Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is an extremely powerful organization in US politics—this is their self-description:
Americans for Prosperity is dedicated to the belief that every person has a unique set of gifts and the ability to contribute to society in their own way, an idea that has inspired progress since our country’s founding.
Driven by this belief, Americans for Prosperity engages in broad-based grassroots outreach to advocate for long-term solutions to the country’s biggest problems that prevent people from realizing their incredible potential—unsustainable government spending and debt, a broken immigration system, a rigged economy, and a host of other issues you can explore.
American for Prosperity activists engage friends and neighbors on key issues and encourage them to take an active role in advancing a free and open society, where every person can realize their American dream. We recruit and unite concerned individuals in all 50 states to advance policies that will help people improve their lives.
I want to talk to AFP, talk to progressives, and research two questions:
Why isn’t Dean Baker one of AFP’s favorite economists?
To what extent is AFP recognized to be a powerful ally of progressives on various issues?
Why isn’t Dean Baker one of AFP’s favorite economists? You can see in AFP’s self-description that I just quoted that AFP is interested in “unsustainable government spending and debt, a broken immigration system, a rigged economy”—the words “rigged economy” are right there in AFP’s self-description. And Baker’s free 2016 book is titled—of all things—Rigged:
I of course recognize that Baker wouldn’t be AFP’s ally on the issue of “unsustainable government spending and debt”, but you’d think that Baker and AFP would be allies on the issue of a rigged economy.
Go through Rigged and look at the policies that Baker proposes. Baker’s policies are free market policies—Baker is a free marketeer who goes up against the corporatists who want to keep things rigged in favor of the rich. And AFP and Baker should be allies in that fight, you’d think—I don’t see why Baker shouldn’t have major support from AFP in that battle.
To what extent is AFP recognized to be a powerful ally of progressives on various issues? Progressives definitely see AFP as a major opponent on the environment and on other things, but that doesn’t mean that AFP can’t be a powerful ally of progressives where there’s overlap.
Just consider criminal justice reform, immigration, and foreign policy. The AFP website says this about criminal justice reform:
One mistake should not determine the rest of a person’s life. Yet, for those exiting incarceration and reentering our communities, their past often prevents them from moving on and rehabilitating their lives.
To enact lasting criminal justice reform, lawmakers and other stakeholders in the justice system should work together and adopt recommendations that would give every American a shot at a second chance. Building on the success of the First Step Act, legislators can support policies that ensure that formerly incarcerated individuals who have earned their freedom are given the opportunity to find employment, housing, and health care.
Keeping our communities safe is the primary goal of our justice system. By ensuring that our returning citizens are set up for a successful reentry, we can help keep our communities safer.
And the AFP website says this about immigration:
U.S. immigration laws are outdated, ineffective, and unaccountable—resulting in a status quo that does not work for U.S. citizens or immigrants.
The partnership between immigrants and citizens is an essential part of the success of the United States.
That’s why Congress must act to fix our nation’s broken and outdated immigration system. The overwhelming majority of immigrants want to add value to our economy, communities, and culture. We should welcome them, while simultaneously ensuring those who would come to do us harm are prevented from doing so. We can have better immigration, a stronger economy, and safer communities.
And the AFP website says this about foreign policy:
One of the primary roles of government is to provide for a strong national defense. But that is only part of what good foreign policy should look like.
Our nation’s foreign policy should be characterized by a grand strategy of realism and restraint, free trade, and diplomacy; keeping our military out of endless entanglements around the world; and using military force only when a national interest is at risk.
When there is a legitimate threat to our country, lawmakers must be decisive in where the military is authorized to engaged. Our service members need and deserve clearly defined strategies and strong leadership to carry out their missions.
Charles Koch helped to create AFP, and he himself seems to have common cause with progressives on some issues. The Charles Koch Institute website says this about criminal justice reform:
The status quo in our criminal justice system is not working. An effective criminal justice system protects people and preserves public safety, respects human dignity, restores victims, removes barriers to opportunity for people with criminal records, and ensures equal justice for all under the law.
