Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award Winner of the Los Angeles
Times Book Prize Finalist for the National Book Award The Nation's
"Most Valuable Book" "[A] vibrant intellectual history of the
radical right."-The Atlantic "This sixty-year campaign to make
libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself
is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried
about what all this means for America's future, you should be."-NPR
An explosive expose 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-government.
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