I’ve been reading Dark Money, an excellent book by the New Yorker writer Jane Meyer on how the Koch brothers built a political machine (memorably dubbed the Kochtopus) that rivals the Republican Party in power and influence. She describes how the Kochs and their ideological allies established and supported academic centers, think tanks, “grassroots” groups (which were little more than corporate fronts) and media organizations to advance their goal of a smaller government.
A major point of her critique of the Kochs and their friends is that they weaponized philanthropy and took advantage of non-profit tax provisions to support an agenda that, however rooted in idealistic vision of libertarianism it might be, mainly benefited the bottom line of their companies.
As I read this, I started thinking about the Clintons and how they, similarly, have built a sprawling network to support their endeavors.
It starts with the Clinton Family Foundation, the nonprofit entity that controls the Clinton fortune. Last year, according to tax forms released by the Clintons, Hillary and Bill paid $1 million into their own foundation. This, as Mayer observes, is a common tactic: millionaires frequently put their money into tax-exempt or –reduced vehicles controlled by their families.
And from there, money gets shuttled to the Hillary, Bill and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, another nonprofit that, according to its mission statement, works to “improve global health and wellness, increase opportunity for girls and women, reduce childhood obesity, create economic opportunity and growth, and help communities address the effects of climate change.” The foundation has received somewhere between $5 million and $10 million from the family’s nonprofit. (As a 501c(3) nonprofit, the foundation does not have to publish its donors’ exact contributions.)
Again, this arrangement is not unusual, nor is it inherently wrong. But it mirrors what happens among right-wing millionaires, who establish a family foundation (say, the Lynne and Harry Bradley Foundation), which gives them significant tax write-offs, and use it to fund their pet projects (in this case, the laughably named Philanthropy Roundtable, a group of oligarchs who meet to discuss best practices for screwing the poor).
We can criticize the Clinton Foundation for its incestuous tendencies and the conflicts of interest that it mires its principals in – and those criticisms are valid. But more sinister, in my view, is the larger network that has sprung up around the Clintons, employing partisans, benefactors and beneficiaries and policing the outer edge of left-wing thinking.
The Clinton network mirrors that of the Koch brothers, who set out to create a pipeline of conservative ideas. And while the Koch network aims to push the Republican Party to the right, by redefining the limits of conservatism, the Clinton network polices the left, drawing clear lines showing what will and won’t be allowed in liberal thought.
Take the Center for American Progress (CAP), for example. Its president is Neera Tanden, formerly of the Bill Clinton administration and Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign and frequently mentioned as a possible chief of staff for Hillary’s administration. While the center is one of the few liberal think tanks with national prominence, it is hardly a hotbed of leftist thinking. In a recent report titled “After Liberation,” for example, it described the Iraq War as “the U.S. investment in military operations in Iraq,” a delightfully Orwellian phrase that transforms our disastrous invasion from a horrendously reckless fiasco to a hedge fund portfolio that needs a bit of time before it pays dividends.
Indeed, the worldview of CAP is best described as distinctly Hillarian, emphasizing complicated and targeted redistribution policies at home – think Earned Income Tax Credits – and what could euphemistically be called a “robust American presence” around the world.
And then there’s David Brock, the Tony Soprano of liberal politics, an attack dog whose one purpose in life is to promote the Clintons. Brock began his professional career as a right-wing sleazebag. His chief accomplishment in that role was smearing Anita Hill, who had accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” Brock experienced a conversion sometime in the late 1990s, and took to liberal politics with abandon.
But like any convert, he changed only the content of his beliefs, not the nature with which he propagated them. At the risk of engaging in Aggravated Psychoanalysis, I’ll say that Brock’s main goal is not a more just, equal society for all but rather more power for himself.
He controls an astonishingly powerful section of the liberal political machine. He’s the founder of Media Matters for America, a web site chiefly devoted to mocking right-wing media commentators who have leaped off the deep end. He was a director of Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC, until he resigned in February 2015. (In a resignation letter hilarious for its lack of self-awareness, he accused Priorities of engaging in “the kind of dirty trick I’ve witnessed in the right-wing and would not tolerate then.”) He’s the founder of American Bridge, a super PAC that does opposition research. He founded and continues to lead Correct the Record, a super PAC that, despite regulations prohibiting PACs from coordinating with the campaigns they support, directly works with the Clinton campaign. (It claims the right to do so by arguing that it works only online, a specious argument that probably would be dismissed immediately by the FEC if the FEC weren’t an irrelevant agency riven by partisan divides that makes Congress look functional by comparison.)
