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Nancy MacLean

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Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America Hardcover – June 13, 2017

by Nancy MacLean (Author)

4.7 2,489 ratings

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Los Angeles Times Book PrizeWinner, 2017

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Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Finalist for the National Book Award
The Nation's "Most Valuable Book"

“[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.”—The Atlantic

“This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be.”—NPR

An explosive exposé of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution.

Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.

In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.

Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy.

Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.

Print length

368 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Viking
Publication date

June 13, 2017
Dimensions

6.75 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

1101980966
ISBN-13

978-1101980965
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"[A] remarkably important book...this book is a superb contribution to our understanding of the rise of libertarian notions and right-wing political power in the US. If you wonder how the Supreme Court came to define speech as money or corporations as people, this volume will help you to figure it out...The melting ice caps, if nothing else, stand as testament to the folly of listening mainly to the rich and powerful."—Bill McKibben, The Times Literary Supplement

“Democracy in Chains leaves me with hope: Perhaps as books like MacLean’s continue to shine a light on important truths, Americans will begin to realize they need to pay more attention and not succumb to the cynical view that known liars make the best leaders." —New York Times Book Review

“A remarkable new book which argues that the radical right revolution engineered by Charles and his brother David is not just about accruing political and economic power, but about restricting democracy itself.” —The New Republic

“[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right . . . [MacLean] has dug deep into her material—not just Buchanan’s voluminous, unsorted papers, but other archives, too—and she has made powerful and disturbing use of it all. . . . The behind-the-scenes days and works of Buchanan show how much deliberation and persistence—in the face of formidable opposition—underlie the antigoverning politics ascendant today. What we think of as dysfunction is the result of years of strategic effort.” —The Atlantic

“This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . [MacLean] takes the time to meticulously trace how we got here. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be. . . . And if someone you know isn't convinced, you have just the book to hand them.” —NPR

"It’s the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past half century. To read Nancy MacLean’s new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, is to see what was previously invisible." —George Monbiot, The Guardian

“[A] riveting, unsettling account of 'Tennessee country boy' James McGill Buchanan, key architect of today's radical right.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“A remarkable book . . . Democracy in Chains is a revelation, as politics and as history.” —Jacobin

“Democracy in Chains should be read by every thinking person in the United States. It is disturbing, revealing, and vitally important.” —NYJournalOfBooks.com

"Perhaps the best explanation to date of the roots of the political divide that threatens to irrevocably alter American government.” —Booklist (starred review)

“It’s happening: the subversion of our democratic system from within. How did the political Right do it? Nancy MacLean tells the long-overlooked story of the political economist who developed the playbook for the Koch brothers. James McGill Buchanan merged states rights’ thinking with free market principles and helped to fashion the inherently elitist ideology of today’s Republican Party. Professor MacLean’s meticulous research and shrewd insights make this a must-read for all who believe in government ‘by the people.’” —Nancy Isenberg, author of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

“This book is mesmerizing. Rarely have I encountered a work that speaks to such significant issues, with evidence rooted in conclusive new sources. In clear prose, MacLean reveals how a public once committed to social responsibility and egalitarian values became persuaded that only an unregulated free market could protect ‘liberty’ and ‘choice.’ Because of this, our once cherished democracy is now subject to attack. Everyone who wants to understand today’s confrontational politics should read this important book, now.” —Alice Kessler-Harris, author of In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America

“How did we get to where we are today? How did corporations come to possess ‘rights?’ How did democracy come to be defined as selfish individualism? Or money as free speech? Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains provides the answers. It is essential reading in order to understand the ideas that billionaires use to justify their control of our political institutions. I can’t imagine a more timely or urgent book.” —Greg Grandin, author of Fordlandia(finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) andThe Empire of Necessity(winner of the Bancroft Prize)

"[MacLean] creates a chilling portrait of an arrogant, uncompromising, and unforgiving man . . . [she] offers a cogent yet disturbing analysis of libertarians' current efforts to rewrite the social contract and manipulate citizens' beliefs. . . . An unsettling exposé of the depth and breadth of the libertarian agenda." —Kirkus Reviews

"MacLean constructs an erudite searing portrait of how the late political economist James McGill Buchanan (1919 - 2013) and his deep-pocketed conservative allies have reshaped --and undermined--American democracy. . . . A thoroughly researched and gripping narrative, she exposes how Buchanan’s strategies shaped trends in government in favor of “corporate dominance” and against the welfare state. . . . She has delivered another deeply important book. . . . Her work here is a feat of American intellectual and political history." —Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

