Democracy in Chains (2017)

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America is a 2017 nonfiction book by Nancy MacLean published by Viking Press. MacLean critically examines the school of economic thinking known as "public choice", focusing on its founder James M. Buchanan, who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1986. According to MacLean, Buchanan's work has had a significant influence on the libertarian movement and in the US Republican Party, including the political activities of the Koch brothers.

MacLean argues that Buchanan believed democracy must be suppressed for capitalism to flourish, which explains why the right wing, funded behind the scenes by secretive dark money networks, engages in anti-democratic behavior and policy-making, such as opposing unions and Social Security, supporting voter suppression and privatization, and placing impenetrable barriers to popular and social democracy. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Reviewers received it mostly along partisan political lines.

Background and development

The idea for the book came about while MacLean was researching school segregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia. She was studying the closure of public schools by segregationists from 1959 to 1964 in reaction to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education, which held that laws establishing racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional.

MacLean learned that Prince Edward County refused to appropriate funds for the County School Board, effectively closing all public schools rather than integrate them, in a strategy known as massive resistance, an attempt to get Virginia's white politicians to pass laws and policies to prevent public school desegregation. "Black students were locked out of any formal education while their white peers went off to private, segregation academies with school vouchers, essentially punishing the black community in Prince Edward for having been part of the Brown v. Board of Education case," she recalled.

Her research, which spanned a period of about ten years, led her to American economist Milton Friedman and his defense of school vouchers, and to American economist James M. Buchanan. After Buchanan died in 2013, MacLean gained access to his papers at the Buchanan House at George Mason University. She discovered documents supporting the Kochs' investment in Buchanan's Center for Study of Public Choice, and this led her to develop her hypothesis about right-wing politics in the U.S. for the book.

Content summary

This book focuses on the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences-winning political economist James M. Buchanan and his work developing public choice theory, as well as the roles of Charles Koch and others, in nurturing the libertarian movement in the United States. MacLean argues that these figures undertook "a stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and national levels back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation." According to MacLean, Buchanan represents "the true origin story of today’s well-heeled radical right."

Reception

The book was praised by liberal and progressive scholars and readers. In The Atlantic, Sam Tanenhaus called Democracy in Chains "A vibrant intellectual history of the radical right", writing that the book "is part of a new wave of historiography that has been examining the southern roots of modern conservatism" and that it "untangle[s] important threads in American history [...] to make us see how much of that history begins, and still lives, in the South." George Monbiot, climate science author and columnist for The Guardian, wrote that the book was "the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past half century." Colin Gordon, writing in Jacobin, called the book "a revelation, as politics and as history." MacLean was interviewed by Rebecca Onion in Slate, Alex Shephard in The New Republic, and Mark Karl in Alternet about her "remarkable" and "groundbreaking" book. Bethany Moreton of Dartmouth College called the book "indispensable reading [that] adds a critical storyline to the complex and multi-causal conservative counterrevolution." For BillMoyers.com, Kristin Miller wrote that MacLean "has unearthed a stealth ideologue of the American right" whom Charles Koch "looked to for inspiration". For NPR, Genevieve Valentie wrote the book "feels like it was written with a clock ticking down" after a "sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself." Marshall Steinbaum of the Roosevelt Institute described himself as "in sympathy with MacLean’s characterization of the Virginia School as profoundly antidemocratic and anti-academic" and called the book "an important warning, and it should be read by all despite its rhetorical shortcomings." Luke Darby of GQ called Democracy in Chains "one of the nine books to read before the next election." MacLean was an invited guest on several popular television and radio outlets, most notably Real Time with Bill Maher, where she appeared twice (in August and November 2018) to discuss contemporary politics and the history of the far right.