Brock has his fingers in the most important political pies on the left, but his influence goes beyond elections. In 2014, Brock was elected chairman of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit that tracks corruption in Congress. Once he got there, CREW’s work began to wane. Through 2013, it published a yearly report naming the most corrupt members of Congress; it hasn’t released one since then. The number of lawsuits it files has dramatically declined, from an average of eight per year before his arrival to an average of two in the years since he took over. And its targets have become increasingly partisan, as it ignores Democratic corruption and pursues Republicans. Tellingly, the center failed to follow up on a petition it had filed for information about Hillary Clinton’s emails, even after the Office of Inspector General had concluded that the petition had been improperly denied.
CREW is only one of several ethics watchdogs in Washington, but it was, at one point, an important one, skewering both Democrats and Republicans for failing to live up to their public responsibility. It is now little more than an arm of the Clinton campaign and will, undoubtedly, be a reliable cheerleader of a Clinton administration.
Brock’s purchase of Blue Nation Review, a liberal news outlet, has produced some unintentionally funny results. Brock incorporated a media company in November 2015 that soon afterwards bought an 80 percent stake in BNR, “a place where progressives can debate where we want to be as a movement,” according to its original mission statement. (That its mission now is to be a “media platform Democrats trust” is telling.) The new management fired most of its staff and set off on a crusade against Bernie Sanders, whom it had been generally positive toward. It now regularly hits the publish button on such paragons of pure Clinton sycophancy as “CHEERS: I Think Hillary Would Have a Beer With Me.”
Its editorial staff is headed up by Peter Daou, a veteran of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign and also of a right-wing Lebanese death squad (I’m not making this up), and Melissa McEwan, a self-identified misandrist with such poor reasoning skills that she once wrote a column based on the difference between a lie and a false statement. She apparently does not own a thesaurus.
This is not to mention the universe of people with financial ties to the Clintons who are frequently trotted out on television to defend Hillary Clinton.
The Clintons and those supporting her have built a sprawling network that ranges from think tanks to legal groups to media outlets, all focused, laser-like, on defending Hillary and propagating her worldview. If you squint, it all begins to look like those Koch meetings that we on the left are so fond of sneering at.
Of course, there are many differences between the Kochs and the Clintons. For one, the Kochs have spent their fortune in aid of a singular ideological goal – shrinking the government, when not shutting it down altogether. The Clintons, on the other hand, are skilled politicians exactly because their worldview is so muddy. If one were pressed, one could say that the Clintons believe in both governmental controls on the economy and free markets, diplomacy and military might. It’s the ideological equivalent of a Rorschach test – any interpretation of it is correct.
For another, the Brocktopus is far less effective, comprehensive and methodical than anything devised by the Kochs. This may be a function of the Clintons’ aggressive centrism – no one wants to fund think tanks devoted to the status quo or to enroll in a college center that teaches a diffuse and shifting ideology. More than that, the Clintons have never seemed all that preoccupied with victory for their vision, whatever that might be. In the 1990s, Bill was more than willing to throw his supporters under the bus. We remember the Sista Souljah moment, but it went beyond the humiliation of Jesse Jackson at that Rainbow Coalition dinner in 1992. He ignored labor’s objections when he signed NAFTA and negotiated America’s role in the World Trade Organization; he spat in the face of poverty advocates by campaigning on a promise to end welfare as we knew it; he turned his back on the gay community by signing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act.
Hillary, this time around, is proudly touting endorsements from Republicans like John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence under George W. Bush, strongly undermining any claim she might make to solicitude for civil liberties.
This is all to say that ideological purity has no place in the equation for the Clintons or in the network supporting them. Unlike the Kochtopus, the Brocktopus has no prey.
But it’s worth thinking about the consequences of a network, responsive only to the Clintons but claiming to represent the left, that is under control of so few people with such great power to inform discourse about liberal politics. Throughout the Democratic primary, we leftists had a serious debate about what constitutes progressive thought. But a group of very powerful people had a ready answer – it was whatever the Clintons said was progressive. And they are the people who write the reports, get invited on to CNN, decide which ethics complaints to file against which congressmen and publish the articles and op-eds that claim to represent progressive thought.
This is a problem for which I have no solution, but it’s one that we all should keep in mind as we move closer to an administration controlled by these people.