“For those who think the Tea Party, Freedom Caucus, and the alt-right are recent constructs, MacLean provides an extensive history lesson that traces the genesis of the right wing back to post-WWII doctrines. . . . A worthy companion to Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, MacLean’s intense and extensive examination of the right-wing’s rise to power is perhaps the best explanation to date of the roots of the political divide that threatens to irrevocably alter American government.” —Booklist (starred review)

About the Author

Nancy MacLean is the award-winning author of Behind the Mask of Chivalry (a New York Times "noteworthy" book of the year) and Freedom is Not Enough, which was called by the Chicago Tribune “contemporary history at its best.”The William Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, she lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

A QUIET DEAL IN DIXIE

As 1956 drew to a close, Colgate Whitehead Darden Jr., the president of the University of Virginia, feared for the future of his beloved state. The previous year, the U.S. Supreme Court had issued its second Brown v. Board of Education ruling, calling for the dismantling of segregation in public schools with “all deliberate speed.” In Virginia, outraged state officials responded with legislation to force the closure of any school that planned to comply. Some extremists called for ending public education entirely. Darden, who earlier in his career had been the governor, could barely stand to contemplate the damage such a rash move would inflict. Even the name of this plan, “massive resistance,” made his gentlemanly Virginia sound like Mississippi.

On his desk was a proposal, written by the man he had recently appointed chair of the economics department at UVA. Thirty-seven-year-old James McGill Buchanan liked to call himself a Tennessee country boy. But Darden knew better. No less a figure than Milton Friedman had extolled Buchanan’s potential. As Darden reviewed the document, he might have wondered if the newly hired economist had read his mind. For without mentioning the crisis at hand, Buchanan’s proposal put in writing what Darden was thinking: Virginia needed to find a better way to deal with the incursion on states’ rights represented by Brown.

To most Americans living in the North, Brown was a ruling to end segregated schools—nothing more, nothing less. And Virginia’s response was about race. But to men like Darden and Buchanan, two w ell-educated sons of the South who were deeply committed to its model of political economy, Brown boded a sea change on much more.

At a minimum, the federal courts could no longer be counted on to defer reflexively to states’ rights arguments. More concerning was the likelihood that the high court would be more willing to intervene when presented with compelling evidence that a state action was in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection” under the law. States’ rights, in effect, were yielding in preeminence to individual rights. It was not difficult for either Darden or Buchanan to imagine how a court might now rule if presented with evidence of the state of Virginia’s archaic labor relations, its measures to suppress voting, or its efforts to buttress the power of reactionary rural whites by underrepresenting the moderate voters of the cities and suburbs of Northern Virginia. Federal meddling could rise to levels once unimaginable.

James McGill Buchanan was not a member of the Virginia elite. Nor is there any explicit evidence to suggest that for a white southerner of his day, he was uniquely racist or insensitive to the concept of equal treatment. And yet, somehow, all he saw in the Brown decision was coercion. And not just in the abstract. What the court ruling represented to him was personal.Northern liberals—the very people who looked down upon southern whites like him, he was sure—were now going to tell his people how to run their society. And to add insult to injury, he and people like him with property were no doubt going to be taxed more to pay for all the improvements that were now deemed necessary and proper for the state to make. What about his rights? Where did the federal government get the authority to engineer society to its liking and then send him and those like him the bill? Who represented their interests in all of this? I can fight this, he concluded. I want to fight this.

Find the resources, he proposed to Darden, for me to create a new center on the campus of the University of Virginia, and I will use this center to create a new school of political economy and social philosophy. It would be an academic center, rigorously so, but one with a quiet political agenda: to defeat the “perverted form” of liberalism that sought to destroy their way of life, “a social order,” as he described it, “built on individual liberty,” a term with its own coded meaning but one that Darden surely understood. The center, Buchanan promised, would train “a line of new thinkers” in how to argue against those seeking to impose an “increasing role of government in economic and social life.”

He could win this war, and he would do it with ideas.

While it is hard for most of us today to imagine how Buchanan or Darden or any other reasonable, rational human being saw the racially segregated Virginia of the 1950s as a society built on “the rights of the individual,” no matter how that term was defined, it is not hard to see why the Brown decision created a sense of grave risk among those who did. Buchanan fully understood the scale of the challenge he was undertaking and promised no immediate results. But he made clear that he would devote himself passionately to this cause.

