The Political is Personal: Authoritarianism and Sadism are Learned at Home

Family plays a massive role in who we are and what we become. We flourish when we are loved and cherished by our caregivers, and we are emotionally injured when we are abandoned, neglected, or maltreated. At home, we learn to either value and empathize with other people or treat them as if they are merely objects standing in the way of our own gratification.

When family life goes awry, it can result in destructive fallout in which one makes other people pay for one’s pain in the quest to get what one emotionally needs or forge character and deepen one’s empathy and compassion. Politicians and ordinary citizens are prey to the same familial influences and pressures. Politics is more personal than we realize. Because most people—from pundits to ordinary citizens—all too often approach politics consciously and cognitively, the hidden emotional forces that shape it are all too often minimized. Politics, like history, also reflects the unconscious feelings of the people involved—leaders and citizens.

How This Applies to the Koch Brothers

Much of my understanding of the Koch brothers’ childhood and family dynamics and their implications for a psychohistorical perspective on their political viewpoints and actions is based on Jane Mayer’s (2016) invaluable research in Dark Money and Clayton Coppin’s (2003) unpublished Stealth, which includes interviews with the Koch brothers and their friends, and it is quoted in Mayer.

“There’s class warfare all right,” Warren Buffett aptly notes, “[b]ut it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning” (quoted in Mayer, 2016, p. 331). The Koch brothers have been at the center of a vast network of plutocrats, Right-wing media moguls, conservative elected officials, and political operatives who have been architects of a nearly five-decade clandestine campaign for “limited government” designed to dismantle the state and remake American society in their own undemocratic, antigovernment, libertarian image. Koch believes that government is our enemy and desires capitalism unhampered by any restrictions. “Our movement must destroy the prevalent statist paradigm” (quoted in Mayer, 2016, p. 66), Charles Koch wrote in August 1978.

The members of Koch’s stealth crusade believe that government is the disease—a threat to liberty and prosperity because it can

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tax, force a person to purchase health insurance, regulate industry, and protect the environment, as well as hold big corporations financially accountable—and that they are the cure. (The fact that auto deaths per mile driven and teenage smoking have plunged because of government oversight doesn’t fit their ideology or moral calculus. Nor does the equally inconvenient truth that Love Canal in upstate New York and the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in West Virginia occurred when regulations were absent.)

Charles and his now late brother, David, who died in 2019, have been playing the long game, creating what the former calls “true democracy,” a form of governance in which people “can run their own lives and choose what they want to buy, choose how to spend their money,” as he told Daniel Fisher (2012). Charles and his cohorts advocate drastically deregulating business and environmental protections, holding down wages, disempowering unions, eliminating taxes on polluting, dictating political debate, and curtailing social services for the disadvantaged. Around 1980, William Buckley, a preeminent voice of conservatism, called Koch’s movement “Anarcho-Totalitarianism,” as Jim Horn reported (quoted in Mayer, 2016, p. 5).

After the Republicans refused to conduct hearings to consider Barack Obama’s nominee to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant after Justice Antonia Scalia died in early 2016, the normally reticent conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, “At some point we are going to have to recognize that we are destroying our institutions” (quoted in Koh, 2016, p. 1). This is in keeping with the Koch brothers’ approach.

“I’m very strong on creative destruction,” Charles Koch told Stephen Dunbar on NPR’s “Freakonomics” on June 21, 2017. Brian Doherty, an editor of Reason, the Koch-funded libertarian magazine, and the author of Radicals for Capitalism, a 2007 history of the libertarian movement, said that Charles’ goal was to “tear government out ‘at the root’” (quoted in Mayer, 2016, p. 65). “Charles was in constant rebellion against authority” (quoted in Mayer, 2016, p. 44), Clayton Coppin writes in Stealth, his unpublished 2003 report on Charles Koch’s political development. Coppin was commissioned by Koch Industries in 1993 to write a confidential corporate history. One of the few outsiders to the Koch family with unique access to personal and corporate documents and family and business associates—he interviewed the Koch brothers and their

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friends and read Koch family letters—he thus had first-hand knowledge of the personalities of the key protagonists and the inner workings of the organization. Coppin added that Charles was “driven by some deeper urge to smash the one thing left in the world that could discipline him: the government” (quoted in Mayer, 2016, p. 66).

