Reviews of Nancy MacLean’s "Democracy in Chains"
Essentially, MacLean argues that the institutions of American democracy are under assault by a radical libertarian minority who combine the philosophical writings of Nobel Prize-winning economist James McGill Buchanan with the financial resources of multi-billionaire Charles Koch. According to MacLean, the academics, politicians, and business interests financed by Koch are convinced that American democracy constitutes a threat to the economic liberty of the wealthy whose taxes are confiscated to support collectivist programs such as public education, Social Security, and Medicare. Thus, she concludes that the goal of the radical right is to place restrictions upon the implementation of democracy and majority rule.
Crucial to Buchanan’s thought is the concept of public choice. Majority rule is suspect as it leads to ever expanding government intervention. Once a government program is introduced, it is virtually impossible to terminate the benefits bestowed upon its constituents, as they will collectively elect politicians to secure and expand programs and benefits. Thus to protect capitalism and the liberty of wealthy individuals, it is imperative that government must be limited so that the majority will not be able to tyrannize the minority.
MacLean devotes a chapter to Buchanan’s work as an adviser to the Augusto Pinochet regime following the bloody military coup in Chile. Buchanan’s job was to help the Pinochet government devise a new constitution that would place “a lock and bolt” upon majority democratic rule and make it difficult to alter the protections for capitalism enacted by the Pinochet regime. Although MacLean concedes that Buchanan was reluctant to discuss his work in Chile, she suggests that the Chilean experience could be a foreshadowing of America’s future if the Koch-Buchanan agenda is realized within the United States.
MacLean asserts that employing stealth methods, the radical libertarian right seeks “Calhoun-style liberty for the few—the liberty to concentrate vast wealth, so as to deny elementary fairness and freedom to the many” (234).
Review of Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the
Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America” | History News Network
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/166524
Have you ever had a conversation with someone, asking how far the radical right wants to go in turning back the reforms of the New Deal and the 1960s/1970s, wondering when the libertarian billionaires behind this effort will be satisfied? I mean, how many billions of dollars does one need?
they won’t be satisfied until our Constitution is changed so that a small number of wealthy white elitists have unlimited property rights, and the only functions of government will be to provide national defense and to keep the angry majority from rebelling.
A little-known economist named Jim Buchanan (1919-2013) is the theorist behind this effort, and Charles Koch has provided the money. Isn’t it interesting that you have probably never heard of Jim Buchanan, also that you have only really heard of the Koch brothers in the last ten years? This is because they knew that their ideas would be so unpopular with the masses that they have run a stealth movement for decades...
- the end of public education,
- Social Security,
- Medicare,
- the U.S. Postal Service,
- minimum wage laws,
- prohibitions against child labor,
- foreign aid,
- the Environmental Protection Agency…and, in time,
- the end of taxes and government regulations of any kind.” (pp, 139-140)
Economic liberty and property rights are seen by this movement as the most important goal, and democracy is seen as hostile to economic liberty.
After all - would the majority of Americans vote to eliminate all the programs mentioned above so that a small group of - white elitists can pay almost no taxes, pay their workers less than the minimum wage, and get rid of all regulations that limit the profit of this privileged class? Of course not! Hence the effort over the last several decades to restrict the vote; fewer voters means more success for them.
The influence of this stealth movement is felt throughout our society. Many members of Congress as well as lawyers and judges have attended their workshops, as this group tries to indoctrinate as many of our public servants as possible. They aim to take us back to a time before the New Deal when judges favored property rights over the rights of the people, and they are well on their way to getting there. When you hear people like Paul Ryan talk about how going in this direction will be best for everyone, he is lying. The effort of Buchanan and Koch has to be based on lies because no person with an ounce of compassion would ever agree with their goals...
We have to stop this movement or it will lead to violence and dictatorship, even fascism. Oliver Wendell Holmes said that taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society. Apparently this group doesn’t care about our society being civilized as long as they have the absolute freedom to make as much money as they want.
Our current president, whether he knows it or not, is following the libertarian agenda by appointing Cabinet secretaries who want to destroy the government departments they were appointed to run and by appointing judges who rule on the side of corporations over people. He is doing everything he can to benefit a wealthy elite and to make life difficult for the rest of us. And unfortunately, the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln that once fought a war to end slavery, has bought right into Trump’s agenda. They would rather be in power than do what is right for the people. So, it is up to all of us to stop this.
