Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean (PDF)

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Winner of the Lillian Smith Book AwardWinner of the Los Angeles Times Book PrizeFinalist for the National Book AwardThe 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.

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⭐This is an important book in revealing the well-conducted plan by the radical right to reshape the country in their image of establishing a corporate aristocracy and changing the rules so that the working class were shut out of the political process and the corporate elites could retain their power. This is something that appeared to me to be occurring, and this book reveals the deeper plan going on behind the scenes. This book is very important in revealing this plan to Americans as the plan has been very successful, and as a country we need to come together to defeat it. With the ascendancy of Donald Trump it showed how under threat our Democracy really is and that the problem is with the entire Republican Party, and the whole right-wing infrastructure of their punditry, think tanks, economic and legal scholars, and more.The book looks at the development of this plan over the years through the Lens of the radical right-wing economist James M. Buchanan’s career, which began in the 40s and 50s. This is an important period as The New Right began to mobilize and gradually take over the Republican Party. McLean shows how Buchanan was influenced a great deal by the radical southerner John Calhoun who played a key role in inspiring Southern States to secede from the Union leading to the Civil War. This helps understand how the Republican Party today resembles the Confederacy in many ways. When Buchanan teamed up with Charles Koch and his large financial backing this plan became a well oiled machine through ‘indoctrinating’ a new generation of legal and economic scholars trained in their school of thought through Corporate Universities like George Mason, and with the closeness to DC. they were able to have a great deal of influence on public policy. The goal was to take over the courts to change the laws to protect the Capitalist minority, and reshape public opinion through think tanks, and punditry.McLean reveals how Buchanan found himself getting defeated time and time again by Democracy through all the progress being made towards his vision, and showed how these right wing radicals needed to reshape public opinion to turn them against public schooling, social security, and more. They needed to destroy trust in all of our Democratic Institutions. Buchanan said, “Our process was indeed subversive.”I found it very intriguing how even Buchanan came to feel betrayed by Charles Koch and his group of political strategists. They had become hypocrites and abandoned the libertarian principles that Buchanan was so loyal to with pushing for corporate welfare. Buchanan left his partnership with Charles Koch on bad terms and his principled colleagues had abandoned their principles choosing money and prestige instead. This is a big reason as to why I have been firmly against libertarianism as in practice Capitalists will exploit the lack of regulations and rig the system even more to favor themselves, and we have been seeing that happen in America through the era of Neoliberalism.

⭐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.

⭐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.

⭐I knew the fallacies and objectives of the Tory right and neoliberalism more generally in the U.K., but I didn’t know the origins or how they were being used in the US or the malign end game and frankly inhuman origins of these policies.Very interesting link between US inequality levels and the constitutional checks and balances.I always make a point of reading the critics of such works and the odious pile of pathetically biased tissue thin carping from those exposed by their own words is great testimony to its accuracy.Must read for anyone interested in building civilisation and not tearing it down.

⭐Excellent introduction to the subject

⭐How very interesting. Explains a multitude.

⭐If you want to understand the United States, this book, plus Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money” followed up with John Perkins “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man lift the covers on the chess game going on still today. What some people and countries will do to take advantage of others. It is the law of the jungle. Eat or be eaten. Fascinating read. Educate yourself with reality. Even in a free speech society, these authors worry about the repercussions to themselves by lifting the covers so others can see.

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