Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer

The Koch network loomed as a colossus over this new political landscape. On the right, there were other formidable donor networks, including the one assembled by Karl Rove, but no single outside group spent as much. On its own, in 2012 the Kochs’ network of a few hundred individuals spent at least $407 million, almost all of it anonymously. This was more than John McCain spent on his entire 2008 presidential bid. And it was more than the combined contributions to the two presidential campaigns made by 5,667,658 Americans, whose donations were legally capped at $5,000. Politico’s Kenneth Vogel crunched the numbers and discovered that in the presidential race the top 0.04 percent of donors contributed about the same amount as the bottom 68 percent. No previous year for which there were data had shown more spending by fewer people. The staggeringly lopsided situation made 2012 the starkest test yet of Louis Brandeis’s dictum that the country could have either “democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few,” but not both. The