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Dec 23, 2023

What Should You Do with an Oil Fortune?

By Andrew Marantz Let’s say you were born into a legacy that is, you have come to believe, ruining the world. What can you do? You could be paralyzed with guilt. You could run away from your legacy,

By Andrew Marantz

Let’s say you were born into a legacy that is, you have come to believe, ruining the world. What can you do? You could be paralyzed with guilt. You could run away from your legacy, turn inward, cultivate your garden. If you have a lot of money, you could give it away a bit at a time—enough to assuage your conscience, and your annual tax burden, but not enough to hamper your life style—and only to causes (libraries, museums, one or both political parties) that would not make anyone close to you too uncomfortable. Or you could just give it all away—to a blind trust, to the first person you pass on the sidewalk—which would be admirable: a grand gesture of renunciation in exchange for moral purity. But, if you believe that the world is being ruined by structural causes, you will have done little to challenge those structures.

When Leah Hunt-Hendrix was an undergraduate at Duke, in the early two-thousands, she wasn’t sure what to do with her privilege. She had grown up in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, and spent most summers in Dallas with her wealthy churchgoing grandmother. One afternoon, she wandered into a lecture by Stanley Hauerwas, a divinity-school professor whom Time had just named America’s “best” theologian. Hauerwas, as it happened, was also from Dallas; the son of a bricklayer, he could speak in the academic argot of a virtue ethicist or the salty style of a fire-and-brimstone preacher. He rejected the “ahistorical approach of liberal theory,” the assumption that each individual is an autonomous economic unit with a view from nowhere. Instead, as Hunt-Hendrix later put it, “we are born into traditions, and it becomes our task to keep making sense of the world through those traditions, improving them as we go.” Inequality was arguably the defining fact of contemporary American life, which struck Hunt-Hendrix as urgently, intolerably wrong. Hauerwas encouraged his students to reckon with the forces that had shaped their lives, even ones that were set in motion long before they were born.

One summer, Hunt-Hendrix studied with Hauerwas one-on-one, reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The following summer, she went back to Dallas. On campus that fall, Hauerwas saw her sitting on a bench and stopped to ask about her break. “She sort of sheepishly mumbled something about interning at the family business,” he recalled. “At that moment, it hit me, and I blurted it out, ‘Well, shit, you’re a Hunt! ’ ”

At a place like Duke, where about twenty per cent of the students come from the one per cent, it’s not remarkable to encounter a rich kid. Only in extraordinary cases (Rockefeller, Murdoch) is a surname, on its own, an instant giveaway. Hunt is a common name, but to a Dallasite of Hauerwas’s generation it was unmistakable. “I can’t believe it took me this long to put it together,” he told her that day on campus. “My daddy must have laid bricks for your granddaddy.”

H. L. Hunt, Leah’s maternal grandfather, was a Dallas oilman. In the nineteen-thirties, he built wells all over the East Texas oil field, which turned out to be one of the most prodigious reservoirs of oil in the United States. In 1948, Fortune estimated that he was the wealthiest person in America; in 1967, Esquire quoted a source saying, “There’s absolutely no question about the Hunts being the richest family in the country.” Hunt backed Barry Goldwater, the archconservative senator from Arizona, and George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama. (When term limits prohibited Wallace from seeking reëlection, Hunt encouraged him to run his wife, Lurleen, in his place.) He supported the power-mad senator Joseph McCarthy, the rabidly anti-Communist John Birch Society, and reportedly even the Nation of Islam, which promoted racial separatism. William F. Buckley, Jr., once wrote that Hunt’s “yahoo bigotry” had almost managed to “give capitalism a bad name.”

If Leah Hunt-Hendrix had accepted the notion that she was merely an atomized individual, unencumbered by history, then all of this might have seemed like little more than a coincidence. Her grandfather had died before she was born. Why should she do penance for his sins? And yet, no matter how many times she repeated this argument to herself, she remained unconvinced. She even looked a bit like her grandfather: fair skin, apple cheeks, round face. When Hunt began amassing his fortune, it was not widely understood that the overuse of fossil fuels could ruin the planet. But this was known by 1987, when Hunt Oil finished building a pipeline through the desert of North Yemen; and in 2007, when Hunt Oil signed a prospecting deal with the regional government of Kurdistan (a deal that the Bush Administration disavowed in public but blessed in private); and in 2017, when Rex Tillerson, who had worked closely with Hunt Oil in the Middle East, became Donald Trump’s Secretary of State. Hunt Oil is still family-owned, and still among the largest private oil-and-gas companies in the U.S. It’s now one of several family companies that are part of Hunt Consolidated, including Hunt Energy, Hunt Refining, Hunt Realty, and Hunt Power. The Hunt Consolidated headquarters, in downtown Dallas, is a fourteen-story tower made of steel and glass; the air-conditioning bills must be enormous, yet, somehow, the building is LEED-certified.

