Buying Politicians, Selling Lies, and Suppressing the Vote

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of the War on Voting"

The Republican War against your right to vote. Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Buying Politicians, Selling Lies, and Suppressing the Vote

Right-wing billionaires know that if average Americans understood their real agenda, we’d never again elect a Republican. And it’s been that way for a long, long time.

As historian, author, and University of Wisconsin professor Harvey J. Kaye wrote in 2015 for Bill Moyers’s online magazine:

Polls conducted in 1943 showed that 94 percent of Americans endorsed old-age pensions; 84 percent, job insurance; 83 percent, universal national health insurance; and 79 percent, aid for students—leading FDR in his 1944 State of the Union message to propose a Second Bill of Rights that would guarantee those very things to all Americans. All of which would be blocked by a conservative coalition of pro-corporate Republicans and white supremacist southern Democrats.41

It wasn’t always this way.

In 1956, when Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower was seeking reelection, he campaigned on a platform that bragged that the Eisenhower administration “has enforced more vigorously and effectively than ever before, the laws which protect the working standards of our people,” that “unions have grown in strength and responsibility, and have increased their membership by 2 millions,” and that the administration had led the “expansion of social security” and called for “better health protection for all our people.”

The platform pledged that the Eisenhower administration would “continue to fight for dynamic and progressive programs,” including “improved job safety of our workers.” It would “[s]trengthen and improve the Federal-State Employment Service and improve the effectiveness of the unemployment insurance system”; prevent corporations from robbing pension plans by working to “[p]rotect by law, the assets of employee welfare and benefit plans”; “assure equal pay for equal work regardless of Sex”; “[e]xtend the protection of the Federal minimum wage laws to as many more workers as is possible”; and—remember that this was before Nixon’s Southern strategy—“[c]ontinue to fight for the elimination of discrimination in employment because of race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry or sex.”

It even went so far as to embrace increased immigration into the United States, noting that the administration had “sponsored the Refugee Relief Act to provide asylum for thousands of refugees, expellees and displaced persons” and would “continue and further perfect its programs of assistance to the millions of workers with special employment problems, such as older workers, handicapped workers, members of minority groups, and migratory workers.”42

Eisenhower was the last Republican who was elected without having to resort to treason or election fraud, and the last Republican to talk in such a “liberal” way. Fred Koch’s John Birch Society was fond of informally referring to Ike as a communist.

From the polls in the 1940s to polls today, most Americans are closer to the policy positions of Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, than to those of even moderate Democrats like former president Bill Clinton. And when presented with clear lists of Republican positions, most Americans are repelled.

So, to get people to vote for the largely Republican politicians they own, the billionaires and their front companies realized that first they must lie.

But even that wasn’t enough.

When Reagan, in his first inaugural, said, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” most Americans didn’t understand that the president was setting up calls for privatizing Social Security; ending Medicare (which Reagan had campaigned against in the 1960s when it was passed); and dialing back on the pollution controls that the EPA had put into place during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. Just minutes after the Iranians released their hostages, Reagan said, “It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.”43

Most Americans didn’t think he meant that we should stopfunding hospitals and public schools, or devastate LBJ’s Great Society programs that had cut the poverty rate in America in half. They didn’t see Betsy DeVos or “Leon” Musk on the horizon.

But there they were.

Ironically, in 1980, the year Reagan was first elected president, David Koch essentially outed the Libertarian Party. He made a massive donation to the party, and they put him on the ticket as vice president. And he figured that Americans were smart enough that he wouldn’t have to use the salesmanship that Moshe Kroy had advocated just a few years earlier.

The Libertarian Party platform on which Koch ran in 1980 was unambiguous. It included the following:

•      We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.

•      We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax- supported plan to provide health services. . . .

•      We favor the repeal of the . . . Social Security system. . . .

•      We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.

•      We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.

•      As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.

•      We support repeal of all . . . minimum wage laws. . . .

•      Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended. . . .

•      We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency. . . .

•      We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system…

•      We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration. . . .

•      We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and “aid to the poor” programs.44

The list went on from there, including ending government oversight of abusive banking practices by ending all usury laws; privatizing our airports, the FAA, Amtrak, and all of our rivers; and shutting down the Post Office. In a bone they threw to the white supremacist, white evangelical, and Catholic movements, they also called for an end of all tax-supported abortions (although the Hyde Amendment had already banned this in 1976).

Koch thought they’d kicked off a movement, but when the election returns came in, he was disappointed. Commenting that he’d always been talking to friendly crowds, he candidly noted that he was surprised when his candidacy pulled only about a million votes nationwide.

So the billionaires walked away from libertarianism and turned their attention to taking over the Republican Party. That, it turned out, was much easier.