Democracy is a bad investment. That is why the far right keeps winning

On Monday 20 February 1933, at six in the evening, about two dozen of the richest men in Germany arrived at a grand house in Berlin. It was the official home of Hermann Göring, who at the time presided over the Reichstag, Germany's parliament. Some came on foot, some by chauffeured car. Gustav Krupp was there, head of the Krupp steel empire. So was Friedrich Flick, another steel baron, and Günther Quandt, who had turned a textile business into a maker of weapons and batteries, along with executives from the chemical giant IG Farben and Kurt Schmitt, who ran the insurance company Allianz. Göring welcomed them. Then Adolf Hitler, who had been chancellor, the head of the German government, for exactly three weeks, spoke for ninety minutes.

He did not talk about race or destiny. He talked about communism, the movement that wanted to take factories and land away from private owners, and he talked about property. Private business, he told them, could not survive in an age of democracy. He promised to crush the communists and to rebuild the army, which for men who made steel and chemicals sounded less like a promise than a price list. When he finished, Krupp stood up and thanked him. Then Göring got to the point of the evening. The Nazi party's campaign chest was empty and a national election was coming on 5 March. The money he was about to ask for would be easier to give, he said, because this election would surely be the last one for ten years, probably for a hundred.

Göring left the room. Hjalmar Schacht, a banker and economist who after the war would be tried as a war criminal and acquitted, took the floor and asked for three million Reichsmarks, the German currency of the day. The money went into a bank account named Nationale Treuhand. IG Farben gave 400,000. Deutsche Bank gave 200,000. By the time the counting stopped, 2,071,000 Reichsmarks had come in. Seven days later the parliament building burned, and the Nazis used the fire as a reason to arrest their opponents. Two weeks after that, the parties those men had funded won the election.

It is tempting to read that evening as a story about evil, or about ideology. Read it instead as what it was on a balance sheet. Twenty-five investors heard a pitch, worked out what they would get back, and wrote cheques. They were not converts. What they bought was protection: no communists, no strong unions, and an army that would need a great deal of steel. Nobody in that room paid for anything he could not eventually cash in.

Hold that picture. It explains more of the last ninety years than any ideology does, and it explains an election result from last Sunday.

So here is the question. Why does the same meeting keep happening, in different rooms, in different decades, and why does the other side never get one?

Start with the ideas. The economics most governments now treat as common sense, that markets know best, that taxes are a burden, that growth is the goal and regulation the enemy, did not win because it was proven. It won because it was bought, deliberately, over decades, by people who would profit from it.

In 1945 a former fighter pilot named Antony Fisher walked into the office of Friedrich Hayek at the London School of Economics. Fisher had just read a shortened magazine version of Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom, which argued that when governments plan the economy and provide for people, they end up taking away freedom. Fisher wanted to go into politics to put this right. Hayek told him not to. Politicians follow ideas, Hayek said, and the ideas come from academics, teachers and journalists; if you want to change what a country does in thirty years, you reach them. Four years later Hayek put the same argument on paper in an essay called The Intellectuals and Socialism.

He had already started. In April 1947, at a hotel above Lake Geneva in the Swiss village of Mont Pèlerin, Hayek gathered thirty-nine economists and philosophers, among them Milton Friedman and Karl Popper, and founded a private society that took the village's name. Its members believed that free markets, low taxes and small government made people freer, and they meant to spread that belief. Fisher did his part with chickens. He turned a Sussex cowshed and a few hundred day-old chicks into Buxted Chickens, Britain's first factory farm, and by 1968 it was selling more than 20 million pounds of poultry a year. With that fortune he founded the Institute of Economic Affairs in London in 1955, a think tank, meaning an organisation that pays researchers and writers to produce reports and arguments and then pushes those arguments into newspapers, universities and the offices of politicians. In 1981 he founded Atlas, whose only purpose was to start copies of his institute in other countries. In the United States, Joseph Coors, whose family brewed Coors beer, wrote a cheque for 250,000 dollars in February 1973 to found the Heritage Foundation, and then kept sending roughly 300,000 dollars a year.

There is a name for the range of ideas a politician can say out loud without ending their career: the Overton window. It moves. The people at Mont Pèlerin understood that if you fund enough professors, enough newspaper columns and enough think-tank reports, you can drag that window towards you until what was extreme in 1947 is the sensible centre in 1980. Different organisations in different cities across four decades, running one strategy: fund the research, reach the universities and the newspapers, shape politics, and build a body of ideas that could outlast any single election.

It worked. In 1975, newly elected as leader of Britain's Conservative party, Margaret Thatcher pulled a Hayek book out of her briefcase in a policy meeting, slammed it on the table and told the room that this was what they believed. When Ronald Reagan took office as US president in January 1981, Heritage handed him Mandate for Leadership, a 1,093-page instruction manual with roughly 2,000 things to do, and he gave a copy to every minister in his government at their first meeting. Heritage says nearly two-thirds of those recommendations were carried out or attempted, including the 1981 tax cut, which took the top income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent in a single law.

