Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

Even Richard Posner, the pioneering conservative scholar and senior federal judge who we last saw celebrating the right’s economic victory with some of his fellow masterminds just before the turn of the century, admitted in 2017 that it has all gone too far. During a conference on corporate concentration at the University of Chicago, he was his bracingly candid self. As a member of Congress, he said, “you are a slave to the donors. They own you. That’s [the] real corruption, the ownership of Congress by the rich.” And the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, the conservative majority’s view that “there’s no such thing as spending too much money to support a political candidate, because your money is actually speech—that’s all nonsense,” but as a result, apart from passing a constitutional amendment, “there isn’t anything the government can do [about regulating campaign finance] now.”