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

by Nancy MacLean

Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, two economics professors at the core of the operation funded and overseen by Charles Koch at George Mason University, Buchanan’s last home, have called the antebellum South Carolina senator “a precursor of modern public choice theory,” another name for the stream of thought pioneered by Buchanan. Both Buchanan and Calhoun, the coauthors observe, were concerned with the “failure of democracy to preserve liberty.” In particular, Buchanan and Calhoun both alleged a kind of class conflict between “tax producers and tax consumers.” Both depicted politics as a realm of exploitation and coercion, but the economy as a realm of free exchange. And both designed inventive ways to safeguard minority rights that went beyond the many protections already enshrined in the Constitution.2 Calhoun and Buchanan both devised constitutional mechanisms to protect an elite economic minority against “exploitation” by majorities of their fellow citizens, and advocated a minority veto power that, as the acolytes note, had “the same purpose and effect.”3 Both thinkers sought ways to restrict what voters could achieve together in a democracy to what the wealthiest among them would agree to.