Coppin suggests that Charles’ hatred of the government was so powerful it could only be understood as connected to childhood conflicts with authority. From his earliest years, according to Coppin, Charles’ goal was to achieve complete control. “He did not escape his father’s authority, until his father died” (quoted in Mayer, 2016, p. 65), notes Coppin. From that time on, Charles worked enormously hard so that “neither his brothers nor anyone else could challenge his personal control of the family company” (Mayer, 2016, p. 65).

“They [the Koch brothers] said they were driven by principle,” writes Mayer (2016, p. 7), “but their positions dovetailed seamlessly with their personal financial interests.” I would add—and their upbringing. The Koch brothers’ politics have personal as well as political and economic motives that were shaped in childhood. Fred and Mary Robinson Koch, who had four sons in the first eight years of their marriage—Frederick, Charles, and twins David and William—seemed to care a great deal about their children but were absent much of the time. Fred was preoccupied with business, and his wife was focused on being a socialite, according to Mayer.

Fred Koch, the family patriarch, founded an oil business that developed lucrative commercial relationships with Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. He built his fortune by receiving $500,000 from Stalin. What his son Charles excises from his family history in his The Science of Success, notes Mayer (2016), is that in 1934, after leaving his work in the USSR, Fred’s firm Winkler-Koch Engineering of Wichita, Kansas, “provided the engineering plans and began overseeing the construction of a massive oil refinery owned by a company on the Elbe River in Hamburg” (p. 35), whose top executive was a “notorious American Nazi sympathizer named William Rhodes Davies” (p. 35). Fred built the Hamburg Oil Refinery, which was apparently crucial to Hitler’s war efforts, and Davis was eventually accused by a federal prosecutor of being an “agent of influence” for the Nazi regime (Mayer, 2016, p. 35).

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Charles described his father as a “John Wayne-type figure, charismatic and forceful” (Koch, 2007, p. 12). Fred Koch was a man who taught his sons to idealize liberty and hard work. “He was constantly speaking to us children about what was wrong with government,” noted David Koch (Mayer, 2016, p. 46). Fred had scorn for people who had a “dependence on government” or were “feeding at the public trough” (Schulman, 2014, pp. 42 & 48).

“It was a miserable childhood…” Coppin told Mayer (2016), and David admitted that “Father put the fear of God in him” (p. 44). David also added that “Father was a severe taskmaster … a tough and demanding disciplinarian” (Mayer, 2016, p. 44). He was rough on his sons because he didn’t want them to become what he called “country-club bums” (Mayer, 2016, p. 41), like some of the children of oil tycoons he knew. The Koch boys had to “dig ditches and shovel manure at the family ranch” (Mayer, 2016, p. 41). Charles was sent away when he was 11 to the Southern Arizona School for Boys, known for its strictness. He did poorly, resulting in him being sent to an even stricter school, the Fountain Valley School in Colorado. Recalling his school years, Charles told Jason Jennings in an interview on the Koch Industries website, “I hated all that” (Mayer, 2016, p. 44).

The admiration and fondness Fred Koch’s sons later claimed for him masks both his absence and brutality. “He was a hard man to love” (quoted in Mayer, 2016, p. 41), notes one family member, and another remembers seeing Fred strip a tree branch and “whip the twins like dogs.” Fred Koch “wasn’t around much,” added another family member, but when his boys misbehaved, they “really got it” (Mayer, 2016, p. 41).

