Koch says he regrets funding Tea Party because it gave rise to Trump https://mol.im/a/8947565  via @MailOnline

1) If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?

2) These comments display a shocking ignorance of how government works & how the party system was founded.

3) Lemme 'splain, especially since I have a lot of fairly new followers.

4) The modern political party system was founded in 1826 by a New York Congressman, Martin Van Buren. He was "personally" anti-slave, though he had owned a slave as a Yut.

5) Van Buren, like Thomas Jefferson who died in 1825, thought the Missouri Compromise was the "death knell" of the Union because it would open up so many free territories to statehood & they would vote slavery out of existence, hence causing a civil war.

6) It bears repeating, BOTH these men saw a civil war as inevitable if the US didn't do something about slavery.

7) Van Buren's solution was to find a way to forever gag talk about slavery. To make it so that no one would ever bring it up or legislate it. There was even a . . .

7) contd . . . gag rule in Congress so that NO legislation even dealing with any aspect of slavery could be introduced for discussion!

8) So how did Van Buren plan to appeal to anti-slave northerners? He would bribe them. He started in all earnestness the "spoils system."

9) He would reward party loyalists with different levels of local, state, & party jobs, then local, state, & federal jobs for "getting out the vote."

10) If you want to see how this works, watch the election scene in "Gangs of New York."

11) By the time the Whig Party came on the scene a couple of years later, it was too late: the playing field was set. To get elected, you had to promise jobs. How many? More than your opponent.

12) Still, gubment only grew slowly, because the #s of jobs being handed out . . .

12) contd . . . were miniscule compared to today.
The largest single source of largesse was the U.S. Post Office with about 9,000 postmaster jobs to give away.

13) No one paid any attention to the SIZE of gubment cuz it was, with 2 exceptions, always in the hands of VB's party

14) That would be the DemoKKKrats, but at that time the Whigs played the spoils game just as well.

15) The Pendleton Act, instead of "reform" actually made it worse. Now, instead of giving away individual jobs, pols had to give away large blocs of jobs in the form of . . .

15) contd . . . military bases, railroad subsidies, prisons, & a thousand other "bloc" bribes.

16) ICYMI, we still had a civil war. This in large part was VB's fault: with the steady growth of gubment, which no one really paid attention to, it was "ok" (a phrase we got . . .

16) contd . . . from VB himself as he belonged to "Old Kinderhook," a club in his home town: if you were a member you were . . . OK).

17) Because DemoKKKrats ran gubment from 1828-1860, no one noticed its growth. But in 1860, when someone with a totally different ideology . . .

17) contd . . . came into the White House, all of a sudden everyone in the South realized that a US President had incredible appointment powers even in the South that would affect slavery. Hence, secession.

18) But back to the growth of gubment.

18) contd . . . We have a single member district, winner take all structure in which to have a hope of winning an election, you need to be close to 50%.

The Libertarians are screwed. Even if they believed in giving away gubment jobs, they won't ever get anywhere near 50%.

19) To a small degree---but not an overwhelming one---Trump suffered from this because he did not get into office by virtue of promising jobs. He promised to CUT THEM.

20) So if the Kochs thought the Tea Party would somehow buck the trend that got them into office, welp . . .

21) Meanwhile, by NOT standing 100% behind Donald Trump, the ONLY PRESIDENT SINCE John Q. Adams who had a chance to actually reduce the size of gubment, the Kochs deserve every bit of heartburn they get.

22) Trump actually could have begun an assault on the spoils system.