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

by Nancy MacLean

To save money, Flint’s appointed city manager switched the source of the city water supply to the polluted Flint River.

The Koch team by then could count on its Club for Growth to fund primary challenges to ensure that the party line on environmentalism would be maintained by Republican members of Congress. That explains why Senator John McCain is but the best-known—and once most principled—Republican to flip his position after being faced with a Tea Party primary challenge. By 2014, only 8 of 278 Republicans in Congress were willing to acknowledge that man-made climate change is real.31

Advised by the Wisconsin affiliate on his agenda since taking office as governor, Scott Walker’s administration imposed a gag order in 2015 to prohibit employees charged with oversight of state-owned land from even discussing climate change on the job.35

To put all this another way: if the Koch-network-funded academics and institutions were not in the conversation, the public would have little doubt that the evidence of science is overwhelming and government action to prevent further global warming is urgent.36 Sadly, however, their campaigns are working. The number of Americans who believed that “the continued burning of fossil fuels would alter the climate” dropped from 71 percent in 2007 to 44 percent in 2011.37

Rather than admit their ideological commitment to ending public education, they have convinced a sizable segment of the American population that the problems in schools today are the result of those teachers’ unions having too much power.

Even the school supplies budget was cut by more than half; students can no longer take home textbooks in some poor communities, for fear they may be lost.38

Where is this money going? Into corporate America, to a new “education industry” of private schools, many of which are held to no standards or even disclosure requirements.

Just as the radical right seeks, ultimately, to turn public education over to corporations, so it pushes for corporate prisons.

he neglected to note how the profit motive could lead private prison corporations to push for tougher sentencing to drive up prison populations and to cut costly items such as job training and substance abuse counseling.41

The IMF concluded that the rights of workers to bargain collectively must be restored to slow the growth of inequality and enable economic growth.47

Yet the cause is pushing hard in the opposite direction: willful destruction of workers’ ability to organize into unions and negotiate for better wages and conditions.

At midcentury, the former slave states of the South led the nation in passing antiunion right-to-work laws, with only a smattering of imitators elsewhere, mostly in places of sparse population. Yet between 2012 and 2016, guided by Buchanan’s ideas and pushed by the Koch-funded organizations ALEC, the SPN, and Americans for Prosperity, fou...

longer be allowed to negotiate working conditions and benefits, only wages (with those held to the rate of inflation). Each contract would be only a year in duration, thus draining staff time and energy away from addressing the concerns of existing members and from organizing new members in order to prepare for now back-to-back annual negotiations. Unions would lose the right to have dues deducted from members’ paychecks and instead have to chase down individuals who did not pay. And, in a final slap, with the unions no longer able to do anything of substance for their members, they would face recertification elections each year.49 No wonder Walker boasted that “we dropped the bomb.”50 His approach cut in half, over just five years, the share of public employees who belong to unions.51

The combination of hobbling unions and privatizing public services has taken a particular toll on African Americans, who were able to move into the middle class in significant numbers specifically because of measures preventing discrimination in government jobs. “Public employment,” explained the authors of a large interdisciplinary research study on U.S. inequality, “has been the principal source of black mobility, especially for women, and one of the most important mechanisms reducing black poverty.” One recent headline captures the impact succinctly: “Public Sector Jobs Vanish, Hitting Blacks Hard.” The austerity measures induced by the Great Recession have contributed, but public sector employment’s failure to rebound also results from deliberate choices to cut taxes and services and outsource or privatize what remains.52

U.S. corporations have nearly all discontinued the defined benefit pensions that a generation ago covered half the labor force.

And with wages essentially stagnant for the majority since the 1970s, very few Americans have 401(k) accounts or other savings equivalent to what has been lost.

One key finding was that by the 1920s, in both Europe and the United States, “the expansion of the voter franchise” beyond “wealthy male landowners” had produced the unfortunate result of enlarged public sectors.

