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

by Nancy MacLean

To those who scorned the idea of a broad and inclusive electorate, it was cause for mourning.

This fund-raising appeal was not just a deviation from academic norms and from the more scholarly fund-raising efforts Buchanan had spearheaded his entire academic career; it may have broken the law. The center had been chartered as a nonprofit entity, a 501(c)(3), which made it a tax-deductible charity for IRS purposes—a status that requires abstention from partisan activity. And someone, who chose not to reveal his or her identity, took the time to send Buchanan, as well as the chair of the economics department at GMU and the dean of the college, copies of the letter Gramm had sent out, pointing out that her solicitation “involves clear violations” of tax law. Surely, he or she said, something had to be done about “the blatant political activities of the JBC.”35

By self-description autistic and an “upper-middle-class white male who all his life felt like he belonged to the dominant group,” Cowen was not inclined to sentimentality or solidarity.

The new staff had shown terrible judgment in advertising the “Chief of Staff Weekend Retreats” at which figures such as sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and “experts” from such think tanks as Cato and Reason addressed “senior congressional staff” on “a variety of important policy issues, while maintaining relevance to the legislative calendar.”

When he died in 2013, neither Koch nor Fink, nor Cowen nor Meese, bothered to attend his memorial service.47 Why should they? His days of his usefulness to them had passed.

elect [Bill] Clinton by a large majority, how can such a citizenry be expected to understand either the justice or efficiency of markets and the necessity of constitutional constraints on governance?”

For example, the economist prophesies lower-income parts of America “recreating a Mexico-like or Brazil-like environment” complete with favelas like those in Rio de Janeiro. The “quality of water” might not be what U.S. citizens are used to, but “partial shantytowns” would satisfy the need for cheaper housing as “wage polarization” grows and government shrinks. “Some version of Texas—and then some—is the future for a lot of us,” the economist advises. “Get ready.”17

She “found that public choice theory explained everything,” including that “health officials’ interest in testing small children’s blood for lead made sense when one considered that finding poisoned children validated their jobs.”22

The Flint scandal broke because of a mother who would not give in. When she appealed to the appointed city manager and Republican governor in late 2014 because her daughter’s hair was falling out, her older son was suffering abdominal pain, and her twins were developing untreatable rashes, they brushed aside her concerns. It was not until she found scientific experts from another state who were willing to help that most Americans learned of the worst public health disaster in state history.

By 2009, more than half of the deindustrializing and economically troubled state’s black voters were being governed by such appointed emergency managers, among them the residents of Detroit, Benton Harbor, and Flint. “It’s dictatorship, plain and simple,” one city commissioner said of the new system. To save money, Flint’s appointed city manager switched the source of the city water supply to the polluted Flint River. The Mackinac Center lobbyists, by the way, made sure that the law incorporated provisions to protect the appointed managers from lawsuits. Given the scale of the damage they had every reason to know they would inflict, that was a wise protection of potential future foot soldiers for the cause.25

Is it any surprise, then, that those who would put public sanitation and clean water at risk are now the leading proponents of climate change denial? Or that before embarking on this mission, Buchanan’s students and colleagues were producing economic analyses funded by the tobacco industry to discredit the “paternalists” who would deny cigarette companies, smokers, and those in their immediate surroundings their “voluntary choice” in a misguided “majoritarian” quest, pushed by “rent-seeking interest groups” whose “appeal to the ‘public’s health’ is essentially just political rhetoric designed to camouflage the coercion”? Or that these economists would insinuate that government-funded researchers would never find a cure for cancer because that “would put many cancer bureaucrats out of work”?26

because public choice showed that a government cure would be worse (from their perspective, of course) than the disease, global warming “is best left alone.”28 That advice was rejected by serious scientists and concerned citizens, so the Cato Institute and the Independent Institute joined a circle of less-known Koch-funded libertarian think tanks driving what two science scholars describe as systematic environmental “misinformation campaigns.” They spread junk pseudoscience to make the public believe that there is still doubt about the peril of climate change, a tactic they learned from the tobacco companies that for years sowed doubt about science to keep the public from connecting smoking and illness.

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.

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

“Who will care for America’s children and the elderly,” she asks, now that two-thirds of mothers with children under six are in the workforce, yet “market fundamentalism—the irrational belief that markets solve all problems—has succeeded in dismantling so many federal regulations, services and protections?”53 But the cause would argue that it has answered that question over and over again: You will. And if you can’t, you should have thought of that before you had kids or before you grew old without adequate savings.

Changes under way in the media offered still more promise for the cause. 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

Calling these inbuilt “majority constraining” obstacles “veto players,” the two scholars found a striking correlation: the nations with the fewest veto players have the least inequality, and those with the most veto players have the greatest inequality. 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.

An omen: after years of criticizing “judicial activism” by the Supreme Court for greater equity, Koch grantees are now making, as one Cato publication puts it, the Case for an Activist Judiciary to secure economic liberty.78

To advance their constitutional revolution, the donor network has pumped hitherto unheard-of sums into state judicial races.

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 measures would most reduce the political influence of low-income voters and young people, who had been inclining leftward.

Daley points out that the GOP is an election away “from achieving an unimaginable goal in a country that sees itself as a beacon of democracy: a veto-proof supermajority operating without majority support.”92

Koch network had “quietly built a secretive operation that conducts political surveillance and intelligence gathering on its liberal opponents, viewing it as a key strategic tool in its efforts to reshape American public life.”94 A case in point: when Jane Mayer began to expose the operations of the Koch brothers and their network, they dispatched private investigators in a fruitless quest to find dirt with which to discredit her and tried to convince her employer to fire her.