“The abuse of buying and selling votes crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors.” —Plutarch, Gaius Marcius (Coriolanus)

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. ” —Franklin Delano Roosevelt, April 29, 1938 (Message to Congress)

In Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, there is a remarkable description of a February 1933 meeting that occurred shortly after Adolf Hitler was chosen as German chancellor. It is remarkable because it occurred almost a century ago, a prelude to one of the darkest chapters in world history. It is a period that has been thoroughly historicized; yet something about it is eerily familiar and up to date.

The newly installed Nazis summoned the oligarchs of German commerce and industry—Krupp, the heads of IG Farben and the largest steel companies, and others—to Hermann Goering’s estate outside Berlin so that Hitler could “explain his policies.” While the moguls expected a dialogue (in deference to their financial power), Hitler appeared late, addressed them at some length, and departed without answering questions.

The influx of contributions from big capital was a decisive factor in the Nazis winning the March 1933 elections, the last competitive election in Germany for the next twelve years.

The bargain, as Hitler’s underlings explained to the attendees, was this: he had just promised the oligarchs to bring parliamentary democracy to an end, smash the Communist Party, and destroy independent unions. There was to be an election the following month; the capitalists’ part of the deal was to pay up with very large political contributions. It was not a question of should they pay, they must pay; what better return on investment could the captains of industry possibly want?

And pay they did: in the following weeks, millions of Reichsmarks flowed into Nazi Party coffers that had been severely short of funds. Tooze believes that the influx of contributions from big capital was a decisive factor in the Nazis winning the March 1933 elections, the last competitive election in Germany for the next twelve years.

Fast forward to 2024. In April, Donald Trump met with oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Floride. After hearing a complaint from one executive about supposedly excessive fossil-fuel regulation, Trump surprised the group with a blunt proposition: raise $1 billion and send him to the White House, and the oil industry will get everything it wants, from a repeal of tailpipe emission regulations to the junking of EV incentives. It would be a “deal” the industry could not pass up.

Press reports of the exchange noted the surprise of the industry executives at the crassly transactional nature of Trump’s offer, although why they felt it necessary to make this disclaimer seems quaint, if not disingenuous. As a former congressional employee, if there is one thing I learned, it is that a meeting with any representative of a business interest always carried an implicit quid pro quo. The coyness over being explicit about a cash transaction is simply the lobbyist camouflaging his greed with a veneer of decorum.

The popular mind so thoroughly associates rich people with reactionary, or for that matter fascist, politics (Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life is a hardy perennial) that we may have become numb as to the reasons. The wealthy themselves, or most of them, have long believed that any regime to the left of Dwight Eisenhower, in addition to leaving the economy in ruins, might unleash Bolshevik mobs to storm the millionaires’ mansions and murder them in their beds. (Although Robert Welch, the wealthy founder of the John Birch Society, claimed that Ike himself was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.”)

The contradictory part is that multiple sources state that economic growth in the United States has been substantially better under Democratic presidents than their Republican counterparts. The New York Timesestimated in 2021 that since 1933, average yearly........

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