Call it what it is dammit -- The Koch Party!!

Jeet Heer writes in a guest column for The Globe and Mail:

As hard-core libertarians who oppose most government social policy, the brothers Koch have given tens of millions of dollars over the years to right-wing think tanks and political-action groups. Their largesse has been instrumental in turning the Tea Party movement into a force in U.S. political life. An adviser to Barack Obama has described it as “a grassroots citizens' movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”

The idea of populist billionaires seems, on its face, absurd. The original U.S. populist movement arose in the late 19th century in opposition to big business, especially banks and railways, to argue for greater communal control of key economic decisions. This is exactly the tradition the Kochs have spent a lifetime fighting, spending a king's ransom.

There are two ways to think about their plutocratic populism. One is to see it simply as a well-executed con game: Using shell organizations and slippery rhetoric, the Kochs have duped many ordinary Americans into thinking that they are fighting powerful vested interests when the result will allow big business to be further entrenched. This is the implicit thinking governing Ms. Mayer's article and there is truth to it.

But it doesn't do justice to the emotional power of the Kochs' pitch. Despite its seeming absurdity, right-wing populism is a brand that has been marketed successfully for nearly 80 years. So we might want to ask why plutocrats have been allowed to style themselves as avatars for the common man and woman.

The original plutocratic populist was William Randolph Hearst, the great pioneer of tabloid journalism whose newspapers were once a byword for sensationalism.