



Democracy in Chains
The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America
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4.5 • 91 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Finalist for the National Book Award
The Nation's "Most Valuable Book"
“[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.”—The Atlantic
“This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be.”—NPR
An explosive exposé of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution.
*Now Updated With A New Preface*
Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.
In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.
Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy.
Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Author Nancy MacLean calls herself an “archival rat” in her eye-opening Democracy in Chains—a finalist for the National Book Award—as she sifts through long-forgotten clues to piece together a stealthy crusade to subvert U.S. democracy. From synchronized efforts to suppress voter turnout to the planned demise of government regulations, MacLean persuasively charts how a Nobel Prize–winning economist named James McGill Buchanan inspired a movement that would ensure “the will of the majority could no longer influence representative government on core matters of political economy.” Threading together history, personality, and politics, she presents accessible and alarming insights into a decades-long campaign funded by billionaires like Charles Koch, promoted by think tanks such as the Cato Institute, and embraced by politicians like vice president Mike Pence.
Customer Reviews
Eye opening
This was my first peek into the history of libertarian movement but the world and the image the author developed is really troubling. Well written and easy to read I recommend it to any reader interested in the subject whether he/she comes from needing to understand how we got where we are in our democracy or simply to understand an important part of the political history of this country. Of course, it also does help to understand the possible future.
Democracy in Chains
Thanks to Nancy MacLean for her amazing research and exposing the true nature and intentions of the Koch-movement. Most importantly, thanks for her courage and hard work in documenting and reporting the history and inner workings of an evil enterprise.
Amazing
Good reads