Behind every great fortune is a great crime, according to an adage attributed to Balzac—but, unlike the money, the crimes are not fungible. Some took place many generations ago, whereas others are ongoing; some afflict a marginal few, others the whole world. Hunt-Hendrix joined a Christian-fellowship group on campus and volunteered as a community organizer in downtown Durham. She wanted to devote her life to rectifying society’s imbalance of wealth and power, but none of the familiar options—endow a professorship? work at a soup kitchen?—seemed to get to the root of the problem. “Most of us spend our lives only embracing or only renouncing where we come from,” Hauerwas told me. “Leah wanted to do the grownup thing, the exceedingly difficult thing—to look all of it square in the face, and then to find a way to make herself actually useful.”

After graduating, Hunt-Hendrix entered an interdisciplinary doctorate program at Princeton called Religion, Ethics, and Politics. (“In my mind, those are three ways of saying the same thing,” she said.) Two of her main advisers were Cornel West—one of the best-known public intellectuals in the country, always ready to support a labor strike or a socialist candidate—and Jeffrey Stout, who was about to publish “Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America.” (The book posited that the U.S. seemed to function “as a plutocracy,” and that the way out was to help organizers build power “from the bottom up.”) She took a leave from grad school in 2009 and spent a year teaching English in a small Egyptian city, then another year studying Arabic in Damascus. In Tunisia, she later wrote, she met organizers who “talked about the role of oil companies”—the major public ones, in this case—executing land grabs and “violence against activists who were part of the resistance to fossil fuel extraction.” On a trip to the West Bank, she heard residents’ stories of abject suffering and, moved by compassion and guilt, asked what she could do to help. But many people told her: We don’t want your help, we want your solidarity.

When she came back to Princeton, she proposed a dissertation on the intellectual history of solidarity. (“Vast, interdisciplinary topic,” West told me. “We knew she’d pull it off, but she exceeded our expectations.”) She could spend her life giving money to those in need, she concluded, but charity would only change things at the margins; to help uproot structural inequality, she would have to invest in social movements.

Hunt-Hendrix is now forty and splits her time between New York and Washington, D.C., where she has become a nexus of the New New Left, in frequent contact with street organizers and also several members of Congress. A few times, I saw someone recognize Hunt-Hendrix in passing—Representative Ro Khanna, leaving a progressive centimillionaire’s holiday party in Greenwich Village; a Teamsters organizer at a rally of UPS workers in Canarsie—and ask her, “What is it you do again?” Each time, she struggled to give a concise answer. Basically, she is a philanthropist, though she is reluctant to use the word, given her skepticism toward much of what passes for philanthropy. She donates money to leftist social movements, and she leverages her connections to persuade other rich people to do the same. She gave early funding to Black Lives Matter activists, and to the long-shot primary campaigns of members of the Squad. Since 2017, through her organization Way to Win, she has helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars for left-populist politicians—not quite Bloomberg or Koch money, but significantly more than is usually associated with the far left.

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“She has better politics than anyone else who’s that rich, and she’s better at fund-raising than anyone else with her politics,” Max Berger, who worked on Elizabeth Warren’s Presidential campaign in 2020, told me. “Whatever you want to call my faction—the Bernie wing, the Warren wing, democratic-socialist, social democrat—we would have way less power if Leah didn’t exist.” If the faction had enough power to enact its full agenda, many of the richest people in the country would likely lose money and influence; a centerpiece of the agenda is the Green New Deal, which, if implemented in maximalist form, could help put fossil-fuel companies, including Hunt Oil, out of business. “Leah was clearly preoccupied with how a person of extreme privilege can live responsibly in the world,” Stout told me. “That seemed to be, for her, an existential question.”

Legend has it that H. L. Hunt won the lease to his first oil field in a poker game. According to the book “Texas Rich,” the legend is just that: Hunt actually got some of his most prized properties by keeping the wildcatter Dad Joiner in a hotel room for days and wearing him down until he signed away the land, a deal that Joiner apparently regretted for the rest of his life. “In terms of extraordinary, independent wealth,” J. Paul Getty said in 1957, “there is only one man—H. L. Hunt.”

In the press, Hunt cultivated a reputation as a respectable conservative who wore rumpled gabardine suits and carried a sack lunch to work. With the benefit of a fuller historical record, it’s clear that, even by the standards of his time, Hunt was unusually racist and reactionary. He sometimes implied that to give up a significant portion of one’s income, through taxation or philanthropy, was to let the Communists win. He funded a nationally syndicated conservative radio show, “Life Line,” and an endless series of far-right-propaganda pamphlets and books, many of which he wrote himself. “Alpaca,” a self-published novel in the vein of Ayn Rand, sketched his vision of a political utopia; it included a system called “graduated suffrage,” in which rich people would get more votes. Once, after a “Life Line” anchor spoke out against “hate groups” on the air, Hunt privately admonished him never to espouse “opposition to a white-supremacy group.”

