In 1956, (NINETEEN FIFTY-SIX!) Ian Fleming wrote

[Hermit-The-Prog]

20. Don't forget our home-grown billionaires who despise democracy

There is a symbiotic relationship between the GOP and anti-democratic billionaires. Captured media provides the messages that shape voters' perceptions; Republicans in office provide the deregulation, rubber-stamping for mergers, and tax cuts for the filthy rich; libertarian and christofascist billionaires provide the funding for campaigns, propaganda, research for voter 'triggers', institutes for grooming, and test cases for courts.

A beginning:

Nobel laureate James Buchanan is the intellectual linchpin of the Koch-funded attack on democratic institutions, argues Duke historian Nancy MacLean

MacLean describes how the economist developed a grand project to train operatives to staff institutions funded by like-minded tycoons, most significantly Charles Koch, who became interested in his work in the ‘70s and sought the economist’s input in promoting “Austrian economics” in the U.S. and in advising the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Koch, whose mission was to save capitalists like himself from democracy, found the ultimate theoretical tool in the work of the southern economist. The historian writes that Koch preferred Buchanan to Milton Friedman and his “Chicago boys” because, she says, quoting a libertarian insider, they wanted “to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root.”