Democracy in chains The deep history of the radical right's stealth plan for America

Review by Choice Review

This is a "now it can be told" book." It traces the subversion of American democracy, the rise of selfish individualism, and the granting of free speech rights to corporations to a Nobel Prize-winning economist, James Buchanan, whose ideas, according to McLean (Duke), provide the ideological spine for the dark money of the Koch brothers and others, who are hell-bent on subverting American democracy. According to McLean, they are well on their way to doing so. This is not a scholarly work: it is, at best, advocacy journalism by an academic, at worst a one-sided screed. The very title of the work reveals its character, as do the phrases used to characterize it: a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok--never mind that that big money is a phenomena of the Left as well as the Right. Not recommended. Summing Up: Not recommended. --Peter J. Galie, Canisius College

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, by Nancy MacLean. (Penguin, $18.) MacLean sketches out the six-decade push to protect the wealthy elite from the will of the majority. The architect of this plan was James McGill Buchanan, a political economist who, starting in the mid-1900s, devoted his career to paving the way for a right-wing social movement. BLACK MAD WHEEL, by Josh Malerman. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) A rock 'n' roll band, the Danes, is approached by a top military official to help identify a mysterious, but potent, noise: The sound seems able to neutralize any kind of weapon, and even make people disappear. As the story goes to the African desert and beyond, the novel "takes flight in some head-splitting metaphysical directions," Terrence Rafferty wrote here. THE WORLD BROKE IN TWO: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature, by Bill Goldstein. (Picador, $18.) The year 1922 was pivotal for these modernists. Goldstein makes good use of their correspondence and published material to outline each writer's development and creative blocks, and how their work fit into a broader postwar movement. MOVING KINGS, by Joshua Cohen. (Random House, $17.) David King is a heavyweight in the moving industry in New York, the patriotic, Republican and wealthy owner of a well-known storage company. In a moment of nostalgia, he invites his distant cousin Yoav, fresh from service in Israel's military, to work for him, carrying out the business's ugly side - evicting delinquent tenants and seizing their possessions. The novel and its tensions promise some thematic heft, touching on race, occupation, gentrification and who deserves the right to a home. THE LONG HAUL: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road, by Finn Murphy. (Norton, $16.95.) Murphy has logged hundreds of thousands of miles and decades on the road, but may be an unlikely representative: He falls asleep reading Jane Austen in motels and nurtures a crush on Terry Gross, "probably because I've spent more time with her than anyone else in my life." SUNBURN, by Laura Lippman. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $16.99.) In a sleepy Delaware town, two newcomers - a waitress running from her past and a short-order cook - fall in love, though the two are not what they claim to be. Set in 1995, this novel has an undertow of 1940s noir, but with more heart than you might expect. As our reviewer, Harriet Lane, wrote: "You see the huge red sun sinking into the cornfields; you feel the dew underfoot."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* For those who think the Tea Party, Freedom Caucus, and the alt-right are recent constructs, MacLean (Freedom Is Not Enough, 2006) provides an extensive history lesson that traces the genesis of the right wing back to post-WWII doctrines. The buildup to the takedown of democracy as we know it has been a long, dedicated, and patient campaign to, as it were, repeal and replace every facet of public governance. Though now firmly in the hands of Wall Street and inside-the-Beltway billionaires, MacLean argues that the roots of this political philosophy started with a lower-middle-class political economist from the backwaters of Tennessee, Nobel Prize winner James McGill Buchanan. Buchanan established a think tank in response to the groundbreaking Brown v. Board of Education decision and espoused the kind of libertarian and neoconservative rhetoric that is currently enjoying an unprecedented resurgence. Eventually, Buchanan's nihilistic zeal attracted multibillionaire Charles Koch, and the union of Buchanan's fanaticism with Koch's unlimited finances, claims MacLean, unleashed the deconstructionist forces that now occupy Congress, the White House, and the courts. A worthy companion to Jane Mayer's Dark Money (2017), 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.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

MacLean (Freedom Is Not Enough) 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. MacLean makes the convincing argument that an American "paloecapitalist" elite has sought to destroy our institutions in pursuit of their own "economic liberty." Focusing on Buchanan, winner of the 1986 Noble Prize in Economics and mastermind behind public choice theory, MacLean traces his career and influence, including over former Virginia governor Harry Byrd and Chile's former military ruler, Augusto Pinochet. In 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. His theories, according to MacLean, influenced the push for privatizing education. Moreover, the cadre of wealthy libertarians he inspired still persists in contemporary politics. MacLean examines the reach of this powerful group and its think tanks, such as Charles Koch's Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. She has delivered another deeply important book that will interest general readers and scholars alike. Her work here is a feat of American intellectual and political history. Agent: Susan Rabiner, Susan Rabiner Literary. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

How American democracy is being destroyed by powerful libertarians.Focusing on Nobel Prize-winning economist James McGill Buchanan (1919-2013), whom Charles Koch funded and championed, MacLean (History and Public Policy/Duke Univ.; The American Women's Movement, 1945-2000: A Brief History with Documents, 2008, etc.) elaborates on the revelations about the Koch brothers' insidious, dangerous manipulation of American politics that has been presented forcefully by Jane Mayer in Dark Money (2016) and Daniel Schulman in Sons of Wichita (2014). Based on Buchanan's papers as well as published sources, MacLean creates a chilling portrait of an arrogant, uncompromising, and unforgiving man, stolid in his mission to "save capitalism from democracy." To Charles Koch, he seemed a kindred spirit. Buchanan believed that growth of government undermines individual freedom. Government overreach, he maintained, included public schools, the Postal Service, prisons, labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid for the poor, guarantees of voting rights, foreign aid, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the graduated income tax. Government's only role, Buchanan and his followers believe, "is to ensure the rule of law, guarantee social order, and provide for the national defense." MacLean traces Buchanan's career at several universitiesthe last was the fledging George Mason, which the Wall Street Journal called "the Pentagon of conservative academia"where he reigned over his own economics institutes, backed generously by wealthy libertarians; and his embrace by exclusive think tanks, such as the Mont Pelerin Society, the Hoover Institution, the Cato Institute, the Club for Growth, and the Heritage Foundation, among many other Koch-funded organizations. Besides influence at home, Buchanan helped design a constitution for the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, a document that ensured constraint of majority power. MacLean offers a cogent yet disturbing analysis of libertarians' current efforts to rewrite the social contract and manipulate citizens' beliefse.g., by spreading "junk pseudo science" about climate change. An unsettling expos of the depth and breadth of the libertarian agenda. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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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. Excerpted from Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Secret Plan for America by Nancy MacLean All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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