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

by Nancy MacLean

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From the perspective of the far right, perhaps most galling was Eisenhower’s characterization of his administration and its approach to problem solving as “modern Republicanism”—with the not-so-subtle implication that those who upheld pre–Great Depression ideas of economic liberty at any cost were obsolete relics.26

The “line of bayonets in Little Rock,” intoned Buckley, was what had always been hidden under “the maternal skirts” of “Mother Welfare State.” What civil rights, labor unions, and social insurance came down to in the end, Buckley warned, was the “army of occupation . . . enforcing unconditional surrender.”

Whataboutism at its finest

Over time, the center’s faculty and students began to see themselves as heroic figures

fighting the good fight, a notion they could maintain and embellish because there were so few on campus who might raise difficult questions about whose liberty was being saved, and at what cost to others.

A political bubble

For twenty years, Dean Ivey Lewis held sway over faculty hiring and the curriculum, without fail rejecting “applicants who might critically examine southern traditions, advocate environmental interventions to social problems, or otherwise disconcert the flourishing community

of eugenicists he had installed at the university.”

unlimited privatization of education.

As believers in individual liberty, they said, they approved of neither “involuntary (or coercive) segregation” nor “involuntary integration.”

Tax-funded private schools were...

If parents had to bear the full cost of educating their children, he believed they would have “the appropriate number of children.”27

“No one in a democratic society has a right to have his private prejudices financed at public expense.”

Most understood that a fire sale of tax-funded public schools to private school operators would be political suicide. They wanted to stop integration, not be ejected from office.37

Faced with majority opinion as expressed in votes, politicians could not be counted on to stand by their stated commitments.

That September, they padlocked every public school and opened new private schools for the white children while leaving some eighteen hundred black children with no formal education whatsoever. “It’s the nation’s first county,” reported the Wall Street Journal, “to go completely out of the public school business.” Local black youth remained schoolless from 1959 to 1964, when a federal court intervened to stop the abuse.

what was happening in the South until that time illustrated the probability of absolute power to corrupt absolutely.

Majority rule ought not to be treated as a sacred cow. It was merely one decision-making rule among many possibilities, and rarely ideal.

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 authors made it clear that they preferred the constitutional rules of 1900 rather than 1960—a kind of dog whistle to those who would catch the reference. It

“The facts of

history” showed that once the floodgates opened to a more inclusive democracy, it always led to “a notable expansion in the range and extent of collective activity” in pursuit of what the authors deemed “differential or discriminatory legislation.” By this they meant graduated income taxes that asked more of the wealthy and corporations; protective tariffs for, or investments in, manufacturing; and laws that allowed workers to organize unions.

Buchanan’s project was intellectual—creating a new field of scholarship—but in the end, it was not simply ivory tower acclaim that he was after. It was real-world impact.

Public Choice Society.

“For those of us who revere

the memory of Abraham Lincoln,” a New Jersey woman on the Republican National Committee complained, “this is a difficult pill to swallow.”5

“The Southeast will never vote for anyone who advocates turning over the TVA to the . . . monopolists.”6

Goldwater next took on the most popular New Deal program—Social Security—and in a state with one of the nation’s largest ratios of retired voters. On the hustings in New Hampshire, he called for the program to be made “voluntary,” knowing that this would cripple—and in time end—the system, because, like Obamacare in the new century, Social Security relies upon a vast pool of contributors to spread risk and ensure adequate provisioning. In an attempt to deal with the backlash, his advisers insisted that he explain that he meant only to see Social Security “strengthened” and made “sound,” but most voters knew he had said what he meant originally. For many, the proposed alternative—investing

their money in the stock market—raised painful memories of the crash of ’29, when families lost their life savings. For others, investing elsewhere was not an option, because they had never earned enough money to save fo...

Medicare, he then argued, was nothing but “socialized medicine.”

Today Goldwater is best remembered for one line in his acceptance speech, the most uncompromising in major-party history, until recently. Critics of “our cause,” he suggested, could leave the GOP and take their “fuzzy” Republicanism with them. “I would remind you,” the nominee announced in his climax, “that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!”

When Election Day came, the cause’s standard-bearer suffered the worst defeat of any major-party presidential candidate in a century and a half. Goldwater won the Electoral College votes of only six states: his home state and five states of the Deep South that practiced acute voter suppression, among them Mississippi, where he garnered 87 percent of the almost entirely white vote.

White southerners who opposed racial equality and economic justice knew from their own region’s history that the only way they could protect their desired way of life was to keep federal power at bay, so that majoritarian democracy could not reach into the region.

As he made the case for libertarian economics, he assumed that the cause would eventually triumph by conversion—voter by voter, as long as it took.

It did not help his mood that Goldwater pulled down so many other GOP candidates that Lyndon Johnson, one of the most skilled political tacticians ever to sit in the Oval Office, was able to gloat that the incoming Congress “could be better, but not [on] this side of heaven.”

In June 1963, the dean of the faculty alerted the president to “a condition in the Department of Economics that has worried me for quite a while. Doctrinalism tends to breed authoritarianism,” he warned. “And absolute doctrinalism breeds absolute authoritarianism absolutely.”

the “‘Virginia School,’ an outlook described by its friends as ‘Neo-Liberalism’ and its critics as ‘Nineteenth-Century Ultra-Conservatism.’”

the exclusively private funding of the autonomous center suggested external influence on the scholars’ mission, a reference to right-wing corporate donors funding an academic program to advance their political agenda.

“what economists should do.” They should cease focusing on problems of resource distribution—what the field called “allocation problems”—because the very idea that inequality was a bad thing led to looking for remedies, which in turn led the discipline toward an applied “mathematics of social engineering.”

One had only to

read Charles Dickens to grasp the reality of unregulated capitalism; the unchecked economic power of some enabled the domination of others.

No one who claimed the mantle of science should advocate “doing nothing while people starve.”41

The scholars were conducting, in effect, thought experiments, or hypothetical scenarios with no true research—no facts—to support them, while the very terms of their analysis denied such motives as compassion, fairness, solidarity, generosity, justice, and sustainability.42

murmured that, in effect, “there was nobody in the Department [of Economics] to the left of the John Birch Society.”46