Some may argue that while Darden fulfilled his part—he found the money to establish this center—he never got much in return. Buchanan’s team had no discernible success in decreasing the federal government’s pressure on the South all the way through the 1960s and ’70s. But take a longer view—follow the story forward to the second decade of the twenty- first c entury—and a different picture emerges, one that is both a testament to Buchanan’s intellectual powers and, at the same time, the utterly chilling story of the ideological origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionaire- backed radical right to undo democratic governance.

For what becomes clear as the story moves forward decade by decade is that a quest that began as a quiet attempt to prevent the state of Virginia from having to meet national democratic standards of fair treatment and equal protection under the law would, some sixty years later, become the veritable opposite of itself: a stealth bid to r everse-engineer all of America, at both the state and the national levels, back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation.

Alas, it wasn’t until the early 2010s that the rest of us began to sense that something extraordinarily troubling had somehow entered American politics. All anyone was really sure of was that every so often, but with growing frequency and in far-flung locations, an action would be taken by governmental figures on the radical right that went well beyond typical party politics, beyond even the extreme partisanship that has marked the United States over the past few decades. These actions seemed intended in one way or another to reduce the authority and reach of government or to diminish the power and standing of those calling on government to protect their rights or to provide for them in one way or another.

Some pointed to what happened in Wisconsin in 2011. The newly elected governor, Scott Walker, put forth legislation to strip public employees of nearly all their collective bargaining rights, by way of a series of new rules aimed at decimating their membership. These rules were more devilishly lethal in their cumulative impact than anything the antiunion cause had theretofore produced. What also troubled many people was that these unions had already expressed a readiness to make concessions to help the state solve its financial troubles. Why respond with a ll-out war?

Over in New Jersey, where Governor Chris Christie started attacking teachers in startlingly vitriolic terms, one headline captured the same sense of bewilderment among those targeted: “Teachers Wonder, Why the Heapings of Scorn?” Why indeed?

Equally mysterious were the moves by several GOP-controlled state legislatures to inflict fl esh-wounding cuts in public education, while rushing through laws to enable unregulated charter schools and provide tax subsidies for private education. In Wisconsin, North Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Iowa, these same G OP-controlled legislatures also took aim at state universities and colleges, which had long been integral components of state economic development efforts—and bipartisan sources of pride. Chancellors who dared to resist their agenda were summarily removed.

Then came a surge of synchronized proposals to suppress voter turnout. In 2011 and 2012, legislators in f orty-one states introduced more than 180 bills to restrict who could vote and how. Most of these bills seemed aimed at low-income voters, particularly minority voters, and at young people and the less mobile elderly. As one investigation put it, “the country hadn’t seen anything like it since the end of Reconstruction, when every southern state placed severe limits on the franchise.”

The movement went national with its all-out campaign to defeat the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act. Hoping to achieve consensus, the White House had worked from a plan suggested by a conservative think tank and tested by Republican Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts. Yet when the plan was presented to Congress, opponents on the right almost immediately denounced it as “socialism.” When they could not prevent its passage, they shut down the government for sixteen days in 2013 in an attempt to defund it.

Numerous independent observers described such stonewalling, vicious partisanship, and attempts to bring the normal functioning of government to a halt as “unprecedented.” When the Republicans would not agree to conduct hearings to consider the president’s nominee to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant after Justice Antonin Scalia died in early 2016, even the usually reticent Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas spoke out. “At some point,” he told the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, “we are going to have to recognize that we are destroying our institutions.”

But what if the goal of all these actions was to destroy our institutions, or at least change them so radically that they became shadows of their former selves?

Many people tried to get a better handle on what exactly was driving this sortie from the right. For example, William Cronon, a University of Wisconsin historian and the incoming president of the American Historical Association, did some digging after Governor Walker’s attack on public employee unions in Wisconsin. His investigations convinced him that what had happened in Wisconsin did not begin in the state. “What we’ve witnessed,” he said, is part of a “ well-planned and well-coordinated national campaign” (italics added). Presciently, he suggested that others look into the funding and activities of a then little-known organization that referred to itself as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and kept its elected members a secret from outsiders. It was producing hundreds of “model laws” each year for Republican legislators to bring home to enact in their states—and nearly 20 percent were going through. Alongside laws to devastate labor unions were others that would rewrite tax codes, undo environmental protections, privatize many public resources, and require police to take action against undocumented immigrants. What was going on?

