Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

If you’re looking to shop a conspiracy theory to Breitbart or InfoWars, it would be hard to outdo this one: Warren Buffett, dismayed by our dysfunctional plutocratic government, summons 17 elitists to a Maui hideaway. They are rich (George Soros, of course, and Ross Perot), famous (Warren Beatty, Yoko Ono), plugged into the media establishment (Barry Diller). With their vast wealth and privileged status, they transform America by unionizing Walmart, driving private money out of elections, establishing single-payer health care and rewriting the Pledge of Allegiance (“with liberty and justice for some.”)

There’s a kicker to this fantasy. It was published almost 10 years ago, as a 733-page novel titled Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!. And the author was not Alex Jones or Newt Gingrich, but Ralph Nader—yes, the corporate-busting, Gore-undermining, Corvair-demolishing activist Ralph Nader. Most important, while the book is a tad heavy-handed—the right-wing radio voices opposed to these elitist liberal reforms are named “Bush Bimbaugh” and “Pawn Sanity”—Nader was more than a little prescient. The 2018 midterms demonstrated that a long-cherished belief on the left—that the ultra-ultra-ultra-rich pose a clear and present danger to our democracy—is fast being overtaken by events. It is not a fantasy to suggest that the next presidential election could involve a powerful push to the left by a handful of the richest people in America.


Ever since the 5-4 Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. FEC greatly reduced the government’s power to regulate—and in some cases curb—political messages, the Democratic Party has condemned the decision. In his State of the Union address delivered just days after the decision, President Barack Obama said, “Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections.” (That was when Justice Samuel Alito mouthed the response, “not true.” And Alito was right if he meant that the “floodgates” permitting huge amounts of independent expenditures was in fact opened more than 40 years ago in Buckley v. Valeo).

A determination to undo Citizens United is at the heart of the Democratic Party’s view of how to fix American politics. The party’s 2016 platform reads: “Democrats believe we must fight to preserve the essence of the longest standing democracy in the world: a government that represents the American people, not just a handful of powerful and wealthy special interests. We will fight for real campaign finance reform now. Big money is drowning out the voices of everyday Americans, and we must have the necessary tools to fight back and safeguard our electoral and political integrity. … Democrats support a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s decisions in Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo.”

Senator Bernie Sanders has been particularly tough on the decision, saying it was “corrupt and undermining American democracy,” and that it gave corporations the ability to “buy and purchase the United States government.”

Yet the facts, as they typically do, suggest a more complex picture. First, the rise of the internet has made a long-held dream of reformers a reality, going back to Senator John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign: It is very possible now to raise huge sums of money one small donation at a time. There’s no better example than Sanders’ own presidential campaign. He raised $229 million, keeping him competitive with Hillary Clinton, and 58 percent of that total arrived in contributions of $200 or less.

The contrast between Democratic garment-rending and reality was even sharper in the just-concluded midterms. According to OpenSecrets.org, the Democrats out-raised the Republicans by $300 million, and 51 Republican incumbents found themselves out-raised by at least 2 to 1. The story is told dramatically by Corry Bliss, who was the field general for the Congressional Leadership Fund, a GOP-allied PAC. In an interview with POLITICO Magazine’s Tim Alberta the day after the election, Bliss sounded like a commander leading troops through a valley, while the enemy constantly fires down from the commanding heights.

“The Democrats deserve credit,” Bliss says. “They did a great job with hard-dollar, small-dollar fundraising that helped their candidates get on TV early, start earlier than ever before. There were a number of these races that if we didn’t win August, it wouldn’t matter who was going to win October because the Democrats had record amounts of money and they did a good job recruiting good stories and good candidates.” Bliss also noted that the financial firepower enabled Democrats to throw resources into races at the last minute, into whatever terrain seemed most promising: direct mail, TV, social media.

But what about those deep-pocket Republican supporters, like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson, those gazillionaires whose campaign donations liberal parents read to their children at night to frighten them? They were certainly present in the latest cycle. Adelson and his wife kicked in more than $113 million, all of it to Republicans and conservatives. But Tom Steyer, the liberal hedge-fund manager, gave almost $60 million to Democratic campaigns, much of it in the form of face-to-camera ads urging the impeachment of President Donald Trump. (This may not be entirely altruistic; Steyer has given hints that he may join the 436 other Democrats running for president.)

But if we’re looking for the real-life version of Nader’s fantasy plutocracy, it’s Michael Bloomberg, who really deserves our attention. The ex-mayor of New York spent some $80 million on House candidates, just about all of them Democrats, and donated $20 million to Senate Democrats in the last two weeks of the midterms. Bloomberg’s net worth is pegged by Forbes at $45 billion, give or take a billion or so. In his three mayoral runs (as a Republican), he spent more than $260 million of his fortune, according to the New York Times. And that doesn’t count the contributions he gave to various civic groups when he was trying (successfully) to get the City Council to change the law so that he could run for a third term. Nor did Bloomberg stop spending when the polls closed. The Times says that in his 12 years as mayor, Bloomberg contributed almost the same amount—$260 million—to a range of philanthropic and civic organizations, in some cases making up for public funds that were no longer available.

Perhaps Bloomberg’s most eye-opening contribution wasn’t political at all: a $1.8 billion gift to Johns Hopkins University so that its admissions office could be “forever blind” to the incomes of its applicants. If Forbes’ estimate of his wealth is accurate, Bloomberg’s gift to Hopkins adds up to 4 percent of his net worth. It’s also roughly one-third of the estimated total spent on all House and Senate races in 2018. If Bloomberg decided to run for president—or decided to support another candidate through the myriad of loopholes in what’s left of our campaign finance laws—he could equal the total amount of midterm campaign spending and still be left with roughly $40 billion.

With just a little imagination, a few other members of the top .001 percent could decide to join Bloomberg in an effort to move American politics on matters like the environment, health care, or—yes—getting big money out of politics. A handful of Americans at the very pinnacle of wealth could drown their opponents in campaign money, no matter how rich (by normal standards) these opponents were.

It’s a truism—because it’s true—to note that money is often not decisive in politics. Ask Jon Ossoff or Beto O’Rourke or Hillary Clinton. But a huge advantage in resources has a multiplier effect, as 2018 showed. Money enabled Democrats to test ads in midcampaign—something most campaigns simply lack the funds to do. Money means that a candidate can make an effort in neighborhoods and among constituencies that otherwise would simply be abandoned as a matter of triage. And if you think Democrats might recoil at the idea of putting a huge financial advantage to work—just remember that the first candidate to walk away from public financing, and its spending limits, in a general election for president was Barack Obama.

I don’t expect Bloomberg, or any other very well-heeled figure, will use Nader’s reimagining of Atlas Shrugged as a road map. Nor would I expect Bloomberg to embrace the tax-the-rich, bring-Wall-Street-to-heel outlook that characterizes the Democratic left. But the point is that he and others could if they wanted to. What Nader sketched out a decade ago as a fantasy is within rich liberals’ reach today. And if it does happen, don’t be surprised if Republicans suddenly discover the baneful influence of Citizens United and money in politics.