Charles Koch and far-right "Leninism"

Political Research Associates has an excerpt from Nancy McLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (2017) about the infamous rightwing billionaire, Charles Koch, the Cato Institute, and the makings of a Right-Wing Empire.

She has this to say about his ideological perspective:

As Koch was building his company into the behemoth it is today, he never stopped reading. Among his favorite authors was Ludwig von Mises, who, like Ayn Rand, wrote of entrepreneurs with reverence, treating them as the greatest heroes in human history. That sense of intellectual and even ethical superiority to others may help explain why Charles Koch bypassed the also libertarian but more empirically and practically minded economist Milton Friedman to make common cause with the more uncompromising [rightwing economist] James Buchanan. Koch referred to Friedman and the rest of the post–Hayek Chicago school of economics he led, as well as to Alan Greenspan, as “sellouts to the system,” in the words of journalist Brian Doherty. Why? Because they sought “to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root.” They actually tried to help government deliver better results, which could only prolong the disease. Koch believed that only in its “radical, pure form,” without compromise, would the ideas “appeal to the brightest, most enthusiastic, most capable people.” (Is it any wonder, then, that his allies would now rather bring down the government than improve it?) [my emphasis]

Some people were no doubt surprised by Steve Bannon's description of himself as a Leninist. But it's not unusual in the far-right milieu for activists to style themselves as a mirror image of what they imagine the Enemy to be. Charles Koch's father Fred was a founding member of the John Birch Society. Who made a great deal of his fortune doing oil deals with the Soviet Union during Stalin's rule.

The JBS tried to style its operations around what they understood to be the Communist Party's mode of operation. Magnifying the tiny US Communist Party into a massively effective agent of Soviet influence that somehow dominated the federal government through both the Democratic and even Republican parties, they set out to imitate their image of the CP.

And since the JBS was the mothership of conspiratorial rightwing conspiracy theories in the US for decades after its inception. And so this practice of imagining themselves as a mirror image of what they consider to be the practice of the left was a common posture of far-right figures. This obviously offer a lot of opportunities for psychological projection on their part. Even today, it's worth keeping in mind that what Republicans are saying about the evil intentions and deeds of The Left may be a large clue to what the Republicans themselves are doing or intend to do.

McLean explains how a revered figure among the "paleocons," Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), who also indulged in "Leninist" posturing. And who much impressed Charles Koch:

It was Rothbard who explained to him how small numbers could effect big changes. Rothbard suggested that Koch study Lenin.

“I grew up in a Communist culture,” Rothbard later said of the extended “family, friends, [and] neighbors” in the New York City milieu he rebelled against. Even as he despised their goals, he took from their heated discussions in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his own wide reading in the original sources, a deep appreciation of the strategic and tactical genius of Vladimir Lenin, who led a revolution in a place where others said it simply could not be done. A champion of “uncompromising libertarianism,” Rothbard, like Lenin, believed that government was “our enemy.” He admired Lenin’s daring leadership, but most of all he saw that some of his techniques could serve a wholly opposite purpose: namely, to establish a kind of capitalism purer and less restrained than the world had ever known.

In 1976, over a weekend of discussion as Koch’s guest in Vail, Colorado, Rothbard explained to his host how a Lenin-like libertarian strategy might work. The Russian revolutionary had once said of the ranks of the revolutionary party, “Better fewer, but better.” To create a sound, disciplined movement, Rothbard explained, preparing a “cadre” must be the top priority. What his admiring biographer [Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com], a foot soldier himself, summed up as “the general flakiness and counterculturalism” of so many libertarians had had its day, Rothbard told Koch. The survivalist-like stocking up on beans and science fiction novels to last years of exile, with backpacks at the ready to rush for the hills if the statists came, the visions of colonizing remote islands or even of other planets: all that had to go. A new seriousness was needed. It was time for the revolutionary cause to orient itself to Middle America. [my emphasis]