Book Review: Democracy in Chains
https://theorcasonian.com/book-review-democracy-chains/
The rightward shift in the United States political world that has been growing for decades is not a reflection of the wishes of the majority. It is, in fact, the fruition of the efforts of “libertarian” economists and their wealthy funders to permanently alter U.S. governance and bring an end to majority rule democracy.
Through meticulous research, author Nancy MacLean demonstrates how these economists, led by James Buchanan, who define liberty as the freedom for markets to operate unfettered by any restrictions whatsoever, have been funded liberally by corporate executives, most notably Charles Koch. The desire to free companies from any and all federal regulations mandating such things as collective bargaining, pollution controls, minimum wage, and fair taxation is and has been the goal, and this group is succeeding.
Early proponents of this “libertarian” philosophy included Representative Howard W. Smith, and Senator Harry Bryd. As MacLean states, they knew “how well-crafted rules could maintain the outward form of representative government while stifling organized challenges to elite control.”
One of the major thrusts has been to end Social Security, traditionally one of the most highly supported social service programs in the country. Knowing that attacks on this program would not immediately succeed, those wishing to destroy it recognized that they must first discredit it. This is being done by subtly attempting to convince younger workers that they are paying too much to support the elderly, and by claiming that funding for Social Security is in deep trouble.
Therefore, it is said, by privatizing Social Security, people can invest their own money, rather than depending on an “unreliable” government program, or needing to support people other than themselves. Of course, the companies in which this money would be invested stand to profit handsomely from this proposed change.
Climate change is another target; this is attacked in part by stating that climate change scientists are self-serving, commanding huge salaries to write and speak about this “myth.” By 2014, only 8 of 268 Republicans in Congress would admit that human activity had an impact on climate change. They vote accordingly, removing, whenever possible, any regulations mandating limits to air and water pollution.
Taxes, it is claimed, cause the “makers” of the country to support the “takers,” those who, they say, simply want to remain on the government dole. This category includes the homeless, the unemployed, veterans, the elderly, and the handicapped.
Those who do not have sufficient savings for retirement should have planned better, this view says. In 2005, Buchanan commented on people who didn’t save sufficiently for retirement. He said they “are to be treated as subordinate members of the species, akin to . . . animals who are dependent.”
The unemployed, according to this economic theory, should look harder for work. If people do a good job, they will receive raises; collective bargaining is an “unfair” practice, forcing the “makers” to do things that may not be in the best interest of “economic liberty.”
The assault on labor unions, under the mask of “right to work” laws, seeks to eliminate the gains that collective bargaining has brought to workers for nearly a century, and certainly to prevent any future progress. The Draconian regulations passed by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker are an excellent example of the success of this insidious program.
Restriction of voting rights is a key component of this plan; if the poor can be prevented from voting, the will of the wealthy white elites is far more likely to be implemented. Attacks on voting rights have increased across the country.
Perhaps one of the most disconcerting aspects of this assault on democracy is the impact on the judiciary. By as early as 1990, fully 40% of federal judges within the U.S. had been to “training camps,” seminars provided by the so-called “economic liberty’”experts, in which they are taught how to decide cases within the context of this “economic liberty.”
The architects of this new world order are clear on their goals: an end to majority rule, since an educated and informed majority would never agree to their proposals and programs. But through deceptive practices, and the use of clever wording (e.g. “right to work” rather than “anti-union”), and naming those who require government assistance, including the unemployed and the elderly, as “takers,” they plant the seeds that have already taken root, with the hope that they will eventually destroy the social contract the government implemented with the citizenry during the New Deal, and which has grown for the good of the majority since then.
Democracy in Chains should be read by every thinking person in the United States. It is disturbing, revealing, and vitally important.
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan
for America
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/democracy
Jack Rakove reviews Democracy in Chains – Critical Inquiry
Nancy MacLean. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. New York: Viking, 2017. 368 pp.
