Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America tells the never-before-told story of James Buchanan, a Nobel prize winning economist who created the intellectual foundation and strategic blueprints behind the billionaire-funded radical right’s campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, curb democratic majority rule and ultimately change the Constitution.
This book is a chilling page-turner.
It exposes the crucial role that Buchanan played in helping libertarian Charles Koch invest his fortune to develop an operational strategy that will permanently disable our democratic institutions in favor of free-reign capitalism. This roadmap is being carried out largely below the radar of most citizens by instituting several tactical fronts simultaneously and legally until the final goals of total privatization of all social structures in this country are permanent. Examples are passing laws that destroy unions without saying what their true purpose is, suppressing votes of people who are most likely to support active government, privatizing schools and prisons, social security and health care. Imagine a private fire department. With these incremental incursions, the ultimate goal is to reduce and ultimately eliminate all government regulations of air and water quality, drugs, schools, prisons, workplace safety, old age homes. One of their mottoes is “personal responsibility”. In the area of education, all public schools would be shut down. Their goal is for parents to pay the full cost of their children’s education in for-profit private schools. There will be no regulations, no quality standards, no disclosures. Parents would be held accountable with no recourse if they could not afford the tuition.
The content of this book clarifies the radical right’s motivations, tactical logic and ultimate endgame. Reading, watching or listening to the news will never be the same. Recognizing and organizing are the tools needed to prevent this movement from succeeding.
Professor MacLean’s scholarship has received more than a dozen prizes and awards and been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowships Foundation. In 2010, she was elected a fellow of the Society of American Historians, which recognizes literary distinction in the writing of history and biography. Also an award-winning teacher at Duke University, she offers courses on post-1945 America, social movements, and public policy history.
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