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

by Nancy MacLean

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.

the usually reticent Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas spoke out. “At some point,” he told the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, “we are going to have to recognize that we are destroying our institutions.”6

the Kochs and other rich right-wing donors were providing vast quantities of “dark money” (political spending that, by law, had become untraceable) to groups and candidates whose missions, if successful, would hobble unions, limit voting, deregulate corporations, shift taxes to the less well-off, and even deny climate change.8

save capitalism from democracy—permanently.

the American people would not support their plans, so to win they had to work behind the scenes, using a covert strategy instead of open declaration of what they really wanted.13

To Buchanan, what others described as taxation to advance social justice or the common good was nothing more than a modern version of mob attempts to take by force what the takers had no moral right to: the fruits of another person’s efforts. In his mind, to protect wealth was to protect the individual against a form of legally sanctioned gangsterism.

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.

Ordinary electoral politics would never get Koch what he wanted.

The focus must shift from who rules to changing the rules.

RINOS—Republicans in name only.

We don’t understand that the old Republican Party, the one my own father voted for during most of his life, exists no more.

In a nutshell, they aim to hollow out democratic resistance. And by its own lights, the cause is nearing success.

Calhoun saw “that some people in the community must be net payers of tax funds, while others are net recipients.” (In today’s parlance, makers and takers.)

By his theory, the net gainers of tax monies were “the ‘ruling class’ of the exploiters”; the net losers of tax funds were “the ‘ruled’ or the exploited.” In other words, Calhoun and Rothbard inverted how most people would construe who had power over whom. A man whose wealth came from slavery was a victim of government tax collectors, and poorer voters were the exploiters to watch out for.

President Andrew Jackson, the leader of Calhoun’s political party, suggested that the man be hung for treason.

He wanted one class—his own class of plantation owners—to overpower the others, despite its obvious numerical minority.9

They, like Calhoun, believe that Madison’s Constitution was flawed by its failure to fully hamstring the people’s ability to act “collectively.”

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.

Madison

and his fellow framers built numerous protections of minority rights and property rights into the document, among them the Electoral College and the Senate, with their systems of representation that favored less populous states.

Calhoun

railed, all “sovereignty” was vested “in the people of the several states” that consented to the federal Union—“not a particle resides . . . in the American people collectively.”28

Propertied southerners took the lead in devising schemes to subdue democracy because of their determination to safeguard the distinctive race-based, hyperexploitative regional political economy that Calhoun and his fellow planters did so much to shape, one based first on chattel slavery and later on disenfranchised low-wage labor, racial segregation, and a starved public sector.

white elites in state after southern state devised new laws that decimated black voter turnout without ever mentioning race.

attacks on federal power pitched to nonelites have almost always tapped white racial anxiety, whether overtly or with coded language.

Like many other southern states, Virginia required voters to pay a tax to participate in the political process,

The lawsuit astounded the white elite. Its members could not believe that “their” Negroes would show such ingratitude.

Lost to all but the scholarly literature is the fact that most of Virginia’s white citizens were inclined to accept it.

But the state’s governing elite, which was led by the Byrd Organization and based in the former plantation, black-majority communities of the state’s Southside, like Prince Edward County, viewed the Supreme Court decision as but the latest and most shocking in a string of federal incursions on their right to rule,

“I am an aristocrat. I love liberty; I hate equality.”

The paper’s owners, as one contemporary noted, took as a given that society separated itself into “those who ride and those who are the donkeys to be ridden.”25

Calhoun insisted that the authority for the U.S. Constitution came not from the American people collectively but from the states that consented to the Union.

Its aim was to insulate government from citizen pressure for public spending or other reform.

In his view, if liberty was to be preserved, the federal government should provide for the national defense and law enforcement, and little else.37

Because the Byrd Organization favored policies that were against the majority’s interests, it was preoccupied with manipulating the rules for voting and representation.

Key went on to quip that, compared with Virginia, “Mississippi is a hotbed of democracy.”39

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.

But by 1946, when a twenty-seven-year-old Buchanan enrolled, the school’s president boasted to donors of having “the most conservative economics department in the world.”19

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.

For the newly minted libertarian economist, far-reaching individual marketplace freedom was the fairest and surest route to prosperity.

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.

How dare federal officials tell them how to manage their employees? Why should they pay into unemployment and retirement funds to support those who failed to save in personal accounts? Such matters should not be the business of the federal government. They were for men of property to decide as they saw fit.7

In Byrd’s view, government must defer entirely to business owners to run the economy while balancing its own budgets like a prudent household.

no

public investments that would incur debt, no matter how great the pro...

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

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.

By his lights, the Wagner Act, the Social Security Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act were as unlawful as