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

by Nancy MacLean

As 1956 drew to a close, Colgate Whitehead Darden Jr., the president of the University of Virginia, feared for the future of his beloved state.

To most Americans living in the North, Brown was a ruling to end segregated schools—nothing more, nothing less. And Virginia’s response was about race. But to men like Darden and Buchanan, two well-educated sons of the South who were deeply committed to its model of political economy, Brown boded a sea change on much more. At a minimum, the federal courts could no longer be counted on to defer reflexively to states’ rights arguments. More concerning was the likelihood that the high court would be more willing to intervene when presented with compelling evidence that a state action was in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection” under the law. States’ rights, in effect, were yielding in preeminence to individual rights.

James McGill Buchanan was not a member of the Virginia elite.

The center, Buchanan promised, would train “a line of new thinkers” in how to argue against those seeking to impose an “increasing role of government in economic and social life.”1 He could win this war, and he would do it with ideas.

Buchanan’s team had no discernible success in decreasing the federal government’s pressure on the South all the way through the 1960s and ’70s. But take a longer view—follow the story forward to the second decade of the twenty-first century—and a different picture emerges, one that is both a testament to Buchanan’s intellectual powers and, at the same time, the utterly chilling story of the ideological origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance.

a stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and the national levels, back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation.

Some pointed to what happened in Wisconsin in 2011. The newly elected governor, Scott Walker, put forth legislation to strip public employees of nearly all their collective bargaining rights, by way of a series of new rules aimed at decimating their membership.

Equally mysterious were the moves by several GOP-controlled state legislatures to inflict flesh-wounding cuts in public education, while rushing through laws to enable unregulated charter schools and provide tax subsidies for private education.

Then came a surge of synchronized proposals to suppress voter turnout. In 2011 and 2012, legislators in forty-one states introduced more than 180 bills to restrict who could vote and how. Most of these bills seemed aimed at low-income voters, particularly minority voters, and at young people and the less mobile elderly. As one investigation put it, “the country hadn’t seen anything like it since the end of Reconstruction, when every southern state placed severe limits on the franchise.”5

organization that referred to itself as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and kept its elected members a secret from outsiders.

Alongside laws to devastate labor unions were others that would rewrite tax codes, undo environmental protections, privatize many public resources, and require police to take action against undocumented immigrants.7

But such inquiries ran aground, because none of the usual suspects had sired this campaign. The missing piece of the puzzle was James McGill Buchanan.

Virginia’s decision to issue state-subsidized education vouchers to fund enrollment in all-white private schools in the aftermath of Brown.

I came across a footnote pointing to another economist named James McGill Buchanan, who had founded what some called the Virginia school of political economy.

This project was no longer simply about training intellectuals for a battle of ideas; it was training operatives to staff the far-flung and purportedly separate, yet intricately connected, institutions funded by the Koch brothers and their now large network of fellow wealthy donors. These included the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth, the State Policy Network, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Tax Foundation, the Reason Foundation, the Leadership Institute, and more, to say nothing of the Charles Koch Foundation and Koch Industries itself.

The current vice president, Mike Pence, a case in point, has worked with many of these organizations over the years and shares their agenda.12

to, as the team saw it, save capitalism from democracy—permanently.

Buchanan had realized the value of stealth long ago, while still trying to influence Virginia politicians. But it was Koch who institutionalized this policy. In his first big gift to Buchanan’s program, Charles Koch signaled his desire for the work he funded to be conducted behind the backs of the majority.

A brilliant engineer with three degrees from MIT, Koch warned, “The failure to use our superior technology ensures failure.” Translation: the American people would not support their plans, so to win they had to work behind the scenes, using a covert strategy instead of open declaration of what they really wanted.13

And thus, a movement that prided itself, even congratulated itself, on its ability to carry out a revolution below the radar of prying eyes (especially those of reporters) had failed to lock one crucial door: the front door to a house that let an academic archive rat like me, operating on a vague hunch, into the mind of the man who started it all.

James Buchanan did not start out as a shill for billionaires. For one thing, there were no billionaires in the United States in 1956—only the oil magnate J. Paul Getty even came close.14

What animated Buchanan, what became the laser focus of his deeply analytic mind, was the seemingly unfettered ability of an increasingly more powerful federal government to force individuals with wealth to pay for a growing number of public goods and social programs they had had no personal say in approving. Better schools, newer textbooks, and more courses for black students might help the children, for example, but whose responsibility was it to pay for these improvements? The parents of these students? Others who wished voluntarily to help out? Or people like himself, compelled through increasing taxation to contribute to projects they did not wish to support? To Buchanan, what others described as taxation to advance social justice or the common good was nothing more than a modern version of mob attempts to take by force what the takers had no moral right to: the fruits of another person’s efforts. In his mind, to protect wealth was to protect the individual against a form of legally sanctioned gangsterism.

Buchanan believed with every fiber of his being that if what a group of people wanted from government could not, on its own merits, win the freely given backing of each individual citizen, including the very wealthiest among us, any attempt by that group to use its numbers to get what it wanted constituted not persuasion of the majority but coercion of the minority, a violation of the liberty of individual taxpayers.

To end the coercion, he counseled, one had to stop “government corruption.” By that he meant the quiet quid pro quo reached between government officials and organized groups that keeps these officials reflexively attuned and responsive to the demands of such groups in exchange for their votes.

economics.” The enemy became “the collective order,” a code phrase for organized social and political groups that looked to government.