The very idea that there is really an existing “stealth plan” for the subversion of American democracy might strike some readers of Nancy MacLean’s new book as the latest iteration of the great theme of Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay on “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”[1] If such a conspiracy exists, as MacLean implies, its origins lie in a most curious place. Democracy in Chains is primarily a trimmed-down intellectual and political biography of James Buchanan, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and a principal founder of public choice theory, which involves the systematic application of modes of economic analysis to political decision-making. MacLean has done a significant amount of archival research, well documented in her notes. Although the numerous detractors she immediately attracted as soon as her book was published argue that MacLean has misused various sources, her reconstruction of Buchanan’s career has a solid evidentiary foundation. In her account, the formulation of Buchanan’s project took place in conjunction with the vivid reassertion of states’-rights ideology that followed the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. As chair of the economics department at the University of Virginia, Buchanan was empowered to set up a center for political economy that pursued his libertarian agenda. Buchanan had no particular brief for maintaining racial hierarchies or waging a white supremacist campaign of massive resistance. But he understood that the political dynamics of the late 1950s favored the other libertarian causes he had adopted since his training in economics at the University of Chicago and his exposure to the ideas of F. A. Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society.
Except for a few unhappy years at UCLA in the late 1960s (a “lunatic asylum,” he later observed) Buchanan spent his academic career orbiting the ancient dominion of Virginia, teaching at Mr. Jefferson’s university in Charlottesville, then at Virginia Tech, and finally at George Mason (p. 102). Wherever he went, Buchanan attracted numerous students with a libertarian, market-oriented bent. Collectively their work established public choice as a serious school of political economy that everyone needs to reckon with one way or another. But in MacLean’s larger story, the critical moment came in the mid-1990s when Buchanan formed a working alliance with Charles Koch, who appears here as the ruthless, manipulative, domineering éminence grise of the radical right. In her account, Buchanan finally provided Koch with the fully articulated ideology he needed to rationalize his own political preferences.
Once MacLean forges the Koch-Buchanan connection, Democracy in Chains begins to read more like Ramparts-style journalism than academic history. The great goal of Koch’s movement would involve curtailing the public regulation of economic activity—or more specifically, capitalism itself—at every level of governance. Its ultimate objective, some of us suspect, is to secure the adoption of a balanced budget amendment to the US constitution, a policy-oriented renunciation of authority that would cripple the capability of the federal government to pursue the general welfare of the American people.
MacLean’s journalistic turn gives her book an admirable polemical vigor that makes it fun to read—especially for anyone who has never read Ayn Rand and is free from libertarian leanings or radical-right credentials. But as a serious intellectual history of public choice ideas or (more to the point) of Buchanan’s own substantial oeuvre, Democracy in Chains is disappointing. Buchanan’s ideological commitments were indeed quite pronounced and are therefore easy to ridicule. MacLean’s account of Buchanan’s academic maneuvers and migrations illustrates, among other things, that libertarian ideas and authoritarian academic politics are wholly compatible. Much libertarian and conservative academic thinking rests on the premise that the dominant liberal intelligentsia precludes hiring and promoting scholars on the right. Yet once they dominate particular institutions and departments, libertarians and conservatives seem just as militant, or perhaps even more so, since they perceive themselves as the embattled advocates of a beleaguered minority.
Yet beyond these claims of departmental trench warfare, Buchanan and his students are hardly alone in applying economic modes of analysis to political phenomena. Had MacLean prepared a better intellectual history, she would have done more, even by way of a survey, to convey the diversity and complexity of these approaches. Instead she steers us toward Buchanan’s fateful alliance with Charles Koch, who remains, it seems, the true dark prophet of “the radical right’s stealth plan,” its Darth Vader or even its emperor. By the conclusion of the book, one is left to wonder whether the “stealth plan” MacLean wishes to unveil belongs not to some amorphous entity known as “the radical right,” but is simply the property (that’s the right term here) of Charles Koch. And if the latter is indeed the case, and the key challenge is to grasp the origins and dimensions of the Koch project, readers might still prefer the acclaimed journalist Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2017).
Nancy MacLean has been taking numerous hits ever since her book appeared in June. (Everyone knows how to google these responses, but one finder’s clue would be to use “Volokh Conspiracy Nancy MacLean.”) Serious charges about her misuse of sources have already been made, which I will not discuss because they lie beyond my scholarly competence and knowledge. At some point there should be a thorough scholarly review of these points, and one suspects that MacLean will have to make a more concerted effort to justify her argument than she has yet provided. Any reader of Democracy in Chains must keep these concerns in mind. Yet her questions remain important and well worth pondering. Even amid the daily turmoil of the Trump presidency, which can hardly embody the political endgame the Koch brothers imagined—though Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah (as it happens, a former student of mine) have other thoughts—deep concerns about the character and future of American democracy now dominate our political psyches. Somehow the idea that they can be rooted in the academic writings of James Buchanan remains a curious and highly problematic explanation. But as conservatives like to say, following the influential book by Richard M. Weaver, ideas (like elections) do have consequences. There is no question that Buchanan’s ideas have become part of our political discourse, even if the portion of Americans who would recognize his name is minuscule.
