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

by Nancy MacLean

The first step toward understanding what this cause actually wants is to identify the deep lineage of its core ideas. And although its spokespersons would like you to believe they are disciples of James Madison, the leading architect of the U.S. Constitution, it is not true.37 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.

A former vice president and, at the time he devised his plan, a U.S. senator, Calhoun was America’s first tactician of tax revolt, and arguably the nation’s most influential extremist.

the militant economic libertarians among today’s donor class. They, like Calhoun, believe that Madison’s Constitution was flawed by its failure to fully hamstring the people’s ability to act “collectively.”

Indeed, like Calhoun, the members of the team now applying Buchanan’s thought are interested not so much in fighting big government, per se, as in elevating that branch of government they can best control in a given situation.

The irony of all this is vast, as Einhorn points out: “The anti-government rhetoric that continues to saturate our political life is rooted in [support for] slavery rather than liberty.” The paralyzing suspicion of government so much on display today, that is to say, came originally not from average people but from elite extremists such as Calhoun who saw federal power as a menace to their system of racial slavery.19

Being a shrewd man, Calhoun could see the arithmetic of national politics changing. If something was not done, slave masters would lose the sway they had enjoyed at the founding, when the regions were more evenly matched in population. “The South,” Calhoun warned in 1831, was already “a hopeless minority.”22

One liberal scold called the senator “a steadfast opponent of most of the twentieth century,”

No man should be allowed to impose “degrading” work on another through sheer private economic power, nor should any lender crush an honest farmer with debt. Government should serve all citizens, not act at the behest of “arrogant” would-be “aristocrats.”4

Indeed, rather than sympathize with the plight of black Americans, Buchanan later argued that the failure of the black community to thrive after emancipation was not the result of the barriers put in their way, but rather proof that “the thirst for freedom, and responsibility, is perhaps not nearly so universal as so many post-Enlightenment philosophers have assumed.”18

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.

Why simply assume government could do better? Yet empirical comparison never interested Buchanan or the school he founded. Where his interest and genius lay—even if you call it an evil genius—was in his intuitive grasp of the importance of trust in political life. If only one could break down the trust that now existed between governed and governing, even those who supported liberal objectives would lose confidence in government solutions.42

Wicksell articulated the notion that tax policy ought to be arrived at through unanimous consent. “It would seem to be a blatant injustice,” he wrote, “if someone should be forced to contribute toward the costs of some activity which does not further his interests or may even be diametrically opposed to them.”44

Wicksell’s ideas, Buchanan later said, “seemed to correspond precisely with those I already had in my head” but “would not have dared to express in the public-finance mindset of the time.”45

By year’s end, he said, he “suddenly ‘saw the light.’” The new light notably resembled the old dogma of the southern-state “Redeemer” governments that had put an end to Reconstruction, although Buchanan did not comment on the similarity, whether or not he perceived it.

“Pay as you go” was both economically wise and morally just, Buchanan concluded in his first book.

Left unspoken was how that framework appealed to the more right-wing members of the propertied class by keeping their taxes low and denying basic services—schools, roads, and sanitation—to those who could not pay for them.

Buchanan got the break of his career in 1956: a post at the University of Virginia, as the new chairman of the economics department.

With the help of Nutter and a steadily growing number of others at UVA, Buchanan would be able to turn a regional libertarian creed into a national counterrevolution.

More specifically, the center aimed to combat what its founders referred to as “social engineering” by changing the way people thought. They hoped to break “the powerful grip that collectivist ideology already had on the minds of intellectuals,” as Buchanan later put it.3

Brown so energized this ragtag collection of outraged radicals of the right that some were no longer happy calling themselves “libertarian.” The name had no passion and fire; with its seven Latinate syllables, it could never become a household word. Some wanted to call themselves what they were: “radicals” of the right. Others understandably feared that any name with the word “radical” in it might turn off the wealthy men of affairs who would be needed to fund the cause, and so opted for “conservative” as interchangeable with “libertarian.” Yet while “conservative” might help in attracting powerful allies, that name understated the demolition-minded nature of their vision.20

One thing all advocates of economic liberty agreed on, at least, was that they were “the right,” or the “right wing,” and against “the left” and anything “left wing.” In the split inherited from the French Revolution, in which the left upheld popular participation and equality, and the right upheld private property rights and order, those coming together in the 1950s stood on the right—and proudly.

