More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 18 - June 19, 2019
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.
Nonsense
Equally mysterious
How is this mysterious
maintenance of order
In other words: protection
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.
He clearly did not believe that
The only way to ensure that the will of the majority could no longer influence representative government on core matters of political economy was through what he called “constitutional revolution.”
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.
who did not need the Koch donor network’s money to run,
Wrong
Could it be—and I use these words quite hesitantly and carefully—a fifth-column assault on American democratic governance?
Idiot
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.
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.
Actually it is true
Calhoun and Buchanan both devised constitutional mechanisms to protect an elite economic minority against “exploitation” by majorities of their fellow citizens, and advocated a minority veto power that, as the acolytes note, had “the same purpose and effect.”
Like Madison
His ideas about government broke sharply from the vision of the nation’s founders and the Constitution’s drafters,
False
Note the emerging pattern, which we will see again: while criticizing government action that threatened his own liberty as a property owner, Calhoun saw nothing untoward in calling on the federal government to use its police powers to help his class stifle debate about its practices.
That sleight of hand—denying the legitimacy of government power to act for the common good while using government power to suppress others—appears repeatedly in the pages that follow.
Its also the reason Madison helped draft the constitution
Far from expressing the original intentions of the Constitution’s framers, then, Calhoun and his allies conceived a novel reshuffling of authority in the pursuit of more power for their class.
False
Slavery is a moot point now, of course,
Nevermind the millions of humans rafficked in the usa
the quest of some of the propertied
Its all of tem
for the many, acting in the knowledge that the majority would choose other policies if it could.
See Sam Huntingtons Crisis of Democracy to show ghis is false
A “government based in the naked principle that the majority ought to govern,” Calhoun warned, was sure to filch other men’s property and violate their “liberty.”
Exactly what Madison feared
Einhorn found that 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. They believed, as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. later put it, that taxes are “the price we pay for civilization.”18
statesmen of the founding era were sufficiently ashamed of slavery that they never mentioned it by name in the document.
So ashamed they fought a revolution to protect slavery
and good even for the enslaved, who, according to Calhoun, could count on food and shelter where the free wage earners of the North could not.
How he disciplined his labor force to keep his enterprise profitable should be no one else’s business.
men of property must ever guard against the certainty of “oppression” if that government came under the control of the majority.
Among its tried-and-true tools was a poll tax that effectively kept most whites as well as nearly all blacks away at election time.
For forty years, in fact, the Byrd Organization had to win only about 10 percent of the potential electorate to hold on to power.
The rulers understood, better than others, how clever legal rules could keep the state’s voter participation among the lowest in the nation relative to population, and its taxes among the lowest in the nation relative to wealth. Above all, the rules served to hold in check the collective power of those who might want their democracy to do more.
The widely reviled system, so redolent of slavery,
It was slavery
The exasperated citizens wrecked the TCIR’s stockades and liberated the black and white convicts held in them.
Blacks certainly outnumbered whites
The lineaments of a long battle were being drawn: collective security versus individual liberty.
False framing since the minority of the opuent was seeking collective freedom as much as the newly organized working class
They converged at the Hôtel du Parc, an elegant Belle Époque mansion in the mountains near Vevey.
Who paid for it?
It took the intercession of the Chicago legal scholar Aaron Director with the University of Chicago Press
Rockafeller money
In his view, their distinguishing and shared feature was reliance on the central state; their people’s break with individual self-reliance was the germ that caused the disease.
The same central state crucial to his own worldview
“problems of equalitarianism”
Why should they pay into unemployment and retirement funds to support those who failed to save in personal accounts?
They arent paying so much as they are giving back some of what they stole from the workers they rented.
the venture needed an innocuous name that would not draw attention to its members’ “extreme views . . . no matter how relevant they might be to the real purpose of the program.”
so that of Charlottesville molded the nascent counterrevolution of the late 1950s against government action in answer to collective citizen demand.
The author keeps using this inaccurate framing when both are collectivist
usually staying for a good while thanks to the generosity of the program’s right-wing donors,
The real mover here being the donors
Theory of Collective Bargaining
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.
They ignored the overt racism and turned a blind eye to the chronic violations of black citizens’ liberty and
False. They understood that racism was essential to their project
The Richmond-based Virginia Industrialization Group (VIG), most of whose members were from the state’s largest banks, retail operations, and new industries, warned
In principle the full burden of education should be borne by the parents of children,”
Three days later, the two economists went public with their long report advocating school privatization, as Milton Friedman had earlier urged, publishing it in two full-page installments in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Such access to the press their opponents did not have
“Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s,” writes the historian Alexander Keyssar, “the legal underpinnings of the right to vote were transformed more dramatically than they had been at any earlier point in the nation’s history.”
was that the majority, without the consent of the elite white minority,
Patently false
The lack of proof,
A bedrock of classic economics
The Mont Pelerin Society taught that ideas could trickle down, as it were, to the man in the street, or at least be sold to him by what Professor Hayek called “second-hand traders in ideas.”
“Underneath its abstract analysis,” Buchanan allowed in hindsight, “the Virginia research program has always embodied a moral passion.”
Abstract always and unrealilistic
He predicted that “it should at the very least shift the southern branch of the Democratic Party further to the right”—a