Hunt’s life was so soap-operatic that J. R. Ewing, of the TV show “Dallas,” is assumed to be based on him. According to posthumous reporting, he was both a grandstanding moralist and a semi-secret polygamist who fathered fifteen children, some of whom he acknowledged only when he was forced to. Leah and her branch of the Hunts refer to themselves as the Second Family, which is slightly misleading given that, while living with his First Family and before starting his Second, Hunt married another woman on the sly and had four children with her. (The woman later testified in court that he’d tried to coax her into converting to Mormonism, so that his multiple marriages could be legal; when this didn’t work, she alleged, he offered her nearly a million dollars to sign a statement swearing that they’d never been married.) Near the end of his life, he sold what he marketed as health food—whole-grain bread, peanut butter, canned chicken—and extolled an exercise technique that he called “creeping,” otherwise known as crawling around on the floor.

By 2020, according to Forbes, the Hunts had slipped from the richest American family to the eighteenth-richest, worth more than fifteen billion dollars. Leah’s uncle Ray Hunt, the only Second Family son, started running Hunt Oil after his father died, in 1974, and today he is worth between five and six billion dollars. (H.L. also left several oil companies to his First Family heirs, whose descendants now run Petro-Hunt, which is based in Dallas as well.) “My brother was groomed to take over the family oil business,” Leah’s mother, Helen LaKelly Hunt, once wrote. “My sisters and I were taught to be precious Southern belles.”

Helen has an older sister, June, who hosts a popular evangelical radio show, and a younger sister, Swanee, who was Ambassador to Austria under President Bill Clinton. For years, the sisters lived on monthly allowances, but eventually they negotiated to get dividends from Hunt Oil. Since then, they and their descendants have been invited to annual meetings at the corporate headquarters; they are allowed to ask questions, but they have no formal power within the company. Helen rebelled against expectations when she was a young adult, in the late sixties, by moving to New York; she later grew close to Abigail Disney and Gloria Steinem, and funnelled much of her share of the family fortune into the second-wave feminist movement. Most of the Dallas Hunts remain George W. Bush-style Republicans, yet they are proud to think of their family as the kind that can hash things out over Thanksgiving dinner, without raised voices.

In April, I went with Leah to visit her parents. They now live in Dallas full time, in a not particularly lavish condo decorated with Pueblo pottery, mementos of their children’s accomplishments, and a KFC bucket repurposed as a flowerpot. (Leah has four half siblings and one full sibling—Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, the lead singer of the critically lauded metal band Liturgy, who lives in Brooklyn.) Her parents are well-known marriage counselors with several best-selling books (“Getting the Love You Want,” “Keeping the Love You Find”); her father, Harville Hendrix, has made more than a dozen appearances on “Oprah.”

“A few years ago, we asked our staff for a list of the ten American cities with the highest divorce rates,” Harville said. “We went down the list, going, ‘We don’t know anyone in Las Vegas, don’t know anyone in Jacksonville—’ ”

Helen gently interrupted him: “Well, we do have family in Kansas City.” Clark Hunt, of the First Family, is chairman and part-owner of the Kansas City Chiefs. “But in the end we decided on Dallas,” Helen said, smiling.

“Yes, we thought Dallas would be best,” Harville said, smiling.

They are constantly doing this sort of thing—surfacing some minor disagreement and then settling it, amicably and a bit ritualistically. When things get tense, they resort to what they call “mirroring”: one partner talks and the other listens, speaking up only to ask clarifying questions. (“So it sounds like you’re frustrated that I ran that yellow light. Am I getting that right?”) One of their core tenets has been that almost no married couple should ever get divorced. “We believe that relationships are the cornerstone of society, and a lot of people’s relationships are not doing so well these days,” Helen said, wincing empathically. In Dallas, they hoped to start a proof-of-concept revival, restoring one city’s civic health from the cornerstone up. “We thought, If we can lower the divorce rate in just one place, then maybe that will lower the rates of alcoholism and crime and all sorts of things,” Harville said. “Sounds a bit grandiose, maybe.”

“Everyone in this family, in one way or another, wants to change the world,” Helen said.

We spent several hours in Helen and Harville’s car, a dinged-up silver Lexus, on a driving tour of the city. “That’s one of Caroline’s hotels,” Helen said. (Caroline Rose Hunt, of the First Family, founded the Rosewood hotel chain.) And later: “That’s the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge.” (Margaret, Caroline’s sister, founded the Dallas Cotillion; three of their brothers tried to corner the global silver market in the seventies, resulting in a commodities crash.) We parked next to the colonnaded white mansion where Helen grew up; in front of it, written in wrought iron, were the words “Mount Vernon.” (The house is a replica of George Washington’s plantation home, in Virginia, and is about the same size.) “Popsie used to take us around town and make us sing these little anti-Communist ditties he wrote,” Helen said. She started to sing one from memory—“Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” but with lyrics warning about what would happen “if the Reds take over.”

One day of the visit was Palm Sunday, and Leah and her parents went to church. “My parents used to be very close with the pastor,” Helen said. “I believe they had a building named after my mother.” The pastor her parents had known was W. A. Criswell, who for years was a virulent anti-Communist and segregationist. His church, First Baptist Dallas, is now a megachurch, and its head pastor is Robert Jeffress, a Fox News contributor who has been called Trump’s Apostle. Leah, looking a bit ashen, read his Wikipedia bio on her phone.

