You know a book is essential reading when an army of Kochbots is deployed -and they've come out in force against Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains.
MacLean is a historian at Duke, focusing on American social movements and public policy. Her previous book was about the Klan. After that she wanted to research Virginia’s decision to fund all-white private schools in the aftermath of Brown vs. Board of Education. Her interest was aroused by a University of Virginia economist who continued his defense of segregation after the case was settled: James M. Buchanan. Buchanan had enjoyed a long and prestigious run in conservative circles. From his post at University of Virginia in the 50’s, he attracted the attention of the state’s governing powers. Advocating limited government and justifying state's rights, he began his life’s work as an advocate of unfettered capitalism.
Maclean followed the trail of Buchanan to his archives at George Mason University, where he ultimately wound up as the guiding light of the economics department. He died in 1993, a few months prior to her visit, and the department had been moved to a lavish Koch-endowed center elsewhere on campus. But his unsorted archives were still in his old offices.
What she found there is the origin story of the Republican playbook.
It was MacLean’s description of Buchanan’s ideas that addressed my question about this Republican Congress- namely, how do you make sense of its priorities?
- Voter ID? Disenfranchising people whenever possible?
- Voting xxx times to repeal the ACA? Repeal / Replace, but with one part left out?
- Wasting entire congressional terms investigating designated boogiemen? (HRC, Planned Parenthood, etc)
- Stonewalling a Supreme Court nominee?
- Shutting down government??
Think how many ways you've heard the right slam the mere idea of government: it's the problem, not the solution. It should be small enough to drown in a bathtub. IT SHOULD BE PRIVATIZED. In fact, in its present form, it probably should not even exist.
The missing answer comes from the Confederate States and their justification for resisting the powers of a central government. MacLean finds the basis of Buchanan's thinking in the ideas on John C. Calhoun, the premier legal thinker of the 19th century south. In his reasoning, plantation owners found justification for maintaining their own fiefdoms, their own economies, their own slave workforce. They were not interested in joining northern industrial states to build roads, regulate labor, or enact tariffs. And they were especially not interested in paying taxes. Furthermore, Calhoun warned, a government based on the naked principle that the majority ought to govern was sure to filch other men’s property and violate their “liberty”. The greedy impulses of the majority had to be constrained- and politicians had to be restrained from catering to them, which they would do, predictably, to get elected.
Buchanan was the economist who repurposed Calhoun's ideas for the twentieth century. His ideas first got traction at University of Virginia Charlottesville in the 50's and 60's, as Virginia resisted school integration. In fact, "ground zero for the respectable defense of Jim Crow was Virginia”, and its intellectual center was UVa. (see Sam Tanenhaus’ article, ‘The Architect of the Radical Right’, in the Atlantic 7/17)
I had not realized the extent to which southern states were willing to go to maintain their way of life. The girls in the photo called a strike in 1951 to protest the miserable conditions at their high school. Later, that same county padlocked its schools for 5 years- between 1959 and 1964- rather than integrate them. (White children were provided with private school vouchers.)
In Buchanan's thinking, states and counties should be able to maintain “freedom of association”, and education could continue “separate but equal”. He argued that the crux of the desegregation problem was that “state run” schools had become a “monopoly,” which could be broken by privatization. If authorities sold off school buildings and equipment, and limited their own involvement in education to setting minimum standards, then all different kinds of schools might blossom. Effective as Buchanan's arguments were in prolonging school segregation, race was not really his issue. Reviving anti-government ideas was the long game for him as an economist. Calling his theories 'public choice', his career was a protracted war against the idea of a beneficent government.
To Buchanan, what others described as taxation to advance social justice or the common good was nothing more than a modern version of mob attempts to take by force what the takers had no moral right to: the fruits of another person’s efforts. In his mind, to protect wealth was to protect the individual against a form of legally sanctioned gangsterism.
-Democracy in Chains
In 1962 Buchanan published his book The Calculus of Consent. By then, he had established the Thomas Jefferson Center at UVa and staffed it with his disciples. Frequently advising secrecy- the desegregation battle had taught him a few things about waging open war on public opinion- he worked to educate a new generation of conservative thinkers whose ideas would ferment until the political climate was right. The seventies and eighties were not a particularly auspicious time for the right. Goldwater lost, Nixon signed off on programs like the EPA, and LBJ's Great Society created even more social progams. And although David Stockman, Reagan's budget director, planned to implement Buchanan’s reforms, he concluded that it would mean declaring war on “Social Security recipients, veterans, farmers, educators, state and local officials, the housing industry.” Republicans weren't ready for this quite yet.
According to MacLean, the failure of the Reagan Revolution marked a definitive split in the GOP. Stockman thought the public could understand that taxes were necessary to provide the programs they wanted. But advisers like Buchanan disagreed, counseling stealth tactics. Reagan proceeded to lower taxes while greatly increasing spending, trebling the budget deficit. This marks the start of the alternate reality we're living in today: cutting taxes is always the top priority, while programs and benefits dear to the taxpayer are magically supposed to continue.
In the eighties, Buchanan moved closer to the political action, at Geoge Mason University outside Washington, DC. The Wall Street Journal soon labeled George Mason “the Pentagon of conservative academia.” Its law and and economics departments had already attracted the valuable attention of Charles Koch. Along with his think tanks- the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth, etc. etc. he started pouring money into George Mason. The faculty underwent a complete purge to make room for 'like-minded' professors.
