I'm three or four chapters into reading Jane Mayer's Dark Money. Mayer is the Ida Tarbell of our generation, and to her we owe a huge debt of gratitude. If Tarbell exposed how the trusts work at the turn of the previous century, Mayer is now exposing how enormous amounts stealth money are working to bring into the mainstream extremist ideas that would remain at the fringes if there were not enormous amounts of money buying their legitimacy. It's one thing to suspect this kind of thing is happening; it's another to see it well researched and sourced.
This isn't just about the Kochs; it's about the Scaifes, the Olins, and many others in their networks that have found ways through their foundations to reshape American political culture in their image since the 1960s. It's just not their think tanks (like AEI, Heritage, Hoover, Cato, etc.), and the bought politicians, their infiltration of state legislatures with ALEC, and the funding astro-turf movements ; it's their concerted efforts to change the judiciary through Law and Economy programs they have used to bribe law schools (starting with Harvard and then imitated everywhere) into introducing ideological indoctrination programs masquerading as dispassionate intellectual inquiry. It's their effort to change the judicial culture by providing lavish two-week junkets for federal judges over the last several where it's explained to them why environmental regulation and labor laws impinge Liberty. It's about their lavish funding not the Federalist Society. There is nothing like it on the Left.
I'll probably have more to say about this as I read on, but read Bill McKibben's review in NYRB to get a better overview now, and then go and read the book.
Here's an excerpt from near the end of McKibben's review:
As for Sanders, if every American were to somehow decide to devote the coming months to reading Mayer’s book, it seems a safe bet his argument about “the millionaires and the billionaires” would find even more adherents.
...In any event, the lasting contribution of the Kochs to our history will almost certainly be the introduction of truly huge money into the political process, vast funds coming from the tiniest sliver of the population. With each election cycle the resources they’ve assembled have grown, and this year, as I’ve said, they’ve announced plans to spend $889 million. About $300 million of that is slated to go directly into campaigns; the rest will pay for get-out-the-vote operations, their voter data project, and the like. “We’ve had money in the past, but this is so far beyond what anyone has thought of it’s mind-boggling,” Fred Wertheimer, the longtime head of Common Cause, told Mayer. “This is unheard of in the history of the country. There has never been anything that approaches this.” Thanks to Mayer, we are, at least, fully warned.