[1] See Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s Magazine (Nov. 1964): 77–86.
https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jack_rakove_reviews_democracy_in_chains/
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Is there a conspiracy to keep cash from the common folk? Or does it just seem like it? In her book, “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,” author Nancy MacLean describes the division of dollars between the haves and have-nots to the detriment of democracy. She was recently at the Greenwood Senior Center as part of the Town Hall lecture series, and there was an interesting age range of people present for the hourlong talk. The subject matter of the book, along with its academic language, appealed to a very specific demographic, though the unfortunate truth is all U.S. residents are affected.
In “Democracy In Chains,” MacLean draws a connection between billionaires, politicians and the practice of law in America and how all of it is weighted heavily toward the side of property owners using ideals that were in place when slavery was still legal. She is a professor of history and public policy at Duke University and author of four other books. She has researched how Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan’s legal interpretations are used in a way that has eroded many of the checks and balances put into place by the original writers of the U.S. Constitution.
Colgate Darden, the president of the University of Virginia, hired Buchanan in the mid-1950s to plan a legal strategy for states to defend against the recent Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education. The Brown case established that separate schools for Black and White students were inherently unequal, and thus unconstitutional. But Buchanan and Darden’s concern was for states’ rights, because they feared states would lose much of the authority they previously enjoyed. Though the intention was merely to protect the Southern way of life, which happened to include the oppression and slavery of others, the phrases “individual liberty” and “economic liberty” began to be applied only to ownership of property as opposed to actual individuals. It is through the bureaucratic tangle of law that MacLean provides an excellent narrative on how the subtle changes in perception of law led to a difference in practice and enforcement of law.
Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1986 for his work in building the Public Choice Theory of political economics. He called the theory “politics without romance” because he said promises made in politics are intended to appear concerned with the interest of others, but in reality are the products of selfish ulterior motives. Political decisions, by politicians and by voters, are rarely made with the intention of helping anyone except the one making the decision.
It is rather obvious that to alter the perception and practice of law, altering the perception and practice of lawyers is an essential step. Through the members of groups like Mount Perelin and the Cato Institute, pairs of lawyers were invited to lectures and conventions that outlined the interpretation of law, which would provide the leverage for states’ rights to resist federal rulings as unconstitutional. The Koch family financially backed these events, and they have funded many of the institutes that utilize Libertarian philosophy and Buchanan’s ideas in their practices, including the Center for Study of Public Choice, The Institute for Humane Studies and the Reason Foundation.
There is a Bob Marley song that parallels the road paved by Buchanan’s ideas and the theme that MacLean draws out in the book. “Slave Driver” includes the phrase “only to be chained in poverty, good God I think it’s illiteracy,” which was an actual fear of property owners when federal laws removed polling taxes — that illiterate voters would outnumber the conservative constituency. The lines could also be a reference to the fact that many U.S. citizens are unaware of what the laws would actually mean for their lifestyle when enacted. Over and over again, these economists are faced with the task of getting laws passed that they know the majority of people would disagree with if they were not implemented in a stealthy manner.
MacLean reveals an impelling narrative regarding how the Koch family — using the practice of law, properly placed propaganda and millions of dollars — has influenced the public perception of policies that had previously been able to withstand presidents from each party. Social Security, for example, is a successful program that millions of U.S. people rely on. Yet now, as privatization is talked about more and more, the ideals which were venerated when Social Security was enacted are being challenged. The unfortunate truth is that the dollars being used on global warming, economy and liberal business practices are working in the favor of corporations: In 2007 71 percent of Americans believed that fossil fuels altered the climate, and in 2011 only 44 percent held the same belief.
MacLean notes that the practices that the Koch networks are engaging in have been used before, most notably in Chile, where General Augusto Pinochet was involved in a coup that overthrew an elected government, and installed a junta which ruled in the name of economic liberty. The Chilean Constitution of Liberty is said to be virtually unamendable, and it is written essentially to protect economic liberty while restraining majority power. Curiously, Buchanan did not mention his involvement with the Chilean document in his resume afterward.
