Is the Koch Family Warming to the Tea Partiers?

Some of the conservative movement’s most important financial backers may be adopting a more favorable view of the Tea Party.

The Washington Examiner’s Mark Tapscott has an important interview with Dr. Richard Fink, the President of the Charles G. Koch Foundation and the Vice-President of Koch Industries.

As the owners of the second largest privately-held company in the United States, the Koch brothers have spent much of their lives dedicated to the funding of free-market advocacy groups. So much of the existing right-of-center intellectual infrastructure can be traced back to the Kochs, which is why Tapscott’s interview with Fink is so important.

I conducted a similar interview with Fink just over two months ago, and it’s interesting to see the development of Koch thinking.

The first thing that caught my eye about the Tapscott-Fink interview was the change in tone towards the tea parties.

In my interview with Fink, I was surprised when he offered even tempered criticism of the tea parties. “Some of their worries are… more thoughtful, some of them are less thoughtful,” said Fink at the time. With very little prodding, Fink had tried to put definitive distance between Koch and the tea partiers:

We’ve been labeled tea party founders or funders – in fact, masterminds – but that’s not consistent with the facts… To my knowledge, we have not been approached for support by any of the newer ‘tea party’ or other grassroots groups that have sprung up around the country in the past year or so.

The approach is different now. When Tapscott asks about the funding of the tea parties, Fink is willing to concede more of a connection:

…If our work over the past 30 or 40 years has helped stimulate some of those citizens who are becoming more active, that’s great, but it’s a far cry from pulling strings.

Further, Fink offers unapologetic praise of the movement, something he seemed hesitant to do in his interview with me. In Tapscott, Fink is quoted:

It is a very positive development that so many citizens have chosen to express their concerns about government growth and overspending… Free societies depend on such dedicated efforts.

Just as surprising to me in our original interview was Fink’s willingness to condemn dogmatism. Puzzling, however, was his similar willingness to blast compromises and incrementalism as “slippery slopes”. It is clear that, in the two months since my interview with Fink, management in the Koch-linked groups are thinking about the causes of their weaknesses.

Indeed, Fink tells Tapscott of a term for the space between incrementalism and dogma: ‘principled entrepreneurship’:

To really solve problems, we must remain principled and pursue solutions that are well thought out and can be implemented. We call this principled entrepreneurship. The best approach is to stay true to our constitutional principles of liberty and personal responsibility while insisting on practical policy solutions.

It’s hard to understand what this means – if it means anything at all. But the new phrase represents progress in one of the most important families of funding for conservative groups; humility, reflection and development in a way that suggests writing theoretical papers may not be the most effective route for conservative change.

One could argue that I’m overzealously reading tea leaves.  But even slight changes in tone can mean a lot when it comes to Koch – my experience with them is that they are tremendously precise. As I pointed out in my original interview with Fink, the conditions for my discussion with them included a transcript which they supplemented with new quotes and were approved by one of the Koch brothers themselves.

As a final note of commentary: it is troubling, if true, that the Koch family seems to be moderating their cautious stance towards the tea parties. Fink told me in May that a likely cause for their present quagmire is their focus on theory over practice:

I think one of our big failings is that those of us coming from universities and think tanks are usually much better at theory than practice… Proposing solutions that aren’t realistic or implementable or haven’t been thought through fully can cause those proposals to do more harm than good.

Tea partiers, for all their energy and noble intentions, don’t hold the realistic solutions that Fink and the Koch groups seek. Tea parties are for protest. The Koch groups should turn to those with practical experience: independent-thinking Congressmen like Bob Inglis, staffers with knowledge of the intricacies of government, and public policy thinkers who have personal experience with getting legislation passed.

Add me on twitter: www.twitter.com/timkmak