Cooper’s argument turns on a claim about corporate ownership structures that may strike some readers as arcane, but which she believes is important to understand in order to make sense of the world we live in now. After World War II, the most important companies in the United States were large, publicly traded corporations governed by professional managers, owned by thousands of dispersed shareholders. (Although numerically, the majority of businesses have always been privately owned small firms.) After the New Deal, these publicly traded corporations were overseen by a government entity, the Securities and Exchange Commission, which made sure they were not actively engaged in fraud. During the Cold War, this regulated capitalism flourished. When executives sought to maintain social peace by bargaining with organized labor and supporting social welfare, this was not just a pragmatic political response; Cooper argues that it also reflected the structure of the publicly traded corporation, which is accountable to its shareholders through quarterly reports and annual meetings in a way that a privately held company does not need to be.
During the 1970s and ’80s, Cooper writes, this form of corporate structure and social compact began to come apart. Shareholders and owners, anxious about falling profits, sought to assert their dominance over management. Hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts made it clear who was really in control, and with them also reemerged an older form of corporate power: the privately held firm in which the owners were directly responsible for managerial decisions, without external oversight. Even when private companies went public, a variety of ownership structures emerged—private equity, venture capital, family trusts—that privileged owners and shareholders and gave small groups of people greater control over the firms, despite the fact that they were publicly traded.
These entrepreneurial executives, Cooper argues, constitute an under-recognized force driving the rise of the Trumpian right: Privately held firms are often much more politically aggressive and may be more likely to pursue the libertarian and culturally conservative politics that publicly held companies avoid. Family dynasties such as the Kochs and the DeVoses (of Amway fame) have been able to pour so much money into libertarian political causes in part because there is no one warning them that doing so might damage the corporate brand. As Cooper puts it, “S&P 500 corporations are not so much ‘woke’ as legally accountable to shareholders and constantly vulnerable to the risk of consumer backlash. Private, unlisted companies and their general partners are far less constrained.”
For Cooper, this change in patterns of ownership is part of a larger transformation of the economy and our political culture that has taken place over the past five decades. But it is also a distinct shift that has helped to create the ethos and worldview of Trump’s political base. Wealthy individuals hailing from the world of private equity, hedge funds, and venture capital, followed by real estate, construction, and oil and gas—all industries studded with large, privately owned companies—have contributed generously to Trump. In 2024, most of the top individual donors to his campaign came from privately owned companies like SpaceX, Hendricks Holding Company (a privately held conglomerate), and Uline Incorporated (which sells shipping supplies).