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DeVos and Van Andel were active in Republican Party politics, and, as Read shows, were highly influential in the New Right movement to push the party away from its moderate Eisenhower center and toward a fundamentalist Christian fringe. Van Andel helped create the Heritage Foundation and headed up America’s largest pro-business lobbying group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; DeVos was finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. Ronald Reagan was a keynote speaker at the Amway convention in 1980, and four years later, he appointed Van Andel to lead the National Endowment for Democracy, an outfit that funneled money to countries like Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, France, and Panama, to further America’s business interests and influence elections. (It didn’t hurt that Amway was looking to expand overseas.) In 1997, DeVos and his wife each donated $500 million to the Republican Party. And you likely remember that their daughter-in-law, Betsy DeVos, was Donald Trump’s first secretary of education. Trump himself has been wrapped up in numerous MLM schemes; he was a spokesperson for ACN, a telecommunications MLM, and licensed his name to something called the Trump Network, which sold vitamins.

During Barack Obama’s last term, it looked as if the FTC might finally take action against Herbalife and overhaul the “Amway rule” that allowed MLMs to flourish if they promised to require sales. But after the release of a government complaint documenting what looked like an extremely predatory business, the FTC only slapped Herbalife with a $200 million fine. When Trump took office in 2016, the chance for any regulation related to MLM disappeared, and the industry entered what one MLM stockholder cheered as a “post regulatory world.”

The FTC may have failed to prevail over MLMs in part because it’s just so hard to get a handle on what exactly they do. Read’s account of the Amway trial shows how incomprehensible the company’s self-presentation was, and how the judge struggled to grasp that there was something at stake other than toothpaste and soap. Another reason that MLMs have survived is that the harm isn’t always so drastic at the individual level: The victims might be out only a couple of hundred dollars, and some break even (if you don’t count the time they wasted attending seminars and sales events and trying to recruit new downlines). MLM participants are not organized in a way that makes it easy for them to push back against the company that is exploiting them. In fact, MLM tools stress that anyone who criticizes the model or even complains is automatically wrong. This has the tautological twistiness of a cult ideology, in which criticism of the cult or concern from family members only makes the follower dig in further. Do you want to be a wage slave—and a loser—for the rest of your life? MLMs ask. The answer is obviously no.

MLMs offer both a financial and a spiritual solution to economic anxiety, seeming to fill a hole in Americans’ working hearts. Companies like Amway and Mary Kay emphasize Christianity as part of their business, which for some provided a religious basis for work that the rational industrial economy suppressed. Read profiles one Mary Kay seller who seems to find real emotional fulfillment as a distributor for the company, even though she has lost tens of thousands of dollars. The woman tells Read about the rush she felt at a Mary Kay convention when the crowd cheered her move to a new selling rank. “She had never been shown so much love all at once,” Read writes. One of the strengths of this book is Read’s stance toward the sellers she encounters; she is neither pitying nor condescending, painting a clear-eyed picture of the reasons people get sucked into these money-losing schemes. MLMs persist because they promise status and success at a time that the rest of American life, with dead-end jobs, demeaning pay, and oppressive cost of living, denies most people those things. In an MLM, you can purchase a move up the corporate hierarchy, become a Mary Kay Red Jacket wearer, or an Amway Diamond seller. You don’t have to scrape and claw your way through a bureaucracy; you just have to sell 10 tubes of Glister toothpaste every month.