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

by Nancy MacLean

States’ rights, in effect, were yielding in preeminence to individual rights.

James McGill Buchanan was not a member of the Virginia elite. Nor is there any explicit evidence to suggest that for a white southerner of his day, he was uniquely racist or insensitive to the concept of equal treatment. And yet, somehow, all he saw in the Brown decision was coercion. And not just in the abstract. What the court ruling represented to him was personal. Northern liberals—the very people who looked down upon southern whites like him, he was sure—were now going to tell his people how to run their society. And to add insult to injury, he and people like him with property were no doubt going to be taxed more to pay for all the improvements that were now deemed necessary and proper for the state to make. What about his rights? Where did the federal government get the authority to engineer society to its liking and then send him and those like him the bill? Who represented their interests in all of this? I can fight this, he concluded. I want to fight this.

a testament to Buchanan’s intellectual powers and, at the same time, 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.

When the Republicans would not agree to conduct hearings to consider the president’s nominee to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant after Justice Antonin Scalia died in early 2016, even 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 But what if the goal of all these actions was to destroy our institutions, or at least change them so radically that they became shadows of their former selves?

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.

To avoid criticism that “an organization with extreme views, or a propagandizing agency” was being established on campus, he recommended that the center should not have the words “economic liberty” in its name, even if this phrase captured “the real purpose of the program.”

John Boehner, the former House Speaker, who in 2015 finally gave up and walked out, calling one of the leaders of this cause inside the Capitol, Ted Cruz, “Lucifer in the flesh.”

He went so far as to pledge to build a costly wall to stop immigrants from coming to take the jobs U.S. companies offered them because they could hire desperate, rightless workers for less.

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.

taxes are “the price we pay for civilization.”

A case in point: to suppress a biracial movement of the region’s farmers at the turn of the century without running afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment, white elites in state after southern state devised new laws that decimated black voter turnout without ever mentioning race. Those rules held down everyone but the most wealthy for generations, but they hurt racial minorities most, because they needed the federal government to preserve their rights in the face of abusive employers and state authorities. They still do. And from the start, as Calhoun’s calculations illustrate, the notion of unwarranted federal intervention has been inseparable from a desire to maintain white racial as well as class dominance. Not surprisingly, then, but with devastating consequences all around, attacks on federal power pitched to nonelites have almost always tapped white racial anxiety, whether overtly or with coded language.

No one was willing to see the new light in their children’s eyes extinguished.

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.”

With no rights in America, the guest workers could be paid “$60 or less for a 60-hour week”—with transportation and other expenses deducted from their wages. Those from the Bahamas, like Senator Byrd’s workers, “suffer the worst exploitation of all.”

One liberal scold called the senator “a steadfast opponent of most of the twentieth century,” but Byrd wore his antiprogress politics as a badge of pride. A colleague said that as chair of the all-powerful Senate Finance Committee, Byrd “measured his success as a senator not by what he passed, but what he stopped from passing.” In his view, if liberty was to be preserved, the federal government should provide for the national defense and law enforcement, and little else.

For forty years, in fact, the Byrd Organization had to win only about 10 percent of the potential electorate to hold on to power. “Of all the American states, Virginia can lay claim to the most thorough control by an oligarchy,”

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.

Nearly everyone, even as they differed on the particulars, believed that in the age of the giant corporation, America needed what the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith had recently termed “countervailing power”: organized workers and consumers. The federal government must also put its weight on the other side of the scale to ensure fair play and economic stability. Put simply, most Americans then trusted their government.

Kilpatrick’s book was a beacon of sorts for Americans like these who were sorely disappointed that the election of the first Republican president in twenty years, war hero Dwight Eisenhower, had not led to a sharper turn to the right. Unlike the centrist majority of Republican voters, they somehow expected a man who had no connection with their movement and no reason to be particularly sympathetic to its aims to pursue their agenda. To the contrary, believing that capital and labor must cooperate to ensure stability and prosperity, Eisenhower accepted the New Deal welfare state and mass unions of working people with political influence, to say nothing of Soviet power in Eastern Europe, as settled matters. He conserved, as it were. He even secured the expansion of Social Security to cover more people and asked Congress to include the “millions of low-paid workers now exempted” from the minimum wage. If all that were not enough, it was Eisenhower who earlier had appointed as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Earl Warren, who issued the Brown decision. 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.

