38 United States The EconomistAugust 31st 2019
F
ew industrialistshave been as cruelly self-serving as Andrew
Carnegie. Fatal accidents at his steel mills accounted for a fifth
of all male deaths in Pittsburgh in the 1880s. Most of his surviving
employees, ground down by 12-hour shifts, seven days a week,
were discarded by the age of 40. Carnegie did not much mind such
human wastage. Influenced by an extreme version of Darwinism,
he considered the winnowing of the feeble and thriving of the
ablest—in this case, himself—to be progress. Yet he was also a
great philanthropist, responsible for endowing thousands of cha-
rities, libraries and, in a sense, your columnist. A Carnegie schol-
arship to medical school was the lifeline that enabled one of his
grandfathers to escape his Glasgow tenement and get on.
David Koch, who died last week, presents a similar study in
contrasts. On the one hand, the richest resident of Manhattan and
more visible of the fraternal owners of Koch Industries did a lot of
good. He donated a fraction of his $50bn fortune to hospitals and
universities—especially for research into cancer, the disease that
killed him at 79—and the arts. In recent years he and his elder
brother Charles, the mastermind behind the Wichita-based energy
and chemicals behemoth, also splurged on campaigns to help
poor migrants and for criminal-justice reform. Yet they are better-
known for their more divisive political activism.
As the vice-presidential candidate for the Libertarians in 1980,
Mr Koch’s ticket attracted only 1% of the vote. Yet the brothers’ lob-
bying against regulation, unions and entitlements—in almost any
circumstance, a position so extreme that William F. Buckley derid-
ed it as “anarcho-totalitarianism”—helped push the Republican
Party much further to the right than most of its supporters knew or
wanted to go. And on climate change in particular this effort was
underhand. While acknowledging the reality of global warming,
the brothers, both mitgraduates, funded lobbyists, junk scientists
and conspiracy theorists to propagate an alternative reality in
which climate science is always contestable, and any policy re-
sponse to it a socialist power-grab. A new book on the brothers’ op-
erations by Christopher Leonard suggests this disinformation
campaign began as early as 1991, in a successful bid to prevent
George H.W. Bush fulfilling his pledge to curb carbon emissions.
Thereby the brothers helped corrupt the American right, misleadthe public and destroy a healthy bipartisan consensus on the issue.
Mr Koch’s obituarists have tended to stress either the good or
bad he did, according to their politics. The settled view of Carne-
gie—that his philanthropy was great and his business practices
unconscionable—suggests history’s judgment will be more clear-
eyed. No amount of charity can negate the damage the brothers
have done to Americans’ trust in expert opinion, as well as to the
environment. Moreover Mr Koch’s philanthropy, like Carnegie’s,
was to some degree expedient. The brothers’ work on migrants and
criminal justice, though in earnest, was part of a broader effort to
improve their awful public image.
Carnegie is also a reminder that the plutocratic tendency the
Kochs represent is not new, but cyclical. It reflects America’s en-
during ability to generate huge fortunes, complacency about con-
centrations of power, and the many opportunities its diffuse and
multilayered democracy provides for influence-peddling. The
steel magnate and other robber barons warded off political chal-
lenges to their monopolies for decades before Woodrow Wilson
ended them. That led to a period of populist ferment hostile to fat
cats, including mass strikes and ultimately the New Deal of the
1930s. But the growth and changes in business culture of the 1970s,
re-establishing the power of owners over workers, fuelled a new
wave of corporate activism, which the Kochs illustrate.
They were more consistent in their beliefs than Carnegie (a pro-
tectionist until he sold his steel mills, then a free-trader). Yet their
war on regulation, especially of carbon emissions, was squarely in
the interests of their shareholders (themselves). As a private com-
pany, they were freer than their rivals to make long-term invest-
ments in such efforts; the “Kochtopus”, as the brothers’ political
network is known, is believed to have 1,200 employees, three
times as many as the Republican National Committee. This repre-
sents the broader trend: a relentless and generally effective in-
crease in corporate lobbying. But is the tide now turning against it?
The extent to which the Kochs’ priorities have been subsumed
by Donald Trump’s populism suggests it could be. The president’s
apprehension that the brothers’ anti-government views were not
shared by many Republican voters was his major insight. And
though he has brought about some things they like, chiefly tax cuts
and the dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency, he
has also given them protectionism and insults; last year he called
them “a total joke”. Meanwhile, in the Democratic primaries, Eliza-
beth Warren and others promise a new campaign against billion-
aire influencers—which polls suggest would be wildly popular. Yet
though neither party seems likely to revert to the Republicans’ for-
mer state of corporate vassalage, a sweeping corporate retreat is
unlikelier still.Doing the hokey-kochy
In part, that is because the left is almost as beholden to rich people
as the right. Its most free-spending presidential candidate, Tom
Steyer, is a billionaire financier—who also promises to smite the
“powerful and well-connected”. Yet it is mainly because the politi-
cal economy is vastly more complicated than a century ago, and its
institutions, including political parties and the media, weaker.
The opportunities for buying influence this throws up would be le-
gion even if a Democratic administration reformed campaign-fi-
nance laws. The Kochs’ effort to spread climate-change scepticism
also illustrates this. It is said to have cost them around $120m. That
is pocket-change for Charles Koch, whose political commitments
will in no way be lessened by his brother’s demise. 7Lexington The Kochtopus’s garden
David Koch’s destructive legacy suggests plutocracy is a feature of American democracy, not a bug