1. Moderate Republicans
1.1. Prescott Bush
1.2. Nelson Rockefeller
1.2.1. centrism booed at SF RNC convention
1.3. George HW Bush
1.3.1. "A Kinder Gentler Nation"
1.3.2. defeated Dukakis with Willie Horton racist ad
1.4. Jeb Bush
1.4.1. his soft immigration ideals hurt him
2. Congressional Supporters
2.1. Joseph McCarthy
2.2. Senator Phil Gramm
2.2.1. led de-regulation
2.2.2. the government’s official autopsy of the collapse called that ban “a key turning point in the march toward the financial crisis,” because “derivatives rapidly spiraled out of control and out of sight.”
3. Radical Republicans
3.1. Barry Goldwater
3.1.1. his brand of libertarian, antitax absolutism found a fervent audience among American executives who were confronting an alarming change: after a quarter century of relentless growth, American profits were declining.
3.2. Ronald Reagan
3.3. Donald Trump
4. Wall Street
4.1. in the last two decades of the twentieth century, financiers and economists opened vast new realms of speculation and financial engineering—aggressive methods to bet on securities, merge businesses, and cut expenses using bankruptcy laws. U.S. stock markets grew twelvefold, and most of the gains accrued to the wealthiest Americans. By 2017, Wall Streeters were taking home twenty-three per cent of the country’s corporate profits—and home, for many of them, was Connecticut.
4.2. top twenty-five hedge-fund managers earned an average of two hundred and seven million dollars a year.
4.3. Steve Cohen
4.3.1. Steven A. Cohen paid $14.8 million in cash for a house, then added an ice rink, an indoor basketball court, putting greens, a fairway, and a massage room, ultimately swelling the building to thirty-six thousand square feet—larger than the Taj Mahal. In a final flourish, Cohen obtained special permission to surround his estate with a wall that exceeded the town’s limits on height. It was nine feet tall.
4.4. Raj Rajaratnam
4.4.1. arrested for stock cheating
4.5. Walter Noel
4.5.1. funneled clients $$ to Madoff
4.6. Robert Mercer
4.7. Charlie Glazer
4.8. Thomas Peterffy
4.8.1. “When the choice is between two ideologies, then it’s a luxury to dwell on the personalities of the candidates,” he told me. “It’s a luxury that we cannot afford.” Peterffy, who made his fortune as a pioneer in digital trading, said that the choice was between “a high degree of government regulation or a diminished amount of government regulation, because, basically, that’s how the U.S. will get to socialism—increasing government regulation.”
4.8.2. an advocate for replacing all government benefits with a universal basic income: “It is much, much cheaper to give the people money and not restrict business in any way.”
4.9. As of last year, America’s four hundred richest individuals owned about three trillion dollars in wealth—more than all black households and a quarter of all Latino households combined, according to the Institute for Policy Studies.
4.10. On average, Trump gave households in the top one per cent a forty-eight-thousand-dollar tax cut, while those in the bottom twenty per cent received a hundred and twenty dollars,
4.11. Cliff Asness
4.11.1. “economic suggestions that kind of hurt me to admit,” he wrote. “We need, and I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, fiscal help. We need fiscal relief for individuals and small (and maybe large) businesses.” Anticipating the charge of hypocrisy, he wrote, “Yes, I’m losing libertarian bonafides here. I’m ok with that.”
4.12. When the President eventually signed a relief bill, in March, it included a tax deduction, mostly for hedge funds and real-estate businesses, that was worth an average of $1.7 million for each of America’s forty-three thousand wealthiest taxpayers and cost the Treasury about ninety billion dollars in the first year.
5. Big Banks
5.1. John Reed, Citibank
5.2. William Harrison, JP Morgan Chase
6. Connecticut Liberals
6.1. Joanna Swomley
6.1.1. In 2017, Greenwich Democrats won control of the town finance board for the first time in recorded history; the next year, they won seats in the state legislature that no Democrat had occupied since Herbert Hoover was in the White House.
7. Consultants and Influencers
7.1. "Black, Manafort and Stone"
7.1.1. influence peddling
7.1.2. clients included Murdoch and Trump
7.2. they built a coalition of conservative élites and the white working class.
7.3. Paul Manafort
7.4. Roger Stone
7.5. Lee Atwater
7.5.1. Bannon wishes that more people knew about his discreet contribution to the movement. “Lee Hanley is like, when you read the history of the American Revolution or the Civil War—all these great events—you find out about these individuals in back that never won any credit, but, if it was not for them, the victory would not be achieved,” he told a conservative audience in 2017. “He had a real love of the hobbits, of the deplorables, and he put his money where his mouth was.”
7.6. Lee Hanley
7.7. Turning Point USA
7.8. Charlie Kirk
7.9. Students for Trump
7.10. Pat Caddell
7.10.1. Caddell’s polls quickly suggested that the “level of discontent in this country was beyond anything measurable.”
7.11. Steve Bannon
8. Conservative Theorists
8.1. William Buckley Jr.
8.1.1. government exists only“to protect its citizens’ lives, liberty and property."
9. Liberal Theorists
9.1. Kenneth Galbraith
9.1.1. one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is, the search for a truly superior moral justification for selfishness.
10. Greenwich Power Players
10.1. J. William Middendorf
10.1.1. a “disciple” of the libertarian movement, enthralled by Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter.
10.1.2. “We created the conditions that put conservative Republicans back in power after more than thirty years of domination by the liberal eastern establishment—the so-called ‘Country Club’ Republicans.”
10.2. Connecticut has the richest one per cent of any state, but, according to several studies of crumbling infrastructure, its roads are among the worst in the country.
11. Economists
11.1. Charles Rossotti
11.1.1. Republican businessman who served as the commissioner of the I.R.S. from 1997 to 2002, has estimated that sophisticated tax ploys and shelters cause ordinary citizens to pay an extra fifteen per cent in taxes each year