Inside, there were three thousand seats, and nearly all of them were filled; the pulpit featured a three-hundred-person choir and a baptismal tank full of bright-blue water. “They’re doing an amazing job of marketing,” Harville said. “Notice how they keep mentioning his book?” Leah was more attuned to the hallmarks of movement-building: an upcoming singles’ night, a pancake breakfast, infant care—amenities that were increasingly rare in the public commons. (Leah agrees with the sociologist Émile Durkheim, who believed, as she noted in her dissertation, that “the importance of a religion is not its proximity to an absolute truth, but its ability to hold a community together.”) “Why can’t the left pull off anything like this?” she whispered. “Maybe that’s what we should have been building all along.”

In the fall of 2011, activists took over Zuccotti Park, in lower Manhattan, forming an encampment that came to be known as Occupy Wall Street. Hunt-Hendrix, who was renting a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn and working on her dissertation, started spending a lot of time there. “New solidarities were formed,” she wrote in her dissertation. “People of vastly different backgrounds found themselves in meetings, ate meals together, debated politics.”

She tried to listen more than she talked. This was meant to convey humility, but it was also a way to avoid having to divulge too much about herself. “If a table needed to be wiped down, she was wiping down the table,” Nelini Stamp, an Occupy Wall Street participant, told me. Still, word got around. “Someone pulled me aside and pointed and went, ‘You know that’s oil money right there,’ ” Stamp recalled. “I went, ‘Leah? No way, that’s the homie.’ ” Another Occupier told me, “I remember hanging out with Leah when she was coming back from a party, and she mentioned, ‘Oh, Chelsea Clinton was there.’ I thought, Huh, O.K. Not the kind of parties I get invited to!” Hunt-Hendrix also became friends with Brooke Lehman, another Occupy participant who was born rich. (“Lehman, as in the brothers?” fellow-activists would ask her, and the answer was yes—one of hundreds of descendants, but still.) As more organizers realized that some of their comrades had ties to dynastic fortunes, they mused about what the movement could achieve with access to that money and power.

Hunt-Hendrix, Lehman, and a half-dozen other participants, most of them wealthy, started to meet up informally, over home-cooked meals at Leah’s apartment. Some referred to themselves as “one-per-centers for the ninety-nine per cent,” or, semi-ironically, as “class traitors.” Most of them, including Hunt-Hendrix, were members of Resource Generation, which was a group for young progressives who had money but felt ambivalent about it. Lehman used family money to buy a dairy farm in upstate New York and turn it into a retreat center for organizers. Farhad Ebrahimi, whose father is a software billionaire, had a sixty-five-million-dollar bank account that he controlled outright; he committed to donating all of it to leftist activists, within the next decade. Most of Hunt-Hendrix’s family money, by contrast, came at the discretion of her parents.

She was “outed,” as she put it, in March of 2012, when Salon ran an article about her under the headline “Occupy’s Heiress.” She corresponded with her uncle Ray—a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’s board of directors—who wrote her a letter asking about her participation in the movement. There were bad apples in every profession, including finance, but why tear it all down? She wrote several long, earnest responses (“It’s not about bad people, but about a system that has gone awry”), each time beginning and ending on a note of familial conciliation (“Thank you for holding our differences with such gentleness”).

Occupy was criticized for not having a central demand, but after a few months it splintered into several local campaigns around the country seeking specific policy concessions: end fracking, raise the minimum wage. Most of these nascent groups were in no position to apply for seed funding from philanthropic foundations like MacArthur or Ford—many didn’t even have official names, much less 501(c)(3) status, and some employed civil-disobedience tactics that big foundations might not condone. Instead, the organizers could call Hunt-Hendrix to ask for what they needed. In 2013, this ad-hoc funding method became a community of donors, helmed by Hunt-Hendrix, called Solidaire Network. It began as a rapid-response e-mail list that went out to a few dozen donors, then to a few hundred. One e-mail raised six thousand dollars for a bail fund for Black Lives Matter activists in Minneapolis; another e-mail requested twenty-five thousand dollars for “land acquisition in an oil pipeline fight.” Even when the actions hit close to home, Hunt-Hendrix didn’t intervene. In 2014, a protest called Flood Wall Street targeted “oil, gas and coal companies that pursue increasingly extreme projects for bringing fossil fuels out of the ground”; Hunt-Hendrix was one of the organizers.

When her friends and their friends couldn’t keep up with the demand for donations, she set out to recruit more wealthy progressives who could. Liz Simons and Caitlin Heising, the daughter and granddaughter of the hedge-fund billionaire Jim Simons, became Solidaire members; so did Regan Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, who also got her mother, Susan, to join. At a conference at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in D.C.—held by the Democracy Alliance, a network of V.I.P. progressive donors, including George Soros and Tom Steyer—Hunt-Hendrix worked the room, trying to persuade people to support more grassroots activism. While courting a finance person, she compared scrappy nonprofits to undervalued stocks; with a venture capitalist, she talked about early adoption and hockey-stick growth. “There is a part of me that deeply detests élite spaces, but there is another part that feels quite at home among powerful people,” she said.

