As I am finding through my immersion in Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, one of the things that the Koch brothers recognized (much as Naomi Klein did in The Shock Doctrine (was that there was or is no way that their Neo-Liberal agenda could be forwarded by democratic means. There was/is simply no way you could convince the majority of the voter pool that the best way to go is to give the 1% of our population everything they want. Therefore, as David Koch argued, the only way to go about it is to manipulate the “rules of the game” and exploit the technology available to them via their financial resources and the think tanks those resources created.
(And yes: these people are that dangerous, far more so than the what-about-ism aimed at the left. I mean how much influence does PETA and Vegan societies really have on our political process?)
The thing we have to understand here, though, is that the technology Koch is talking about also involves the language games at work in our political discourses. It basically comes down to doxa or socially programmed responses to socially programmed cues. Take, for instance, the term “liberty”. Sounds liberal and reasonable enough; right? However, when this term is used by the right, what it almost always means is the liberty to exploit others for their own gain. In fact, this very term was used in the Antebellum south by John C. Calhoun to defend the rights of plantation owners to have slaves. And in the context of modern Capitalism, it is used to maintain the right of oligarchs to keep accumulating wealth and power, even if it comes at the expense of the liberty of others.
And I bring this up because I think it about time for Democrats to start taking a few pointers from the right-wing playbook and start taking back a few of the terms they claim to have some monopoly on –including those that the right shamelessly stole from progressives in the first place. They need to make clear that the right does NOT have a monopoly on terms like “liberty” or even “self determinism”. In fact, the right doesn’t even have respectable claim to a respect for market forces. We all know that the market economy can be a useful tool. But that’s the difference: we see it as a tool whereas the right sees it as some kind of religion or grand narrative.