Last week I was in a colloquy on Twitter with a Boston political journalist and an activist, neither of whom enjoys my focus on money in politics. So, I’ll be doing more of that.
But first, one thing they both say is the public does not care at all about who funds politics, especially dark money. So I mentioned Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. It came out in 2017, was a long-time bestseller, one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of the Year, National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Los Angeles Times book Prize finalist, PEN/Jean Stein book Award Finalist, and shortlisted for the Lukas Prize. So, someone in the public read it.
Fluke? There is a lot of good writing on dark money, lots of it by journalists, but the journalist said yeah, they all came out in the 2010s and didn’t matter. So, here is my chance to pump up some really great books!
Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. If you can only read two books on money in politics, read Dark Money and Democracy in Chains. Jane Mayer explained how dark money operates and Nancy MacLean explains why it operates that way. MacLean introduces readers to James Buchanan, a Nobel winning economist who taught Koch and others (including early on, school segregationists) how to sugarcoat privatization. Democracy in Chains won the Lillian Smith Book Award, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Finalist for the National Book Award, and was The Nation’s “Most Valuable Book.” It’s brilliant.
Ever heard of the Council for National Policy? I knew almost nothing about them until reading award winning journalist Anne Nelson’s 2019 book Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. The CNP is a secretive umbrella group and clearinghouse for the far right, bringing together big money, evangelical communications networks, and membership organizations like Turning Point USA and the National Rifle Association. All the major think tanks and institutional players on the right—Heritage Foundation, Leadership Institute, etc.—are represented on CNP.
Kyle Spencer is another award winning journalist and her 2022 book Raising Them Right: The Untold Story of America’s Ultraconservative Youth Movement and Its Plot for Power is remarkable in its insights into young far-right leaders like Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, who raises a ton of money from wealthy oligarchs and pumps up campus conservatives. There are other young leaders close to Donald Trump in here, and Spencer had inside access to them all. There is even a full chapter interview with unique youth leader Morton Blackwell—well, he was a youth leader in 1964 when he was the youngest Goldwater delegate. His Leadership Institute has been an essential training ground for young conservatives to head into politics and right-wing media. (He’s also the most important “mom” in Moms for Liberty).
Have you noticed maybe we are in the middle of this thing we call the culture war in which conservatives conjure a new moral crisis almost weekly to keep the base in overdrive? A special target is college campuses and that is the subject of Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola’s 2021 book Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War. This is a great guide to where the money comes from (especially the Koch network) and the groups who carry the message, their media propaganda amplifiers, legal strategies, etc. Their campaigns lead to harassment and threats against professors (largely black or LGBTQ) the Koch folk deem “left-wing.” (And it works on K-12 too. It was because I had read Wilson and Kamola that I immediately recognized what Moms for Liberty really is).
Billionaires and Stealth Politics published in 2018 by Benjamin I. Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew J. Lacombe reveals key reasons why oligarchs use dark money: to hide that they are the ones driving policy agendas and debates, not upbeat sounding fronts like National Parents Union or Democrats for Education Reform. Dark money is essential because there are vast differences between the policy preferences of the wealthy and the general public, and if the true interests are known the public becomes suspicious and rejects the policies. The book did pretty well too—here’s the New York Times review.
Here’s one that opened my eyes—Mary Ziegler’s 2022 Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment. Guess what’s at the center of the story? M-O-N-E-Y. Much of the legal strategizing, organizing, and lawsuits that went into reversing Roe v. Wade came after anti-abortion activists realized they needed to gain control of the Supreme Court and to do that, spend without restriction. Ziegler argues that we are where we are today—Donald Trump and a far-right Republican Party, because of the nexus of abortion politics and M-O-N-E-Y.
Maurice T. Cunningham, Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization. I have it on sound authority that the author wanted to help people across the nation understand what is happening to them: who is attacking their public schools and what they can do about it. It is Massachusetts heavy, and you can only read it in this book—no media in Massachusetts covers it! (Maybe the public doesn’t want to know?). Buy the book anyway. The author is a Golden Ager living on a fixed income and needs the money.
Book I am waiting on: Josh Cowen, The Privateers: How Billionaires Created A Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, out September 10 but pre-order over summer.
Oh, and I hear Jane Mayer is nearing completion of another book—this time on how all that money went into transforming the Supreme Court! Might sell a few copies.
Order them all from your local independent bookstore. Happy reading to all!
Postscript, May 7, 2024: Apparently the Pulitzer Prize Committee disagrees with the Boston political journalist: the Committee awarded the public service Pulitzer Prize to ProPublica for its reporting revealing how a set of billionaires had been using dark money to curry favor with Supreme Court justices.
“Why wait for popular opinion to catch up when you could portray as ‘reform’ what was really slow-motion demolition through privatization?” – Professor Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Plan for America.
[Full disclosure: as a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy. Along with Nancy MacLean, Kyle Spencer, Anne Nelson, Isaac Kamola, and Ralph Wilson, I am one of the founding members of the Democracy Research Project.]
Image: istock.