What exactly was Glenn Beck’s Tea Party crowd in Washington demonstrating for? A closer look at who they were and how they came together offers some answers.
In August 1963 around a quarter of a million people joined the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” to hear Martin Luther King deliver his famous “I have a dream” speech.
Fast forward to August 2010 and some 100,000 people gathered at the same spot for Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally with special guest Sarah Palin.
The 1963 demonstrators were predominantly young, and about two thirds of them were African American. Last week’s Tea Party inspired manifestation was overwhelmingly white and significantly middle-aged.
The two meetings sought to achieve diametrically opposite results. The civil rights demonstrators demanded government action. The 2010 gathering wanted a libertarian society self-regulating itself through the application of selected religious principles, with minimal government.
Anyone who has ever tried to organise their fellow humans knows just how fraught a process it can be. It takes time, experience, logistics and resources. Organising a national rally in a country as vast as the USA requires massive preparation, effort and resources.
Martin Luther King’s Jobs and Freedom march was organised through a number of experienced organisations. These included his own Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP civil rights organisation, trade unions such as A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and student bodies like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Officials and activists from these bodies had, over years, learned their organisational skills in America’s prisons, pulpits and picket lines. Skills that would help make the 1963 march the epoch-changing success it became.
A similar network of seasoned organisations did not feature in the organisation of last weekend’s bash.
Glenn Beck is a talented, if abrasive, broadcaster and writer. His Glen Beck Program is syndicated on radio stations across the US while his television show on the Fox News channel draws considerable audiences. His personal voyage from the Catholic to the Mormon church and his struggle with substance abuse have undoubtedly left him with a wealth of experiences but mass organisation is not one of them.
Sarah Palin’s organisational experience as Mayor of Wasilla and its 10,000 inhabitants and later as Governor of Alaska for a couple of years is hardly the stuff of national rallies either.
This begs the practical question of just how the “Restoring Honor” rally was organised. Who reached out to those who travelled from all across the US? Who booked the hotels and sound systems? Who printed the badges and organised the security? Since there was no seasoned organisational structure, that effort had to come from competent professionals. Such a use of professionals leads to the twin questions of who paid and why?
Dig a little and you find resources and ideas flowing from bodies such as the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, Patients United Now, the Institute for Justice, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Bill of Rights Institute, the Independent Women’s Forum, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Virginia, the Heritage Foundation, the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment, and many others.
The Texas branch of Americans for Prosperity gave its Blogger of the Year Award to a young woman named Sibyl West. She who, last June, described Obama as the “cokehead in chief” on her site.
A little further research into these bodies and their funding them and certain wealthy American family names start to regularly appear. The Olins, the Mellons, and most generously of all the Koch brothers, Charles (74) and David (72). The Koch conglomerate is involved in oil, chemicals, wood, paper and a host of other sectors and is, in the words of David Koch “the largest company that you’ve never heard of.” Their combined fortune of $35bn puts them in third place in the personal wealth stakes behind Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Forbes ranks Koch Industries as the second-largest private company in the USA.
As Jane Mayer explains in the current edition of the New Yorker* the Koch brothers have very quietly spent over $250 million on right wing political campaigns during the last ten years.
The Koch brothers are far from being novices, it’s just their approach and profile which has changed over the years. The then 39-year-old David Koch stood as the ultra-right Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1980 – running against Ronald Reagan from the right on a ticket with Ed Clark.
As a candidate there was no limit to the personal funds David Koch could commit to the campaign. Electoral observers believe his final bill was of the order of $2 million. The Libertarian Party achieved its best ever result in 1980 – just over one percent of the popular vote.
Accepting that they could not persuade US voters to support them, the brothers (along with many others) set out to change the parameters of US political debate. They poured hundreds of millions of dollars into think-tanks, foundations, research centres and amenable academics.
These were among the bodies which contributed so much to getting George W Bush into the White House for eight years. These are the bodies which are now very discreetly funding many of the local and state Tea Party initiatives.
No wonder Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod commented acerbically on “a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”
Knowing who has paid the piper often helps you understand the tune.
(a shorter version of this article appeared in The Irish Times on Monday September 13, 2010: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0913/1224278755542.html)
*http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer