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Her parents were then living on Riverside Drive, in a Beaux-Arts town house with nine bedrooms, eight fireplaces, and a Tiffany-glass skylight. They hosted a series of invitation-only “salons,” where grassroots organizers mingled with Solidaire members while caterers served wine. It was hard to miss the resemblance to the scene that Tom Wolfe captured in his essay “Radical Chic,” in which uniformed maids at Leonard Bernstein’s Upper East Side apartment offered Roquefort-cheese balls to members of the Black Panther Party. One Solidaire salon featured Occupy activists, Arab Spring organizers from Egypt and Tunisia, and a special performance by Peter Buffett (New Age recording artist, son of Warren); it also promised “a discussion of how we can dip into history as it swirls around us,” followed by “generous helpings of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream scooped by Jerry himself!” For a few months, Black Lives Matter organizers stayed in some of the upstairs bedrooms, covering the walls with butcher paper as they brainstormed future protests.

Historically, a lot of radical-chic activism hasn’t amounted to much more than virtue signalling. Some post-Occupy initiatives that Solidaire funded led nowhere, but others kept gaining momentum. A campaign to increase the minimum wage became the Fight for $15, which was ultimately successful in New York City, Los Angeles, and multiple states. The Black Lives Matter movement culminated, in the summer of 2020, in the largest civil-rights uprising in American history. A youth climate-justice campaign spurred a congressional bloc calling for a Green New Deal. Solidaire now distributes tens of millions of dollars a year to activist groups. (Hunt-Hendrix has stepped down as executive director, but she’s still a member.)

In 2015, Hunt-Hendrix pledged ten thousand dollars to the Debt Collective, a group co-founded by a socialist writer, filmmaker, and organizer named Astra Taylor. The group demanded, among other things, the abolition of all student debt in the U.S., an idea that was then considered ludicrous. But when Bernie Sanders ran for President in 2020 he included the idea in his campaign platform; Joe Biden then promised to cancel some student debt, a position he had previously opposed. (Since that year, Way to Win has given the Debt Collective an annual grant of a quarter-million dollars.) Last year, President Biden signed an executive order cancelling tens of billions of dollars in student debt, only for the Supreme Court to strike it down this June; the Administration recently announced a narrower debt-forgiveness plan. This fell short of Taylor’s aspirations, but it showed how far a movement’s demand could get within a decade. “People think this shit just happens on its own,” she said. “Anyone close to it knows it takes years of work, and money.”

Rich people have always given alms to the poor, but the tax-exempt institution we now know as philanthropy is only about a century old. In a 2018 book called “Just Giving,” the Stanford political scientist Rob Reich argues that many corporations and wealthy individuals use contemporary philanthropy as “a plutocratic exercise of power”—a soft-power equivalent of graduated suffrage. No wonder many left-wing activists have little patience for distinctions between bad plutocrats and less bad ones. “If someone approaches me and says, ‘I have ties to the fossil-fuel industry, which has been destroying the planet and lying about it for fifty years, but now I feel bad and I want to help,’ I think it’s rational for me to go, ‘Nah, go fuck yourself,’ ” a prominent Green New Deal organizer told me. “I don’t feel that way about Leah, but only because she spent years putting in the work to convince people like me that she’s legit.”

After grad school, Hunt-Hendrix spent a few years in San Francisco, trying to make inroads among the new-money entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. She had some success—she grew close to the founder of a well-known tech company, and his wife became an active member of Solidaire—but less than she’d hoped. Many people in the Bay Area were influenced by effective altruism, an ethos that purports to reinvent philanthropy from first principles, but which struck Hunt-Hendrix as glib and ahistorical. “I’m glad any time a rich person redistributes money to a poor person—it’s better than nothing,” she told me. “But ultimately, in the absence of a larger strategy, it’s just palliative.”

She elaborates on her theory of change in a book she wrote with Taylor called “Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea,” due out next year from Pantheon Books. (It was going to be published this year, by Verso Books, but then, following a dispute between the Verso union and management, Taylor and Hunt-Hendrix pulled it, in solidarity with the workers.) The book traces the concept of solidarity from Aristotle to nineteenth-century French “solidarists” to Rosa Luxemburg to the American welfare state. One chapter, “The Problem with Charity,” contends that most current philanthropy amounts to doling out Band-Aids without addressing what’s causing the injuries in the first place. “If Amazon warehouse workers can’t afford housing,” Hunt-Hendrix told me, “the response can’t just be ‘Let’s build more shelters.’ ” The chapter’s moral foils include noblesse-oblige patrons such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, who are described as “grandstanding” and “Janus-faced,” and Bill Gates, who “wields a disconcerting amount of power.” Among its heroes are the Secret Six, a network of abolitionists who clandestinely funded John Brown, risking jail time.

