“The new, hyper-partisan think tanks had impact far beyond Washington. They introduced doubt into areas of settled academic and scientific scholarship, undermined genuinely unbiased experts, and gave politicians a menu of conflicting statistics and arguments from which to choose. The benefit was a far more pluralistic intellectual climate, beyond liberal orthodoxy.”

“The Kochs were unusually single-minded, but they were not alone. They were among a small, rarefied group of hugely wealthy, archconservative families that for decades poured money, often with little public disclosure, into influencing how Americans thought and voted. Their efforts began in earnest in the second half of the twentieth century. In addition to the Kochs, this group included Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking and Gulf Oil fortunes; Harry and Lynde Bradley, midwesterners enriched by defense contracts; John M. Olin, a chemical and munitions company titan; the Coors brewing family of Colorado; and the DeVos family of Michigan, founders of the Amway marketing empire. Each was different, but together they formed a new generation of philanthropist, bent on using billions of dollars from their private foundations to alter the direction of American politics.”

“One associate said Koch had confided that he gave away approximately 40 percent of his income each year, which he estimated at about $1 billion. This of course left him with an annual income of some $600 million and considerably helped ease his tax burden, but he enjoyed the role, a family member said, in part because it bought him respectability. There was another side to his spending, however, that was then still largely secret. While David was happy to put his name on some of the country’s most esteemed and beloved cultural and scientific institutions and to take a public bow at the ballet, his family’s prodigious political spending was a much more private affair.”

“Republicans in the House would eventually threaten to default on paying America’s debts, potentially pitching the fragile US economy into a calamitous free fall, in order to extort further tax and spending concessions favored by wealthy donors. All of this played out against a backdrop of growing economic inequality and stagnating social mobility. The United States, which idealized itself as a classless society in which everyone had the opportunity to get ahead, had in fact fallen behind many other rich nations in terms of intergenerational economic mobility, including such old-world, class-bound countries as France, Germany, and Spain.”

“In the final months before the 2008 presidential election, Michael Mann, a tenured meteorology and geosciences professor at Penn State University who had become a leading figure in climate change research, told his wife that he would be happy whichever candidate won. Both the Republican and the Democratic presidential nominees had spoken about the importance of addressing global warming, which Mann regarded as the paramount issue of the day. But what he didn’t fully foresee was that the same forces stirring the Tea Party would expertly channel the public outrage at government against scientific experts like himself.”

“To be sure, the numbers on the far right had grown. Membership in the Liberty League, the anti–New Deal corollary to the Tea Party during the 1930s, has been estimated at 75,000, while membership in the John Birch Society in the 1960s has been estimated at 100,000 core members. Overall, at its height, 5 percent of Americans approved of the John Birch Society. The Tea Party movement, in contrast, was estimated by The New York Times to have won the support of 18 percent of the population at its zenith, but at its core, according to the researcher Devin Burghart, were...