For Coors, the return on his 250,000 dollars arrived inside eight years. That is the mechanism, and it is worth saying plainly, because it explains everything that follows. Funding market-liberal ideas is not charity. It is an investment. Every cheque to a right-wing think tank comes back as a tax cut, a legal loophole, a weaker union, a cheaper licence to pollute. Political funding, on that side, pays for itself, and a machine that pays its funders never runs out of funders.

The deeper victory was harder to see and worth far more. Growth, meaning a bigger economy every year, came to mean progress. Money came to mean freedom. Nobody argued those two ideas into people; they were installed as common sense, the kind of thing you believe without noticing you believe it, and they still decide which policies look realistic and whose interests count whenever a budget gets written.

Now watch the same machine build something uglier.

By the 2010s market liberalism had a problem. Forty years of it had produced flat wages, unaffordable housing, hollowed-out towns and a planet visibly on fire, and people had started asking who did this. That question is dangerous to the people who did it, because the answer, if anyone looked up, was the same class of donors who had paid for the ideas in the first place.

The far right solves that problem. It takes the anger that forty years of market liberalism produced and points it sideways: at migrants, at refugees, at Muslims, at the woke, at Brussels, at anyone but the people who own things. It tells the man whose wages have not risen since 2008 that the reason is the family in the asylum centre down the road, not the landlord, not the shareholder, not the billionaire whose tax bill has fallen every decade of his life. And while the public fights about who belongs, the far right delivers what the donors actually want. The AfD wants Germany out of the Paris climate agreement and wants the inheritance tax abolished. Those are not the demands of a working-class uprising. They are the demands of the room in Berlin.

This is the point that gets missed. The far right is not a revolt against the system. It is the insurance policy the rich buy when democracy threatens their wealth. When people stop believing that markets will look after them, you need them to blame someone else. Looking down costs the donor nothing. Looking up costs him everything. So the money pays for looking down, and people who should be standing together keep fighting each other.

Which brings us back to Germany, and to last Sunday. On 6 September 2026 the state of Sachsen-Anhalt, in the former East, went to the polls. The AfD took 43.8 percent of the vote, the highest share any party has won in that state since reunification and roughly double its result five years earlier. The CDU, the party of Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel, fell to 17.2 percent. Turnout was a record 77.8 percent. The state's own domestic intelligence agency has classified the AfD's regional branch as confirmed right-wing extremist since 2023. It won anyway.

Now ask who paid. Investigative reporting linked a €2.35 million contribution to the AfD's 2025 national election campaign to property billionaire Henning Conle, allegedly channelled through an intermediary. In May 2026, a Berlin court upheld the surrender of the donation because its true source had not been identifiable when accepted.¹ The AfD said it had been deceived. The party also received a different kind of billionaire backing. In January 2025, Elon Musk appeared by video at an AfD rally in Halle, in Saxony-Anhalt itself, and urged support for the party. He had already interviewed Alice Weidel on X. A movement presenting itself as a rebellion against the establishment had the owner of a global communications platform helping it reach an audience.

Musk had just helped finance Donald Trump's return to the White House. Federal filings showed more than $250 million in support, much of it funding efforts to turn out voters. After the election, Trump brought him into the effort to cut government spending and regulation. The donor was now helping shape the state.

These examples show how private wealth can strengthen the far right through campaign funding, publicity and access to power. They do not establish that a particular donor delivered the Saxony-Anhalt result. What they expose is the imbalance before a ballot is cast: a billionaire can finance the operation, amplify its message and help keep it going between elections. A movement can call itself anti-establishment while enjoying advantages most of its voters could never afford.

Nobody in Berlin in 1933 paid for the ideology, and nobody pays for it now. Krupp bought protection from communists and unions.² Conle, von Finck,³ Stöcker⁴ and Musk buy protection from the twenty-first century's version: climate policy, wealth taxes, tenant rights, a European Union that regulates, and any party that might make the rich pay. The 1930s are not a warning about the past. They are a description of the present business model, and the returns are still being paid.

Now look at the other side of the political spectrum. The progressive left movements are trying to fund a fairer world. In plain words, it wants a few things. It wants wealth shared more evenly, so that the very rich pay more and everyone else has more. It wants real action on climate change, which means leaving oil, gas and coal in the ground, the carbon taxes and laws that protect nature. It wants an end to unequal exchange, the arrangement where poor countries sell their raw materials and labour cheaply to rich countries and buy back finished goods cheaply. It wants stronger rights for workers, and it wants universal basic services: healthcare, education, housing, transport and care guaranteed to everyone, paid for together, the way we already pay for roads. It wants ordinary people to have a direct say in decisions, and it wants corporate lobbying, the industry of paid professionals who persuade politicians to write laws that suit their employers, shut down.

