Anyone born after 1970 may find it strange to consider a political landscape in which powerful corporations do not have influence over legislation, campaigns, and elections. However, this was actually the case for a considerable portion of our nation’s history. From the so-called Progressive Era that saw the government’s breakdown of previously unfettered monopolies, to the New Deal reforms enacted during the Great Depression, Big Business was not only constrained but was also politically uninvolved.
In their book, The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government, Brody and Luke Mullins expound the fascinating history of one of the most significant and underreported political transitions in modern American history and the development of modern lobbying.
During the early 1970s, a “nearly century-long tradition of relatively evenly matched political debates between the forces of Big Business and the interests of ordinary citizens vanished.” Largely inspired by businessman and future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell and fueled by major lobbying dynasties in both parties, “industry leaders resolved to crush their political adversaries” by dismantling the political leverage of labor unions, environmental groups, and consumer advocates.
Thus, James Madison’s vision of competing interests was abandoned. “Instead,” the Mullins write, “during the 1970s, Washington entered a new era: a nearly four-decade-long stretch in which the corporate capitalists of Wall Street, Big Pharma, and Silicon Valley exercised as much control of the political system as did their Gilded Age predecessors — with far less risk of accountability and reform.”
The Mullins brothers combine in-depth research and intriguing storytelling to narrate the undertakings of the individuals behind the “pro-business influence-peddling machine by the downtown thoroughfare along which many of the city’s marquee lobbying firms were located, K Street.”
The book opens with a prologue on the death of Evan Morris, a Big Pharma lobbyist and one of the “most gifted operators” in Washington, who committed suicide. This sets the tone for the rest of the narrative and reveals the paradoxical contrast between the seemingly idyllic life of golf clubs and Petrus wine and the catastrophes that are reaped when corruption is sowed.
Morris began his career as a lobbyist in the early 2000s, more than 30 years after Washington’s powerful lobbying industry adopted corporate America’s interests for its own. He had been the pupil of Tommy Boggs, “[t]he patriarch of the first Democratic lobbying dynasty.” Tommy was the son of Democratic congressman and House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, a southern New Deal Democrat, long-time admirer of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and a man with a strong record of supporting labor unions and legislating on behalf of workers’ interests.
Although Tommy never left his father’s party, his work as a lobbyist directly undermined many of Hale’s achievements. Together with Tony Podesta, a lobbyist for Wall Street and Silicon Valley, Boggs helped “unify a previously fractured business advocacy community, ignite an explosion of political spending in Washington, develop close ties to the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and lead the Democratic Party away from its old friends in organized labor and toward a new set of allies in corporate America.”
Democrats are not solely responsible for the development of K Street. The Mullins write about four operators who worked together to form the Republican lobbyist dynasty of the Reagan era: Lee Atwater, Charlie Black, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort. They explain how the four men were largely responsible for the uprooting of “the nearly half-century-long tradition of New Deal liberalism, and assisting the reorientation of federal policy making around a new set of pro-business ideals.” By the 1990s, corporate America had a strong foothold in both parties and the fate of American politics seemed bleak — that is, for those paying enough attention to the silent neoliberal consensus in Washington. The Mullins write:
While Tommy Boggs drew his clout from the old-line establishment of New Deal liberals, this new dynasty of Republican influencers amassed its power through the conservative revolution. In this sense, Black, Manafort, Stone, and Atwater became to Republican Washington what Tommy Boggs was to Democratic Washington. Now, regardless of which party was in power or their political persuasions, anyone with enough money could find a talented lobbyist to help them get what they needed out of our democracy.
In subsequent decades, while the two parties pretended to disagree on substantive matters of economic policy, their track record proved to be strikingly similar, especially in the Obama and Bush eras. Disagreements on social and cultural issues were eventually reduced to mere rhetoric, as powerful corporations in Silicon Valley and the entertainment industry became more left-wing than the average American family. As Rachel Bovard wrote in a recent First Things piece, “Conservatives lost the culture war decades ago, and as a result we are living not just under the political but also the corporate and cultural power of left-leaning CEOs, entertainment figures, and political leaders, many of whom do not have children, do not want them, and who adhere to an ideology that is either indifferent to or actively hostile toward traditional family life.”
In the last chapter of their book (arguably the most politically relevant section in terms of the upcoming general election), the Mullins concede that “it was the rise of Trump that finally shattered Washington’s pro-business policy consensus.” In the years following his election in 2016, the Republican Party reshaped itself to fit the Trump base, as evidenced by unusual partnerships like those between Republican Sen. Josh Hawley and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and the increasingly pro-worker policies being advocated by other Republican senators like Marco Rubio (Fla.), Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), and vice presidential nominee JD Vance (Ohio).
This is not to say that the Mullins are partisan in their reporting, or even particularly hopeful for the Republican Party’s chances of enacting real change. Quite the contrary. They manage to do what far too many journalists are either unable or unwilling to do these days: They maintain a consistent tone of moral seriousness without descending into petty partisanship. In the concluding pages, the Mullins admit that Big Business will always find a way to insert itself in Washington’s influence-peddling machine, even if it takes a “new set of power brokers and lobbying dynasties to define a new era. New fortunes to be made, new rules to be broken. New stories to be told.”
The book ends on a bleak note. As much as one may have cringed or cried during the Jan. 6 riots, the people we saw in the Capitol that day are by no means the “biggest threat to democracy,” as the mainstream media contends. The real threat lies closer to those who were far from the Capitol, watching live news coverage from a comfortable living room.
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