“…James McGill Buchanan is a name you will rarely hear
unless you’ve taken several classes in economics. And if the Tennessee-born
Nobel laureate were alive today, it would suit him just fine that most
well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many economics
students have little understanding of his work.
“The reason? Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that
his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only
introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of
Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans really knew what
Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting
under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a
transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept.
“That is a dangerous blind spot, MacLean argues in a
meticulously researched book, Democracy in Chains, a finalist
for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. While Americans grapple with Donald
Trump’s chaotic presidency, we may be missing the key to changes that are
taking place far beyond the level of mere politics. Once these changes are
locked into place, there may be no going back.
“…MacLean was stunned. The archive of the man who had
sought to stay under the radar had been left totally unsorted and unguarded.
The historian plunged in, and she read through boxes and drawers full of papers
that included personal correspondence between Buchanan and billionaire
industrialist Charles Koch. That’s when she had an amazing realization: here
was the intellectual linchpin of a stealth revolution currently in progress.
“…Buchanan, MacLean notes, was incensed at what he saw as
a move toward socialism and deeply suspicious of any form of state action that
channels resources to the public. Why should the increasingly powerful federal
government be able to force the wealthy to pay for goods and programs that served
ordinary citizens and the poor?
“…The people who needed protection were property owners,
and their rights could only be secured though constitutional limits to prevent
the majority of voters from encroaching on them, an idea Buchanan lays out in
works like Property as a Guarantor of Liberty (1993). MacLean
observes that Buchanan saw society as a cutthroat realm of makers
(entrepreneurs) constantly under siege by takers (everybody else) His own
language was often more stark, warning the alleged ‘prey’ of ‘parasites’ and
‘predators’ out to fleece them.
“In 1965 the economist launched a center dedicated to his
theories at the University of Virginia, which later relocated to George Mason
University. MacLean describes how he trained thinkers to push back against
the Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate America’s
public schools and to challenge the constitutional perspectives and federal
policy that enabled it. She notes that he took care to use economic and
political precepts, rather than overtly racial arguments, to make his case,
which nonetheless gave cover to racists who knew that spelling out their
prejudices would alienate the country.
“…MacLean observes that both focused on how democracy
constrains property owners and aimed for ways to restrict the latitude of
voters. She argues that unlike even the most property-friendly founders
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Buchanan wanted a private governing elite
of corporate power that was wholly released from public accountability.
“Suppressing voting, changing legislative processes so
that a normal majority could no longer prevail, sowing public distrust of
government institutions— all these were tactics toward the goal. But the Holy
Grail was the Constitution: alter it and you could increase and secure the
power of the wealthy in a way that no politician could ever challenge.
“MacLean explains that Virginia’s white elite and the pro-corporate
president of the University of Virginia, Colgate Darden, who had married into
the DuPont family, found Buchanan’s ideas to be spot on. In nurturing a new
intelligentsia to commit to his values, Buchanan stated that he needed a ‘gravy
train,’ and with backers like Charles Koch and conservative foundations like
the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts, others hopped aboard. Money, Buchanan
knew, can be a persuasive tool in academia. His circle of influence began to
widen.
“…Buchanan’s school focused on public choice theory, later
adding constitutional economics and the new field of law and economics to its
core research and advocacy. The economist saw that his vision would never come
to fruition by focusing on who rules. It was much better to
focus on the rules themselves, and that required a ‘constitutional
revolution.’
“…With Koch’s money and enthusiasm, Buchanan’s academic
school evolved into something much bigger. By the 1990s, Koch realized that
Buchanan’s ideas — transmitted through stealth and deliberate deception, as
MacLean amply documents — could help take government down through incremental
assaults that the media would hardly notice. The tycoon knew that the project
was extremely radical, even a ‘revolution’ in governance, but he talked like a
conservative to make his plans sound more palatable.
“MacLean details how partnered with Koch, Buchanan’s
outpost at George Mason University was able to connect libertarian economists
with right-wing political actors and supporters of corporations like Shell Oil,
Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank, and General Motors. Together they could
push economic ideas to public through media, promote new curricula for
economics education, and court politicians in nearby Washington, D.C.
