The dark money keeping society divided

America First Legal is the latest incarnation of slavery-era politics

A common heuristic has persisted for generations, though it re-embedded itself into popular American consciousness when Trump took office in 2016: the left is just as bad as the right.

There are credible problems with every part of the political spectrum. But today, I want to consider one part of this heuristic to show just how mismatched the comparison is: dark money flowing into right-wing political groups. 

The term “dark money” rose to prominence with Jane Mayer’s 2017 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. She investigated the history of right-wing and libertarian activists (most prominently the Koch brothers) using a variety of organizations and lobbyists to push forward agendas that lack mass support.

The focus of these agendas? Dismantling the federal government, which includes the eradication of social safety nets and any progressive action that holds the elite accountable through taxation.

A lot of this mobilization occurs by targeting Christian groups. As Mayer writes,

Billionaire backers were useful. They gave the nascent Tea Party movement organization and political direction, without which it might have frittered away like the Occupy movement. The protestors in turn gave the billionaire donors something they’d have trouble buying—the numbers needed to lend their agenda the air of legitimacy.

Why focus on religious groups? Pure numbers, as Mayer foresaw. Tap into their grievances—which in this case often involves white identity politics—and they’ll vote the party line. Vibes over data.

There’s a deep irony here. Historian Nancy Maclean notes that activists like Charles Koch and economist James McGill Buchanan disdain religion, yet see the ability to manipulate religious groups as useful for their ends.

Maclean writes in her 2017 book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, 

A similar cynicism ruled Koch’s decision to make peace—at least in the short term—with the religious right, despite the fact that so many libertarian thinkers, Buchanan included, were atheists who looked down on those who believe in God. But the organizers who mobilized white evangelicals for political action—men such as Reverend Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed and Tim Phillips—were entrepreneurs in their own right, so common cause could be made.

Maclean traces what would eventually culminate in Project 2025—the Koch-fueled Heritage Foundation’s plan to dismantle the federal government and give all power to the executive branch—back to Civil War-era politics. Generation by generation, she argues, tapping into white racial anxiety has been a mobilizing force for outnumbered elite forces who nonetheless leverage religion and culture war issues to accomplish their ends.

Despite the “democratic paint” that Alexis de Tocqueville observed when touring the American South in the 1830s, we long ago set the stage for racial grievances. As historian Jonathan Spiro noticed, Americans have a “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death”—a fact that inspired Adolf Hitler, for one.

If that seems a stretch, consider these words: “What’s most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters,” writes David Livingstone Smith. “It’s that they were ordinary humans beings.”

Americans have long fixated on race as the driving force of division, yet as Isabel Wilkerson argues in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, it’s merely an exterior manifestation of a much more global and troubling problem:

Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste.

Right now, one political force is especially interested in upholding America’s caste system. In this light, the other isn’t “just as bad.”

Yet, as MacLean points out, grievance politics has kept the right in business for centuries. She points to political theorist and former VP John C Calhoun, a statesman bent on protecting the interests of slaveholders, to the point where his ideas helped to inspire secession.

Since his time, the money and power that flows from the right to uphold America’s caste system continues through the work of people like Stephen Miller.