Democracy in Chains; The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

xxxiv, 334 pages. Notes. Bibliography. Index. In 2018, Democracy in Chains won the Lillian Smith Book Award, for "books that are outstanding creative achievements, worthy of recognition because of their literary merit, moral vision, and honest representation of the South, its people, problems, and promises." Nancy K. MacLean (born 1959) is an American historian. She is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University. MacLean's research focuses on race, gender, labor history and social movements in 20th-century U.S. history, with particular attention to the U.S. South. In 1981, MacLean completed a combined-degree, B.A./M.A program in history at Brown University, graduating magna cum laude. In 1989, she received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. MacLean's doctoral thesis later became her first book, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (1994). From 1989 to 2010, MacLean taught at Northwestern University, where she chaired the history department and was the Peter B. Ritzma Professor in the Humanities. She spoke in favor of and participated in the Living Wage Campaign. In 2010, MacLean moved to Duke University. She co-chaired Scholars for a Progressive North Carolina (SPNC), which has since been renamed Scholars for North Carolina's Future (SNCF). In 2013, MacLean participated in SPNC panels and forums held in opposition to the legislative agenda of Republican majority of the North Carolina General Assembly. An explosive exposé of the right's relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution. Behind today's 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 architect, the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan, and 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 elite's 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 right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan's 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 multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan's strategy. Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's 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 right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-.…