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

by Nancy MacLean

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.