Mayer lifts the veil on a small group of extraordinarily wealthy American iconoclasts who have achieved no less than the transformation of American politics. Focusing on the Koch brothers and their extended network of like-minded political activists, Mayer shows how many politically-conservative outcomes, from the Citizen's United Supreme Court case, to the rise of the Tea Party, have been driven by the goals of a select few. Much of the country's political changes have been largely treated as a series of semi-independent, grassroots driven, reactions by white Americans in response to the changing face and politics of the country. Mayer convincingly argues that many of these newly ascendant political currents are not nearly as bottom-up as the uninitiated might imagine. It is an achievement that
Dark Money does not read as conspiracy theory; Mayer puts in the work to show how slowly these changes have come about, including the set-backs along the way and the intricacies of how new legal designations for foundations and non-profits shelter the identities of those who are broadly influencing discourse. Tying together climate change denial, lowered corporate and individual tax rates, and the rise of free market economics, Mayer accounts for not only the occurrence, but timeliness of changing discourse. Her closing evocation that this network of donors has functionally come to overshadow the Republican Party ties the threads of the story together. I started the book incredulous but it has added a new dimension to how I consider American politics.