“At the 1997 fiftieth anniversary of the Mont Pelerin
Society, MacLean recounts that Buchanan and his associate Henry Manne, a
founding theorist of libertarian economic approaches to law, focused on such
affronts to capitalists as environmentalism and public health and welfare,
expressing eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as
well as kill public education because it tended to foster community values.
Feminism had to go, too: the scholars considered it a socialist project.
“Buchanan’s ideas began to have huge impact, especially in
America and in Britain. In his home country, the economist was deeply involved
in efforts to cut taxes on the wealthy in 1970s and 1980s and he advised
proponents of Reagan Revolution in their quest to unleash markets and posit
government as the ‘problem’ rather than the ‘solution.’ The Koch-funded
Virginia school coached scholars, lawyers, politicians, and business people to
apply stark right-wing perspectives on everything from deficits to taxes to
school privatization. In Britain, Buchanan’s work helped to inspire the public
sector reforms of Margaret Thatcher and her political progeny.
“To put the success into perspective, MacLean points to
the fact that Henry Manne, whom Buchanan was instrumental in hiring, created
legal programs for law professors and federal judges which could boast that by
1990 two of every five sitting federal judges had participated. ‘40 percent of
the U.S. federal judiciary,’ writes MacLean, ‘had been treated to a Koch-backed
curriculum.’
“MacLean illustrates that in South America, Buchanan was
able to first truly set his ideas in motion by helping a bare-knuckles
dictatorship ensure the permanence of much of the radical transformation it
inflicted on a country that had been a beacon of social progress. The historian
emphasizes that Buchanan’s role in the disastrous Pinochet government of Chile
has been underestimated partly because unlike Milton Friedman, who advertised
his activities, Buchanan had the shrewdness to keep his involvement quiet. With
his guidance, the military junta deployed public choice economics in the
creation of a new constitution, which required balanced budgets and thereby
prevented the government from spending to meet public needs. Supermajorities
would be required for any changes of substance, leaving the public little recourse
to challenge programs like the privatization of social security.
“The dictator’s human rights abuses and pillage of the
country’s resources did not seem to bother Buchanan, MacLean argues, so long as
the wealthy got their way. ‘Despotism may be the only organizational
alternative to the political structure that we observe,’ the economist had
written in The Limits of Liberty. If you have been wondering about
the end result of the Virginia school philosophy, well, the economist helpfully
spelled it out.
“Most Americans haven’t seen what’s coming. MacLean notes
that when the Kochs’ control of the GOP kicked into high gear after the
financial crisis of 2007-08, many were so stunned by the ‘shock-and-awe’ tactics of shutting
down government, destroying labor unions, and rolling back services that meet
citizens’ basic necessities that few realized that many leading the charge had
been trained in economics at Virginia institutions, especially George Mason
University. Wasn’t it just a new, particularly vicious wave of partisan
politics? It wasn’t. MacLean convincingly illustrates that it was something far
more disturbing.
“MacLean is not the only scholar to sound the alarm that
the country is experiencing a hostile takeover that is well on its way to
radically, and perhaps permanently, altering the society. Peter Temin, former
head of the MIT economics department, INET grantee, and author of The Vanishing Middle Class, as
well as economist Gordon Lafer of the University of Oregon and author of The One Percent Solution, have
provided eye-opening analyses of where America is headed and why. MacLean adds
another dimension to this dystopian big picture, acquainting us with what has
been overlooked in the capitalist right wing’s playbook.
“She observes, for example, that many liberals have missed
the point of strategies like privatization. Efforts to ‘reform’ public
education and Social Security are not just about a preference for the private
sector over the public sector, she argues. You can wrap your head around those,
even if you don’t agree. Instead, MacLean contends, the goal of these
strategies is to radically alter power relations, weakening pro-public forces
and enhancing the lobbying power and commitment of the corporations that take
over public services and resources, thus advancing the plans to dismantle
democracy and make way for a return to oligarchy. The majority will be held
captive so that the wealthy can finally be free to do as they please, no matter
how destructive.
