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

by Jane Mayer

The school taught a revisionist version of American history in which the robber barons were heroes, not villains, and the Gilded Age was the country’s golden era. Taxes were denigrated as a form of theft, and the Progressive movement, Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, in the school’s view, were ruinous turns toward socialism. The weak and poor, the school taught, should be cared for by private charity, not government. The school had a revisionist position on the Civil War, too. It shouldn’t have been fought; instead, the South should have been allowed to secede. Slavery was a lesser evil than military conscription, the school argued, because human beings should be allowed to sell themselves into slavery if they wished. Like Charles Koch during this period, the school tried to meld its version of history, economics, and philosophy into one theoretical framework, which it called “Phronhistery.”