This is one of the most important books I've read in a decade. If you are interested in what the plan of the Republicans is for America, and how they are using tricks and deception to achieve it, you need to read this book.
Extremely well written by a reputable historian who works at an actual University (Duke), this amazing book shows how libertarians, funded largely by Charles and David Koch, set in place a plan to greatly reduce democracy in America in order to allow the wealthy to run the country the way they want. Almost all the conservative think tanks: CATO institute, Heartland Institute, Heritage Foundation, etc., etc. are Koch funded and coordinated. The goal of all these libertarian foundations is to stop democratic processes from allowing ordinary people to have a say in schools, the environment, workers rights, etc. Other goals include destroying social security, privatizing the prisons, privatizing the schools, and removing most other government institutions that help ordinary Americans, including important parts of the US Constitution.
Prof. Nancy Maclean stumbled accidentally on the trove of information about these plans while researching in the offices of the recently deceased Noble Prize winning economist, James Buchanen. Buchanen wrote much of the plan described above and even applied it to Pinochet's Chilean government (destroying the Chilean constitution and economy in the process). Charles Koch had been working for decades along similar lines, but came up short because the bulk of Americans actually want social security, anti-pollution laws, good public schools, and the ability to influence elections through voting. Around the 1990's, Charles Koch discovered Buchanen's ideas. He then switched the millions of dollars that were funding his hundreds of conservative think tanks and institutions to the stealth method of fooling the American people the way Buchanen suggested.
This implementation has been amazingly successful and is easily seen every day now. For example the Buchanen/Koch technique to destroy social security (a system they think is at the root of the evil they say they are trying to stop), is to make small changes to the system that will eventually cause it fail. Some steps the plan calls for: Divide people into groups and get them to fight with each other, for example 1. Tell current Social Security recipients they will keep their pensions, so they won't resist the changes. 2. Tell younger people that the system won't be there when they need it and so they are unfairly subsidizing the old people, 3. Tell the financial industry and wealthy people that all the money now going into social security will be theirs once changes to privatize it are made, and 4. Make annoying changes around the edges to make people unhappy with the current system (e.g. change retirement age, lower pension amounts, etc.)
The Koch funded libertarian groups also have carefully thought out plans to destroy the public schools, all environmental and pollution regulation (including any action on climate change).
The big question, of course, is why would anyone want to do this to America. Maclean traces the historical reasons back to the slave-owning south, where libertarians such as John Calhoun defined "freedom" as the freedom to own slaves and treat them in any way they wanted. They worried that democracy would take away their "freedom" and so conceived of ways to reduce and prevent democracy. Modern libertarians such as Buchanen, Milton Friedman, etc. use the same definition of freedom: freedom to exploit others in any way they want. And they want to prevent democracy from stopping them for the same reasons. As detailed in this book, they have also been using the same arguments and methods as were used in the pre-civil war South. Recently, however, they have realized that stealth is required, since most Americans oppose their goals.
Finally, a comment on the huge number of negative reviews of MacLean's book on Amazon and elsewhere. The Koch brothers organization is very well organized and extremely well funded, so one expects an all out attack on a book that exposes so much of their stealth program. Most of the attacks just misstate MacLean's points, or make stuff up, and so are typical of the Fox News crowd and easily ignored. But some criticisms seem quite academic and for example say she misquoted sources on purpose to arrive at her conclusions (e.g. about how libertarians mean something different than we do by "freedom": e.g. Cowan says "The freest countries have not generally been democratic.") Careful checking shows that these criticisms also are misstating MacLean intentions, probably in order to stop you from reading the book. For more in depth discussion see historian Andrew Seal's comments on these criticisms.
In summary, we are well on the way to the dystopian America the Koch family wants to create. Better read this book quick and figure out how to stop them before it is too late.
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Speaking from the Heartland of the Buchanan Doctrine
Nancy Maclean, in Democracy in Chains, has kept strictly to her usual rigorous methods of research found in all of her books. I know this, first because I lived, studied and personally experienced the conditions and events she describes about James Buchanan and his time and activity in Virginia. I finished college in Virginia at the time of his ascendency and was keenly aware of how the “state’s rights” dogma he deployed was being used to disguise the white supremacy motive in the resistence to school desegregation. While at the time I did not know specifically of Buchanan, I did, however, know well about how some at the University of Virginia were providing cover for the racist ideology inherent in Massive Resistance to court-ordered desegregation. And later as a professor in Virginia, I began to see the rise of powerful right wing think-tanks, academic institutes and other organizations pushing extremist free market evangelism, only to learn that this fervor was being fed with Buchanan’s ideology and was largely funded by Charles Koch and the billionaire lobby. But now with the publication of Democracy in Chains, we finally have a picture of this entire pathogenic chain in a single volume.But being a lifelong Virginian in the Buchanan era is not the sole measure for my having confidence in her book. I have had another personal way to know of the inner workings of her scholarship. In the early days of her research for Democracy in Chains, she came to see me in a quest for details about the Prince Edward County, Virginia, public school segregation issue, one of the four Brown vs Board cases decided by the US Supreme Court in 1954. The Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors had closed all the public schools from 1959 to 1964. The whites were provided private segregated schools, at first paid for largely by state tuition grants and donations from white segregationist from all across the country. The blacks were left without any schools. While on one of her return visits to see me, she read several of my autobiographical “vignettes,” and not only persuaded me to write a memoir but then spent over seven years nursing me along to get it done. The result was "Scalawag: A White Southerner's Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism" (UVA Press, 2014). Those years working with her revealed up close her uncompromising standard for getting both the facts and the interpretations right. And she demanded no less from me.But despite MacLean’s wide reputation for meticulousness as a scholar, there appears to be an organized campaign attempting to smear and discredit her work in order to shore up Buchanan’s notions of unfettered freedom for property and wealth and their offspring - the extremist political agenda of the Koch brothers and their allies. Some of these ideologues have admitted that they have not even read her book. So I ask anyone who is tempted to abide these Wardens of Wealth - to read her book, as I have, inspect the notes and the key bibliographic sources, as I have, and then decide who to believe: Nancy Maclean or that faction of billionaires with their Draconian stealth plan aimed at the future erosion of our democracy?Scalawag Eddie
Top reviews from other countries
Enrique
A stunning exposé of how the radical right is undermining America’s democracy
Reviewed in Canada on April 1, 2020
huw
From the origins of neoloberalism to the Koch brothers.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 22, 2017Amazon Customer
Great and essential reading
Reviewed in Australia on April 18, 2021
