The front page of the New York Times on Tuesday featured a hit-job against Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, by reporter Noam Scheiber, “Trump Education Pick Plays Hardball With Her Wealth.”
Scheiber, formerly of the left-wing New Republic magazine, is a passionate fan of a $15 minimum wage, and his left-wing leanings are evident in this long hostile profile of DeVos, which included slams at the left’s favorite villains, activist libertarian businessmen David and Charles Koch.
The ideological article, full of both personal insults and ideological assumptions, would not have been out of place at The New Republic, or even the hard-left The Nation magazine.
After Tom Casperson, a Republican state senator from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, began running for Congress in 2016, he assumed the family of Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee to be education secretary, would not oppose him.
The DeVoses, a dominant force in Michigan politics for decades with a fortune in the billions, had contributed to one of Mr. Casperson’s earlier campaigns. But a week before his primary, family members sent $24,000 to one of his opponents, then poured $125,000 into a “super PAC,” Concerned Taxpayers of America, that ran ads attacking him.
The reason, an intermediary told Mr. Casperson: his support from organized labor.
“Deceitful, dishonest and cowardly,” was how Mr. Casperson’s campaign described the ads, complaining that the groups running them “won’t say who they are or where their money is coming from.” On Primary Day, Mr. Casperson went down to defeat.
In announcing his intention to nominate Ms. DeVos, Mr. Trump described her as “a brilliant and passionate education advocate.” Even critics characterized her as a dedicated, if misguided, activist for school reform. But that description understates both the breadth of Ms. DeVos’s political interests and the influence she wields as part of her powerful family. More than anyone else who has joined the incoming Trump administration, she represents the combination of wealth, free-market ideology and political hardball associated with a better-known family of billionaires: Charles and David Koch.
“They have this moralized sense of the free market that leads to this total program to turn back the ideas of the New Deal, the welfare state,” Kim Phillips-Fein, a historian who has written extensively about the conservative movement, said, describing the DeVoses.
Ms. DeVos declined to be interviewed for this article.
Like the Kochs, the DeVoses are generous supporters of think tanks that evangelize for unrestrained capitalism, like Michigan’s Acton Institute, and that rail against unions and back privatizing public services, like the Mackinac Center.
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Indeed, the DeVoses’ education activism, which favors alternatives to traditional public schools, appears to derive from the same free-market views that inform their suspicion of government. And perhaps more than other right-wing billionaires, the DeVoses couple their seeding of ideological causes with an aggressive brand of political spending. Half a dozen or more extended family members frequently coordinate contributions to maximize their impact.
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All of this would make Ms. DeVos -- whose confirmation hearing has been delayed until next week amid mounting pressure that her government ethics review be completed beforehand -- very different from past education secretaries.
“She is the most emblematic kind of oligarchic figure you can put in a cabinet position,” said Jeffrey Winters, a political scientist at Northwestern University who studies economic elites. “What she and the Kochs have in common is the unbridled use of wealth power to achieve whatever political goals they have.”
Her father-in-law was fair game as well, both his political opinions and his personal preferences:
A fan of Rolls-Royces and pinkie rings, Richard Sr. wrote books with titles like “Ten Powerful Phrases for Positive People.”
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The flip side of the family’s proselytizing for capitalism, according to Professor Phillips-Fein, has been an effort to dismantle much “that would counterbalance the power of economic elites.”
Amway funded a nationwide ad campaign in the early 1980s, protesting high taxes and regulations. Not long after, the company pleaded guilty to cheating the Canadian government out of more than $20 million in revenue.
Scheiber found every politician in Michigan that had a nasty thing to say about DeVos.
“Betsy DeVos was like my 4-year-old granddaughter at the time,” said Mike Pumford, a former Republican state representative who once clashed with her. “They were both sweet ladies as long as they kept hearing the word ‘yes.’ They turned into spoiled little brats when they were told ‘no.’”
Even the compliments were distinctly back-handed and show hostility toward conservative thinking.
While Dick and Betsy DeVos appear to practice a more tolerant form of Christianity than their parents -- Ms. DeVos has spoken out against anti-gay bigotry -- as recently as the early 2000s they funded some groups like Focus on the Family, a large ministry that helps set the political agenda for conservative evangelicals. They have also backed groups that promote conservative values to students and Christian education, including one with ties to the Christian Reformed Church.
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But the fights can appear to be as much about consolidating power as ideology. Unions were arguably the family’s most formidable political opponent in Michigan, one of labor’s traditional strongholds.
Scheiber found a cynical, power-politics explanation behind every proposal raised by the DeVos family.
The family spent millions of dollars on a ballot proposal in 2000 asking if Michigan should legalize vouchers, in which students can use taxpayer money to attend private schools.
Many critics, like the education historian Diane Ravitch, argue that the point of vouchers is to destroy public education and teachers’ unions. The group Americans United for Separation of Church and State has documented how conservative Christians have long supported vouchers, which could fund religious schools.
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It is not unusual for the wealthy -- who devote nearly 50 percent of their philanthropic dollars to education, according to the group Wealth-X -- to spend aggressively in the political realm to impose their preferred reforms.
Even by these standards, however, the DeVoses stand out for the amount of money they spend trying to advance their goals through politics rather than philanthropy, such as research into reforms or subsidizing schools.
The last subhead of the story, “Radical Suspicions,” brought home Scheiber’s idea of DeVos as a dangerous ideologue.
Ms. DeVos’s advocates see in these fights the toughness to take on entrenched opponents of expanding reforms like charter schools and vouchers.
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But critics see someone with an unmistakable agenda. “The signs are there that she will do something radical,” said Jack Jennings, a former general counsel for the House education committee. “Trump wouldn’t have appointed this woman for this position if he didn’t intend something radical.”
