DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS: THE DEEP HISTORY OF THE RADICAL RIGHT’S STEALTH PLAN FOR AMERICA
By Nancy MacLean
Viking Press
history.duke.edu/people/nancy-maclean
Taxation as slavery. Environmental regulations and workers’ rights as fundamentally “un-American” ideas. Social security and school integration as “bad for business.”
Well before the Koch brothers gained prominence for their deep-pocket sponsorship of conservative causes, there was James McGill Buchanan, a Nobel Prize-winning political economist whose libertarian theories, according to author Nancy MacLean, have come to form the basis of American conservative thinking today — threatening the very basis of our democracy.
MacLean, who teaches history and public policy at Duke University, is the author of “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,” a study of modern American politics that’s won much praise — including a nomination for a National Book Award — but also provoked considerable controversy and criticism.
Praise for MacLean’s book — she also wrote an acclaimed study of the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s — has come mostly from the political left, while conservative critics have accused MacLean of sloppy research and dishonest use of quotes.
Some political writers on the left, though, like Rick Perlstein, have also faulted aspects of “Democracy in Chains”; MacLean has, in turn, defended her work, telling the Chronicle of Higher Education much of the criticism amounts to “rhetorical bullying [that] would be laughable if it weren’t part of a pattern on the right.”
Her study looks at the broad history of libertarianism and anti-government thinking in America, particularly in the South, but it centers on the Tennessee-born Buchanan, who taught at the University of Virginia, George Mason University and a number of other schools beginning in the 1950s; he later became associated with a number of free-market think tanks like the Cato Institute.
MacLean argues that, in opposing Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision that ordered southern schools to be desegregated, Buchanan and other colleagues began studying ways to push back against government reforms and preserve the power of white elites and of “states’ rights,” in part by accusing government programs of undermining the ability of individual Americans to reach their full economic potential.
As MacLean sees it, Buchanan’s theories and actions helped shape trends in U.S. government and society that have led to corporate dominance of the our political landscape and regular assaults, primarily from the right, against the welfare state. His theories also influenced the push for privatizing education, and these arguments were advanced through a campaign of deliberate misinformation, MacLean writes.
Some 60 years later, MacLean says, we’re only now seeing where much of this has led: attempts in many states, primarily Republican-led ones, to suppress voting; repeated funding cuts and attacks on public education; the seemingly coordinated effort to defeat the Affordable Care Act in 2009-10; and the piles of “dark money” that conservative donors like Charles and David Koch have made to right-wing candidates ever since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010.
It is nothing less than an “attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance,” writes MacLean, “a stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and national levels, back to the political economy and oligarchic government of mid-century Virginia, minus the segregation.”
MacLean’s critics, though, say aside from her misinterpretation of sources and selective use of quotes, she has considerably overstated both the influence that Buchanan had on today’s libertarians, including the Koch brothers, and the extent of a libertarian conspiracy to undermine democracy.
“Buchanan was no more inspired a political tactician than the average political scientist or economist, which is to say, not very inspired at all,” write political scientists Henry Farrell and Steven Teles in Vox, the online news magazine. “The left and center left should accept that not only do their opponents not have any grand master plan but that having a grand master plan is probably a bad idea.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.
Nancy MacLean will discuss “Democracy in Chains” Wednesday at 7:15 p.m. at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, at the college in South Hadley.