And on immigration, Koch wrote in a 2020 op-ed that:
Members of Congress from both parties have long sought to enact immigration reform, including the Gang of 12 in 2007, the Gang of 8 in 2013, and most recently, the Gang of 6 in 2018. While none of their proposals were perfect, they all would have made America’s immigration system more just and secure. But they all fell short.
Why can’t Congress reflect the will of the American people? Because the partisan extremes have drowned out the much larger and more sensible majority.
And on foreign policy, a 2019 NYT piece commented about the Charles Koch Foundation that:
When it comes to foreign policy, though, the agenda of the foundation—which supports education and research and constitutes a relatively small part of the Koch network—does not line up quite so neatly with partisan politics. In keeping with Charles Koch’s libertarian shrink-the-state imperative, the foundation has set out to bring an end to America’s age of endless wars and to reduce the nation’s military footprint around the world—a vision shared by many progressives, some of whom count themselves among the Koch grantees.
Why isn’t Dean Baker one of AFP’s favorite economists? To what extent is AFP recognized to be a powerful ally of progressives on various issues? I hope to find the answers to these two questions.
My own view is that you should work together with others where you can find common cause with them—my guess is that AFP and Charles Koch have the same view. There are of course fringe exceptions to the principle of cooperating where overlap exists—for example, everyone across the spectrum recognizes that people like neo-Nazis should probably never be worked with.
It might seem like the stuff of parody that Noam Chomsky, Dean Baker, and progressive activists would ever ally themselves with AFP. But consider how significant the issues that I’ve mentioned are—criminal justice reform and immigration and foreign policy are huge issues.
To be clear, there are extremely harsh criticisms of AFP—for example, a 2016 article concluded as follows:
The evidence we have presented here suggests that the Koch network is now sufficiently ramified and powerful to draw Republicans into policy stands at odds not only with popular views but also with certain business preferences. With massive resources and a full array of political capacities, the Koch network of the 2000s has set up shop on the GOP right and become a powerful shaper of the careers of party operatives and the agendas of Republican politics. Arguably, Koch network pressures and inducements have so effectively influenced GOP politicians that many of them end up vulnerable to populist defections from voters who dissent from or don’t care about ultra-free-market orthodoxies on trade or immigration or slashing elderly entitlements. In the 2016 Republican primaries, Donald Trump was able to maneuver successfully in the yawning gap between the priorities of most voters (including many Republicans and Independents) and the Koch economic orthodoxies embraced by the GOP establishment.
However, we want to be precise about what we are (and are not) arguing here. Although the gap between Koch network goals and the preferences of most Americans is enormous, we do not want to overstate tensions between Koch network priorities and the policy goals of corporate America, particularly as expressed in recent times by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Legislative Exchange Council in the states. Because Koch and corporate priorities are largely aligned on matters such as curbing labor unions, reducing taxes and social spending, and weakening government regulation, mainstream business lobbies such as the national and state Chambers of Commerce are very unlikely to oppose Koch-backed Republicans in most elections; and Koch groups will continue to ally with corporate organizations in potent campaigns to weaken government as an agent of inclusive economic growth.
In fact, the reinforcing alignment between business associations and far-right ideological groups like the Koch network may help to explain many of the divergences between public policy outcomes and the preferences of most Americans documented recently in the research of Larry Bartels, Martin Gilens, and Benjamin Page. In important policy realms, these scholars and others have shown the significant divides between what most American voters want and what government does (or does not) do. Put simply, when Koch organizations, the national Chamber of Commerce, and an array of other ideological and corporate groups call in one loud voice for government cutbacks, upward-tilted tax reductions, and anti-union measures, virtually all of today’s Republicans do their bidding despite what most Americans say they prefer.