The book has plenty of kind things to say about Marx and Engels, but it levels one major critique: they assumed that solidarity among “all of the laborers of all countries” would arise automatically, sparking a revolution, with or without the help of wealthy patrons—an odd oversight given that Engels, the son of rich industrialists, was a proud class traitor himself. On this point, Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor are sympathetic to Durkheim, who maintained in later writing that solidarity must be cultivated through difficult work—in essence, the work of organizing. Given the current distribution of power, working-class movements need upper-class patrons. But how much can activists really trust them?

Hunt-Hendrix is quick to acknowledge these tensions, even if she doesn’t know how to resolve them. “Ideally, social movements would not depend on philanthropy,” she said. “But, because the labor movement has been so undermined, this is the situation we’re in.” The standard funder-grantee relationship can feel transactional: the foundation sets a goal and subcontracts with a nonprofit to meet it, and to provide quantifiable proof of effectiveness along the way. By contrast, Hunt-Hendrix aspires to what she calls “philanthropy-in-solidarity,” a more cozy-feeling arrangement that allows donors to see themselves as collaborators in activists’ struggles. In a way, it’s an attempt to re-create the prelapsarian days in Zuccotti Park, before she was outed. Many times, I saw her hesitate while describing her relationship to an organizer or a political strategist, vacillating about whether to refer to the person as a grantee, a “thought partner,” a “co-conspirator,” or simply a friend. In practice, many of her grantees do seem to be her friends, and yet most friendships are not marked by the tacit understanding that, if you and your friend drift apart, you might lose your operating budget. “The vulgar Marxist take, which I guess I can’t refute, would be that we’re all in the tank for Leah because we’ve all taken her money,” Max Berger told me. “I would absolutely still fuck with her, on a movement-strategy level and on a personal level, if she were as broke as my other friends. But the tragic irony of our friendship is that there’s no way for me to prove it.”

When libertarian or right-wing plutocrats buy influence—fossil-fuel executives pushing for deregulation, hedge-funders who want lower taxes—it’s easy enough to understand what they’re up to. But leftist class traitors are harder to pin down. They can always be suspected of performative reputation-laundering, or dilettantism, or dual loyalty. The left is wary of them for having been born into an obscene level of privilege; the right resents them for not having the common sense to shut up and enjoy it. It’s one thing to be a rich liberal—acknowledging your unearned privilege, endeavoring to leave the world a little better than you found it—and another to be a rich anti-capitalist radical, galvanized by the conviction that you are complicit in a historic injustice. Nonetheless, the list of inheritors organizing against extractive capitalism continues to grow: Aileen Getty, of the Getty oil fortune, co-founded the Climate Emergency Fund, which supports disruptive protests around the world; the Rockefeller Brothers Fund now donates to groups that coördinate anti-pipeline encampments and other acts of civil disobedience. Farhad Ebrahimi has given most of his money to grassroots activists in places like Alaska and Eastern Kentucky, and plans to donate the last of it this year.

One afternoon, Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor met me at a coffee shop to discuss their book. Afterward, Hunt-Hendrix invited us back to a luxury penthouse on Houston Street, which she shares with her partner, Marvin Ammori. As an elevator opened directly onto the apartment—window walls, potted orchids—she admitted that she had scheduled the interview at a coffee shop because she found her place “embarrassing, or at least more bougie than I feel great about.” (The apartment is Ammori’s; Hunt-Hendrix owns a two-million-dollar town house in D.C.) Ammori is a lawyer who works for a cryptocurrency trading platform. “His parents immigrated to America, he’s self-made, and he is just less conflicted about spending money than I am,” she said. Taylor and Hunt-Hendrix were preparing to host a fund-raiser for Lux, a left-feminist magazine named for Rosa Luxemburg. (The name is also, according to an editor’s note, “a nod to the fact that in our vision of socialism, there is abundance for all.”) An onyx necklace lay on a coffee table; Hunt-Hendrix picked it up gingerly and explained that it had been a gift from Gloria Steinem to her mother. Her dog, a high-strung Maltipoo named Malcolm, growled at a passing garbage truck. By the way she told me his name—quickly, with a barely perceptible flinch—I could guess what turned out to be true: yes, she’d named the dog after Malcolm X, and this, too, seemed to embarrass her.

