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July 10, 2019 - May 17, 2021
States’ rights, in effect, were yielding in preeminence to individual 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?
without whom
His actions gave the movement "traction."
turning those ideas into his personal operational strategy to, as the team saw it, save capitalism from democracy—permanently. These papers revealed something else as well: how and why stealth became so intrinsic to this movement.
Translation: 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.
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,
his analysis of how the rules of government might be altered so officials could not act on the will of the majority became “constitutional economics.”
Buchanan’s penetrating analyses of how incentives guide government action would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986.
legislators understood what at first he did not: the unpopularity of his political-economic vision.
end Social Security as we know it, to disallow the Civil Rights Act under the combined rubric of property rights and states’ rights, to create a flat tax system, and to undercut public education,
The combined effort to implement can always be identified as tyranny.
entrepreneurial genius
Read "tyrant."
seeming inability of government officials to say no when deficits were allowed
no longer have the ability to respond to those who used their numbers to get government to do their bidding.
shackles were put in place, they had to be binding and permanent.
“constitutional revolution.”
majority rule, under modern conditions, had created such systemic corruption, at such risk to capitalism,
Taxation is corruption.
one who understood how government became so powerful in the first place and how to take it down in order to free up capitalism—the
the one who grasped the need for stealth because only piecemeal, yet mutually reinforcing, assaults on the system would survive
men like James Buchanan and Charles Koch do not share power,
the playbook on revolutionary organization had been written by Vladimir Lenin,
just as Lenin had done, to build a movement that refused compromise
The cause also needed a popular base to succeed,
opposition to public schooling and calls for reliance on family provision or charity in place of government assistance.
most critical to success, was to wrest control over the machinery of the Republican Party, beginning in the late 1990s and with sharply escalating determination after 2008.
while these radicals of the right operate within the Republican Party and use that party as a delivery vehicle, make no mistake about it: the cadre’s loyalty is not to the Grand Old Party or its traditions or standard-bearers. Their loyalty is to their revolutionary cause.
The new men in the wings respect only compliance; if they fail to get it, they respond with swift vengeance.
“cannibals” who seek “the end of governing as we know it.”
liberty. But by that they mean the insulation of private property rights from the reach of government—and
Each one claimed that Social Security and Medicare were in mortal crisis
for a modern capitalist democracy to flourish, all must have a share in the economy’s benefits and in its governance.
rival challenges of fascism and Communism in the face of capitalism’s most cataclysmic collapse.
It teaches that all such talk of the common good has been a smoke screen
for “takers” to exploit “makers,” in the language now current, using political coalitions to “vote themselves a living” instead of earning it by the sweat of their brows.
Label 1.
government failed because of bad faith: because activists, voters, and officials alike used talk of the public interest to mask the pursuit of their own personal self-interest at others’ expense.
Label 2. These two labels have been successfully shifted from the perpetrators to their victims.
a fifth-column assault on American democratic governance?
another column of persons hiding within the city who would join the invaders
stealth supporters of an enemy who assist by engaging in propaganda and
even sabotage to prepare the way for its conquest.
distinctive in a few key dimensions about this quest to ensure the
supremacy of capital. For a movement that knows it can never win majority support is not a classic social movement.
This cause is different. Pushed by relatively small numbers of radical-right
billionaires and millionaires who have become profoundly hostile to America’s modern system of government, an apparatus decades in the making, funded by those same billionaires and millionaires, has been working to undermine the normal governance of our democracy.
another characteristic associated with a fifth column: the tactic of overwhelming the normal political process with schemes to disrupt its functioning.
This cause defines the “you” its members do not want to be controlled by as the majority of the American people.
what this cause really seeks is a return to oligarchy,
Compassion, patience, and humor all seemed as foreign to him as the notion that the people he owned had intellects and dreams of their own.
He wanted one class—his own class of plantation owners—to overpower the others, despite its obvious numerical minority.
Their property rights should trump all else.
denying the legitimacy of government power to act for the common good while using government power to suppress others—appears
