Democracy in Chains

For readers of Dark Money, an explosive expose of the man and the ideas behind the capitalist radical right--and its relentless campaign to eliminate unions, disenfranchise voters, change the Constitution, privatize public education, and curb democratic majority rule
"It is not easy to uncover t [...]
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For readers of Dark Money, an explosive expose of the man and the ideas behind the capitalist radical right--and its relentless campaign to eliminate unions, disenfranchise voters, change the Constitution, privatize public education, and curb democratic majority rule
"It is not easy to uncover the inner workings of an essentially secretive political establishment," wrote the reviewer of Jane Mayer's Dark Money in the New York Times. But in Democracy in Chains, award-winning historian Nancy MacLean does exactly that. What she reveals is a troubling prospect. The capitalist radical right has been working to change not simply who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. She names this right's true founder--the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan--and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter government at both the federal and state levels, including the judiciary and understanding of the Constitution. Hyper-partisan politics, she shows, is only one element of a multipronged stealth plan to free corporations by permanently disarming democracy.
But billionaires did not create this movement; white intellectuals in the embattled Jim Crow South did. In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, MacLean brings to light how the ideas guiding today s political right were forged in a crucible of loss in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. The intellectual visionary who came to an imperiled elite s aid was a son of the South educated at the University of Chicago who went on to invent a school of thought to expose government failure. By the 1970s Buchanan launched a long-term project to revolutionize public life that put scholarship in the service of an unprecedented power grab by the right-wing rich.
Guided by Buchanan s ideas, the billionaire Charles Koch and his allied donors have built a vast apparatus to impose on twenty-first century America a version of liberty stamped by the old South. Its operatives seek nothing less than preventing the proverbial pendulum from ever swinging leftward again. And they have amassed the power to carry out their stealth plan, thanks to their effective takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism and to its winning of control of every branch of government in the 2016 elections. With Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause even has a longtime loyalist in the White House.
Based on ten years of unique research and access to Buchanan s archives, Democracy in Chains provides the missing piece to the puzzle of what is happening to American politics, the piece that explains it all. A chilling story of right-wing economists and big money run amok, this magisterial work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government."