The economics department set to work on its pilot project: eliminating Social Security. This represents the Libertarian grail: it severs the public's most vital connection to government, their expectation of a pension, and in the process, frees up vast monies for private investment, assuring support from the financial sector. Admitting that the program was too popular to eliminate outright, they devised a strategy to make it less popular: get the public to view it as insolvent, then work to privatize it. This is the genesis of all those ads with concerned-looking couples worried that Social Security won't be there for them when they need it. Buchanan himself was responsible for the 'Ponzi Scheme' tag. The success of their efforts can be seen in how privatization has moved to the center of public policy- as the welfare state has moved to the fringes.
In the 90’s the Reagan Revolution got another chance. The Contract with America was written by Texan Dick Armey, another economics professor, who found the University of North Texas too liberal and ran for Congress instead. Teaming up with Newt Gingrich just before the 1994 midterms, they had an explosive success, signing up every Republican running for Congress that year and most of the incumbents as well. The plan came apart over their plans for a ‘balanced budget’ that included drastic cuts, and their willingness to go nuclear for it. Two government shutdowns decimated their public support. Then Bill Clinton skillfully co-opted their issues while resisting their extremes.
After this failure, a new tactical plan emerged. Charles Koch turned to James Buchanan as the best strategist to turn his vision of libertarian society into a reality. In 1997 he poured $10 million into Buchanan’s center at George Mason. The strategy: they planned now to achieve their goal in small, incremental steps that polled well with the American public, and so could be passed- but when taken together would connect until their target was unobtrusively reached. By then, encoded in legislation, it would be too late to reneg. If the steps were too radical to pass public muster, they would be cloaked in language that seemed palatable and necessary. So they would refer to saving Social Security and reforming Medicare, when the real goal was to destroy them.
While reading this book, I frequently wished for a glossary of Koch terms:
- Reform = do away with
- Replace = do away with
- Socialism = any program that benefits the general public
- Freedom = doing business with no annoying government constraints
- Choice = freedom to select the best school/health plan/lobbyist money can buy
Koch’s proxy army was in position for the 2012 election. Leveraging Tea Party groups as well as direct mail, they threatened primary challenges to any Republican who dared to dissent from their plans. Journalists reported on many of their maneuvers, without tracing the source to the Virginia institutions that trained most of the Koch operatives. “Surely, this was just partisan hardball, played with astonishing new viciousness.” (-Democracy in Chains)
The current strategy is working, and on so many levels that it’s difficult to grasp.
The Koch influence can be seen on education, as we move toward a for-profit system at every level. Taking aim at teachers’ unions, budgets are slashed and vouchers endorsed, sending children to private schools that as one North Carolina legislator noted, ‘have no obligation to teach them anything.’ They have elaborated plans for the private prison industry (favor), public health (opposed), and of course on climate change (nonexistent). Big donors have started to invest heavily in local judicial races, where they can head off court challenges early. Arbitration, where corporations call the shots, has become the norm. Justice Roberts has signaled his willingness to reconsider the reach of the Commerce Clause, which has long given Congress the ability to regulate a range of state, local and private issues. The ultimate target is the constitution.
NM: What’s been very frustrating to me—having done this 10 years of research and come to understand how the Koch network and its apparatus are operating—I cannot believe...this notion that somehow the Koch story was last year’s story, and this year’s story is Donald Trump all the time.
I would urge people to just avert their eyes from Trump ... and start paying attention to this strange transformation of the Republican Party, in which it’s not responding to the majority of Republican voters. It is responding to these donors.
There’s a huge need for citizen education and rebuilding the institutions of civil society, the kinds of organizations that we had in the mid-20th century that protected democracy. It’s not just a question of who occupies the White House.
-Nancy MacLean, interviewed in TheMillions.com 8/14/17
There is a tactical advantage in the Trump presidency for Republicans. Even a walking, talking Shock Doctrine is an easy choice over a Democrat, who might see through the GOP efforts to dismantle government- or actually work to improve it. Of course there’s a widespread presence of Koch true believers throughout the White House, starting with Mike Pence.
It sobers me to realize that what I’ve always considered dysfunction is actually the result of years of strategic planning. Charles Koch believes in his ideas, and puts his money where his mouth is. The final words of Democracy in Chains are his: “Playing it safe is slow suicide.”
Some reviews and interviews:
Bill Moyers
http://billmoyers.com/story/deep-history-radical-right/
Democracy Now!
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/6/29/republican_push_to_replace_obamacare_reflects
Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-architect-of-the-radical-right/528672/
The New Republic
https://newrepublic.com/article/143561/rights-war-liberal-democracy
Jacobin
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/06/democracy-in-chains-review-nancy-maclean-james-buchanan
The Millions
http://themillions.com/2017/08/surviving-koch-nancy-maclean-wants-ignore-donald-trump.html
Guardian UK
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/19/despot-disguise-democracy-james-mcgill-buchanan-totalitarian-capitalism
NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/books/review/democracy-in-chains-nancy-maclean.html?mcubz=0&_r=0
Book excerpt
http://billmoyers.com/story/book-democracy-in-chains-far-right/