That a Nobel Laureate would be able to influence the Western world in such a manner, without most people being aware of how his agenda would affect personal liberty, not just economic liberty, is a scary story indeed. MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains” demonstrates that the stealth plan that the right has used may actually be too far gone to reverse.
Topaz is a Real Change vendor and member of the Real Change Editorial Committee. He sells at the PCC in Fremont. Read more of his writing at millenniumblues.net.
The paperback version of this book will be available June 5.
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Book Review: ‘Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical
Right’s Stealth Plan for America'
https://www.realchangenews.org/news/2018/05/30/book-review-democracy-chains-deep-history-radical-right-s-stealth-plan-america
...Buchanan's career as the intellectual godfather of libertarianism starts at the University of Virginia in the mid-1950s, where he had been hired to lead the school's economics department. The university's president, Colgate Darden, was paralyzed by both the prospect of implementing Brown v. Board of Education and the prospect of "massive resistance" some in the state were calling for. Like most Virginians of influence — and Darden had served as governor of the Commonwealth — he was affiliated with the political regime of Sen. Harry Byrd, a convinced segregationist, and both the senator and the university president wanted to preserve the gentlemanly image Virginia had forged for itself.
Buchanan proposed starting a center for the study of political economy and social philosophy at the University of Virginia that would pursue, in an appropriately academic way, a means "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 would surely understand." The center would train a new generation of thinkers to see what Buchanan saw in Brown v. Board: not a step towards fulfilling the nation's founding ideals, not the rectifying of a glaring social injustice, but mere government coercion.
It is obvious that Buchanan and his colleagues at the newly formed Thomas Jefferson Center failed to stem the tide of desegregation. But he did succeed in setting forth a vision of a society in which property rights were paramount, and "individual liberty" was locked in a zero-sum struggle with government power at all times. "To Buchanan," MacLean writes, "what others described as taxation to advance social justice or the common good was nothing more than a modern version of mob attempts to take by force what the takers had no moral right to: the fruits of another person's efforts. In his mind, to protect wealth was to protect the individual against a form of legally sanctioned gangsterism." It goes without saying that this is not the Catholic view of government. Just this past Sunday, Pope Francis spoke about the common good as the proper end of governance.
Buchanan, like Byrd, took much of his inspiration from John Calhoun, the fiery antebellum senator who had championed states' rights. He was not alone: Another seminal libertarian thinker, Murray Rothbard, was also explicit about his debt to Calhoun. What mattered was not the racial injustice black people suffered, but the attack on property rights, first against the slaveholders and now against the wealthy, forced to pay taxes for programs from which they did not benefit. In this worldview, racist consequences are perfectly acceptable so long as property is not unduly burdened. You would think it was the slaveholder who was at the receiving end of the lash and that the oppression black Americans suffered under Jim Crow was as nothing compared to the suffering, so-called, of those whose economic freedom was constricted by desegregation. Perhaps most frighteningly, Buchanan (and Rothbard) did not betray any overt racism: Their ideology simply trumped normal human decency, making them incapable of moral evaluation.
Another key inspiration for Buchanan performed a similar distorting role in shaping his ideology: his membership in the Mont Pelerin Society, a group that was devoted to the Austrian school of economics and named for the town in Switzerland where they met. Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek were the two most prominent minds among the Austrians. "F.A. Hayek had been worrying since the early 1930s about the growing appeal of social democracy in particular," MacLean writes. "He was concerned about the model of government that so many organized citizens of Europe and the United States were seeking, based on labor unionism, a welfare state, and government intervention for economic security." I say "distorting" because of all the things to be worried about in the early 1930s, surely the rise of social democracy was not the most troubling thing in the political landscape. Hayek's Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, became a hit in the U.S. after Reader's Digest ran excerpts, which is strange: Whatever path America was on then, still less today, it was not, and is not, a road to serfdom.
Book review: Meet the godfather of libertarianism in 'Democracy in
Chains' | National Catholic Reporter
https://www.ncronline.org/news/politics/distinctly-catholic/book-review-meet-godfather-libertarianism-democracy-chains
...Koch had joined the Mont Pelerin society in 1970, and from the work of Ludwig von Mises, "Koch had learned that entrepreneurs were the unsung geniuses of human history, deserving of a kind of reverence reminiscent of the old Puritan doctrine that equated earthly success with divine favor." Koch was also enamored of idea of "creative destruction" and argued that any businessman who was unsuccessful "should be a janitor or a worker." So much for the dignity of work? One wonders whom he thought cleaned the office buildings he was funding!
