But the most cannily crafted and attention-grabbing piece of the program was something called Excessive Wealth Disorder, or EWD. More than 20 speakers from around the country came to advocate for various tax-policy proposals under the rhetorical mantle of this newly christened national affliction. Broadly defined as a range of societal, economic, and political problems and dangers created by extreme concentration of income and wealth in the hands of a fraction of society — the now well-known .1% of the top 1% — EWD describes not so much a personal pathology as a societal disorder.

Wandering through the hotel’s windowless, 4,300-square-foot ballroom for two days felt a little like bearing witness to a Givenchy-clad seed planting for an improbable political movement. The rich — at least an increasingly vocal minority of them — are revolting. But in an unexpected way. They’re agitating for policies that will directly diminish their own wealth and power. Their pitch isn’t based so much on self-righteous morality or civic duty — though there was enough of that on display over the course of the event — as it is on self-preservation.

“Policies that create gross inequality in our society are not good for regular Americans and are also not good for the rich,” said Patriotic Millionaires co-founder Chuck Collins. The economic apartheid created by worsening wealth and opportunity gaps, he believes, is leading to a country so riven with dissent, poverty, and intractable social ills that soon no one will want to live in it.

We are the wealthy, the Patriotic Millionaires came to the nation’s capital to say. We’ve been getting away with murder and we’re not gonna take it anymore.

The man who coined “Excessive Wealth Disorder”

Founded in 2010, the Patriotic Millionaires are, according to the organization’s website, “high-net worth Americans, business leaders, and investors who are united in their concern about the destabilizing concentration of wealth and power in America.” The group’s organizing principles are support for progressive taxation, increased minimum wage, campaign finance reform, and reducing the influence of money on politics.

The organization is chaired by Morris Pearl, a former Blackrock executive and retired Wall Street financier. Members, who number about 200 and qualify by providing tax returns showing assets over $1 million, include billionaire medical-device heiress Pat Stryker, investor Lawrence Benenson of Benenson Capital Partners, and corrugated-cardboard magnate Dennis Mehiel.

One of its more public-facing members is a quixotic 71-year-old named Alan Davis. Davis personally hosted and underwrote The Hunter Gathering, throughout which his graceful manner and generous nature were lauded by a string of well-to-dos who took to the podium between drinks, crudités, canapés and the fish, steak, or vegetarian dinner option. Tan, tall, fit, and effortlessly affable, Davis is known by friends for a subversive sense of humor and an affinity for puns and wordplay.

“Welcome to the Billionaire Bash. You can take that any way you like,” he says, opening the event on a decent laugh line. “I myself am a conflicted poster child for Excessive Wealth Disorder. I woke up this morning and couldn’t decide whether to wear a Brunello Cucinelli T-shirt or an Armani suit. I decided to go Armani.”

Davis is originally from New York. His father, Leonard, founded the Colonial Penn Group of insurance companies in 1963. After graduating from the University of Southern California in 1970 with a degree in business administration, Davis became interested in a variety of political and social causes. He was particularly drawn to recycling efforts.

In 1976 he founded the Conservatree Paper Company, which in the 1970s and ’80s became the country’s leading distributor of recycled paper. In 1983, Inc. magazine named Conservatree one of the fastest-growing companies in America. But pressure from the biggest players in the paper industry eventually forced it out of business. Conservatree closed as a going concern in 1995, and was later re-established as a nonprofit organization with a recycling education and advocacy mission.

Since then, like his mother and father in their later years, Davis has devoted much of his time to philanthropy and liberal political causes, with forays into other business ventures. He’s lived in San Francisco — not the Bay Area, downtown San Francisco — for almost 50 years. This makes him pretty much the malevolent specter your imagination is supposed to summon when conservatives raise alarm bells over the San Francisco radicals out to turn the United States into Venezuela Jr.

“I myself am a conflicted poster child for Excessive Wealth Disorder. I woke up this morning and couldn’t decide whether to wear a Brunello Cucinelli T-shirt or an Armani suit.”

Davis coined the phrase Excessive Wealth Disorder, which made its first public appearance in an opinion piece he wrote for, of all places, Fox Business in March 2019.

“With income inequality at record levels, underfunded government programs, and unprecedented political and philanthropic giving, the excessively wealthy have outsized influence in vital parts of civic life,” Davis wrote in Fox Business. “They influence who gets to run for office, what issues are discussed, and how Congress votes. They shouldn’t.”

Because the ungodly rich have so effectively insulated themselves from the concerns of everyday Americans, goes the argument, their policy concerns increasingly reflect a set of values anathema to the rest of the country. Because their children need never attend public school, they don’t care about funding public education. Because they’re more likely to get to their next meeting on a private jet than a bus or subway, they neglect public transportation. And so on and so on, until you’re putting Central American kids in cages along the border, homeless tent encampments blight major cities, student debt hamstrings another generation, the national anthem and Betsy Ross’s flag become symbols of divisiveness, and you’ve got more NHL franchises in the Sun Belt than in Canada. Nobody wants this.

Davis initially had a tough time convincing his fellow liberal elites to embrace the EWD handle. Several of the conferences’ 22 partners found the name corny and feckless.

“They like using straightforward clichés, like ‘Tax the Rich,’” Davis told me. “The problem is ‘Tax the Rich’ doesn’t suggest an exploration of the full range of pernicious effects of excessive wealth, and doesn’t have the call to action that a disease has.”

Davis’ stubborn insistence on EWD was vindicated when Krugman sanctified the term in the headline of a New York Times op-ed in the days leading up to the conference.

“Extreme wealth really has degraded the ability of our political system to deal with real problems,” Krugman wrote. “The wealthy, on average, push for policies that benefit themselves even when they often hurt the economy as a whole. And the sheer wealth of the wealthy is what empowers them to get a lot of what they want.”

Full disclosure: I first met Davis in 1998 in the lobby of the Hilton in Port of Spain. I was in Trinidad covering Carnival for a travel magazine. Davis was in the midst of a global working vacation planning the launch of a publishing house specializing in travel guides aimed at the wealthy. In 2002 and 2004, his now-defunct Greenline Publications put out my two-volume set of books documenting relics and extant traces of battle at World War II sites around the globe.

When I began a book project last year (for another publisher) that in part examines how the wealthy commute ideas of status and prestige on the popular imagination, I called Davis. After assuring me he still resided “comfortably within the 1% though nowhere near the .1%,” he invited me to the Hunter Gathering and Tax the (Very) Rich conferences.

“Why haven’t we taxed rich people since Reagan lowered the rates? It’s because those promoting fair taxes have fallen into two traps,” Davis said in Washington D.C. “The first is making taxes so complicated. We debate the merits of one loophole versus another, we try to explain what a carried-interest loophole is, we scare people with proposals that opponents claim will cost them their jobs.”

“The second trap is conflating the 1% with the .1%. There is a huge difference in the circumstances of someone earning $400k versus $2 million. Even the difference between $1 million and $2 million is significant. We should stay focused on the excessively rich, starting with those earning over $2 million per year. There should be a pledge — no new taxes before the top .1% pay their fair share.”

So, what is that fair share?

The Patriotic Millionaires’ favored plan for taxing upper-echelon rich and narrowing the income gap is to impose a 10% surtax — on top of all existing taxes — on all income and wealth over $2 million. According to Josh Bivens, director of research at the EPI, this would raise $75 billion in the first year alone. “That gets you enough to make a serious investment in children under five” and fund a lot of other programs as part of a “full-bore progressive agenda,” Bivens told attendees.