The only thing about money power that ever changes is the name of the person wielding it.

The project to replace the American republic with a corporate oligarchy has been up and running for a long time. Thom Hartmann argues, and I agree, that it began in 1971 when Lewis Powell, then a wealthy tobacco lawyer who saw his primary client’s industry suddenly found guilty of millions of negligent homicides and on the verge of destruction, and Powell vowed that these interlopers with their pesky citizen lawsuits and their pesky public-interest lawyers would not “victimize” his friends in the executive suites without a fight. So he wrote a memo laying out the case for an American oligarchy and the best strategy for achieving it. President Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court and the game was on.

The first two major victories were on the issue of campaign finance—Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 and Boston v. Bellotti two years later. The “Boston” in the latter decision is an abbreviation for the First National Bank of Boston, and the “Bellotti” is former Massachusetts attorney general Frank Bellotti. At the time, Massachusetts had a proposal on the 1978 ballot to adopt a graduated income tax. This naturally roiled up the local money power. FNB wanted to throw a boatload of money into the campaign against the referendum. Unfortunately, at the time, the Commonwealth (God save it!!!) had a law forbidding banks and their affiliated businesses to spend any money

“for the purpose of...influencing or affecting the vote on any question submitted to the voters, other than one materially affecting any of the property, business or assets of the corporation” and that “no question submitted to the voters solely concerning the taxation of the income, property or transactions of individuals shall be deemed materially to affect the property, business or assets of the corporation.”

FNB argued that the state law violated its First Amendment rights as was made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment. That view prevailed 5–4, and the majority opinion was delivered by...Justice Lewis Powell, who wrote:

The court found its answer in the contours of a corporation’s constitutional right, as a “person” under the Fourteenth Amendment, not to be deprived of property without due process of law. Distinguishing the First Amendment rights of a natural person from the more limited rights of a corporation, the court concluded that “whether its rights are designated ‘liberty’ rights or ‘property’ rights, a corporation’s property and business interests are entitled to Fourteenth Amendment protection....[A]s an incident of such protection, corporations also possess certain rights of speech and expression under the First Amendment.”

Corporate Personhood is the primary constitutional heresy that fueled the rise of the oligarchy. Its original source, believe it or not, is the headnote on the decision in the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. The clerk transcribing the case added in his headnote that:

...“Before argument, Mr. Chief Justice Waite said: ‘The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.’ ”

This was not part of the formal decision in the case, but down through the decades, the money power in this country has done a magnificent job of pretending that it was, and the federal courts largely have agreed with them. It is the seed that bloomed finally—and rankly—in 2010, with Citizens United and with McCutcheon v. FEC, which is less infamous but which delivered the final coup de grace to any reasonable campaign-finance regulations for the foreseeable future. That handed the one element in American society that it did not completely control—the democratic institutions of government—over to the money power as its private preserve. We quickly entered the age of scandal and grifting, of crimes without punishment and of decisions without consequence, and of well-financed gerrymandering and voter suppression. The people who damn near wrecked the world economy skated untouched. (And that wreckage was ultimately a bipartisan project.) The money power’s grip has never lessened. The people wielding it have changed—Jay Gould gives way to the Hunts, who give way to the subprime pirates at the investment banks, who are replaced in public adoration by the Thiels, and the Musks, and the other billionaires afflicted with delusions of messianic libertarianism.

But the people wielding the money power need to find mechanisms through which they can do it, and the modern money power has settled on cruelty, meanness, and misogyny as its defensive weapons, and its primary delivery system in Donald J. Trump, president-elect of the United States. And he’s been worth every dime they’ve poured into him just as the conservative network of think tanks and other intellectual chop shops have been worth however many millions they’ve spent to set it up.

The American oligarchy is now established. It is in charge of our law and our politics. Even if the actuarial tables catch up with the president-elect, the vice president-elect is completely a creature of the modern manifestation of the money power, of the tech-bro messiahs, of the Thiels and the Musks. History tells us that the grip of the money power takes generations to be broken, and that no victory over it has ever been permanent.