David Koch meurt à 79: la fin d'une époque?

Presque tous les médias qui s'intéressent à la politique américaine consacrent aujourd'hui au moins un article au décès de David Koch et à l'influence que son frère et lui ont pendant les campagnes électorales depuis plusieurs cycles. Parmi toutes ces publications c'est celle de CNN qui me semble le mieux résumer le modèle original et l'influence de la machine Koch.

 "What David and Charles Koch did starting in the mid-2000s was the equivalent of building not just one permanent store but an entire block of them. In this, they were helped -- mightily -- by the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling in 2010 that allowed political actors like them to spend more freely on efforts to directly advocate for their preferred policies and politic.

 Rather than throwing their considerable wealth -- they are both billionaires -- at fly-by-night political operations, they built their own from scratch, with an eye not toward short-term gains but to affecting longer-term changes in the culture. So, it wasn't just a single quasi-political organization. There were think tanks to incubate libertarian ideas that the Koch favored. There were various foundations to influence public policy outside of the context of campaigns. It was a one-stop political and policy shop, a sort of shadow Republican Party but crafted in the libertarian molds of the Kochs and entirely controlled by them.

That wasn't the only thing that the Koch brothers did differently. While most outside groups up until Americans for Prosperity's formation had dumped all the money they raised into TV ads, the Koch brothers instead focused far more on building grassroots infrastructures -- focusing, again, on sustainability rather than immediate success. By the 2016 election, Americans for Prosperity had state directors in 34 states, according to the New Yorker's Jane Mayer."

https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/23/politics/david-koch-charles-koch-brothers/index.html