Book review: Billionaire Backlash

This week I read Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee’s new book, Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy. It’s quite a good book. I will be assigning a couple of chapters to my class next fall.

The central thesis of the book is that scandals — particularly corporate scandals that do not fit easily within pre-existing partisan boundaries — can be drivers of significant political change. Scandals can activate latent opinion, moving political leaders to action. Culpepper and Lee are gifted political scientists, and they provide strong historical and cross-national evidence in support of the argument.

It is ultimately an optimistic book. Culpepper and Lee see reason for hope that scandal and corruption will generate the conditions for democratic renewal (what they term “good populism”). We are living through the years of DOGE and RFK Jr’s assault on public health. The Trump administration is inventing new kinds of insider trading, and refusing to prosecute audacious white collar crimes. This stuff is not popular. It’s bizarre. And it has real consequences. These are the sort of conditions that can produce large-scale change, particularly when it breaks partisan containment.

The book strikes me as an extension and update on the framework that John Kingdon established with his 1984 classic, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. Like Kingdon, Culpepper and Lee are effectively asking “when does an idea’s time come?” And like Kingdon, they arrive at the importance of attention-shaping moments, along with the critical role of policy entrepreneurs. A lot has changed about politics in the intervening decades, so it’s nice to see an update of this sort.

That being said, I have a couple of critical notes to share.

I think a fair two-sentence summary of their argument would be something like “when a scandal gets picked up by 60 Minutes, politicians feel pressured to respond. And if that scandal isn’t already partisan-coded, that response may significantly alter the status quo.” Hence the title, Billionaire Backlash — when there is a major scandal with billionaires and massive corporations as the villain, we have ripe conditions for significant backlash.

It is a book, in other words, focused on public backlash to the billionaires.

I would argue that there is another, newer phenomenon currently warping our political system though: a backlash by the billionaires, against the public. The role of money in politics is not new, but (as I noted last month) the scale of billionaire influence operations is unprecedented.

Billionaire Backlash is the culmination of a decade-plus of research by Culpepper and Lee. This is both a strength and a weakness. They collect original data, across multiple cases and multiple countries, all of which provides robust support for the overall argument. But the focus on systemic patterns downplays the ways that our current moment really is different.

Just in the past year, Larry Ellison bought CBS for his son David, and they put Bari Weiss in charge of the whole thing. The Ellisons also control the TikTok algorithm, and are taking over CNN and HBO as well. Elon Musk bought Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg runs Facebook, Jeff Bezos now basically pre-approves all Washington Post editorial stances, etc. This level of hands-on billionaire media control is just about unprecedented in U.S. history.¹

It seems to me that this matters a lot for Culpepper and Lee’s model. Scandals only happen when the mass public is exposed to new, non-partisan-coded information through programs like 60 Minutes. It is historically the task of policy entrepreneurs to shepherd these controversies at least until they arrive at that point. What happens when the billionaires outright purchase 60 Minutes and instruct Bari to revamp the program?

To their credit, Culpepper and Lee devote a few pages of the final chapter to the problem of billionaire media ownership and social media fragmentation. They have seen what Musk did to Twitter, and what Bezos did to the Washington Post, and they warn that this is absolutely a problem that needs solving. But, speaking as a media scholar, I found their proposed solutions to be a little halfhearted. They suggest using the threat of government intervention to “compel a more truth-based public sphere.” Something like NewsGuard, perhaps.

In 2024, I reviewed The Death of Truth, by Newsguard’s Steve Brill, for the Journal of Democracy. NewsGuard is a fine endeavor. It is not nearly up to the task of counterbalancing the billionaire assault on the press. It’s not even close.

This is a hard problem. We shouldn’t don’t expect Culpepper and Lee to solve them for us. But it might be the hard problem that proves ultimately fatal for democracy. So it kind of puts a damper for me on their ultimate optimism.

In a still-functioning democratic system, backlash to the billionaires is a source of civic renewal. In our currently-existing political system, backlash by the billionaires threatens an end-run around that process. The book is quite worth reading, but it allays few of my pessimistic concerns. Democracy requires a free and (at least semi-)independent press. The plutocrats went ahead and bought the media system. Whether they will be able to preempt backlash to the billionaires remains to be seen.