When the right opportunity arose, the economist advised, “big-bang style clustered bursts” could dispense with multiple democratic constraints on economic liberty in the same surge (rather like, one could infer, the radical policy changes imposed on multiple fronts in the same sessions in newly Republican-dominated states like mine after 2011, among them education, employment, environment, taxation, and voting rights).64

Television’s new fixation on private peccadilloes, as seen in the Clinton era, could leave citizens jaded and suspicious, thus sowing helpful mistrust of government (although some caution was in order, as the “cynicism may undercut some of the values needed to sustain a free society”). The emerging Internet, for its part, “appears especially well suited for rumor, gossip, and talk of conspiracy.”66

The most obvious among these binding features is our grossly malapportioned Senate, designed to put brakes on the House of Representatives, which was to represent the people directly. A state with comparatively few residents, such as Wyoming, has the same Senate representation as the most populous state, California. That means the vote of a Wyoming resident carries nearly seventy times more weight than the vote of a Californian in Senate elections and deliberations.68 How fair is that? It’s not. It is precisely the kind of malapportionment that the Supreme Court, in the early 1960s, ruled unconstitutional in internal affairs of the states, whose officials were purposely overrepresenting rural residents over urban and suburban residents—indeed, a much more egregious departure from the “one person, one vote” standard. But because the apportionment of Senate seats is written into the Constitution, in the one section that cannot be amended, the remedy cannot be applied nationally.

On the one hand, this constitutional system has helped make the United States the most stable republic in the modern world. On the other hand, it has also made ours by far the least responsive of all the leading democracies to what the people want and need. It takes upheaval of truly historic proportions to achieve significant change in America, even when it is supported by the vast majority—as evidenced by the civil war required to end slavery, the tens of thousands of strikes and other struggles needed to achieve reform during the Great Depression, and the mass disruption and political crisis that civil rights activists had to bring about in order to win for African Americans the same constitutional rights enjoyed by other citizens.69 The existing checks and balances, in short, create an all but insuperable barrier to those seeking to right even gross social injustice.

The problem is systemic. Built into our Constitution, the change-blocking mechanisms prevent us as a polity from addressing our most profound challenges until ...

Only the United States has four such veto players. All four were specified in the slavery-defending founders’ Constitution: absolute veto power for the Senate, for the House, and for the president (if not outvoted by a two-thirds majority), and a Constitution that cannot be altered without the agreement of three-quarters of the states. Other features of the U.S. system further obstruct majority rule, including a winner-take-all Electoral College that encourages a two-party system; the Tenth Amendment, which steers power toward the states; and a system of representation in the unusually potent Senate that violates the principle of “one person, one vote” to a degree not seen anywhere else.

That language prevents the signers from participating in class action lawsuits over corporate malpractice and compels them to accept mandatory arbitration in a system in which the corporations in question write the rules and choose the decision-makers. That is: the contracts take away citizens’ constitutional right to sue in court, proclaiming their signatures as consent.72

“Ominously, business has a good chance of opting out of the legal system altogether and misbehaving without reproach.”

In short, Buchanan’s desired constitutional order enabled an era of unmatched corporate dominance, in which elites North and South reunited in a shared disdain for the political participation of the great mass of the citizenry.

the interpretation of the Constitution the cadre seeks to impose would give federal courts vast new powers to strike down measures desired by voters and passed by their duly elected representatives at all levels—and would require greatly expanded police powers to control the resultant popular anger.

One is a power grab by affiliated state legislators reaching down to deny municipal governments the right to make their own policies on matters hitherto within their purview, not least local election rules. Pushed by State Policy Network affiliates and guided by ALEC-affiliated legislators, GOP-controlled states have been passing what are called preemption laws that deny localities the right to adopt policies that depart from the model being imposed by the network-dominated state legislatures.83

Virtually every state government, according to a recent study by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, kowtows to business and the wealthy, underrepresents citizens of lesser means, lacks transparency, and does a poor job of enforcing ethics laws. The promotion of states’ rights is not an atavistic racial reflex for the insiders, that is to say, but a cold-eyed way to secure minority rule.86

a nation that stands at 138th of 172 democracies in the world in voter turnout will have even fewer people participating in the political process.87

With fewer people voting, everything will be so much easier to achieve.

In the two years after Republican candidates swept the 2010 midterm elections, ALEC-backed legislators in forty-one states introduced more than 180 bills to restrict who could vote and how.

The question this stealth plan presents Americans with is, at one level, quite simple: Do we want to live in a cosmetically updated version of midcentury Virginia, in a country that so elevates property rights as to paralyze the use of government for democratically determined goals and needs? That extinguishes “the political we”?

The libertarian cause, from the time it first attracted wider support during the southern schools crisis, was never really about freedom as most people would define it. It was about the promotion of crippling division among the people so as to end any interference with what those who held vast power over others believed should be their prerogatives.

“America will soon make a decision about its future. It will be a permanent decision. There will be no going back.” As we consider the future of our democracy in light of all that has happened already, we may take heed of a Koch maxim: “Playing it safe is slow suicide.”99