In 2010, the brilliant investigative journalist Jane Mayer alerted Americans to the fact that two billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch, had poured more than a hundred million dollars into a “war against Obama.” She went on to research and document how the Kochs and other rich r ight-wing donors were providing vast quantities of “dark money” (political spending that, by law, had become untraceable) to groups and candidates whose missions, if successful, would hobble unions, limit voting, deregulate corporations, shift taxes to the less well-off, and even deny climate change. But still missing from this exquisitely detailed examination of the money trail was any clear sense of the master plan behind all these assaults, some sense of when and why this cause started, what defined victory, and, most of all, where that victory would leave the rest of us.

In an attempt to find that master plan, to understand whose ideas were guiding this militant new approach, others attempted to link what was happening to the ideas of the celebrity intellectuals of the so-called neoliberal right (neoliberal because they identify with the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pro-market liberalism of thinkers such as Adam Smith)—especially such avid promoters as Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Friedrich A. Hayek.9 But such inquiries ran aground, because none of the usual suspects had sired this campaign. The missing piece of the puzzle was James McGill Buchanan.

This, then, is the true origin story of today’s well-heeled radical right, told through the intellectual arguments, goals, and actions of the man without whom this movement would represent yet another dead-end fantasy of the far right, incapable of doing serious damage to American society.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Viking; Later Printing edition (June 13, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1101980966
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1101980965
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.28 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.75 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #201,425 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #17 in Libertarianism
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Nancy MacLean

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Nancy MacLean is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, and the award-winning author of several books. Her scholarship has received more than a dozen major prizes and awards, and has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowships Foundation.

Her most recent book is Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. Booklist called it “perhaps the best explanation to date of the roots of the political divide that threatens to irrevocably alter American government.” The Guardian said: “It’s the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past half century.”

A New York Times bestseller, Democracy in Chains was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Current Affairs, the Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Award, and the Lillian Smith Book Award. The Nation magazine named it the “Most Valuable Book” of the year.

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Joan C. Browning

tax money goes more and more to private schools like the segregation academies of the fifties and sixties

Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2017

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Stop right where you are. Put down your pink pussy cap. Carefully lay aside all of your picket signs. Wait to sign more petitions. Whether your seek to change government actions on women's rights, civil rights, environment, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Voting rights, gerrymandering, federal courts ---- read Nancy MacLean's thorough explanation of how all these issues have been subject to a stealth campaign. We did not stumble into the chasm facing us now. We were engineered into this perilous time. Read Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America. Read it alone or with friends. Read it in book clubs. Put it prominently in public libraries. Assign it to every class you teach. Read and then let's strategize to take back our nation.

MacLean begins at the beginning, with the southern slave colonies writing limits to majority rule and federal protection for their "property" into the U. S. Constitution. "One man (or woman) one vote" was never the Founding generation's project. No person of African heritage had any rights than a white man was obliged to honor. The current takeover of our country was organized in Virginia by white supremacists who opposed the U. S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that racially separate schools cannot be equal. They began to tear down public tax support for education from kindergarten through university. Success today includes such cuts in tax funds that college students carry unbearable student loan debts, tax money goes more and more to private schools like the segregation academies of the fifties and sixties, and an avowed enemy of public education is now the U. S. Secretary of Education. The conspirators hid in economics enclaves at the University of Virginia, University of Chicago, other institutions and later Virginia Tech before, with Charles Koch millions, essentially buying George Mason University.

Their goal is simple: leave wealth alone. Limited taxation only for internal policing and external military defense. Sell (or give to wealth people and corporations) public property. "Outsource" public services from garbage collection to prisons to profitable corporations. Leave the poor, the young, the elderly, the sick to fend for themselves. Jesus was mistaken , they published: The Good Samaritan was wrong because helping those who are down and out merely created "parasites" who would exploit those with wealth rather than earn their own way. Worship the Golden Calf, scorn the Golden Rule.

