Dark money, dark souls

Jane Mayer’s ‘Dark Money’: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right’ is one of the best books I have read recently.

Mayer, a journalist, has produced two deeply researched, well argued, and highly topical books. Beside ‘Dark Money,’ she is the author of ‘The Dark Side: The Inside Story of how the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.’

Dark Money is one of a very select list of books essential to understanding where we are, how we got here, and where we are going unless we do something about it.

The story she tells is well-documented and chilling:

“During the 1970s, a handful of the nation’s wealthiest corporate captains felt overtaxed and overregulated and decided to fight back. Disenchanted with the direction of modern America, they launched an ambitious privately financed war of ideas to radically change the country. They didn’t want to merely win elections; they wanted to change the way Americans thought.  Their ambitions were grandiose—to “save” America as they saw it, at every level, by turning the clock back to the Gilded Age before the Progressive Era. Charles Koch was younger and more libertarian than his predecessors, but his ambitions were if anything more radical: to pull the government out ‘at the root.’”

This is a radical project but, specifically, it is a reactionary, counterrevolutionary program aimed at, essentially, erasing most of the twentieth century. They wanted to do away with the income tax, a legacy of the Progressive Era. They wanted to abolish Social Security, the rights of labor unions to organize, bargain and strike, and the minimum wage, New Deal innovations. They wanted to crush the entire work of the Great Society, from Medicaid to food stamps. They wanted, most of all perhaps, to prevent any new safety nets programs from being enacted. Thus, they fought Obamacare tooth and nail.

Jane Mayer aptly calls this gang of ultra-rich zealots the Radical Right. They want to deracinate, to pull out from the roots, everything that was planted from Theodore Roosevelt to FDR, to LBJ, to Barack Obama. But I prefer to call them the reactionary rich. Radical is usually associated with the left, with the idea that a better world is possible. Turning the clock black is an eminently reactionary move. It is based on the belief the past was better and the goal is to make the future like the past.

The Radical Right encompasses more than just the reactionary ultra-wealthy. They have a ton of pseudo-intellectuals for rent, salaried mouthpieces skilled in lying and misleading, and political errand boys and girls. But the mega-rich set the course for the counterrevolution’s ship, pay the crew, call the shots.

As excellent as Mayer’s book is, some aspects of the Reactionary Right require further analysis. For one, the moral bankruptcy of this crew who see themselves as saving America is breathtaking. Their dark souls are a match for their dark money. Early on, Fred Koch, the family patriarch, made much of his money by doing business with Hitler and Stalin. David and Charles Koch, multi-billionaire brothers, waged a bitter legal and personal war for two decades over something each had more than they could have spent in several lifetimes: money. They teamed up to try cut a third low-key brother out of the family money, blackmailing him by threatening to expose him as gay.

The leading families of the Reactionary Right are, by and large, morally repugnant. Richard Mellon Scaife, probably the second biggest financier of the Reactionary Right was, according to sister Cordelia, a “gutter drunk” as she was by her own admission. The sins of the other leading families, like the DeVos family that profits from private schools while undercutting public education and trying to squeeze every dollar from student debtors defrauded by bogus private universities. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s brother, Eric Prince, was the head of the lucrative Blackwater group that made money hands over fist in Iraq while spreading death.

Racism is another under-analyzed dimension of the Reactionary Right. This is as lily-white a group as the Republican Party. There are references to racist practices in several of the companies led by the corporate honchos who Mayer studies. Like the Republicans these people are Christian of the variety that follows their own Golden rule: “Those who have the gold rule.” Despite the classic anti-Semitic libel, there are, at most, a handful of Jews among these masters of the universe.

Mayer could not cover every aspect of the Reactionary Right unless she wanted to produce something about the length of the collected works of Karl Marx, which few people would read and wouldn’t sell. And, although her focus is on how the Radical Right has used their money to hollow out American democracy, she also gives us plenty to enable us to see through to the moral black hole at the core of these self-described saviors. Too much money and too much alcohol make for a bad mix, especially, as is often the case with these people, when they go with poisonous family relations. Examples abound, but I have room for just one telling account. Mayer reports that as a child Charles Koch was fond of telling a joke about the time when he was given a treat and asked to share it with others. Koch responded. “I just want my fair share, which is all of it.”

This is as pithy a statement as possible of the mindset and the policies the Reactionary Right. This tiny, entitled, self-serving, self-righteous circle has tried to make America safe for its selfishness. Although Mayer completed the book before the Trump election, the moral misery of the Right-Wing Reactionaries is eerily similar to the moral misery of Donald Trump. Soul brothers sharing dark politics and dark hearts.

The Reactionary Right has managed to bring about a lot of its agenda. But not all. Resistance and reversal are possible. The KOCHTOCTOPUS, Mayer’s name for the bewildering web of opaque right-wing groups bearing benevolently misleading names, failed in stopping or repealing Obamacare—and not for lack of trying. Polls also show that Americans overwhelmingly support Social Security and other welfare state programs right-wing reactionaries detest. The success of Elizabeth Warren is yet another indication Americans have had enough of the vast right-wing conspiracy.