Every single item on that list is a threat to somebody's profits. Funding tax cuts makes a billionaire richer. Funding redistribution asks a billionaire to pay for having less. Funding climate action asks the owners of oil fields to pay for the end of oil fields. Taxing environmental destruction reduces profits. Funding an end to unequal exchange asks the companies that profit from cheap raw materials to pay for the end of cheap raw materials. Funding workers' rights asks employers to pay for stronger employees, and funding universal basic services asks the people who sell healthcare and housing for profit to pay for a world where nobody needs to buy them.

For anyone making money by pulling oil, minerals, timber and cheap labour out of the ground and out of people, the success of the left is a loss. This is why the left will never be funded the way the right is funded. There is no cheque a billionaire can write to the green left that comes back with interest, so the cheque does not get written. The sympathetic donor exists, and generosity exists, but generosity has a ceiling that self-interest does not. When the moment came in 1933, the people who owned the factories and the money did not defend democracy. They bought whatever promised to protect what they owned. That is why I refuse to assume powerful people will defend democracy if they come to believe something darker will guard their interests better.

The same logic explains what happens to the movements that do get money. Watch a movement that starts winning. It gets noticed. It needs staff, an office, lawyers and someone to answer the press. The volunteers who carried it cannot carry a payroll, so somebody writes to the foundations, the charitable bodies wealthy people set up to give money away. The grants arrive, usually for one year, sometimes for three, each with a programme officer, a reporting form and a list of what the money may and may not be spent on. The movement learns what the funders like to fund and starts proposing that. Its horizon shrinks to the length of a grant cycle. The people who once demanded that the rules be changed now run a project that helps people cope with the rules as they are, because coping is fundable and changing is not. Nobody sells out. Nobody has to. The organisation simply reshapes itself, one budget line at a time, around the interests of whoever pays, and those interests are often the very ones it was founded to fight. A corporate partnership follows. A donor gets a seat on the board. The demand for redistribution softens into a demand for transparency, and twenty years later the logo is still on the door while the movement is gone.

That is the trap. A movement that depends on wealthy donors either stays small enough to be ignored or grows large enough to be bought. Power brings money, money brings conditions, and the conditions always point back towards the people the power was meant to challenge.

So how did any movement ever win? Look at the ones that lasted, and you find the same answer every time: they were paid for by their own people. Churches have run on the collection plate and the tithe for two thousand years, which is one reason they are still here and most of the rulers who once bankrolled them are not. Trade unions were built on weekly dues, a few coins from each worker, and those coins bought the weekend, the eight-hour day and the right to strike without being sacked. When Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama boycotted the city's buses in 1955, the car pools that replaced the buses were financed from collection plates passed at church mass meetings, and no foundation could tell that movement what to ask for. Human rights groups, the labour movement, the churches: the ones that survived are the ones that owned their own money.

That is the model, and it is the only one available to us. Build movements paid for by their own members and by trade unions, the way the right built institutions paid for by chicken profits and beer. Move large private fortunes into civic funds, pools of money that belong to no single donor and are run democratically by the people they serve. Put communities, not foundations, in charge of deciding where charitable money goes. Change the rules on political donations so wealth can no longer buy its own protection, so that no poster campaign can be laundered through a straw man and no billionaire can put 250 million dollars behind a candidate. And pay the people doing this work, because people fighting for a fairer world need salaries, legal support and funding they can plan around. Hayek's people planned in decades. Ours have to be able to stay in the fight for decades too.

So why has the right won for eighty years, and why is the far right winning now? Its ideas are not better, and the people who vote for it are not stupid. It wins because on their side every euro is an investment that comes back with interest, and on our side every euro is a gift. Return on investment explains Mont Pèlerin. It explains Reagan's manual and Thatcher's briefcase. It explains a billionaire's posters in Sachsen-Anhalt and a billionaire on a screen in Halle telling Germans to stop feeling guilty. It explains why the man who has been robbed is told to blame his neighbour. And it explains why the room in Berlin has never really emptied. The names change. The return does not.

We cannot make democracy a good investment for them. It never will be. What we can do is stop waiting for their permission. Pay for our own movements. Own our own money. Write the rules so wealth cannot buy its own protection. Stay in the fight for decades, on salaries our own people pay.

Democracy cannot depend on whether billionaires find it worth funding. To them, it never will be. So we pay for it ourselves, or it stays unbuilt.

As long as democracy depends on the generosity of the powerful, the powerful decide how much democracy we get.

This article is also published on Substack. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the opinions of leading Sustainability Thought Leaders, their views do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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