“MacLean argues that despite the rhetoric of Virginia
school acolytes, shrinking big government is not really the point. The oligarchs
require a government with tremendous new powers so that they can bypass the
will of the people. This, as MacLean points out, requires greatly expanding
police powers ‘to control the resultant popular anger.’ The spreading use
of pre-emption by GOP-controlled state legislatures to suppress local
progressive victories such as living wage ordinances is another example of the
right’s aggressive use of state power.
“Could these right-wing capitalists allow private
companies to fill prisons with helpless citizens—or, more profitable still,
right-less undocumented immigrants? They could, and have. Might
they engineer a retirement crisis by moving Americans to inadequate
401(k)s? Done. Take away the rights of consumers and workers
to bring grievances to court by making them sign forced arbitration
agreements? Check. Gut public education to the point where
ordinary people have such bleak prospects that they have no energy to fight
back? Getting it done.
“Would they even refuse children clean water? Actually,
yes. MacLean notes that in Flint, Michigan, Americans got a taste of what
the emerging oligarchy will look like — it tastes like poisoned water.
There, the Koch-funded Mackinac Center pushed for legislation that would allow
the governor to take control of communities facing emergency and put unelected
managers in charge. In Flint, one such manager switched the city’s water supply
to a polluted river, but the Mackinac Center’s lobbyists ensured that the law
was fortified by protections against lawsuits that poisoned inhabitants might
bring. Tens of thousands of children were
exposed to lead, a substance known to cause serious health problems including
brain damage.
“Tyler Cowen has provided an economic justification for
this kind of brutality, stating that where it is difficult to get clean water,
private companies should take over and make people pay for it. ‘This includes
giving them the right to cut off people who don’t—or can’t—pay their bills,’
the economist explains.
“To many this sounds grotesquely inhumane, but it is a way
of thinking that has deep roots in America. In Why I, Too, Am Not a
Conservative (2005), Buchanan considers the charge of heartlessness
made against the kind of classic liberal that he took himself to be. MacLean
interprets his discussion to mean that people who ‘failed to foresee and save
money for their future needs’ are to be treated, as Buchanan put it, ‘as
subordinate members of the species, akin to…animals who are dependent.’ Do you
have your education, health care, and retirement personally funded against all
possible exigencies? Then that means you.
“Buchanan was not a dystopian novelist. He was a Nobel
Laureate whose sinister logic exerts vast influence over America’s trajectory.
It is no wonder that Cowen, on his popular blog Marginal Revolution, does
not mention Buchanan on a list of underrated influential
libertarian thinkers, though elsewhere on the blog, he expresses admiration for
several of Buchanan’s contributions and acknowledges that the southern economist ‘thought more
consistently in terms of ‘rules of the games’ than perhaps any other
economist.’ The rules of the game are now clear.
“Research like MacLean’s provides hope that toxic ideas
like Buchanan’s may finally begin to face public scrutiny. Yet at this very
moment, the Kochs’ State Policy Network and the American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC), a group that connects corporate agents to conservative
lawmakers to produce legislation, are involved in projects that the
Trump-obsessed media hardly notices, like pumping money into state judicial
races. Their aim is to stack the legal deck against Americans in ways that
MacLean argues may have even bigger effects than Citizens United, the 2010
Supreme Court ruling which unleashed unlimited corporate spending on American
politics. The goal is to create a judiciary that will interpret the
Constitution in favor of corporations and the wealthy in ways that Buchanan
would have heartily approved.
“‘The United States is now at one of those historic forks
in the road whose outcome will prove as fateful as those of the 1860s, the
1930s, and the 1960s,’ writes MacLean. ‘To value liberty for the wealthy
minority above all else and enshrine it in the nation’s governing rules, as
Calhoun and Buchanan both called for and the Koch network is achieving, play by
play, is to consent to an oligarchy in all but the outer husk of representative
form.’ Nobody can say we weren’t warned.”