Hunt-Hendrix has center-left critics who consider her too deferential to movements whose slogans (e.g., Defund the Police) might alienate swing voters. She also has leftist critics who worry that even well-meaning wealthy donors can constrain activists’ ambitions in subtle ways, a process that the political scientist Megan Ming Francis calls “movement capture.” Still, most of the leftists I interviewed, even when speaking off the record, did not take the opportunity to bad-mouth her as inept or fundamentally unserious, even though bad-mouthing other leftists is the American left’s most venerable pastime. Most of her “co-conspirators,” especially the left-of-liberal ones, tend to view liberal guilt as a distraction. “There is no right life in the wrong one,” one organizer told me, quoting Theodor Adorno: we live in the fallen world of late capitalism, and we should try to change this fact, but why make a show of lamenting it? The organizer, whose work has been funded by Hunt-Hendrix, said, “It’s never even occurred to me to feel bad about taking that money. All money is dirty money.” Some climate-activist groups refuse to endorse any politician who takes campaign contributions from fossil-fuel companies, yet the same groups accept Hunt-Hendrix’s donations. It’s possible to see this as hypocrisy, or as hubris: the activists don’t trust politicians to be immune to industry capture or soft corruption, but they do trust themselves. They prefer to see it as consistent with a materialist analysis of power. “You don’t take donations with strings attached,” the organizer went on. “Short of that, you take all the owning-class money you can get, and you use it to put the owning class out of existence.”

Last year, when I was in Washington to report on climate activists staging a hunger strike outside the White House, I texted Hunt-Hendrix, who had funded their organization. She told me that she was hoping to make it, but for the moment she was stuck at the Ritz-Carlton, having a glass of wine with her cousin Hunter Hunt, the C.E.O. of Hunt Energy, who also oversees Hunt Oil and Hunt Power. Whenever she found herself doing something conspicuously bougie in my presence—ordering a fresh-squeezed orange juice with a double-digit price tag, booking an impromptu Mediterranean vacation—she would sigh knowingly, or make a self-deprecating joke. She aspired to a life of Aristotelian virtue, defined as “a mean between two extremes.” “Luxury will not bring you happiness,” she continued. “But do you need to give away everything?”

At Occupy, there had been an anarchist-leaning cohort that was skeptical of political power: you could pursue authentically populist goals, or you could sell out and support a major-party candidate, but you couldn’t do both. After Bernie Sanders’s unexpectedly popular Presidential campaign in 2016, and the shock victories of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other democratic socialists, this came to seem like a false choice. In 2017, Hunt-Hendrix co-founded the nonprofit Way to Win with the goal of forging a new electoral map for progressives, one that relied less on the (older, whiter) swing voters in the Rust Belt than on the more diverse purple states in the South and Southwest. In 2020, most of Way to Win’s candidates lost, but there were enough come-from-behind victories—Cori Bush, in St. Louis; Jamaal Bowman, in New York—to prove that the Squad’s success two years earlier hadn’t been a fluke.

While we were in Dallas, Hunt-Hendrix met her cousin Hunter for an after-work drink. She’d suggested meeting at the Petroleum Club, on the top two floors of Hunt Consolidated headquarters, but it was closed that afternoon, so they picked a nearby restaurant instead. Leah and I ordered guacamole and virgin margaritas; Hunter, who had a physical exam the next day, said, “I’m gonna be good and stick to sparkling water.” On the whole, he said, “our family just respects the heck out of Leah, and there’s no question that the world is a better place with her in it.” The sentiment seemed sincere, even if the details were slightly hazy: he didn’t appear to know exactly which causes she supported (“You don’t do PETA, do you?”), except that they occupied a space somewhere to his left. “Leah and I don’t agree on everything—I’m sure our votes cancel each other out,” he added. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t listen.”

“I can be a bit too conflict-averse,” Leah said, almost under her breath.

“Respectfully, you have a funny way of showing it,” Hunter said.

In 1999, he worked for George W. Bush’s Presidential campaign, helping to craft its energy policy. Hunter’s not a climate-change denier, but he is a climate moderate. “If the world is going to use fossil fuels for as far as we can see, let’s make sure we’re doing it as cleanly and responsibly as possible,” he said.

“Do you know the Sunrise Movement?” Leah asked. “They’re the young people pushing for a Green New Deal, going, ‘We’re running out of time!’ How would you respond to that?” She didn’t mention that she’d funded Sunrise, or that it maintained a Dallas “movement house” a few miles up the road.

“Well,” Hunter began, diplomatically, “most of humanity wants the world to be a better place. That’s true of every activist and every oil-company C.E.O. How you define ‘better’ is a different deal.” He reverted to this formulation several times: why can’t everything be a win-win? When you get down to specifics, though, some political questions really are zero-sum—for example, the question of whether the federal government should continue to subsidize fossil fuels or outlaw them.

“Just so you know,” Leah said, “I love the idea of a Green New Deal.”

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“So, here we’re gonna agree to disagree,” Hunter said, civilly. “I do not believe in a Green New Deal. I believe in the I.R.A. That’s a very balanced deal.” The Inflation Reduction Act, so far the capstone legislative achievement of the Biden Administration, is the largest climate investment in American history, though many on the left feel that it doesn’t do nearly enough.

In my time with Hunt-Hendrix, I asked her more than once why she didn’t focus her activism on her own family company. Why not stage a die-in at a corporate meeting, or try to mount an internal coup, or otherwise push Hunt Oil to get out of the oil business? “I don’t believe that you make systemic change by asking corporations to do the right thing,” she said. Even if she could persuade her cousin to stop mining fossil fuels, she argued, he might simply be replaced with a C.E.O. who would. She further pointed out that, if Hunt Oil shut down tomorrow, global emissions would decline by only a small fraction—which was true, mathematically speaking, but also seemed like a convenient dodge.

