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The malevolent incompetence of the Trump White House packs a certain entertainment value, but it is also a distraction; a bumbling misdirection in a long confidence game. At stake, as historian Nancy MacLean underscores in her new book, Democracy in Chains , is not just political power, not just the final dismantling of the New Deal order, but the very future of our democracy. Whatever the fate of Donald Trump and his cronies, the rule of the radical right — in Congress, in statehouses, in the courts — will remain largely unchecked. And with each electoral cycle or legislative session of that rule, the prospects for challenging it fade. Democracy in Chains is a remarkable book. At its core is a startling archival discovery: the unsorted and unprocessed papers of the University of Virginia economist James McGill Buchanan. Buchanan was a quiet but central figure in the making of the modern right: indeed, in MacLean’s account, Buchanan appears — like a libertarian Zelig — at each critical juncture in this history. Educated at the University of Chicago, he takes up his first academic post at the University of Virginia as a fierce defender of segregation and “states’ rights.” Discouraged by both the progress of civil rights and Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, and wearing out his welcome at Virginia, he decamps to UCLA, only to be horrified by the diversity of the setting and the radicalism of the students. He retreats to Virginia Tech for a decade, before being lured to George Mason University on the eve of the Reagan Revolution. At each stop, he builds a privately funded fiefdom designed to develop and disseminate the libertarian creed. At each setback, he doubles his resolve to put ideas into action. With each year, he grows wearier of democratic institutions and the tyranny of majority rule. As an economist, Buchanan was instrumental in developing the moral vocabulary not only for a zealous veneration of property rights, but for a deep suspicion of affirmative state action. As a southerner, taking up his appointment at Virginia in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, he did not hesitate to champion states’ rights — and massive resistance to integration — as if these too were just abstractions of economy theory. As an academic, he was a fierce and reliable shill for corporate benefactors, most notably and generously Charles Koch — who shared Buchanan’s blind faith in the market, his contempt for democracy, and his willingness to play the long game. While this is a work of history, MacLean’s overriding goal is to shed light on our current moment; to better understand the roots, arguments, goals, motives, and methods of the radical right. MacLean is interested in how we got here, but Democracy in Chains is really about what comes next — for the Right and for the rest of us.

This Little Piggy Went to Market At the core of Buchanan’s worldview, and of those in his orbit — ranging from self-congratulatory business titans like Charles Koch to Ayn Rand–addled frat boys like Paul Ryan — is a near-religious faith in the autonomy and infallibility of markets. Buchanan’s singular professional contribution (for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1986) was the development of “public choice” economics — a field whose largely untested insight was that markets never failed but that state interference in them almost always did. In this view, all were market actors, simply responding to incentives and maximizing selfish gain. Politicians did so to get elected. Civil servants did so to build bureaucratic empires. Citizens did so to garner state benefits. And the only way to pay for this was to extract more and more wealth from the real producers. Imposing market expectations on public institutions, as Buchanan did with the state in The Calculus of Consent (1962) and with the university in Academia in Anarchy (1970), of course, distorts their very purpose and — by questioning their efficiency — erodes their legitimacy. It is strangled logic to view the university as a setting in which student-consumers pay discounted prices for a service they do not value, faculty-producers lose all incentive with tenure, and taxpayer-investors are taken for a ride. But, more so today than in 1970, it is pretty effective politics. In the bargain, as MacLean laments, all other motives for private or public action — “compassion, fairness, solidarity, generosity, justice, and sustainability” — fall by the wayside. This market fundamentalism, and the policies that flow from it, are essentially faith-based — and either blind or indifferent to their own contradictions. Here, MacLean echoes the recent work of the sociologists Margaret Somers and Fred Block, underscoring the many ways in which “free” markets are embedded in social relations. Ignoring this fact simply camouflages advantage and disguises the reliance and dependence of successful market actors on conditions (property rights, contract law, patent protection, worker suppression) secured by state action.

The Color Line Market fundamentalism, as MacLean notes, is rooted less in the nation’s liberal traditions than in the illiberal institutions of slavery and Jim Crow. The founding father of choice here is not Jefferson or Madison but John C. Calhoun — a fierce defender of property rights (at a time when nearly half the population of Calhoun’s South Carolina were property), with a “yen for repression” and an abiding distrust of majority rule. Calhoun, who understood “liberty” as nothing more than the freedom to enjoy and exploit his property, was unfazed by any contradiction between constitutional democracy and chattel slavery. Calhoun, of course, ended up on the wrong side of history. But his ideas lived on in both the nostalgia for the Confederacy that persisted in the New South and in the segregation and terror of the Jim Crow era. Here again, the preservation of liberty and poverty depended upon extreme inequality and fundamentally “antidemocratic and racist strategies of rule.” This was the setting in which Buchanan found himself in 1956 — libertarian credentials from UChicago in his back pocket, massive resistance to the Brown decision unfolding outside his new office at the University of Virginia. Buchanan did not hesitate to align himself with white supremacist minority rule (represented by the political machine of Harry Byrd), and urged voucher-based privatization as the solution to the Virginia schools crisis. “[E]very parent could cast his vote in the [educational] marketplace and have it count,” Buchanan argued, fleshing out an argument that the Cato Insitute and Betsy DeVos would champion unchanged a generation later. In some respects, Buchanan seemed either indifferent to the racial underpinnings of the Virginia schools issue or willing to cynically exploit the moment. Yet he championed not only school privatization, but massive resistance as well. Like Calhoun before him, he saw the real threat as the advance of federal power and the enfranchisement of those without property. “In these final hours of the massive resistance era,” MacLean observes, “can be found the seed of the ideas guiding today’s attack on the public sector and robust democracy alike.” In the short run, in Virginia and in the nation, Buchanan and his ilk lost ground. But the bitter anxieties of massive resistance persisted — most markedly in the gradual political realignment punctuated by the campaigns of Goldwater, Wallace, Nixon, and Reagan. Over this span, Buchanan helped transform “a regional libertarian creed into a national counterrevolution.” By 2017, the post-racialist wisp of the Obama years has evaporated entirely, Congress is wagged by the overwhelmingly southern Freedom Caucus, and the counterrevolution is ably represented in the West Wing by the likes of Mike Pence and Jeff Sessions.