingrich’s Capitol Hill office and with Republican senators.” The agitation was so intense that Hillary Clinton acceded to repeated Secret Service appeals and wore a bulletproof vest at one rally, where they arrested several menacing attendees and confiscated two guns and a knife. Rush Limbaugh spoke daily with operatives of Citizens for a Sound Economy about the latest talking points, also pushed out by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. CSE made huge media advertising buys, some to air hourly, out in the states, while conservative Christian churches lathered up their parishioners against the prospect of abortion coverage. It was all so well executed that the combined effort not only defeated the once-popular Clinton push for universal health care, but also enabled the swashbuckling 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, ending decades of Democratic control.³⁶

Indeed, CSE was becoming more formidable than its bumbling origins might lead one to imagine. According to the eyewitness and researcher Jeff Nesbit, CSE was also the crucial late-stage operations manager in a gambit which the federal judge who held the tobacco companies liable “for RICO violations for fraudulently hiding the health risks associated with smoking” called “a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public.” Deliberate disinformation was the very core of the scheme, along with the secretive practices for which Koch has become known.³⁷

Similarly, in 1996, CSE involved partners such as the American Petroleum Institute and the Chemical Manufacturers Association to start what the National Journal called “a $5 million, multi-year campaign to weaken environmental laws in favor of big business.” The project coupled multimedia efforts with the hiring of “field directors to coordinate grass-roots work in the districts.” Again, others called foul. Dubbing CSE “the polluters’ front group,” the Sierra Club lambasted it for using “a phony pediatrician” who brandished “wildly improbable figures” on the cost of adhering to new air pollution standards.³⁸

The Koch Network and Climate Science Denial

It was not a great leap from such stealth efforts in defending industry in other areas to assisting the fossil fuel industry in its fight against honest science when global warming began to receive public attention. After all, fossil fuel was the core of Koch Industries and its most reliable cash cow. Majority opinion was becoming a big problem for the industry and libertarian zealots in this era, as Americans came to embrace environmentalism to one degree or another, recognizing the need for government action to promote it. While corporations such as Exxon Mobil had withheld information to protect their investments and future profits, they could not hold the fort alone, with public opinion and many elected officials awakening to their products’ impact upon the planet. Koch network operations would not be alone in aiding the fossil fuel industry, but their support was significant, and had outsized – and continuing – impact.³⁹

In 1997, as the global climate negotiations got underway which would lead to the Kyoto Protocol of 1998, Citizens for a Sound Economy warned its corporate allies that 76 percent of Americans thought of themselves as environmentalists. “Worse, 65 percent” told industry pollsters that they “do not trust business” to take action against pollution; “79 percent of voters think current regulations are about right or ‘not strict enough.’”⁴⁰ That was an existential challenge for a cause committed to radical deregulation. The lesson the cadre took from such findings was that it could not win majorities for its true goals.

So, what was to be done? Caught between citizen support for environmental action, on the one hand, and, on the other, its members’ resolve to protect corporations from any interference and abiding belief that government could do no good, the libertarian cause came 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 free enterprise – what economists call market failure. This is a conclusion the ideologues cannot tolerate, because it shows the value of government intervention. 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,” said Donald J. Boudreaux, but because a government cure would be worse than the disease, global warming “is best left alone.”⁴¹

But that was not a persuasive proposition with the public, so Koch-funded organizations also promoted climate change denial, using donor funds to expand efforts to make the citizenry believe the science was inconclusive and controversial. These efforts have also been directed at Republican voters, most of whom, even conservative ones, want action on global warming. The cause aims to ensure that they do not get it – indeed, that they are systematically deceived.⁴² 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 describe as systematic “misinformation campaigns.” Nearly all the ostensibly separate but connected wings of the Koch apparatus have participated, from Citizens for a Sound Economy, to the Capital Research Center, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the many affiliates of the State Policy Network, and, of course, Americans for Prosperity.⁴³