Due to Fred’s travels and Mary’s social and cultural activities, the children were entrusted to a series of nannies and housekeepers. Charles and Fred Koch, the two oldest sons, were largely raised by a Nazi nanny. The Kochs “employed a German governess for his first sons, Freddie and Charles” (Mayer, 2016, p. 39). “The nannies iron rule terrified the little boy according to a family acquaintance. In addition to being overbearing, she was a fervid Nazi sympathizer who frequently touted Hitler’s virtues,” Mayer (2016, p. 39) adds. “Dressed in a starched white uniform and pointed nurse’s hat, she arrived with a stash of gruesome German children’s books, including the Victorian classic Der Struwwelpeter” [“Shock-headed Peter” in English], which Mayer (2016) went on to describe as “featured sadistic consequences for

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misbehavior, ranging from cutting off one child’s thumbs to burning another to death” (p. 39). She added: “The acquaintance recalled that the nurse had a commensurately harsh and dictatorial approach to child rearing. She enforced a rigid toilet training regimen requiring the boys to produce morning bowel movements precisely on schedules or be force-fed castor oil and subjected to enemas” (Mayer, 2016, pp. 39-40). We can surmise that this made the boys feel terrified and imprisoned. In 1940, when Fred was seven and Charles was five, the governess left the Koch family. She was apparently overjoyed when Hitler invaded France and “went back to the fatherland in order to join the Fuhrer in celebration” (Mayer, 2016, p. 40).

It is not surprising that Charles’ “life preoccupation would become crusading against authoritarianism while running a business over which he exerted absolute control” (Mayer, 2016, p. 40). (His family history led to a revulsion against authority.) He seemingly became like the father whose control he detested. In an online blog, his daughter, Elizabeth, a Princeton graduate, wrote of a visit home: “As soon as we arrived I felt an overwhelming urge to prostrate myself on the floor and eat dirt in order to illustrate how grateful I am for everything they’ve done for me, that I’m not the spoiled monster they warned me I’d become if I wasn’t careful” (Koch, 2007, para 77). She went on to explain: “The remainder of the trip I engaged in various degrees of sycophantish behavior—chasing my father around his house, with newspaper articles on corn subsidies and weather derivatives…” (Koch, 2007, para 79). Elizabeth finished by commenting: “I cannot go back to panic attacks and meltdowns and pharmaceuticals and terrifying my parents and staring down that dark well of nothing you do will ever be good enough you privileged waste of flesh” (Koch, 2007, para 67).

When Barack Obama was president, Koch attacked him as an “alien threat to the country’s survival” (Mayer, 2016, p. xix). I think it is fair to speculate that the government, like the former president, was a stand-in for Charles Koch’s father and his Nazi nanny, who threatened his existence. Koch’s philosophy and his political agenda emerge directly from his traumatic experience with devoted, albeit absentee parents, an authoritarian and sadistic father, and a fervid, Nazi-sympathizing nanny who touted Hitler’s virtues. Decimating the state—or Barack Obama—made Charles feel as if he were no longer endangered or held hostage to the dic-

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tates of other people, and that afforded him a shot at the liberty he prized above all else and a life of his own.

The problem is Charles never faced or integrated his trauma, so he enacts it on the world. He feels constantly emotionally endangered and endlessly sees a phantom enemy that he has to destroy. So, he uses any means necessary. For example, Koch and his coterie have attempted to impose their view of unfettered capitalism without any government regulation on an unwilling and unsuspecting majority by subterfuge. They use democratic-sounding words to mask extremist ideas and disdain for democratic institutions, the public, and human suffering. The demolition of the government is sold as reform. Educational indoctrination emotionally manipulates unsuspecting people—video games promoting Charles Koch’s political ideology are “pitched to prospects as young as grade school” (Mayer, 2016, p. 68). Campaign finance violations guarantee that the democratic process is subverted. Those who are unaware of their past repeat it, as psychoanalysts, historians, and philosophers (Santayana) teach us.

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