Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics

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That’s why those who see in the current difficulties of liberal democracies the stirrings of past monsters – Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, to name just three – are always looking in the wrong place. Remarkable’ Observer, Book of the Week Democracy is in crisis, and unaccountable and untraceable flows of money are helping to destroy it. The middle section of the book explores how dark money has amplified the growing influence of the American right on British politics. Democracy for Sale is a diligent, brilliant guide through a shadowy world of dark money and digital disinformation stretching from Westminster to Washington, and far beyond.

Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro and populists in many other countries are the beneficiaries. The final part of the book deals with the transformation of our information ecosystem: the ways in which the automated targeted-advertising machines of social media platforms have been weaponised by rightwing actors to deliver precisely calibrated messages to voters, in ways that are completely opaque to the general public, as well as to regulators. Praise for Democracy for Sale: ‘Thorough, gripping and vitally important’ Oliver Bullough’A brilliant description of the dark underbelly of modern democracy. It’s a great case study in how ruling elites can be infected with policy ideas and programmes via those “second-hand traders in ideas” of whom Hayek spoke so eloquently: academics, thinktanks and media commentators.

The first is the massive concentration of corporate power and private wealth that’s been under way since the 1970s, together with a corresponding increase in inequality, social exclusion and polarisation in most western societies; the second is the astonishing penetration of “dark money” into democratic politics; and the third is the revolutionary transformation of the information ecosystem in which democratic politics is conducted – a transformation that has rendered the laws that supposedly regulated elections entirely irrelevant to modern conditions. For example, Lawrence Lessig’s Republic, Lost and Jane Mayer’s Dark Money explained how a clique of billionaires has shaped and perverted American politics. The integrity and trustworthiness of elections is a fundamental requirement for a functioning democracy.

Peter Geoghegan is a diligent, brilliant guide through the shadowy world of dark money and digital disinformation stretching from Westminster to Washington, and far beyond. Geoghegan investigates politicians, fabulously well-funded partisan think tanks, propagandists who know how to game a rigged system, and the campaigners and regulators valiantly trying to stop them. And in the UK, Martin Moore’s landmark study Democracy Hacked showed how, in the space of just one election cycle, authoritarian governments, wealthy elites and fringe hackers figured out how to game elections, bypass democratic processes and turn social networks into battlefields.

If you're concerned about the health of British democracy, read this book - it is thorough, gripping and vitally important' Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland. And it has been able to do this in what has turned out to be a regulatory vacuum – with laws, penalties and overseeing authorities that are no longer fit for purpose. Photograph: Frank Augstein/Pool/Reuters View image in fullscreen ‘These threats to democracy have, for decades, been visible to anyone disposed to look for them’: Boris Johnson in 2019. One of the most depressing parts of this narrative is the bland indifference of most mainstream UK media to these scandalous events.