| DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America Nancy MacLean New York: Viking, June 2017 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-101-98096-5 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-101-98096-6 | 334pp. | HC | $28.00 | |
Scholar Nancy MacLean did not know much about James McGill Buchanan until he died in 2013. At that time, she gained access to the archives of his work at the Fairfax, VA campus of George Mason University. Her research there led to this book, which focuses not on Buchanan's impressive scholarship in the field of economics but on his lifelong effort to bend that scholarship to the service of defending property rights — which is to say the rights of the wealthy. Through her efforts, Buchanan stands revealed as one of the architects of a strategy still employed by well-to-do right-wingers like Charles Koch. The aim of this strategy is to throw off the federal government's control over their activities: in effect, to subvert American democracy itself.
In writing this book, in telling the story of Buchanan and his progeny from 1956 to the present, I have found myself more and more fixated on one gnawing question. Is what we are dealing with merely a social movement of the right whose radical ideas must eventually face public scrutiny and rise or fall on their merits? Or is this the story of something quite different, something never before seen in American history? Could it be—and I use these words quite hesitantly and carefully—a fifth-column assault on American democratic governance? – Page xxx |
An Introduction describes Buchanan's collaboration at the University of Virginia with Colgate Whitehead Darden Jr. (then University president), his coming to the attention of Charles Koch, and his arrival at George Mason University, where he ended his career. Following that, a prologue lays out the words and the legacy of John C. Calhoun, arguably the grandfather of the tactic of using states' rights as the backbone of legislative resistance to federal government control over wealthy elites. Then the tale begins.
It begins by taking us to Prince Edward County, Virginia on 23 April 1951. At the time, Virginia was led by courtly men with standards to uphold. Not for them the beatings and lynching of the deeper South. But they were no less stalwart in opposing desegregation, and, indeed, the central premise of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: that all men are entitled to life, liberty, and the chance to pursue happiness. Students led by Barbara Rose Johns, the niece of the man who mentored Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., began a strike to force the state to upgrade their substandard school. After some setbacks, they won that battle with help from a lawsuit brought by the NAACP — a lawsuit that became one of five folded into Brown v. Board of Education.
The courtly men of Virginia struck back, not with lynchings but with law. Their counterstroke was led by Senator Harry Flood Byrd, Sr. It centered on establishing the legal right of the Commonwealth of Virginia to abandon its obligation to maintain public schools. The benefit was clear: If the federal government required public schools to accept blacks, making all schools in the state private voided the requirement. Byrd's organization did not prevail in this.1
Buchanan, deeply involved in supporting the Byrd organization, drew a powerful lesson from its failure: that state-level legislative changes would never win the day for the wealthy.2 To succeed, they had to find a way to change the federal Constitution itself. In a few years, he had evolved a master plan. He would ally with other libertarian thinkers in a network that, working in "conspiratorial secrecy," would generate persuasive propaganda to draw the undecided toward their point of view. They would cultivate like-minded politicians, and various right-leaning foundations would provide both donations for the politicians and incentives to induce new talent to join the cause. Education was not neglected; they pushed for endowed academic operations at receptive universities, in the pattern of Buchanan's original Virginia school of political economy at the University of Virginia that he set up with Darden's backing.
The upshot of MacLean's well-researched narrative is that the intellectual heft of Buchanan3 and fellow academics, allied with the financial backing of Charles Koch and other billionaires, supported a persistent, stealthy campaign to roll back restrictions on people that from America's birth considered themselves the bulwark of the country: responsible for most of its prosperity and therefore entitled to most of the benefits of that prosperity. That this view is antithetical to the intentions of the Founders, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, seems by their behavior to be of little concern to them.4 The ongoing conflict strikes at the heart of the American experiment: shall it continue to foster the well-being of all of its citizens, or shall it reward a subset of them, a class of elites, with virtually unlimited privileges while the majority struggle to survive with a pittance? The latter outcome smacks of the slavery economy staunchly defended by the leaders of the American South which led to the Civil War — or of the feudalism which prevailed in Europe for centuries before that.
The book might have been better organized and more concise. But I do not fault it on this basis. It presents vital information in a readable way, and supports it with abundant citations, collected in 61 pages of closely-spaced endnotes. These are followed by a 19-page bibliography and an excellent index. I give it full marks and consider it a keeper. The author succeeds in showing that Buchanan, despite his brilliance, espoused an indefensible worldview — and that this worldview, still promoted by his successors, is a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy.
"As one-sided as the political decisions of their own era seemed to Buchanan and Tullock, they never acknowledged that the system of rules they favored, the one that struck down labor and market regulations along with civil rights and voting rights protections, was just as one-sided. The power of the most propertied to constrain representative government through the courts not only allowed states to legislate racial segregation while keeping wage-earning Americans from effectively advancing their interests, but also hobbled the growing number of middle-class reformers who hoped to steer between what they often viewed as greed on one side and grabbiness on the other in an era marked by veritable rolling wars between corporations and workers." – Page 80 |
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