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. The coercion works. Senator John McCain was but the best-known Republican to flip his position after a Tea Party primary challenge. By 2014, only eight of 278 Republicans in Congress were willing to acknowledge that man-made climate change was a reality. 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 points out, “that has turned its back on science at a time when doing so puts the very future of civilization at risk.”⁴⁴

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 government action to prevent further global warming is urgent.⁴⁵ Stop the flow of libertarian corporate cash and the nation might just turn 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 came into being with odes to the Age of Reason and which presents its grantees on university campuses as “classical liberals,” has turned to schemes that defame and intimidate professional scientists. Efforts to discredit their findings having failed, operatives seek to smear individuals and bully them into silence. Invoking public choice thinking, a Koch-subsidized organization thus argues that climate scientists are seeking personal monetary rewards, and not doing honest research in the public interest. “All Aboard the Climate Gravy Train,” reads a typical headline.⁴⁶ Merely for doing their jobs as researchers, climate scientists are being hounded by members of the cadre. Among other practices, these operatives abuse the Freedom of Information Act to demand access to the scientists’ correspondence in hopes of proving that the scholars are crying wolf in the pursuit of personal gain.⁴⁷ Those funded by the Koch network to advance the liberty cause have shown that they will say anything, quite literally, to achieve their goal of preventing government action.⁴⁸

The amounts being spent are astronomical, it bears mentioning. According to Greenpeace researchers, Koch Foundations over the period from 1997 to 2017 contributed over $127 million to ninety-two organizations that engage in climate science denial.⁴⁹

Using the Myth of Voter Fraud to Restrict the Electorate

As the scale of the perceived threat grew, with more ambitious environmental action joining other ominous auguries for economic liberty, such as the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (popularly known as “motor voter”), which brought millions of low-income voters into the political process, the Koch-allied right came to view restricting the electorate as vital to achieving its goals. Here again, Koch grantees in the academy made the intellectual case. Interestingly, the first pilot program for voter ID requirements came from the very Virginia counties (Arlington and Fairfax) that were home to the flagship Koch outpost at George Mason University. It was promoted by a Republican governor, James S. Gilmore III, whose support was crucial to that Koch outpost.⁵⁰

While I do not yet have information to confirm Mercatus team input on the proposal, Koch allies and grantees on the GMU faculty, including Tyler Cowen and Bryan Caplan, have published works which argue that the expansion of the electorate in the twentieth century harmed economic liberty. Cowen observed that “the expansion of the voter franchise” beyond “wealthy male landowners” had led to enlarged public sectors, anathema to libertarians. It seemed that when other citizens, women among them, could influence government policy, taxes went up and government became more intrusive. For example, Cowen noted, “the elimination of poll taxes and literacy tests leads to higher turnout and higher welfare spending.”⁵¹ Calling voters who do not share the cause’s economics “a public nuisance,” Caplan suggested that it might be wise “to reduce or eliminate efforts to increase voter turnout.”⁵² The economist was not specific about how to do it, but implied the desirability of voter suppression.

The task of applying that counsel with practical measures fell to operatives in the integrated Koch network infrastructure. Here again, widespread and well-funded disinformation has proved essential to securing the desired outcomes. Any politician who openly argued for keeping from the polls those citizens likely to disagree with one’s policy goals would face outrage and fierce opposition. And the Constitution now rules out poll taxes, limiting the options.

