If the author wanted to pin something on the rich, I think he should've gone explicitly after think tanks instead. I don't think your run-of-the-mill celebrity intellectual living off book royalties, paid talks and columns has that much to do with large political donors. All a paid speaker needs is a paying audience, and preferably a large one. And if he's a bullshiter, that's all the better: bullshit sells. They just seem target anyone with some disposable income instead. But think tanks need
budgets (different order of magnitude here), and their output is used to supply media and lobbyists with stuff which might budge the decision of voters as well as politicians.
Also, I disagree that this is "The Rise" of anything in either case. Think tanks are recent, but they've been here for a while. But someone peddling some (seemingly?) shallow understanding of the world for money is probably old as the hills. Certainly older than the sophists, older than Mesmer and his animal magnetism, as well as older than any sort of quackery or intellectual sleight of hand in historical memory.
Talking about this as if it were something new, and with allusions to Gramsci to top it off, just strikes me as making it as unnecessarily ominous.