The 2016 election ambitions of the Koch brothers and what they represent on the Republican right wing, free-market absolutism, are nothing short of breathtaking. They feel within their grasp a historical opportunity they have been dreaming about for decades to turn back liberal institutions and customs. Things have lined up their way. Congress is in Republican hands. Big money, insurmountable money, can swing the party’s presidential nomination their way as never before. And they have battle tested at the state level their legislative game plan to roll back settled elements of environmental protections, workers’ rights, progressive taxation, voting rights, criminal justice policy and a host of social issues including abortion rights and gay rights, as well as to play fast and loose with separation of church and state.

What the Kochs represent is a continuous line of corporate reaction to the welfare state and the legitimation of unions that goes back to the New Deal. Their forerunners are the people who called FDR a Nazi and a Communist (as the Tea Partiers are fond of calling Obama–though with the Muslim kicker these days) and in private would call the president Franklin Delano Rosenberg. The continuity is actually amazing over time, with a history of notable triumphs (Taft-Hartley) and defeats (Medicare), but with the single-minded goal of taking over the Republican Party.

The Tea Party was a particular triumph in that these free-market absolutists were able to paper over their tensions with the Republican Party’s largest voting bloc, right-wing populists (social conservatives and evangelicals) in the face of the twinned whammies of 2008, the financial crisis and the election of Obama. On the first signature issue of the Tea Party, opposition to Obamacare, the free-market absolutists and the populists each developed ferocious anger, but for different reasons. For the free-market absolutists, who have never renounced their goal of reversing Social Security and Medicare, this was viewed as a potentially irreversible victory of the welfare state. For the populists, it was a threat to their security which depended on the likes of Social Security and Medicare–Obamacare was going to take these things away from them, as they saw it, and give it to the ‘undeserving.’ The confusion in this on rational grounds was never better formulated than in the famous and oft-carried banner, ‘Government hands off my Medicare.’

The same was true, dissimilar motivations leading to similar politics, for the second signature Tea Party issue–the “debt crisis”. On the third signature issue, immigration, the tensions became more difficult to paper over: Cheaper labor is all to the good for the free-market absolutists; for the populists: one, it’s a shrinking job market; and, two, they’re terrified believing they’re watching white American dominance melt away.