But crab-walking could get the desired result: use deliberate misinformation to change the terms of debate. Hence, Koch-funded organizations, among them the American Legislative Exchange Council, spread the falsehood of mass voter fraud – and continue to, even after repeated studies have exposed it to be a non-existent problem. In turn, elected Republican officials allied to the Koch network enlisted this helpful myth and used the products of the smog-generating organizations to pass measures that have since helped throw elections their way. The years 2011 and 2012 alone saw more than 180 bills proposed in forty-one states to make voting significantly harder by requiring photo identification (while disallowing public assistance and university ID cards), limiting early voting, ending programs that provided for automatic registration of high school students, and moving polling places to harder-to-reach locations. All this in a nation that was 138th of 172 democracies in its level of participation.⁵³

The belief that low-income voters lacked legitimacy was a staple of Buchanan’s Virginia school of political economy. It modernized southern white conservative intellectual traditions reaching back to the suppression of voting rights in the South after Reconstruction and the more sweeping disenfranchisement of Black and low-income whites after the success of the Peoples Party in biracial electoral fusion campaigns in the 1890s.⁵⁴ The will to limit the electorate by class also spread in the Mont Pelerin Society, which launched in 1947 (and today is chock-full of climate change deniers). Pointing to Virginia school ideas about the need to curtail democracy, the economist George Stigler had urged fellow members of the society at a meeting in the late 1970s to consider how the franchise might be restricted “to property owners, educated persons, employed persons, or some such group.”⁵⁵ Otherwise, Grover Norquist later warned, a nation risked “creating an underclass that votes rather than works for a living.”⁵⁶

Such elitist thinking is widespread on the libertarian right, which depicts modern majoritarian democracy as a calculated project of coalition building by the “nonproductive” to exploit wealthy taxpayers – or, in the words of Cato Institute spokesman David Boaz, borrowing from Buchanan, “the predators and the prey.” “Registering the poor to vote,” complained a libertarian pundit more crudely, “is like handing out burglary tools to criminals.”⁵⁷ Such thinking, however commonplace on the right, could not be expected to provide sufficient cover to legislators or persuade reporters, let alone survive court review.

So, here again, the tactic of deception has proved essential. Fraud was the alleged hazard that justified all the efforts to make voting harder. Serious researchers have been unable to uncover any intentional voter fraud (just normal human error in overwhelmed systems and occasional, innocent lack of knowledge about eligibility). But so avidly has the right spread the big lie that mass fraud augured “stolen” US elections, that not only nearly half of registered voters but also even federal judges and Supreme Court justices came to believe it – and decide cases on those fallacious assumptions.⁵⁸

The Misleading Campaign for a State-Convened Constitutional Convention

As effective as these campaigns to corrupt honest debate have been, the Koch-backed misinformation that may prove most consequential for the future of American governance is that which is currently getting the least attention from the media and the Democratic Party: the case for convening a constitutional convention as allowed by Article V – and the promotion of the fiction that its agenda could be contained. While the nation has been transfixed by the daily tweets of President Trump, the Koch network has quietly lined up authorizations from state legislatures to convene the first national constitutional convention since the Constitution was drafted. Common Cause has called the effort “the most serious threat to our democracy flying completely under the radar.” To date, twenty-eight of the thirty-four states needed have signed on. Until the 2018 midterms there were six GOP-controlled statehouses that had not yet committed but could be expected to: Idaho, Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana, South Carolina, and Virginia. (Now, after Democrats won one house of the Minnosota legislature, there are five.) As even Warren Burger, the conservative former chief justice of the Supreme Court noted, “there is no way to effectively limit or muzzle the actions of a Constitutional Convention.”⁵⁹

Yet, central to all the arguments of convention promoters is the spurious claim that such a convention would not be a runaway convention, free to vote up any radical changes proposed by its delegates. Thus, the Convention of States, one of the leading proponents of the effort, assures visitors to its website: “Is it safe? Absolutely.” How it could be safe yet also a “revolution” as promised by Mark Meckler, the Tea Party Patriots leader who heads the effort, is not explained.⁶⁰ Again, misinformation and stealth enable what otherwise would be unthinkable. “You really don’t need people to do this,” one Article V convention advocate told a Wisconsin state representative who attended an ALEC summit. “You just need control over the legislature and you need money, and we have both.”⁶¹