Koch liked Buchanan's radicalism: The billionaire had soured on Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan, calling them "sellouts to the system" because they mistakenly tried "to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root." Buchanan and Murray Rothbard were present at the creation of Koch's Cato Institute in 1977, and the organization would become the flagship Washington think tank for the cause. Buchanan moved to George Mason University just across the Potomac from Washington, and supplied a steady stream of new, young talent to Cato as well as to congressional offices and GOP administrations.
In a memo outlining the goals of the Cato Institute, Rothbard sought to distance the cause from the Republican establishment. To him, conservatism as practiced in the U.S. at this time "embodied the death throes of an ineluctably moribund, fundamentalist, rural, small-town white Anglo-Saxon America." The memo "quoted so liberally from Lenin and so avidly scoured previous revolutions and authoritarian regimes for methods that it was deemed too 'hot' for release beyond the inner circle."
MacLean sums up the work Koch, Buchanan and Rothbard set for themselves: "The mission of the cadre was, quite literally, revolutionary, although a cause with so much money would not need violence. 'The ruling class' to be overthrown consisted of the leaders of labor unions, those corporations and business associations that continued to seek special benefits through lobbying, and the intellectuals who supported government action." Buchanan supplied much of the analysis used by the team at Cato as they generated "nonstop propaganda," and 'all of this held together by the gravy train opportunities Koch's money made available as they pushed their case into the media and public life."...
...The extent of the alliance between Buchanan's mind and Koch's money takes several chapters to tell. I do not want to give the whole story away — I want you to buy the book, read it, and share it with a friend. But if you think this is just all so much interesting, albeit scary, history, think again. Think of the crisis in Flint, Michigan, a direct outgrowth of the Koch-funded Mackinac Center, which first began the push for state-appointed city managers with no accountability to the electorate. Think of the disinformation campaign about climate change and its success: "The number of Americans who believed that 'continued burning of fossil fuels would alter the climate' dropped from 71 percent in 2007 to 44 percent in 2011." Think of the efforts to suppress voter participation that have created a fake issue — voter fraud — to justify restrictions on the franchise that disproportionately harm the poor. Through the American Legislative Exchange Council and the State Policy Network, both funded by Koch, the radical vision of a polity organized not around shared rights of citizenry but around property rights made sacrosanct is being implemented from Wisconsin to North Carolina. And their special focus on races for judgeships may be the least noticed, but most consequential, direct involvement in electoral politics...
'Democracy in Chains' book review, part two | National Catholic Reporter
https://www.ncronline.org/news/politics/distinctly-catholic/democracy-chains-book-review-part-two
To understand the neoclassical revolution in economics and its connection with white supremacy, it is worth extending the history of the nineteenth century that MacLean recounts to include Reconstruction and the circumstances under which it ended.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the era of the “Second Party System,” the national debate about economic policy was over the federal provision of public goods, or “internal improvements.” At the time, South Carolina statesman (and two-time vice-president) John C. Calhoun espoused the philosophy that the only political right that matters is the right to own property. Anything that interfered with that right, according to Calhoun, is ipso facto illegitimate, and in order to preserve it, property-owners should have veto power over government policy to guard against tyranny of the propertyless majority.
But the only property that Calhoun was concerned with was the property of slaveowners, and he wanted to prevent the government overreach of any accretion of federal power for “internal improvements” that might bolster the power of that property to someday overturn the system of their subjugation. As Richard Hofstadter put it, Calhoun was “The Marx of the Master Class.” He despised democracy because he saw it as a threat to capitalist white supremacy, and he despised public goods because he discerned the threat they posed to antidemocratic social and racial hierarchy.
MacLean writes a great deal about Calhoun, since his philosophy of radical minoritarian rule (protecting the slave-owning minority’s rights from federal intrusion) is one that Buchanan’s followers have played up and celebrated, however coyly. In 1992 Buchanan’s disciples Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen wrote a paper explicitly likening Buchanan’s political theory to Calhoun’s, but with only a passing mention of slavery as the ultimate motivation for the whole system. The fact that Calhoun explicitly stated that the property in question was other human beings while Buchanan and his acolytes did not does not relieve their complicity in that immoral and discredited intellectual system, a system that makes sense on its own terms only if black people are not people. To overlook the racist stench attached to Buchanan’s intellectual projects and that of his heirs is to fail to give an accurate account of it.
