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

by Nancy MacLean

It is a contradiction in terms to remain a self-governing intellectual and be part of a messianic movement.

libertarians have been seduced by Koch money into providing intellectual ammunition for an autocratic businessman.”

“Too many of them benefit financially from the pocket money doled out by Charles and David Koch.”

Koch had “no scruples concerning the manipulation of scholarship”;

selling those laws through the seemingly independent but centrally funded and operationally linked groups

Its state affiliates were energizing voter turnout with deceitful direct mail campaigns.

implement radical change in record time, without customary transparency or deliberative process,

partisan hardball played with astonishing new viciousness.

“we must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

“If you tell a great lie and repeat it often enough, the people will eventually come to believe it,” Joseph Goebbels,

the big lie of the Koch-sponsored radical right is that society can be split between makers and takers, justifying on the part of the makers a Manichaean struggle to disarm and defeat those who would take from them.

“parasite economy” that divides us into “the predators and the prey.”

Mitt Romney famously remarked that “47 percent” of voters were, in effect, leeches

on “productive” Americans.

Is it true that the wealthiest among us are being unfairly fleeced by government?

Might such motivated arguments belie a deeper purpose, a compulsion to control others, to limit their freedoms, in the name of ensuring one’s own liberty?

“the fiscal shortfall will come out of real wages as various cost burdens are shifted to workers” from employers and a government that does less.

Those who subscribe to the libertarian philosophy believe that the only legitimate role of government is to ensure the rule of law, guarantee social order, and provide for the national defense.

do not believe that the government should be involved in trying to promote public health,

the field of public health was, from its beginning in the early twentieth century, nothing more than “a major device used by organized interest groups to redistribute wealth to themselves.”

coordinate efforts to prevent state governments from responding to the demands of the “takers.”

Just as the property rights supremacists would rather let people die than receive health care assistance or antismoking counsel from government, so they would rather invite global ecological and social catastrophe than allow regulatory restrictions on economic liberty.

The lesson the cadre took from this was that it could not win majorities to its true goals.

because public choice showed that a government cure would be worse (from their perspective, of course) than the disease, global warming “is best left alone.”

systematic environmental “misinformation campaigns.” They spread junk pseudoscience to make the public believe that there is still doubt about the peril of climate change,

climate scientists are seeking personal monetary rewards. “All Aboard the Climate Gravy Train” reads a typical headline

ensure that the party line on environmentalism would be maintained by Republican members of Congress.

turned its back on science at a time when doing so puts the very future of civilization at risk.”

use of state government power to undercut national reforms follows a strategy of “competitive federalism”

A different kind of catastrophe is under way in the nation’s public school system,

they have convinced a sizable segment of the American population that the problems in schools today are the result of those teachers’ unions having too much power.

a new “education industry” of private schools, many of which are held to no standards or even disclosure requirements.

“private schools that have no legal obligation to teach them anything.”

extremity of our current situation is in good part due to the outsized power of corporations and wealthy donors over our politics and public policy.

“the decline in unionization is strongly associated with the rise of income shares at the top.”

“a colossal loss of faith in the efficacy of law” as citizens concluded that judges always and unfailingly took the bosses’ side.

As the push for aggressive judicial activism on behalf of economic liberty illustrates, for all the small-government rhetoric, the cadre actually wants a very strong government—but a government that acts only in a way they deem appropriate.

The promotion of states’ rights is not an atavistic racial reflex for the insiders, that is to say, but a cold-eyed way to secure minority rule.

After America elected its first black president, operatives throughout the apparatus and their allied officeholders systematically kindled the irrational conviction that Barack Obama had won through massive voter “fraud,” and that, unless a battery of new laws prevented it, such fraud would be used to “steal” more elections.

the most audacious gerrymander in U.S. history, with the purpose of ensuring systematic underrepresentation of Americans viewed as troublesome by the cause and overrepresentation of the more manageable—while

And the game was a long one, all but invisible to those it was locking out.

the GOP is an election away “from achieving an unimaginable goal in a country that sees itself as a beacon of democracy: a veto-proof supermajority operating without majority support.”

public choice theory was wrong in its explanations, and would be toxic if believed by the public or its representatives.

the political economy of midcentury Virginia enacts their dream: the uncontested sway of the wealthiest citizens; the use of right-to-work laws and other ploys to keep working people powerless; the ability to fire dissenting public employees at will, targeting educators in particular; the use of voting-rights restrictions to keep those unlikely to agree with the elite from the polls; the deployment of states’ rights to deter the federal government

from promoting equal treatment; the hostility to public education; the regressive tax system; the opposition to Social Security and Medicare; and the parsimonious response to public needs of all kinds—not

The libertarian cause, from the time it

first attracted wider support during the southern schools crisis, was never really about freedom as most people would define it. It was about the promotion of crippling division among the people so as to end any interference with what those who held vast power over others believed should be their prerogatives. Its leaders had no scruples about enlisting white supremacy to achieve capital supremacy. And today, knowing that the majority does not share their goals and would stop them if they understood the endgame, the team of paid operatives seeks to win by stealth.

liberty for the few—the liberty to concentrate vast wealth, so a...

fairness and freedom to...

“You have to realize that most of the critics of neoliberalism never read the theory.”