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April 30, 2020
its model of political economy,
What is said model?
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.
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But what if the goal of all these actions was to destroy our institutions, or at least change them so radically that they became shadows of their former selves?
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.
George Wallace, a candidate strongly identified with the South and with the right, nonetheless supported public spending that helped white people.
The focus must shift from who rules to changing the rules.
“no existing political constitution contains sufficient constraints or limits” on government.
The religious entrepreneurs were happy to sell libertarian economics to their flocks—above all, opposition to public schooling and calls for reliance on family provision or charity in place of government assistance.
The Republican Party is now in the control of a group of true believers for whom compromise is a dirty word.
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.
Where Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek allowed that public officials were earnestly trying to do right by the citizenry, even as they disputed the methods, Buchanan believed that government failed because of bad faith:
Buchanan and Calhoun both alleged a kind of class conflict between “tax producers and tax consumers.” Both depicted politics as a realm of exploitation and coercion, but the economy as a realm of free exchange. And both designed inventive ways to safeguard minority rights that went beyond the many protections already enshrined in the Constitution.
“Calhoun was quite right,” Rothbard instructed, “in focusing on taxes and fiscal policy as the keystone” of democracy’s threat to economic liberty.
So matchless were the profits that more money was invested in slaves than in industry and railroads.
Calhoun concluded that if something must be sacrificed to square the circle between economic liberty and political liberty, it was political liberty.
Calhoun led a campaign in the early republic that, in the name of property and individual rights, took powers away from local authorities, on whom ordinary people had more influence, and shifted them to central state governments.
What we are seeing today is a new iteration of that very old impulse in America: the quest of some of the propertied (always, it bears noting, a particularly ideologically extreme—and some would say greedy—subsection of the propertied) to restrict the promise of democracy for the many, acting in the knowledge that the majority would choose other policies if it could.
where they were free to do so, voters regularly called on their governments to perform services they valued and elected candidates who pledged to provide them.
“The anti-government rhetoric that continues to saturate our political life is rooted in [support for] slavery rather than liberty.”
As his class’s interests increasingly diverged from those of other citizens’, Calhoun more and more identified the federal government as a menace to liberty.
the notion of unwarranted federal intervention has been inseparable from a desire to maintain white racial as well as class dominance.
The niece of the Reverend Vernon Johns, the radical minister who later mentored the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Barbara Johns never consulted her Montgomery uncle about the strike she was planning.1
It's Important to note the emergent component of civil rights protest
Virginia required voters to pay a tax to participate in the political process, and it was one of the states that also made that tax cumulative, so that if, say, two elections had not featured candidates who interested you but the third one did, you would have to pay all three years’ taxes to vote.
“They expected us to raise our incomes without improving education.”5
His warning that the students’ parents would be jailed unless they desisted got more attention—until someone observed that the town jail was far too small to hold them all.
segregation was bound up in a complex of institutions that sustained the rigid social order and culture they were determined to hold in place—what they liked to call “our way of life.”24
In November 1955, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Brown II, the implementation decree, Kilpatrick followed that call to privatize education with a crusade against federal “dictation.”
Calhoun had argued that state governments had the right to refuse to abide by those federal laws that they found odious.
These vouchers, to use today’s language, would enable white parents who could not stand the idea of integration to send their children to segregated private schools, something only the richest could do without such financial help.
In his view, if liberty was to be preserved, the federal government should provide for the national defense and law enforcement, and little else.
the census of 1920 shows that when Jim was a baby, his parents had a live-in servant and farm laborer, a black man named Foster Garner, who was twenty-one years old. In 1940, a family of black sharecroppers worked Buchanan land.
His defeat left Buchanan convinced that too large an electorate was a problem for the white, property-owning class of men like himself.
The Nashville writer who seemed most decisive in Jim Buchanan’s emerging intellectual system was Donald Davidson, the Agrarians’ ringleader, who portrayed the growth of the federal government since the Progressive Era as a move toward “the totalitarian state” that was destroying regional folkways.
what is notable in Buchanan’s formulation is the Davidson-like framing of the problem in regional terms that missed the most egregious impact of bigotry: on Catholics, Jews, Mexican Americans, working-class white men, and, above all, African Americans.
Knight felt “revulsion” for “dogma” of any kind; he pushed his charges to question every claim, especially those most taken for granted in their day—which happened to be Rooseveltian liberalism and Keynesian economics.
Buchanan took from Chicago school economics a conviction that socialism in any form—that is, any group or government meddling with the market—was a sentimental and dangerous error.
The new Republican majority in Congress used its power to end the controls and to stymie the ambitions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), among them the unionization and democratization of the South, by passing the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
What made the Republicans anti-union?
Their concern was how they might, together, shift the tide of history away from what they called “statism,” or what we might call a strong role for government.
save itself from doom, the Western world must regain reverence for individual liberty, particularly economic liberty. Hayek
Buchanan, by contrast, felt drawn to an older style of political economy that was concerned more with the social contract and governance of the economy than with mathematical derring-do.
He took his stand alongside “the much-maligned man in the street,” who compared national budgets to household ledgers and abhorred red ink in either.
promised to be guided by two traditions: that of the “old-fashioned libertarians” whose ideas encouraged laissez-faire economic policies in nineteenth-century England and America, and that of “the Western conservatives,” who feared the “revolt of the masses,” as the title of one text put it, and sought new ways to ensure “social order.”
In such an era, Buchanan said, “our purpose was indeed subversive.”
By the time Buchanan arrived in Virginia in the mid-1950s, this breaking with the past to master a new reality, this refutation of the late-nineteenth century ideology of the sanctity of private property rights and the concomitant embrace of an affirmative role for organized citizens and their government as the counterbalance to corporate power, had become the new stance of virtually every Western democracy.
In Byrd’s view, government must defer entirely to business owners to run the economy while balancing its own budgets like a prudent household.
What was needed was a “political realignment,” he said, based on “a clear fight over the fundamental issue of our time”: “collectivism and slavery versus capitalism and freedom.”
The AFL-CIO was a thorn in the side of the Byrd Organization, what with its push to bring some democracy to workplaces and its fights against the poll tax and massive resistance.