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.”

Or are graduated taxes based on how much one has benefited from society.

In this expansion of freedom to others, those being challenged saw, rightly, curbs on their accustomed liberties and power.5 And some set out to take the shine off those who had achieved these victories—to deglorify the social movements that had won them, to recast the motivations of the government officials who rewrote the laws, and to question the value of the changes in society that these victories would produce.

It was a sad circumstance for an enterprise founded “to preserve liberty” to be tarred with the “closed society” label then used for totalitarian states. And it would not be the last time it happened.

What Buchanan was doing was leveraging the prestige of economic “science” to reject what several generations of scholarship in the social sciences, humanities, and law had exposed: that the late-nineteenth-century notion of a pure market was a fiction. That fiction helped emerging corporate elites to shape law and governance to their advantage while devastating the societies over which they held sway by virtue of their wealth and the control over others it could purchase.

They actually tried to help government deliver better results, which could only prolong the disease.

“How discrediting it is for us to request [corporate] welfare for ourselves,” Charles Koch chided his fellow businessmen in 1978, “while attacking it for the poor.” No wonder the enemies of free enterprise called company attacks on big government hypocritical. “We must practice what we preach,” he intoned, and cease seeking special privileges and subsidies.

If Jim Buchanan had qualms about helping to design a constitution for a dictatorship or about the process by which the final product was ratified, matters widely reported in the press, he did not commit them to print. Instead, he wrote Sergio de Castro with thanks for “the fine lunch you held in my honor” and shared how he “enjoyed the whole of my visit to Chile.” Mrs. Buchanan, who accompanied him, appreciated “the nice gifts, the beautiful flowers, the Chilean jewelry, [and] the wine.”

Nor did Buchanan ever publicly criticize the final constitution as promulgated by the junta. On the contrary, he continued to promote constitutional revolution, thereafter more single-mindedly, and to seek out support from wealthy funders who might help effect it.

the economic model urged by the society’s thinkers and implemented by their local colleagues made it especially disastrous. Chile’s now unregulated banks engaged in reckless lending that threatened to sink the entire economy when the reckoning arrived.37 The only thing that averted a total collapse was Pinochet’s firing of the Mont Pelerin Society zealots, in particular Sergio de Castro, Buchanan’s leading host, whose proposed solution to the free fall included cutting the minimum wage and other deflationary measures that seemed too risky even to a dictatorship.

Progressives would likely fall for a proposal to make the wealthiest pay more, not realizing the damage that could do to Social Security’s support among group two. And if the message was repeated enough, such that the wealthy began to believe that others are not paying their fair share, they in turn would also become less opposed to altering the program.

The third group would consist of younger workers. They needed to be constantly reminded that their payroll deductions were providing “a tremendous welfare subsidy” to the aged.

Finally, those who would just miss the cutoff for the old system should be targeted for short-term changes. As Buchanan put it, “those who seek to undermine the support of the system (over the longer term) would do well to propose increases in the retirement age and increases in payroll taxes,” so as to irritate recipients at all income levels, but particularly those who are just on the wrong side of the cutoff and now would have to pay more and work longer.

“Here was Jim Buchanan, a country boy from Middle Tennessee, educated in rural public schools and a local public teachers college,

The man who owes his success to public schools wants to eliminate them.

Paul Ryan, has explained that such public provision for popular needs not only violates the liberty of the taxpayers whose earnings are transferred to others, but also violates the recipients’ spiritual need to earn their own sustenance. He told one audience that the nation’s school lunch program left poor children with “a full stomach—and an empty soul.”