Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America - Nancy MacLean

Behind todays 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 architectthe Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchananand 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 elites 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 Buchanans 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 Buchanans 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.

Published: 2017-06-13 (Viking)

ISBN: 9781101980965

Language: English

Format: Hardcover, 334 pages

Goodreads' rating: -

Genres

North American Hi... Political Science American History Politics Economics History Nonfiction

Reviews

Taddeo rated it

Enlightening. Frightening.

Anson rated it

You can make a good living telling billionaires what they want to hear, judging by the large number of (well-staffed) foundations, think tanks, and institutes the mega-rich have founded in the past few decades. So where did this foundation-building complex begin? This book's author credibly traces it back to James M. Buchanan, an economist who was teaching at the University of Virginia in the early 1950s. Buchanan, a southerner by birth and choice, was outraged by the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. So he founded a proto-think tank at UVA to battle what he saw as government intrusion into "personal liberty" (as in, the liberty to discriminate). Drawing on the pre-Civil War writings of John C. Calhoun, perhaps the South's most radical defender of slave-holding, Buchanan attacked government (especially federal government) with arguments that would now be characterized as libertarian. In particular -- recognizing that government's power depended on its ability to tax -- he condemned taxation as an illegitimate incursion on individual freedom. Buchanan eventually attracted the attention of rich patrons on the far right, who at the time were stuck supporting organizations like the John Birch Society, for lack of anything better. Buchanan's academic approach gave them a less buffoonish option. Over time (and with the infusion of corporate money), the right's thought leaders dropped their overt racism and gained more mainstream support for their "free market" agenda. But they have yet to claim the ultimate prize -- ending Social Security and Medicare. That's leading some of them to consider a more radical option: opposing (and seeking to undermine) the democratic process. They reason that the majority of people will never vote to end their own benefits, so major systemic changes are needed. Some appear to be angling for a constitutional convention to re-write the rules in their favor.

Valentin rated it

This book is fascinating, and totally worth reading. It deserves a real review, but, for now, I'll just communicate my feelings in GIF form.