But Calhoun and the antebellum proslavery political interest is not the most apt historical precedent for Buchanan and Public Choice, even if it is the most obvious. The better antecedent is rather the political movement that overthrew Reconstruction in the 1870s and reinstalled former slaveowners, the so-called “Redeemers,” in positions of supreme power across the South. Like Buchanan’s Public Choice theory during and after the civil rights movement, this strategy married reactionary southern white supremacy with a not-explicitly-racist free market economic and political agenda. MacLean does not mention this history but she should have. She includes in her conclusion only a passing reference to late-nineteenth-century America as the model end-state for Buchanan’s and his heirs’ political advocacy.
In order to regain the power they had lost to the new black electorate under Reconstruction, the Redeemers forged a de facto alliance with a class of elite northerners, what in her book The Reconstruction of American Liberalism (2002) the historian Nancy Cohen calls “liberal reformers.” Following the Panic of 1873, class conflict came to dominate the national political debate. The lynchpin of the Redeemer strategy was activating the first wave of American-style “free market” economics to galvanize northern elite opinion. While initially the liberal reformers were careful not to adopt explicit racism in their appeals, race-coded rhetoric increasingly crept into northern publications such as the Nation. The American Social Science Association, for instance, which was formed after the Civil War to organize professional and quasi-professional research and “reform” movements, took on an increasingly partisan and ideological tone, crystalizing an elitist, reactionary political interest that sought to withdraw government from “interference” in the market, particularly in the South.
The two chief ideas that linked the liberal reformers and Redeemer interests were, first, that black people would not supply their compliant labor in the way that white supervisors, planters, and would-be industrialists needed in order for the southern economy to prosper; and second, that instead of working, freedmen displayed a talent and predilection for politics as an alternative means of supporting themselves as sponges off of the state. Frequently these two ideas were combined, for example in the notion that as newly autonomous workers, freed blacks had not yet acquired the civic understanding necessary to fully participate in government, and hence could not be trusted to wield power—because they were doing so in ways that impeded economic development, which in turn required their subservience as a quiescent labor force. As Cohen writes, “The freedmen’s alleged failure as an economic man and his propensity and talent for politics opened a window for the old proslavery theory of the childlike African to reenter in new-fashioned Darwinian dress.”
Crucially, this is exactly the same critique that Buchanan and his ilk later mounted against the civil rights movement: empowering labor, especially black labor, was dangerous to economic development. Moreover, state fiscal policies borne of popular democracy and characterized as redistributive—for example, public goods such as an integrated public school system—constituted an illegitimate perversion and subordination of government to “statist,” “rent-seeking” special interests.
Academic economists of the Gilded Age also espoused the view that inequality, whether between groups or individuals, was driven by innate characteristics and heredity. The more historically stable and wider those disparities, the stronger the evidence that they could not be overcome through so-called “class legislation.” The northern intelligentsia soon advocated both that Reconstruction be abandoned in the South and that Jim Crow–style policy be adopted in the North, namely the criminalization of unemployment and austerity in the face of economic contraction. As Cohen summarizes, “The doctrine of laissez-faire could become pretext, principle, and rationalization for the calls to remove federal protection from Reconstruction governments—for the reformers’ antidemocratic program to confine the genie of universal suffrage.”
But this alliance did not rely on anything like Calhoun’s flagrantly antidemocratic emphasis on property rights above all. In an essentially democratic political context, the alliance could undermine public support for equal rights and egalitarian economic policies by playing off race and class divisions. It worked, and thanks in large part to Buchanan and the intellectual movement he represented, it worked again in the 1960s and ’70s. MacLean argues it is working right up through our present moment—a formidable challenge to the scholars thus implicated, and hence an explanation for the hostility with which they have received her book.
The Book that Explains Charlottesville
https://bostonreview.net/articles/marshall-steinbaum-book-explains-charlottesville/
Book Excerpt: Democracy in Chains - The Introduction
Nancy MacLean delves into the deep, dark history of the American far
right.
https://billmoyers.com/story/book-democracy-in-chains-far-right/
