Charles Koch took an important step in admitting that his decades of funding hyperpartisan Republican causes helped lead to the polarization we’re seeing today in American society.
“We’ve got people so hyped on politics now that it seems like they think that’s all there is,” Koch told The Washington Post. “You know, ‘If the other side wins, it’ll ruin the country and destroy us forever.’ Both sides are saying that, and feel that, and think this is the most important thing. Well, it is important, but it isn’t going to make any difference unless we all learn to work together and help each other and move toward a society of equal rights and mutual benefit.”
Koch, 85, set a good example by admitting that he “screwed up by being partisan,” and he began to make amends this year by immediately acknowledging President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory and sending his congratulations to Biden.
While it was a commendable first step, in today’s climate where democracy itself is under attack, Koch and other GOP megadonors need to go much further.
If the Republican Party is to be saved from slithering further into a neo-fascist gutter, it is imperative for Republican donors to demand a return to regular order, and for the GOP to stop the lunacy spawned by President Donald Trump.
Too many of the GOP’s elected leaders have proven willing to vandalize our democracy. Worse, by their silence, GOP leadership has offered comfort as their militarized shock troops threaten anyone who simply tells the truth about the election. They have turned on their own in state after state. They have offered conspiratorial fictions on behalf of their crybaby leader to overturn his decisive loss. On Thursday, the newest evidence arrived when more than half of the Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives signed onto Texas’ bogus Supreme Court challenge of the 2020 election results.
Therefore, it falls to the all-powerful donors to step up, slap their party into line and issue an ultimatum: Honor democracy and stop the threats of domestic violence, or the GOP money spigot will stop.
Koch provided a baby step by publicly baring his regrets, but now he needs to follow it with action. Koch needs to encourage his fellow billionaires — all of whom made their fortunes within a more orderly and sane America, benefiting from a system now being torn down by their minions — to join him in telling the GOP leadership that their supply of cash is over until they rush back toward the center and denounce the extremism that has infected their party.
Today’s GOP universe has morphed into something no traditional Republican would countenance. There is open talk of civic violence, even civil war, extreme racism and anti-Semitism, for heaven’s sake. GOP elected leaders are too spineless to take action. Thus, it’s imperative that Republican donors, including several extremely prominent donors here in Las Vegas, openly demand that their party return to sanity and traditional values. The Mitch McConnells of the GOP are far past caring about the public interest — if they did, we’d have COVID-19 stimulus in the mail — and they only respond only to their donors’ demands.
If donors demand a return to normalcy in the GOP, it will happen. If they remain silent, they are endorsing the shredding of American way of life. Now is the time to stand for something meaningful: our American democracy.
The modern GOP is rapidly becoming a coalition of violent right-wing militias — most grotesquely anti-Semitic and flagrant racists — as well as outright fascists like the Proud Boys, domestic terrorists like the Boogaloo Bois, white supremacists and frothing conspiracy nutjobs like QAnon supporters. They’re fed by a conspiracy-drunk far-right media universe almost completely unmoored from facts.
The contemporary GOP — funded by the megadonors — provides an umbrella under which we find the same Nazis who recently plastered an Anne Frank memorial with swastikas and are leaving signs on Jewish leaders’ houses announcing “your local Nazis have visited you.” We find people issuing death threats to election workers, plots to take over entire statehouses and murder legislators, including sexualized threats to women officials, and issuing calls for street-level violence to help Trump steal the election. We find radicals actively working to spark a civil war and plotting to attack law enforcement officers. We find elected leaders joining Trump’s attack on democracy by supporting his false claims of widespread vote rigging, and refusing to quell the threat of violence among his supporters. And we find individuals like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis apparently using the power of government to retaliate against dissent to the GOP, as suggested by the recent police raid on the home of health data scientist and DeSantis critic Rebekah Jones.
Enough. Without action by Koch and others, this nation will spend the next decade fighting a racist neo-fascist insurgency under the auspices of a formerly great political party.
When you see Republican leadership groveling and engaging in flagrant assaults on democracy — including Nevadans like Adam Laxalt — the only force in the country that can put a decisive end to this is the Republican donor class.
The clock is ticking and history will remember who stood up for the American way and who stood by writing checks while incipient domestic terrorists began organizing.
We plead with GOP donors to follow Koch’s lead by realizing they’ve helped unleash forces that are destroying the country, and resolve to take steps to stop the chaos. History calls for heroes now before this goes too far. Being a passive witness is a kind of sin if you can take steps to stop the degradation of this country.