We are living, in this perilous moment in human history, in the country that Charles Koch and billionaire fellow travelers have been deliberately engineering since 1980.   The roots of their rebellion against “majoritarian tyranny” go back decades earlier.  Their goal has been to dismantle the regulatory state, the hated administrative state, to concentrate all wealth and power in their own hands without interference from “unelected bureaucrats”. 

Tax fuels the beast they hate, the administration of laws that constrain their profits, in the name of  protecting consumers, so taxes must go, except for taxes on working people who must remain immiserated so they fight each other instead of the powerful parasites who call themselves “job creators”.   Their use of propaganda, based on incendiary lies and amplified through mass media, has been audacious and temporarily successful.

Here’s a little history of their movement in this moment when, with a ragingly insane two-year old and his unelected bureaucrat benefactor as their battering rams,  they are salivating over their final triumph.

The catalyzing event for their long-game revolution was a Supreme Court ruling that absolutely enraged them. In 1954, as the Civil Rights movement was gathering momentum, the Supreme Court heard evidence of the shabby sham of racist segregation’s Separate But Equal as practiced in American schools. You can see photos of this era, the Whites Only water fountain is state of the art, the Coloreds Only water fountain is a rusty spigot on the side of the building. Need a bathroom? Use a modern toilet and wash your hands in the nearby sink, if white, if not, outhouse is out back, behind the bushes.

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0, after vigorous argument between racists and those showing evidence of the grotesque inequality of “separate but equal”, that segregation in public schools violated the Constitution, specifically the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal rights under the law.    This was seen, by white racists, as an affront to the white race, an act of betrayal by “activist judges,” judges likely manipulated by communists, if the truth must be told.  The Brown decision came down in 1954, and it would be years before integration of public schools would be undertaken ” with all deliberate speed”.

The court’s unanimous recognition of racial inequality was a war cry to America’s dedicated segregationists.  One group that organized itself against this tyranny was The John Birch Society.   The founders were wealthy businessmen, extremists on the fringe of the Republican party.  Mainstream Republicans took pains to distance the party from the ravings of the John Birch Society.  John Birch ideology morphed into Libertarianism, the Tea Party, now mainstream MAGA, that is to say, current Republican orthodoxy.  One of the founders of the John Birch Society was Fred Koch, autocratic father of the infamous Koch Brothers.   Fred Koch had the gratitude of Adolf Hitler, since he’d built the oil refinery for the Führer that fueled Hitler’s Luftwaffe.  Koch liked the cut of Hitler’s jib too.   You can read a detailed family history of the troubled Fred Koch and his tortured sons (raised by a strict, German, Nazi nanny) in Jane Mayer’s excellent  Dark Money. 

After an unsuccessful vice presidential run by Charles Koch’s brother David in 1980, an election where the John Birch Society/Libertarian presidential tickets received a fitting 1% of the American vote, the Koch network went to work building a network of organizations to win America’s hearts and minds and use unelected operatives to change America’s policies from within the system.  These have become familiar:  The Heritage Foundation (authors of voting fraud lies, climate change denial and Project 2025), Americans for Prosperity, The Cato Institute, The Federalist Society (authors of numerous, infamous, unappealable 6-3 far right rulings), The Institute for Humane Studies, Judicial Watch, The Antonin Scalia School of Law, The Tea Party, armies of lobbyists and dozens of other well-funded “think-tanks”, influential public mouthpieces for popularizing and normalizing their extremist views, a vast propaganda network amplified by corporate mass media. 

At this moment the other corporate party in America, the Democratic party, appears to be on the ropes, and democracy itself along with it.  Many people are in anguish about how the Democratic party blew it and allowed a lawless, compulsive liar hell-bent on revenge, against America itself, to narrowly win re-election.  There were several reasons for their failure (mainly in the presidential race itself, they won most other seats in several of the swing states Trump won), the most serious was the Biden administration’s inability to prosecute, convict and imprison the organizers of Trump’s January 6th putsch.  

Biden did uphold the rule of law by getting convictions, and rulings against, several prominent Democrats, demonstrating an admirable dedication to the rule of law, without fear or favor, while seeming to fear and favor the Nazis who are celebrating their takeover of America today.