Recent debates over bans on critical race theory in schools point to growing divisions between the Koch political network and the conservative movement.
Recent debates over bans on critical race theory in schools point to growing divisions between the Koch political network and the conservative movement.
A n Associated Press report this week on the Koch network’s opposition to anti–critical race theory (CRT) laws highlights the latest flash point in long-running tensions between the libertarian mega-donors and cultural conservatives. The AP’s Thomas Beaumont writes:
Leaders in the network built by the billionaire Koch family say they oppose government bans over teaching about race and history in schools. While they note they don’t agree with the ideas at the center of the fight, they argue the government bans, now enacted in 11 states, stifle debate essential to democracy.
“Using government to ban ideas, even those we disagree with, is also counter to core American principles — the principles that help drive social progress,” said Evan Feinberg, executive director of the Koch-affiliated Stand Together Foundation.
That argument — that state legislatures’ restricting the teaching of CRT in public schools is tantamount to “using the government to ban ideas,” which is counter to “the principles that help drive social progress” — gets to the essence of the ongoing friction in the Koch empire’s relationship with the conservative movement.
The expansive network of foundations and advocacy groups founded by Charles Koch and the late David Koch has been almost exclusively associated with the Republican Party since the two Kansas-based oil and chemicals magnates first became involved in politics in the 1980s. But in recent years, the GOP’s increased emphasis on culture-war issues — and its internal turmoil over the proper approach to economic ones — has frayed this decades-long friendship.
The Koch network — which includes influential think tanks such as the Cato Institute and advocacy groups like Americans for Prosperity — has long advocated a kind of business-friendly libertarianism that is increasingly at odds with the priorities and worldview of some on the cultural right. On social issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion, David Koch was outspokenly liberal, whereas Charles has been silent; on immigration and crime, respectively, they have favored leniency and the rollback of certain tough-on-crime laws. And now, as Republican-controlled state legislatures begin to take a more interventionist line on the teaching of radical ideologies like CRT in K–12 classrooms, prominent Koch groups such as Stand Together and the Charles Koch Foundation have broken with their former allies once again.
This is not to say that groups like Stand Together are in favor of CRT; by all accounts, they are decidedly not. “CRT is an academic framework that is at odds with America’s founding ideal of equal rights, where all people are treated equally,” a spokesperson for the group told National Review in a written statement. “We should strive to more fully live up to this ideal, not double down on its violation.” But the network’s subsequent divergence of opinion on legislative solutions — “despite our disagreement with CRT, we don’t support efforts to ban its teaching,” Stand Together’s statement explains — exposes the limits of its relationship with traditional conservatives. For many of those on the right who are concerned about issues such as mass immigration, rapid cultural liberalization, and radicalism in public education, the influence of the Koch network and other powerful business interests can be seen as an obstacle.
The Koch ecosystem’s opposition to anti-CRT laws “is in line with the network’s long-held libertarian streak,” the AP reports. But from a traditional conservative standpoint, it is also indicative of the inherent problems in the worldview that the network professes. The argument that CRT laws are “government bans” misunderstands the nature of public education, particularly in monopolistic K–12 schools, which are government institutions themselves. Changes in curricular requirements in government-run schools are hardly government “bans”; they do not expand state power into citizens’ private lives in any substantive way at all. Public-school teachers are government employees, not private citizens, and what they do and do not teach is implicitly endorsed by taxpayer dollars. To argue that their curricular choices are immune from legislative oversight is to argue that taxpayers should not have a say in how their money is spent.
More fundamentally, the idea that interventions in publicly funded curricula “threaten academic freedom” and “amount to heavy-handed overreach that will discourage the open educational environment they claim to champion,” as Charlie Ruger, the Charles Koch Foundation’s vice president of philanthropy, argued in RealClearEducation back in May, is based on a distinctly modern value-neutral conception of liberal learning that is at odds with its traditional precursor. The Millsian liberal idea of education as an open “marketplace of ideas” — a radical and directionless skepticism rather than a means to better understand a set of preexistent and a priori truths — is a long-standing defect in certain corners of the conservative movement. William F. Buckley’s first book, God and Man at Yale, identified this problem all the way back in 1951:
I hasten to dissociate myself from the school of thought, largely staffed by conservatives, that believes teachers ought to be “at all times neutral.” Where values are concerned, effective teaching is difficult and stilted, if not impossible, in the context of neutrality; and further, I believe such a policy to be a lazy denial of educational responsibility.
Buckley’s view on the matter was echoed by many of the founding fathers of modern conservatism. Willmoore Kendall, Buckley’s mentor and the editor of God and Man at Yale, criticized John Stuart Mill’s value-neutrality as “shot through and through with the egalitarian overtones of the French Revolution, which are as different from the measured aristocratic overtones of the pursuit of truth by discussion, as understood by the tradition Mill was attacking, as philosophy is different from phosphorus.” Russell Kirk wrote that teachers had an obligation to “the moral order which transcends the foibles of human reason” and that “academic freedom may properly be restrained, in some degree, by the right of any society to ensure its own preservation.”
Still, the misguided view of education underlying the Koch network’s opposition to anti-CRT legislation persists: The perception that restrictions on teaching the ideology “raise serious questions about academic freedom,” as Ruger argued in a letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education, seems to be the central objection cited by the numerous Koch groups that have criticized the red-state laws. But this is a radical departure from the traditional conservative view of the purpose and scope of free inquiry.
To be charitable, at least some of the Koch network’s stance on this issue could be traced back to the brothers’ principled dislike of public schools altogether. It is to their great credit that many Koch-backed organizations routinely advocate for school choice and other measures to decentralize control of American education and hand power back to parents. Stand Together’s spokesman tells National Review, “We don’t support top-down mandates on curriculum, whether that’s censoring the teaching of concepts like CRT or mandating how those ideas are taught. These efforts replace local control with state overreach.”
However the Koch-backed groups make their case, the deeper ideological problems underlying their opposition to anti-CRT legislation will likely continue to widen the divisions between their coalition and the conservative movement. In some ways, that is a healthy development: The Koch network’s commitment to strict moral value-neutrality in policy-making is at odds with the vision of ordered liberty advanced by traditional conservatives. The political behemoth that the Koch brothers built has done immeasurable good in many areas, and the Right owes them sincere gratitude for those achievements. It even arguably anticipated the skepticism of foreign intervention increasingly popular on the right today. American conservatism, uniquely dedicated as it is to the preservation of political liberty, will continue to align with Koch-backed advocacy on issues ranging from school choice to gun rights to tax reform and beyond. But this is an alignment on policy; it should not be mistaken for agreement on first principles.