The Weekly Sift

Powerful forces aligned behind Dave Brat and against Eric Cantor

When previously unknown Dave Brat beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary Tuesday, pundits struggled in vain to find appropriate historical parallels. In America, majority leaders just do not lose primaries … until now.

Since then, the conventional-wisdom storyline has been David vs. Goliath: A grass-roots candidate with virtually no resources overthrew one of the most powerful insiders in the country. But that’s not exactly true; the more accurate story is that one branch of the Billionaire Party had an unexpected victory over the other branch.

Let’s start with the David. The quick description says Brat is an economics professor from Randolph Macon College in Ashland, VA. That’s true, but there’s more to that story. Brat is director of the BB&T Moral Foundations of Capitalism Program at RMC, one of those ethically suspect programs where billionaires pay a university to teach a particular point of view; in this case, that free-market capitalism is morally superior to all other systems.

Probably, Brat genuinely believes this Randish philosophy. And propagandizing students with his personal opinions makes Brat no worse than professors of many other viewpoints. But unlike those other professors, Brat is paid not to change his mind. He may be a genuine proselyte, but he’s also a hired shill.

Other shills hired by the same people are the stars of right-wing talk radio. As Politico has reported, talk radio runs on a political version of payola:

A POLITICO review of filings with the Internal Revenue Service and Federal Election Commission, as well as interviews and reviews of radio shows, found that conservative groups spent nearly $22 million to broker and pay for involved advertising relationships known as sponsorships with a handful of influential talkers including [Glenn] Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh between the first talk radio deals in 2008 and the end of 2012. Since then, the sponsorship deals have grown more lucrative and tea party-oriented, with legacy groups like The Heritage Foundation ending their sponsorships and groups like the Tea Party Patriots placing big ad buys.

Dick Armey has described the system — known as “embedded media”– more bluntly:

The arrangement was simply FreedomWorks paid Glenn Beck money and Glenn Beck said nice things about FreedomWorks on the air.

Brat spent only $200K or so on his campaign (compared with $5 million by Cantor). But (in what the NYT calls “a unique and potent alignment of influential voices in conservative media”) he got the kind of support money supposedly can’t buy from talk-radio personalities like Ingraham and Levin. Not only did they talk him up regularly on their shows (and dis Cantor), but Ingraham lent her star-power to a Brat rally. Thom Hartmann refers to this arrangement as a “dark money machine” and says:

Once you’ve realized that David Brat wasn’t just some random college professor but was actually the hand-picked candidate of the libertarian billionaire class and its army of talk radio hosts, it’s easy to see another one of the major reasons Eric Cantor lost. We’re living in a brave new world of dark money politics, and in this day and age, doing what Eric Cantor did – hanging out with the Chamber of Commerce, K Street, and Wall Street – only gets you so far. If you want to win these days, you need to win the support of the Kochs, their libertarian billionaire friends, and their allies in the talk radio world.

So while Cantor spent more-or-less transparently — receiving contributions and then buying ads — money got spent invisibly around Brat: The Koch-supported candidate got pushed by talk radio personalities who have sweetheart deals with Koch-funded groups.

That’s not exactly grass roots.

The other misperception about the Brat/Cantor race is that it was all about immigration, where (despite blocking House consideration of the bipartisan Senate immigration bill) Cantor was painted as pro-amnesty. That dynamic was certainly part of the campaign, but if you have a half-hour to burn, it’s worth listening to Brat’s stump speech.

Immigration certainly comes up, along with the I-can’t-believe-he’s-an-economist explanation that cheap labor from immigrants is to blame for the slow growth in jobs. (Cheap unskilled immigrant labor might lower the wages of unskilled jobs, but basic supply-and-demand says that lowering wages would increase the number of such jobs. Since the number of people employed only recently got back to pre-recession levels, immigrant competition can’t be the main reason the job market is so tough.) But Brat’s indictment of Cantor runs much deeper: He’s the Chamber-of-Commerce candidate, while Brat is running against TARP and bailouts and all the other ways that government fixes the game in favor of big business.

If he’s elected, we’ll see if anything comes from that populist rhetoric, or if Brat only implements the cut-spending-on-the-poor and let-corporations-pollute aspects of Randism.

Thomas Frank, whose What’s the Matter With Kansas? detailed the conservative bait-and-switch between populist social-issue rhetoric and cut-taxes-on-the-rich votes in Congress, is skeptical. Yesterday in Salon, he wrote:

The clash of idealism and sellout are how conservatives always perceive their movement, and what happened to Eric Cantor is a slightly more spectacular version of what often happens to GOP brass. That right-wing leaders are seduced by Washington D.C., and that they will inevitably betray the market-minded rank-and-file, are fixed ideas in the Republican mind, certainties as definite as are its convictions that tax cuts will cure any economic problem and that liberals are soft on whoever the national enemy happens to be.

Which is not to say that such betrayals don’t really happen. But Frank finds their inevitability not in universal human corruptibility, but in the fundamental tenets of conservatism itself: Anyone who believes the free market should control all aspects of life will eventually sell his vote to the highest bidder.

So the cycle goes on, uprising after uprising, an eternal populist revolt against leaders who never produce and problems that never get solved. Somehow, the free-market utopia that all the primary voters believe in never arrives, no matter how many privatizations and tax cuts the Republicans try. And so they seek out someone even purer, someone even more fanatical. They drag the country into another debt-ceiling fight, and this time, they say, they really mean it! But what never occurs to them is that maybe it’s their ideals themselves that are the problem.