I sometimes found myself wishing that Hunt-Hendrix would be less conflict-averse—that she would cause a scene, grabbing her cousin by the collar and screaming wildly about the climate emergency. Then again, if she made him uncomfortable often enough, wouldn’t he just stop returning her calls? We left the restaurant, and I drove my gas-powered rental car to my air-conditioned hotel. I checked my e-mail: Passover was coming up, and I was corresponding with one of my cousins about whether we should insert a line in the Haggadah, just before “next year in Jerusalem,” noting that the non-metaphorical Jerusalem seemed to be descending into an authoritarian crisis. I’d suggested a confrontational statement, with references to illegal settlements and occupation; my cousin countered with something more euphemistic. Now we were considering dropping it altogether: it would only make our older relatives upset, and what was the point of that? I couldn’t tell if this was Aristotelian discernment or simple cowardice.

As far as I know, Hunt-Hendrix’s relatives have taken no concrete steps to block her activism. Maybe, given the family’s financial arrangements (which are private), there isn’t much they can do about it. Maybe they don’t pay close enough attention to realize that the social movements she supports could someday directly imperil the family business. Or maybe they understand all of this but still don’t feel threatened, because they think that the activists have so little chance of winning.

In the 2022 midterm, the Democrats narrowly lost the House, but enough of Way to Win’s candidates got elected—Delia Ramirez, from Chicago; Summer Lee, from Pittsburgh; Greg Casar, from Austin; Maxwell Frost, from Orlando—to constitute a kind of Squad 3.0. “Leah let me stay here for a few weeks, in her basement, while I was campaigning,” Casar, an eager thirty-four-year-old, told me, standing in the foyer of Hunt-Hendrix’s town house in D.C.

“Me too,” Frost, the youngest member of Congress, said.

“I used to call the basement my congressional crash pad,” Hunt-Hendrix explained. (She later clarified that it was a “congressional candidate” crash pad; once candidates were elected, they had to be more careful about accepting her hospitality, owing to ethics rules.)

“This is what happens when you bring actual working-class folks to the Hill,” Wasi Mohamed, Summer Lee’s chief of staff, said.

“I moved to Washington with no savings,” Frost said. “I had to max out two different credit cards.”

It was early February, less than a month into the new Congress, and about two dozen people—House and Senate aides, staffers from regulatory agencies, a Teamsters organizer, and six members of Congress—were meeting at Hunt-Hendrix’s house to discuss strategy. She had spent the afternoon uncorking wine bottles, chopping and roasting asparagus, and getting a fire going in the fireplace. Now she guided everyone toward the living room, where they sat in mismatched armchairs. The first-term congresspeople swapped new-kid anecdotes about getting lost in the underground tunnels, or passing Marjorie Taylor Greene in the hallway. Then talk turned to the faction’s less heralded accomplishments, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s recent initiative to crack down on junk fees. “Not the sexiest thing in the world,” Helen Brosnan, the executive director of Fight Corporate Monopolies, said. “But it will probably put more money in more working people’s pockets than anything else that’ll happen in D.C. this month.” As UPS workers prepared for a potential strike this summer, Hunt-Hendrix coördinated with members of Congress and organizers from the Teamsters to support more labor mobilization around the country; she is backing several congressional candidates for 2024, including Ruben Gallego, who will challenge Kyrsten Sinema from the left.

When the weather in D.C. is warmer, Hunt-Hendrix likes to host parties on her rooftop. I dropped by one around sunset, just as Jamie Raskin, then the senior whip of the House Democratic Caucus, was leaving, and Pramila Jayapal, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, was arriving. There were about eighty people on the roof: Ilhan Omar raised a glass of sparkling water for a toast; a half-dozen Squad staffers drank whiskey around a fire pit. People kept ducking inside, down a small ladder, to find a bathroom or do a quick TV hit in one of the empty bedrooms. Each time, in the upstairs hallway, they passed a small, sepia-toned photograph of H. L. Hunt.

It may be true that behind every great fortune is a great crime, but it’s more comfortable to think of yourself as fortunate than to think of your loved ones as criminals. You can try to resolve the discomfort, or you can find a way to live with it. When I talked to Stanley Hauerwas, the theologian, he told me a story from his life. “I was a young guy, a student at Yale Divinity School, and I went home to Dallas over the summer,” he said. “My father, who was caring in his way but not very expressive, hands me a hunting rifle. He’d been crafting it by hand, for months. For me. I told him, ‘Dad, you can keep it—those things ought to be banned.’ ” Hauerwas still looked pained by the memory, though the incident had happened decades earlier. “What an ignorant little shit I was,” he went on. He could have done whatever he wanted with the gun—locked it in a safe, made a sculpture advocating for gun-control laws, melted it down. “But when your ancestor hands you a gift, however deadly it is, the first thing you do is you accept it,” he said. “You have to accept the gift.” ♦