Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for America

Winner of the Lillian Smith Book AwardWinner of the Los Angeles Times Book PrizeFinalist for the National Book AwardThe Nations Most Valuable Book[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.The AtlanticThis sixtyyear campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If youre worried about what all this means for Americas future, you should be.NPRAn explosive expos of the rights relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution.Behind todays headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architectthe Nobel Prizewinning political economist James McGill Buchananand dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elites power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.Corporate donors and their rightwing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanans work in teaching others how to divide America into makers and takers. And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multiarmed machine to carry out Buchanans strategy.Without Buchanans ideas and Kochs money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of rightwing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentiethcentury American selfgovernment.