Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right is the most horrifying book I read all year – but it’s not a horror novel, just a work of well-investigated, well-argued non-fiction that details how archconservative billionaires, usually mad over having to pay taxes, have spent hundreds of millions or more of their own money to buy control of our government. Their efforts helped catapult the retrograde right-wing of the Republican Party from the fringes to the party’s new core, gave them control of the legislative and executive branches, and have, for the last two years, allowed them to pack the federal judiciary with judges who agree with their reactionary views on taxation, environmental regulations, and women’s rights. If this book doesn’t horrify you, you must be one of them.
The main target of Dark Money is the Koch brothers, David (who just died this August) and Charles, who run the second-largest closely held company in the United States. Before David’s death, each was worth around $50 billion, each had longstanding individual efforts to avoid paying taxes, and their company had decades of violations of environmental regulations, including dumping benzene, a known human carcinogen that we absorb by breathing its vapors, into the air near their oil refinery in Corpus Christi. The Kochs’ response to these various federal actions against them has been to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into various front groups that donate to legislative and gubernatorial candidates who promise, in turn, to roll back environmental protections or to push tax cuts for the highest brackets; and to fund professorships at various universities where the positions will go to so-called “free-market advocates” and where the Koch brothers may have had say in hiring. Along with other anti-tax, anti-regulation billionaires, including the DeVos family, Wilbur Ross, John Olin, Art Pope, and more, the Kochs helped found the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation; spent hundreds of millions fighting climate reform; and helped fund massive gerrymanders in states from Ohio and Pennsylvania to North Carolina. They’ve packaged most of these policies, which help them directly or indirectly by helping the businesses they own, as issues of “freedom,” while tying some of them to issues that matter to social conservatives, so that they might convince enough voters to swing their way even when those policies (such as eliminating laws or regulations that fight pollution) would hurt those voters themselves.
Even if you agree with some of the positions that these billionaires are pushing, Mayer’s main thesis here is that our democracy has been bought by a tiny number of people, so that fewer than 20 of these billionaires are setting wide swaths of federal and state policies for a country of 300 million. It is improbable that this extreme minority, all of whom are white and quite old, nearly all of whom are male, and all of whom are in the top 1% of the top 1% of the top 1% of Americans by wealth, would all agree among themselves on policies that are also beneficial to the country as a whole … but even if, improbably, they did so, that’s not how our system of government is supposed to work, and not how most Americans think it works. But, as Mayer describes through her history of the Kochs and of the way money has metastasized throughout our political system, since Citizens United – a Supreme Court ruling that resulted from funding by the Koch brothers and their allies – this is exactly how our government works. Billionaires buying the policies they want is a feature, not a bug.
Mayer also goes into the Nazi roots of the Kochs’ fortune; it is unlikely that the brothers would have become this wealthy had their father not helped Adolf Hitler build a major oil refinery in Hamburg that let the Nazis refine high-octane fuel for their warplanes. Fred Koch, Charles’ and David’s father, also helped Joseph Stalin develop the Soviets’ then-moribund oil industry, helping ensure the dictator’s grip on power and setting the stage for the Cold War after the second World War. It’s estimated they spent nearly $900 million in the 2016 election to try to elect their favored, hard-right Republicans to state legislatures across the country and ensure control of both houses of Congress. Is that possible if Fred Koch doesn’t take Hitler’s money?
There isn’t a simple solution to the problems Mayer details in Dark Money, and she doesn’t pretend there are, instead pointing out every policy change and judicial decision that created this particular monster. Lax IRS regulations have allowed billionaires to funnel money into “non-profits” that don’t have to disclose their donors but manage to skirt rules against such groups funding candidates. Citizens United gave corporations the free speech rights previously reserved for individuals. A lack of federal rules on soft money, donated to groups (like Super PACs) but not directly to candidates, has further enabled the wholesale purchasing of legislators; corporations can’t contribute directly to candidates, but they can fund Super PACs, which can then campaign for or against candidates as long as they aren’t coordinating with the candidates they support. None of this will change soon; it certainly won’t change as long as this version of the Koch-funded Republican Party retains control of the Senate, the White House, and much of the federal judiciary. A huge part of the power of Dark Money is that Mayer channels her obvious indignation into providing more details on the shady (yet legal!) behavior of these billionaires, rather than just delivering a screed on the subject, even though the desire to deliver a screed would be easy to understand.
I don’t think boycotts accomplish a whole lot – they require such enormous coordination, and the presence of viable alternatives – but I am at least trying to avoid spending my money with companies owned by these reactionary billionaires and other companies that support their efforts (such as by funding the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative lobbying group that goes so far as to write bills for their member legislators to submit). I wouldn’t shop at Menard’s if I lived in the Midwest, not with its owner helping fund fights against unions and saying he “doesn’t believe in environmental regulations.” I won’t buy paper goods from Georgia Pacific, although I’m realistic – if I buy a new house, or do some renovations, I probably have no say over where any plywood or OSB comes from. And I don’t think I’m going to move the needle with any of these companies; I would just rather know my money isn’t going directly to help the subjugation of our democracy.
Next up: I’m reading a pair of Evelyn Waugh novels – first The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, and then Black Mischief.