As we have spelled out empirically, the Koch network possesses greater clout and a much stronger ideological backbone than most of the groups that ruled the GOP-conservative roost as recently as 2000; and the contemporary Koch operation has put in place a parallel federation that can discipline and leverage Republican politicians across multiple levels of government. When it comes to government’s role in the economy, however, the overall U.S. conservative agenda has only evolved, not changed. The Koch network brings new capabilities and ideological extremism to a long-running class war from above. Battling Democrats and liberals across all levels of government between as well as during elections, the Koch network, spearheaded by Americans for Prosperity, aims to complete the job started and furthered by Americans for Tax Reform, the Club for Growth, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In some policy fights, the Koch network may flex its muscles against business allies. But for the most part, the network just strengthens the ability of right-wing corporate and ideological elites to steer American democracy away from the wants and needs of most citizens.
(Note: I added hyperlinks to the Chomsky quotations below.)
My guess is that Noam Chomsky would agree with my principle of cooperation and with my idea that AFP should be worked with whenever there’s overlap—Chomsky is probably the harshest critic of AFP in the entire world, so the fact that he would probably agree with me on this tells you something interesting.
In 2020, Chomsky was asked to elaborate on his statement that the Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history—in his answer, Chomsky said that the GOP blocked progress on climate during the Paris negotiations; that the GOP also tried to “prevent anything from happening” at COP25; that the GOP is “the only major party in the world that is refusing to take steps to deal with this urgent crisis”; and that the GOP is “dedicated—openly and publicly—to trying to maximize the threat, to having the maximum possible use of fossil fuels, to cutting back on even domestic regulations just for the benefit of the population of the United States”.
As an example of “cutting back on even domestic regulations”, Chomsky brought up Donald Trump’s executive order to “to essentially dismantle the major environmental protection legislation that goes back 50 years to Richard Nixon that monitors and controls poisonous substances going into the water supply—many other such conditions”. Chomsky said that the “idea is to maximize the coming destruction and to harm the population of the United States as much as possible” and added: “Sounds strong? Just take a look at the legislation.”
Chomsky then brought up a Trump administration document that predicted cataclysmic global warming and still concluded that the US shouldn’t implement any further restrictions on vehicle emissions—Chomsky said about this document:
They don’t give the reasoning, but I guess you can imagine it: “We’re going off the cliff anyway, so why not have a good time?” I can’t think of another interpretation.
If you can find a document like that in history, I’d be interested in seeing it. What comes to mind maybe is the Wannsee Declaration of Nazi Germany—1942—deciding to murder all the Jews and kill 30 million Slavs. Pretty awful. But not saying “Let’s destroy all of organized human life on Earth”, which is what they’re saying.
Chomsky then discussed the indescribable horror and suffering and disruption that countries like India face:
You have to remember we’re coming pretty close to a level of global warming of about 125,000 years ago when sea levels were about 6 to 9 meters higher than they are today—try to imagine a world in which that’s the case. Let alone vast acceleration of what’s going on: in Australia and in Brazil, huge droughts that are causing enormous problems all over the world; in India, temperatures reaching 50 degrees centigrade last summer in Rajasthan. Think what this means for much of the world—there’s just no words to capture it.
Chomsky concluded:
So it is the most dangerous organization in human history—that’s a pretty credible statement.
And Chomsky then discussed AFP’s role in these horrors:
It’s kind of interesting to see how this happened—we know a lot about it. You go back 10 years—2008. The Republican Party was beginning to move towards steps to try to deal somehow with global warming—they were toying with a carbon tax, cap-and-trade, and so on. John McCain ran for the presidency on the Republican ticket in 2008—part of his platform was efforts to deal with the threat of global warming.
What happened? The Koch brothers—huge energy corporation, who’d been working very hard to try to get the Republican Party to be denialist—went into high gear. They launched a juggernaut, under the leadership of David Koch—recently deceased—bribing Senators, intimidating them, developing fake grassroots organizations which would knock on doors. Huge lobbying campaign. They turned the party around—that was enough to turn the entire party into basically denialists.
And despite his extremely harsh criticisms of AFP, Chomsky would probably agree with my idea that progressives should work together with AFP. So I hope that my piece here will open up an interesting discussion about potential cooperation between progressives and AFP.