Kevin Wolf/AP Images for National Portrait Gallery
The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, illuminated in 2014
WASHINGTON – Dejected and battle weary, I sat down this past Thursday evening on the cold stone steps outside the National Portrait Gallery, just a few blocks from K Street.
From inside the neoclassical fortress of the museum, I could still make out a faint hum. Moments earlier, I was basking in the rockabilly glow of a suspiciously short Elvis impersonator before being unceremoniously escorted out the back by security. I was an intruder at an annual gala dinner, packed with libertarian, rocking and rolling, climate change–denying partygoers. I didn’t last more than 15 minutes.
I pulled out my phone and scanned the QR code on a pamphlet I snagged on my way out the door. It directed me to a multiple-choice questionnaire for feedback on the evening’s activities.
Question #1: Overall how satisfied were you with the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s 2023 Julian L. Simon Memorial Award Dinner?
Answer: Very Unsatisfied
Question #2: How satisfied were you with the Elvis, All Shook Up theme and live music?
Answer: Very Satisfied
Food and Beverage?
Answer: The stuffed fennel hors d’oeuvres were delicious. Drinks not strong enough.
Any comments?
Answer: We can’t go on together, with suspicious minds. And we can’t build our dreams, on suspicious minds. Because I love you too much, baby.
My scheme was doomed from the start. I’d been tipped off earlier that night from a source who provided no official invitation or registration credentials. His only advice was to “dress like a waiter” and try my chances at the door.
I couldn’t pass up the chance to watch the bow-tied elite fraternize with the King of Rock and Roll.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, the evening’s sponsor, isn’t a garden-variety free-market think tank. In the 1990s, CEI sponsored the fringe Cooler Heads Coalition, which labels itself an “informal and ad-hoc group focused on dispelling the myths of global warming.” Cooler Heads intended to beat back the growing hysteria over invisible, nontoxic CO2 gently gathering in our planet’s atmosphere. In 2006, CEI ran television ads calling carbon dioxide “essential to life. We breathe it out. Plants breathe it in … They call it pollution. We call it life.” A second ad claimed glaciers were actually “getting thicker, not thinner.” The ads cited a scientist who said his work was being misrepresented.
More recently, CEI has gotten involved in practically every area of our economic lives, from finance to labor to food safety to telecommunications to health care, always on the side of deregulation and free markets. It has become a leading attack dog against Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair Lina Khan, lambasting her anti-monopoly policies—including last week’s lawsuit against Amazon. “This is madness,” said CEI’s president Kent Lassman in a statement.
Far from a sideline player in the action, the institute’s former legal counsel Melissa Holyoak is currently awaiting Senate confirmation as a Republican appointee to fill a vacant seat at the FTC. (Her statement in confirmation hearings suggested she wouldn’t be a doctrinaire opponent to everything the FTC does, at least.) Former FTC commissioner and George Mason University law professor Joshua Wright, who stepped down from his academic post in August amid allegations of sexual misconduct, was a frequent guest and former speaker at CEI events.
The gala was more than an absurdist spectacle celebrating the 1950s; its attendees had bearing on our political moment, and were mostly intent on bringing our politics back into a smokestack-belching postwar era when there were fewer environmental laws (in part because of a lack of understanding about pollution and climate).
I made my first enemy at the backdoor checkpoint, where my press pass failed to pass muster with a guard who told me the registration window for the dinner reception had closed weeks ago. Circling around to the front, I managed to slip past security undetected by sidling up to another guest sporting a name tag.
My luck ran out when I realized I had picked the worst possible time to make my entrance. The opening ceremony had already wrapped up, with awards presented to two economists for their tireless efforts in proving that the market is always right. (The honorees’ book is called Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.) The previous year, the award went to Silicon Valley tycoon Balaji Srinivasan, a short-list candidate to head Donald Trump’s Food and Drug Administration and an advocate for replacing the nation-state with private enterprise–run “network states.”
All the guests were now seated in the palatial courtyard, awash with red and purple strobe lights shimmering off the high glass ceiling. They sat at clusters of round tables, with pink velvet chairs and black tablecloths. An army of uniformed caterers, who appeared to outnumber the roughly 100 guests in attendance, marched through the courtyard serving the main course: a selection of boneless chicken, little gem salad, and cornbread and kale pesto brioche.
As I entered the hall, heads turned from their meals in unison and stared reproachfully at the intruder.
I was reminded at that moment of the Cato Institute conference I’d gone to on assignment last year, and the status anxiety I’d witnessed on full display. Titled “New Challenges to the Free Economy,” the event’s topic of discussion was how to deflate rising populism on both the left and the right. After decades as the kingmakers in Washington, the libertarian psyche had turned even more aggrieved and defensive, as they perceived their vise grip over the country’s political establishment slipping away. The old rulers sensed barbarians at the gate.
