Our Competing Aristocracies

         In August of 2017 I devoted a long post to journalist Jane Mayer's superb book Dark Money, which had appeared a  year earlier.  While I hope readers may go to it and read the whole thing, I am gonig to quote the first few paragraphs here.

"Last weekend I finished Dark Money by Jane Mayer, which appeared last year.  It was marketed, largely, as a history of the involvement of the fossil fuel magnates Charles and David Koch in American politics over the last few decades, but it is much more than that.  I intend in what follows to summarize what I found in the book, but from a slightly different perspective than Mayer’s, and without much of any attention to the voluminous, and fascinating, personal data that she provides about the Kochs and other financiers of our new “conservative” political movement.  Instead I am going to treat the book as the first draft, as it were, of a genuine political history of the last 40 or 50 years—because it explains more about where we are and how we got here than anything else that I have ever read.   Mayer leads her readers through the story in rough chronological order, and I recommend the book to everyone.  I on the other hand am going to try to identify its major features in an effort to explain how we got to the miserable point at which we find ourselves.

"Charles and David Koch are the most striking example of extraordinarily wealthy Americans who have had an outsized impact on the politics of the last forty years—and whose impact is reaching a new peak right now.  They followed in the footsteps of their father Fred, who in the 1950s was one of the founding members, along with candy manufacturer Robert Welch, of the John Birch Society.  Nothing illustrates what has happened to American politics in my lifetime in more striking fashion than this.  The ideas of the John Birch Society, a group of fanatically anti-government lunatics who in the 1950s identified Dwight D. Eisenhower as a member of the international Communist conspiracy, are now the single most influential set of ideas in American political life. Their main tenets are an unlimited faith in free enterprise and a conviction that government attempts to moderate the negative impacts of capitalism are simply a power grab designed to establish dictatorship.  And because of the success of their political movement, their fortunes have grown by orders of magnitude over the last few decades.

"In addition to the Kochs, the superrich political elite has included John Olin, a chemical manufacturer; Richard Mellon Scaife, a scion of a Pittsburgh family prominent in banking and industry; and Harry Bradley, another Birch Society acolyte who ran the Allen-Bradley Electronics Company in New York.  In the middle of the twentieth century, when marginal income tax rates topped out at 91%, these men had all taken advantage of a provision in the tax code—first used by the Rockefeller family—to create a “philanthropic” foundation to shield substantial portions of their enormous income from taxes.  Unfortunately, the definition of philanthropy has been broad enough to include the subsidy of a particular ideology—and ultimately, direct intervention in politics.  That one tragic flaw in our tax code has reshaped opinion and redistributed power at every level of American government.

"Now I have rarely been impressed by any of the ideas coming out of the new Right during the last few decades, but like many liberal Democrats, I suspect, I have assumed that conservative intellectuals had honestly come by their ideas.  I am not suggesting now that they have lied about them, but Mayer leaves no doubt that the entire new right wing intellectual establishment was created from the ground up by the handful of major benefactors listed above.  Both the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation—the two centers of conservative “thought” in Washington—were originally funded largely by Richard Mellon Scaife. The Bradley and Olin Foundations were also powers behind the Heritage Foundation, and the Kochs have been involved as well.  I have always thought of the Cato Institute as a nest of principled libertarians—partly because it tends to oppose foreign interventions—but it turns out to have been started by Charles Koch.  Charles Murray was an unknown writer before the Olin foundation adopted him and subsidized his first book, Losing Ground, arguing that social programs were hurting the poor.  (Spoiled, perhaps, by success, Murray went a bridge too far when he and Richard Herrnstein argued in The Bell Curve that black people were intellectually inferior to whites.)  And I was amazed to learn from Mayer that the Bradley foundation gives four annual awards of $250,000 each to leading conservative journalists, activists, and intellectuals. Winners have included George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Sowell, Ward Connerly, Heather MacDonald, Shelby Steele, Victor Davis Hanson, John Bolton, William Kristol, Paul Gigot, Michael Barone, Jeb Bush, Harvey Mansfield, Edwin Meese, Roger Ailes of Fox News, General John Keane, and Charles Murray."

I certainly think that I was on to something then, but I have suddenly realized that this was only half of the story of what has happened to our political life.  I discovered the other half in 2022 book by a much younger conservative journalist, Luke Rosiak, entitled, Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education. Now, while I haven't met either Mayer or Rosiak face to face, I suspect I would enjoy dinner with Mayer much more.  Rosiak is a rather angry early middle-aged man whose prose drips with contempt; Mayer is more of an old school journalist.  But Rosiak's book, like Mayer's is so exhaustively documented and carefully footnoted that there is no question but that he has also identified a very important presence in our political life.   The right wing foundations that Mayer documented turn out to be only half of the story.  