Their methods are straightforward: to tear up the social contract. As articulated by David Stockman, President Reagan's' budget director, they would have to fight "Social Security recipients, veterans, farmers, educators, state and local officials, [and] the housing industry" whose middle class buyers relied on mortgage tax deductions. Unable to finance their massive tax cuts and military spending, the president "forsook the fact-based universe." The Kemp-Roth bill slashed taxes on the wealthiest but tripled the national debt so that by 1989 it amounted to 53 percent of gross domestic product. And having departed the fact-based universe, they began denying the human role in climate change. Now, we have "alternative facts." No coincidence. This was the plan. Now, we do not know what to trust.

Stealth methods included "counterintelligentsia" deployed in universities, "think tanks", newspaper and magazine and radio and television, and more recently, in social media to portray government as the enemy, social security and Medicare as "bankrupt", environmentalists as dangerous (See War on Coal!), and the super wealthy, the 1%, as the only possible rescuers of the country.

The ultimate goal is to change the U. S. Constitution so that wealth can never be taxed without unanimous consent.

Democracy in Chains concludes that we have at most two or three years to prevent the complete the stealth of our democracy. The "Kochtopus" tentacles are sunk deep in every nook of American democracy. Read. Discuss. We need know the enemy so that we may be able to make America safe for democracy.

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Randolph Eck

A Chilling Reveal

Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2017

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Nancy MacLean, the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, presents to us a chilling story of what she calls “the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance.” As she covers the story decade by decade, we see that what began as an attempt to prevent the state of Virginia from having to meet certain national democratic standards would, sixty years later, become a bid to reverse-engineer all of America back to the oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia.

A key figure in this development is James McGill Buchanan; he founded the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy (an innocuous name that belied it intentions). What concerned Buchanan was the unfettered ability of an increasingly more powerful federal government to force the wealthy to pay for goods, services, social programs, etc. that they had no personal say in approving. He likened it to mob attempts to take by force what the takers had no moral right to, that is, the fruits of another person’s labor. He wanted legal constraints on public officials so that no matter the will of the majorities that elected them to office, they would no longer have the ability to respond to the masses to do their bidding. Hmmm. Sounds like Congress today, doesn’t it? By the 1990’s Charles Koch saw the value in having Buchanan as a powerful ally.

The pursuit of this movement was “liberty.” But what they really meant was insulation of private property rights from the reach of government, and the takeover of what is generally considered public: schools, prisons, etc. The author subsequently shows how this movement’s ideas can be dated back to John C. Calhoun, a strategist of ruling-class power dating back to the early 1800’s. Shocking to me is the notion that the “anti-government rhetoric that continues to saturate our political life is rooted in [support for] slavery rather than liberty” according to historian Robin Einhorn. So the paralyzing suspicion of government on display today has its origins not from the average people but “from elite extremists such as Calhoun who saw federal power a menace to their system of racial slavery.” The view of this movement is that the federal government should provide for national defense and law enforcement and little else. In fact, it was argued that the growth of government would eventually undermine all freedom and usher in a totalitarian state according to one supporter of the movement, F. A. Hayek. The group eventually took the name the Mont Pelerin Society, from the mountain where they met in Switzerland.

I noticed a lot of ideas circulating on the right back then, such as “the liberal press,” privatization of education, transforming public universities into corporate-style entities, and “right-to-work” ideas that still resonate in libertarian circles today. Buchanan spoke of modern society willing to allow for the existence of parasites or freeloaders who took from society without adding any value. He said this at the time (early 70’s) concerning students in university, but before the decade was out, he would recommend it for all who looked to government for assistance. Followers of this thinking came to the conclusion that citizens knew little about government calling it “rational ignorance.” They understood that people basically just accept what they are told by news sources they trust. Their solution was to convert people in power in domains that mattered: “politics, business, the media, and the courts.” Many institutions sprung up to promote the libertarian ideals. For example: the Institute for Contemporary Studies, the Law and Economics Center (at University of Miami), the Institute for Humane Studies, the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Liberty Fund, and others.

We now see Charles Koch enter the picture with a merger of Koch’s money and managerial talent and Buchanan’s team. They were concerned with how the populace became more powerful than the propertied. Eventually we see the rise of the Libertarian Party. They sought a world quite different than what we have now – a world without government coercion in any form. This meant no public education, Social Security, Medicare, Postal Service, minimum wages laws, no EPA, and on and on. By 1977, we see the founding of the Cato Institute – one of many institutes designed to promote the cause.