Survival mode kicked in, and I made a beeline for the nearest open seat to give the impression I belonged. My time would be limited. I was a devil in disguise.
Luke Goldstein
I sat down next to a man in a gray flannel suit who worked in the plastics business and spewed vitriol (and flecks of chicken meat) over the environmental regulations destroying his industry. He didn’t blink when I put on my best shit-eating grin, turned to him, and gave him the requisite line from The Graduate: “one word: plastics.”
The conversation took a turn when it came time for me to disclose my own reason for attending the gala. “You look like a kid out for a free meal, isn’t that right?” the plastics man said with a wink.
I took that as my cue to find another table. I peered out across the sea of Cooler Heads chattering amongst themselves, to see if I could identify any of the event’s marquee guests.
I looked for Holyoak, who was rumored to be in attendance. A few tables over sat the evening’s honorary guest speaker, Annie Duke, a World Series of Poker champion turned industry spokesperson for light-touch regulations of online betting markets.
Nearby, David Simon smoldered in a dark blazer. He’s the son of the event’s namesake Julian Simon, an economist known primarily for his work defending fossil fuel energy, extracted by any means necessary, as an unmitigated good. The elder Simon notoriously fought against state liquor restrictions, and pioneered “market solutions” for airlines, which aren’t finding much public enthusiasm these days.
The ratio of men to women was not what Elvis would have wanted, I thought. The tables angled toward the central stage, prepped with an electric guitar and microphone for several impersonators to deliver the evening’s entertainment. To their credit, CEI had gone all out on recreating the 1950s ambience, even hauling in a pink Cadillac cruiser for photo ops. The institute’s Big Tech, Big Oil, and Big Tobacco funding was well spent.
The Cooler Heads had distilled the pop singer’s storied career into a simple hagiography, painting him as both an anti-media censorship crusader and a conservative. An exhibit at the event’s entrance indicated that only two events in Elvis’s life were important: his 1957 performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, restricted by the television networks for being overly sexual, and his laudatory letter to Richard Nixon in 1970, where he called the president “one of the top ten outstanding men of America” and asked to be designated a federal agent working on the president’s behalf.
Elvis’s huckster manager, Colonel Tom Parker, struck me as a better avatar for the hosts’ laissez-faire attitude toward business contracts.
I made my way to the cocktail bar for a moment of respite before plotting my next move. I foolishly interjected as the man beside me recounted skinny-dipping with P.J. O’Rourke, the late conservative satirist and National Lampoon editor. I suggested to him that I’d been invited to the gala by the writers of Reason magazine, co-hosts of the event. Looking suspicious, the man challenged me on which writers I knew. It turned out I was speaking to an affiliated editor at Reason.
He pointed me to their table in the back corner, where sure enough I spotted lead editor Nick Gillespie with his signature Beatles cut, fresh off the harrowing travails at this year’s Burning Man. Gillespie, the emcee of the event, was dressed in a shimmering white Elvis outfit: cape, diamond studs, golden sash, and all.
The man offered to take me over to the Reason table to introduce myself, which seemed more like a truth-or-dare proposition than a sincere gesture. To avoid a confrontation, I cut away and made for the bathroom areas just as the first Elvis contestant took to the stage and began playing “Don’t Be Cruel.”
Out in the hallway, I was spotted by the two guards who’d kicked me out of the first entrance. After a brief verbal altercation, they ushered me out the back.
On the patio, I ran into a young conservative in an Oxxford suit whom I’d met a few times covering right-wing events. The last time we spoke, we’d discussed the graduate dissertation he was working on about Milton Friedman’s civil rights record, which he’d started while in school in Austria. Leaning against a pillar, he smoked a clove cigarette with a couple who’d just watched my ejection from the museum with glee.
I joined them in the middle of a conversation about the recent Republican primary debate, which they all agreed exemplified the vacuous core of the party, unmoored from traditional free-market principles. They saw no hope in the current slate of candidates, who’d become too cozy with populist rhetoric like Trump’s and enthralled with a muscular, big-government posture.
A woman in a plaid skirt remarked that the U.S. could only be saved by a figure like Javier Milei, the firebrand libertarian presidential contender in Argentina, whom she saw as unafraid to mock the “shit leftists” in control of the government. Alternatively, in her view, the tough-on-crime policies of El Salvador president and Bitcoin fanatic Nayib Bukele would do just fine. She bristled when I suggested she might be leaning into a kind of right-wing Third Worldism.
A light rain came down and the trio went back inside to pay homage to Elvis. I decamped to the bar at the Morrison-Clark Inn, where CEI’s guests were staying the night, to see if I could catch any stragglers. No such luck. I downed one last drink, and walked into the night, as “Don’t Be Cruel” drifted eerily once again through the hotel bar.