The power of foundations, as Mayer and Rosiak both point out, stems from a particular provision of the tax code that allowed some of America's richest families to escape the very high income and inheritance taxes of the middle of the twentieth century.   The Rockefellers and the Fords were among the first to escape inheritance taxes by turning much of their fortunes over to charitable foundations named after themselves.  And although Rosiak's book focuses on various serious problems within the US public educational system, the biggest lesson I drew from it is that the Ford, Rockefeller, John T. and Catherine MacArthur, Gates, Kellogg,  Annie E. Casey foundations and the Open Society Foundation founded by George Soros are playing at least as large a role in American life as the Koch, Scaife, Bradley and Olin foundations that Mayer focused on.  They, however, are run by left wing, largely woke bureaucracies, and their grants have created whole infrastructures of educational and public policy activists who are providing K-12 curriculums for schools based on woke ideas and pushing for radical changes in schools, especially in our largest districts, in the name of "equity."  Our new gilded age has become a struggle between two groups of billionaires, one left wing and one right, in which the views of average citizens play a very limited role.

The Ford Foundation, Rosiak reports, provided about $60 million in funding for racial equity issues a year between 2011 and 2020, and announced a further $180 million increase in 2020.  The MacArthur Foundatin indirectly subsidized the career of Nikole Hannah-Jones when she worked at Pro Publica, and has funded the Pulitzer Foundation, which has distributed curricula based on her historically inaccurate 1619 Project to school districts around the country.  The foundations, Rosiak shows, have many links to teachers unions, whom serious educational reformers--the ones who run effective charter school networks--now regard as the biggest obstacle to necessary changes.  (I know this because one of my sons worked for one of those networks for more than a decade.)  The Ford, MacArthur and Soros foundations have joined with the National Education Association to fund FairTest, which lobbies to limit the use of standardized tests in schools on the grounds that they are discriminatory.

Rosiak, himself a parent of school age kids, spends a long chapter on the disastrous decision to shut down schools during the pandemic, one that has inflicted damage upon a whole generation that seems likely to last for a long time.  He also shows how the educational establishment used that crisis to implement many other changes that activist groups--funded by the foundations--have been pushing.  These included easier grading systems that make it almost impossible for students to fail, a de-emphasis on standardized tests (a policy also adopted by many colleges, although some are now reversing it), and an end admissions standards to elite high schools based solely on standardized tests--the practice that turned schools like Boston Latin, Stuyvesant High School and the Bronx High School of Science, and Lowell High School in San Francisco into the highest-achieving schools in the country, public or private.  Such policies, new racial advocates argue, are "inequitable"  by definition because the produce student bodies composed mostly of Asian and white students.  I read Rosiak quite carefully, and I don't think he ever mentioned another activist demand:  that the teaching and administrative staffs of inner city schools reflect the demographic makeup of their students as closely as possible.  I have heard this demand frequently voiced by Boston area activists on my local NPR stations, on the grounds that "children of color" can only get the education they need from "educators of color."  Not coincidentally, NPR is very heavily supported by the foundations that Rosiak lists.  

On another front, Rosiak discusses the widely held view, particularly among liberals, that public education in the United States promotes inequality because it is financed largely by local property taxes, and thus, poorer communities spend much more per children than rich ones.  He presents some data showing that this simply is not true, and I can now corroborate that based on data from my own state of Massachusetts.  Boston, the city with by far the largest number of poor students in the state, spends $28,882 per pupil per year, one of the highest figures in the state. Cambridge, which ranks 134 out of 341 cities and towns in per capita income,. spends the second most, in the state, $36,712 per pupil.  Brookline and Wellesley, two of the wealthiest suburbs, spend nearly as much as Boston, more than $25,000 per pupil each, but Newton and Lexington, whose schools seem to have the best reputations of all, spend just  $16, 804  and $22,736  per student, respectively.  I suspect that the cost of education in Boston is so high for the same as it is at Harvard University--administrative bloat. These are, obviously, fragmentary data, but it does seem that the correlation between per-pupil spending on the one hand, and wealth and educational achievement on the other, is not nearly as strong as many people tend to think.

And although Rosiak doesn't mention this, the MacArthur Foundation also uses its renowned "Genius Grants" to reward its favorite intellectuals in the same way that the Bradley Foundation, as I mentioned above, rewards prominent conservative thinkers--but on a much larger scale.  The Bradley Foundation awards are one-shot gifts of $250,000, while the MacArthur grants are worth $800,000 over five years.  The foundation began awarding these grants in 1981, and their rosters are a kind of history of the last 43 years of US intellectual life.  In the first five years, winners included political scientist Seweryn Bialer, literary critic Harold Bloom,  historian Henry Louis Gates, Political Scientist Alexander George, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable, novelist William Kennedy, novelist Cormac McCarthy, historian James A. McPherson, novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, filmmaker John Sales, and poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren.  Since 2015 they have included Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Homeric translator Emily Wilson, historian Ibram X. Kendi, and interdisciplinary scholar Imani Perry.  They now include far fewer scientists than they originally did.  Of the 20 2023 winners, 2 are white males and three are white females.

I am proud to have read both Mayer's and Rosniak's books.  One was written primarily for liberals, the other for conservatives, but both paint very convincing pictures of the intellectual and political power of great wealth, protected by the tax laws and dispensed by foundations without any public accountability at all.  They are a very important part of the new aristocracy which controls so many aspects of American life, and none of them seems to care very much about what is good for average Americans.