Using Disinformation to Criminalize Protest

How convenient, then, that Koch network partners, representatives of the fossil fuel industry, and allied elected officials are also seeking new measures to punish protest, which, like the push for a constitutional convention, are attracting little attention, what with the mayhem in Trump’s Washington. Some thirty-one states have considered bills to criminalize and discourage protest, and eight states have passed these laws. Most target specific types of dissent: critical infrastructure bills establish harsh criminal penalties for pipeline protestors and organizations that support them; campus free speech bills specify sanctions for student protestors following protests against incendiary speakers; and highway bills aim at protests by Black Lives Matter. Several of these bills are based on model legislation from ALEC.⁶²

Here, again, disinformation greases the skids to secure passage of laws that otherwise might be considered a violation of the First Amendment and the traditions of direct-action protest that have animated politics in America since the Revolution. Actors on the right, including the current president and right-wing media, have spread the narrative meme of “angry mobs,” funded by George Soros, that must be deterred with aggressive new measures, leveraging anti-Semitism and white anxiety to stifle reason and convey urgency.⁶³

Conclusion

This is not the first time in our 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, by a long shot. This is partly true owing to changes in media and technology, which other chapters in this volume address. But what is driving it, in the Koch 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 up to and including alteration of the Constitution, they aim to lock in the unpopular program of a tiny, messianic minority. And to stop action on the imminent climate catastrophe.

This chapter has outlined how the Koch network of extreme right donors, allied organizations, and many academic grantees have used disinformation as one strategy to achieve their agenda. Seeking changes radical and encompassing enough to constitute a quiet, slow-motion revolution, Charles Koch and his team have sought to mislead the public on matters as varied as social security, the harms of tobacco, climate science, alleged voter fraud, constitutional change, and direct action protest. Through it all can be seen the unifying thread of “wealth defense” so characteristic of oligarchs through the ages, but now modernized to leverage sophisticated technology and targeted media that would have been unimaginable to the oligarchs of old.⁶⁴

Nor is this wealth defense on the part of would-be oligarchs solely a US project; though anchored in the USA, it has gone global. While my own research has concentrated on the American core of the effort to enchain democracy through disinformation, the Koch-backed corporate-anchored libertarian cause is transnational. It operates through the Atlas Network, an international umbrella organization of over 450 affiliates in ninety-six countries, with extensive funding from US donors.⁶⁵

Scattered reports suggest that many of its affiliates engage in the kinds of practices explained here. For example, British journalists have discovered that the Institute for Economic Affairs, the leading UK-based Atlas affiliate, played a secretive role in promoting Brexit – one that has since landed it in legal trouble.⁶⁶ So, too, have Koch Industry representatives hosted visitors from Australia who sought their investment to “change the voting system” down under. Steve Dickson of the climate-denialist One Nation party was recorded telling Koch personnel: “We can change the voting system in our country, the way people operate, if we’ve got the money to do it. … The ingredients are there, we just don’t have the petrol to put in the engine.” One can only assume that with any such petrol would come strategic disinformation and stealth efforts of the kind described here. Indeed, the ABC report continued, Dickson “and the Koch Industries representatives also discussed the laws and public disclosure requirements in Australia for political donations.”⁶⁷

Perhaps the most stunning revelations to date, however, concern the Koch-allied Heartland Institute. An Atlas affiliate in the vanguard of US climate science denial, it has advised and worked with the German neo-Nazi party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which is recruiting hard in troubled coal communities and trying to stop action on climate change.⁶⁸

What is needed to combat this transnational apparatus of discourse pollution and democracy subversion? My dream is that a group like the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the network of investigative reporters from seventy countries that produced the Panama Papers, would start to seek out on information on Koch network allies across the globe, information that network participants so assiduously seek to hide. If such a team were able to do on Atlas what they did for tax offshoring and money laundering with the Panama Papers, we might just have a chance to save an imperilled planet from the toxic practices of these embattled fossil fuel magnates and the right-wing populist con men with which they and their allies defend the indefensible.⁶⁹