Chapter ten gives us a preview of what this movement can do. Here we see Buchanan assisting in the formation of Chile’s 1980 Constitution of Liberty We see the formation of a political-economic model that does not bode well for the less-well-to-do majority. Yet this regime is held up as an exemplary “economic miracle” by the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and others. In a subsequent chapter, we learn how George Mason University became as one Wall Street writer noted, “the Pentagon of conservative academia.” By the late 1980s, we see this movement become interconnected with right-wing Republican officials to the point where any sharp boundary became undefinable. The ultimate goal became the “removal of the sacrosanct status assigned to majority rule.” This meant the enemy was socialism. They defined it as any effort by citizens to get the government to provide anything that cost money other than police and military functions. In addition to those already mentioned, more organization were formed to promote the cause: the State Policy Network (affiliated with think tanks in all fifty states), Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Club for Growth, and others. Many of these are Koch affiliated.

So the author asks, “Do we want to live in a cosmetically updated version of midcentury Virginia, in a country that so elevates property rights as to paralyze the use of government for democratically determined goals and needs? That extinguishes ‘the political we’”? I know I don’t.

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Enrique

A stunning exposé of how the radical right is undermining America’s democracy

Reviewed in Canada on April 1, 2020

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This book exposes a previously little known alliance between libertarian academics and corporate money to provide intellectual cover to policies that undermine democratic norms in the United States. This alliance was brought by ideologues on one side, and very pragmatic wealthy individuals concerned that democracy may lead to higher taxes and reduce their influence in the political sphere. The book is very well-researched and has attracted a lot of attacks against the author. The only critique that I sort of agree with is that the book leaves you with the impression that this particular story explains in its entirety the rise of market fundamentalism and how it has taken over American politics. The author denied this was her intention, but I had this impression even before knowing this was a criticism held by several other people. Nevertheless, this is a highly recommended reading.

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AnthonyParis

Important

Reviewed in France on August 20, 2017

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If you want to understand the economic theories that the minority are putting into operation to impoverish the majority, both financially and politically. Where thatcherism and reaganomics lead.

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huw

From the origins of neoloberalism to the Koch brothers.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 22, 2017

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Absolutely brilliant book, particularly for those like me less familiar with US politics. I am a economist and much of the focus is on Nobel Laureate James Buchanan. However, the real story is the theoretical framework of the minimalist neoliberal state and the attempts to impose it on the American people. To the neoliberals in this book, the state should not be involved in redistribution and individuals should be responsible for their own education, health care and pensions (to name but a few). Over decades, from school vouchers, privatization of public utilities and ending of defined benefit pensions, these policies have been persistently pushed behind the scenes, with a great deal of success. To a foreigner like me, the fuss about Obama care is hard to understand., but now I see why. These neoliberals would prefer people having no healthcare rather than a state funded system. Just as they would prefer private schools to public. The economists James Buchanan played a role in all of this, in reaction to the civil rights movement's attempts to de-segregate schools in Virginia. The bit that is really interesting is the role of the Koch brothers in funding the neoliberal agenda over the decades through a variety of foundations and think tanks (Cato institute etc). As the title of the book indicates, the neoliberal project has found its policies unpopular and has found ways to get around democratic institutions.

15 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Great and essential reading

Reviewed in Australia on April 18, 2021

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Great and essential reading on a topic that should be important to everyone. I am glad I picked this up and and even happier having read it all

shima

米国の政治を理解するなら必読

Reviewed in Japan on July 3, 2020

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共和党は、表向きにはレーガンやギングリッチあたりから急に保守化したように見えるが、その種が蒔かれたのはずっと昔のことであり、John C. Calhounの影響を受け、ノーベル経済学賞を受賞したJames Buchananの存在が大きかった。でも、James Buchananの名前は米国人でも知らないでしょう。本作品でも説明されているとおり、行動がばれないように、影で動く方が都合の良い結果を出せると分かっていたから。チリ政府のアドバイザーとして活躍したことも知られていない。
ちなみにJohn C. Calhounの銅像は2020年6月24日に撤去された。レイシストとしても知られていたから。その影響を受けたJames Buchananも、レイシストなところがあったから、2020年であればネット上で叩かれていただろうけど、2013年に死亡。
でも彼が築いたシステムは残っている。一番問題なのは、保守系の連邦判事を次々に輩出していること。
本作品を読むとその背景がよく分かる。

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Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America Hardcover – June 13, 2017

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