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.”28

Black southerners’ claim to equal schooling when they did not pay equal taxes and their calling in of the federal government to help them get it was a prime example of the collectivist menace to liberty. It was part of the “dangerous trend toward socialism” the candidate pledged to fight.29

“The ‘soak the rich’ purpose” of graduated taxes was “discriminatory,” Andrews announced. For government to be “confiscating property” from citizens on “the principle of the capacity to pay,” he said in an interview with U.S. News & World Report: “That’s socialism.”30

in the words of Virginia’s J. Addison Hagan. He complained that leaders of both major parties had “been playing to the minorities such as Farmers, Unions, Negroes, and Jews” at the expense of “the white majority” whose “forebears made this country.”31

The nine justices of the Supreme Court had created a situation that could “be settled only by violence and the threat of force.” And besides, Buckley said, the NAACP was exaggerating the mistreatment of the black students.

Buchanan’s secretary became a lifelong loyalist, staying with him for nearly fifty years as his “gal Friday” and the Virginia school’s “First Lady.”

Newly divorced after twelve years as a homemaker, she was happy to find a full-time job—even if the $200-a-month starting salary meant that to support her three children she had to live with her mother and sister and rely on them to care for her infant son while she worked.

By the early 1950s it seemed that only domineering businessmen and Dixiecrat politicians objected to working people being allowed a countervailing voice to that of corporations.50

Buchanan took pride in what he called his academic entrepreneurship. Contributions from corporations such as General Electric and several oil companies and right-wing individuals flowed in, as anti–New Deal foundations provided funds to lure promising graduate students.53 Before long, the cofounders of the center were able to seize an opportunity to prove their enterprise’s value to the Byrd Organization on the issue that mattered most to its stalwarts in these years: the future of the public schools.

Was the problem for those who promoted economic liberty majority rule itself? The economists’ next intervention raised that possibility.

If a constitution enabled what he would call “socialism” (which, in Virginia’s case, meant requiring a system of public schools), it would be nearly impossible to achieve his vision of radical transformation without changing the constitution.

For most of us today, the story of this period is one of righting wrongs long overdue for correction. It’s about basic fairness and equal treatment under the law.

But for some at the time and since, the story of this period was one of loss, not advancement. What was happening, in their view, in the civil rights era—and, indeed, the New Deal era before it—was that the majority, without the consent of the elite white minority, was taking something they considered intrinsic to the promise of America—the protection of property rights.

Indeed, those whom the propertied considered their social inferiors were refusing to submit to their rule on their terms any longer and instead offering their own ideas about fairer ways of doing things.

allocating resources by majority decision-making invited voters to group together as “special interests”—or “pressure groups”—in collective pursuit of “profits” (later called “rent-seeking”) from government programs.

To make matters worse, the system encouraged equally profligate “logrolling.”

The Calculus of Consent claimed to show that simple majority voting thus “tend[ed] to result in overinvestment in the public sector.”

“discriminatory taxation”—or

Interestingly, these conclusions issued from purely abstract thought experiments, not from any research on political practice.

Any collective with the power to enlist the state for its members’ benefit, Buchanan and Tullock insisted, was illegitimate in “a society of free men.”

The only truly fair decision-making model to “confine the [political] exploitation of man by man within acceptable limits” was unanimity: give each individual the capacity to veto the schemes of others so that the many could not impose on the few.

Only if a measure gained unanimous consent, they argued, could it honestly be depicted as ...

“public c...

It provided the moral vocabulary for a political economy like that which had prevailed in the United States in the late nineteenth century, when property rights were nearly sacrosanct.

“We more or less explicitly considered our exercise an implicit defense of the Madisonian structure embodied in the United States Constitution,” Buchanan later said.17 But if he believed that, it was not on the basis of close study of Madison.

When John C. Calhoun made his case for minority veto power like that which Buchanan and Tullock were advocating, Madison made clear in unequivocal language that he rejected it, saying that to give “such a power, to such a minority, over such a majority, would overturn the first principle of free government, and in practice necessarily overturn the government itself.”

“protecting capitalism from government.”

The commission spread its message far and wide: that the federal government had been acting illegitimately since at least the 1930s—a school of thought that would later be called “the Constitution in Exile” and associated with Justice Clarence Thomas and others on the arch right. As the VCCG’s chairman of publications, Jack Kilpatrick ensured that the group’s publications reached every state legislator and governor, every member of the U.S. Congress, federal judges, bar associations, business leaders, chambers of commerce, town and law school libraries beyond number, and daily newspapers and national magazines—with, ultimately, two million pamphlets and books that tutored readers in a restrictive understanding of the Constitution.22

Milton Friedman visited Charlottesville in 1960, invited by Buchanan and Nutter to give a public lecture on the economics of education, at which the faculty who spoke up in defense of public education “were openly ridiculed” by the economists who commanded the floor.32 Friedman went home sounding like Lincoln Steffens after his trip to the USSR: “I’ve seen the future, and it works.”33