Buchanan’s penetrating analyses of how incentives guide government action would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986. That award was the supreme vindication of his intellectual achievement. But the other Buchanan, the deeply political foot soldier of the right, experienced mounting despair. His attempts to win passage of radical proposals in Virginia in the late 1950s failed miserably, because legislators understood what at first he did not: the unpopularity of his political-economic vision.

Buchanan’s hopes were lifted with the presidential run of Barry Goldwater in 1964. But when the candidate conveyed to voters his desire to end Social Security as we know it, to disallow the Civil Rights Act under the combined rubric of property rights and states’ rights, to create a flat tax system, and to undercut public education, he lost every state in the union except his home state of Arizona and those of the Deep South.

Richard Nixon expanded government more than his predecessors had, with costly new agencies and regulations, among them a vast new Environmental Protection Agency.

Had there not been someone else as deeply frustrated as Buchanan, as determined to fight the uphill fight, but in his case with much keener organizational acumen, the story this book tells would no doubt have been very different. But there was. His name was Charles Koch.

The Libertarian Party he funded to run against Ronald Reagan in 1980, with his brother David on the ticket, had proven a joke, hardly worth the investment, save for its attraction of new recruits to the cause. The Cato Institute, which he founded and funded, had not proven much more effective in its advocacy.

revolutionary. The goal of the cause, Buchanan announced to his associates, should no longer be to influence who makes the rules, to vest hopes in one party or candidate. The focus must shift from who rules to changing the rules.

Informed early on by one of his grantees that the playbook on revolutionary organization had been written by Vladimir Lenin, Koch dutifully cultivated a trusted “cadre” of high-level operatives, just as Lenin had done, to build a movement that refused compromise as it devised savvy maneuvers to alter the political math in its favor.

But no war is won with all generals and no infantry. The cause also needed a popular base to succeed, one beyond the libertarians of the right, who were kindred in conviction but few in number.

A similar cynicism ruled Koch’s decision to make peace—at least in the short term—with the religious right, despite the fact that so many libertarian thinkers, Buchanan included, were atheists who looked down on those who believed in God.

From there it was just a short step to lay claim to being the true representatives of the party, declaring all others RINOS—Republicans in name only.

Our trouble in grasping what has happened comes, in part, from our inherited way of seeing the political divide. Americans have been told for so long, from so many quarters, that political debate can be broken down into conservative versus liberal, pro-market versus pro-government, Republican versus Democrat, that it is hard to recognize that something more confounding is afoot, a shrewd long game blocked from our sight by these stale classifications.

We don’t understand that the old Republican Party, the one my own father voted for during most of his life, exists no more.

that. The Republican Party is now in the control of a group of true believers for whom compromise is a dirty word. Their cause, they say, is liberty. But by that they mean the insulation of private property rights from the reach of government—and the takeover of what was long public (schools, prisons, western lands, and much more) by corporations, a system that would radically reduce the freedom of the many.26 In a nutshell, they aim to hollow out democratic resistance. And by its own lights, the cause is nearing success.27

The 2016 election looked likely to bring a big presidential win with across-the-board benefits. The donor network had so much money and power at its disposal as the primary season began that every single Republican presidential front-runner was bowing to its agenda. Not a one would admit that climate change was a real problem or that guns weren’t good—and the more widely distributed, the better. Every one of them attacked public education and teachers’ unions and advocated more charter schools and even tax subsidies for religious schools. All called for radical changes in taxation and government spending. Each one claimed that Social Security and Medicare were in mortal crisis and that individual retirement and health savings accounts, presumably to be invested with Wall Street firms, were the best solution.

approaches to political economy, with real-life consequences for us all. One was in its heyday when Buchanan set to work. In economics, its standard-bearer was John Maynard Keynes, who believed that for a modern capitalist democracy to flourish, all must have a share in the economy’s benefits and in its governance.

The most starkly opposed vision is that of Buchanan’s Virginia school. It teaches that all such talk of the common good has been a smoke screen for “takers” to exploit “makers,” in the language now current, using political coalitions to “vote themselves a living” instead of earning it by the sweat of their brows.

His was a cynicism so toxic that, if widely believed, it could eat like acid at the foundations of civic life.

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?

capital. For a movement that knows it can never win majority support is not a classic social movement.

Pushed by relatively small numbers of radical-right billionaires and millionaires who have become profoundly hostile to America’s modern system of government, an apparatus decades in the making, funded by those same billionaires and millionaires, has been working to undermine the normal governance of our democracy. Indeed, one such manifesto calls for a “hostile takeover” of Washington, D.C.34

The size of this force is enormous. The social scientists who have led scholars in researching the Koch network write that it “operates on the scale of a national U.S. political party” and employs more than three times as many people as the Republican committees had on their payrolls in 2015.

This points to another characteristic associated with a fifth column: the tactic of overwhelming the normal political process with schemes to disrupt its functioning. Indeed, this massive and well-funded force is turning the party it has occupied toward ends that most Republican voters do not want, such as the privatization of Social Security, Medicare, and education.35

its architects have never recognized economic power as a potential tool of domination: to them, unrestrained capitalism is freedom.

For all its fine phrases, what this cause really seeks is a return to oligarchy, to a world in which both economic and effective political power are to be concentrated in the hands of a few.

Their intellectual lodestar is John C. Calhoun. He developed his radical critique of democracy a generation after the nation’s founding, as the brutal economy of chattel slavery became entrenched in the South—and his vision horrified Madison.