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

by Nancy MacLean

Those who are leading today’s push to upend the political system are heirs to a set of ideas that goes back almost two centuries: the pushback of imperious property against democracy. Its earliest coherent expression in America came in the late 1820s and ’30s, from South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, a strategist of ruling-class power so shrewd that the acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed him “the Marx of the master class.”1 Hofstadter’s label gestured, with his signature sense of irony, to the revolutionary nature of Calhoun’s strategy for how the wealthiest one percent (actually, far fewer) of his day could wield outsize power in a constitutional republic. A former vice president and, at the time he devised his plan, a U.S. senator, Calhoun was America’s first tactician of tax revolt, and arguably the nation’s most influential extremist.