calhoun

see nancy mcclain orig interview<div>thot himself a ploticap philos, wrote 2 art'ls; jj kilpatrick exhumes him to fight (aftermanth?) of Brown v bd</div><div>interpolation interpostion // nullifiction?</div><div>
</div><div>for james B we need to fix const (thus convention) b/c it (no longer?) protect property of rich</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div> mcconn folds on filbuster w/o manchin and x<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/senate-filibuster/">https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/senate-filibuster/</a>
history
President Joe Biden has promised swift action on the pandemic, the economic crisis and more, but much of his agenda hinges on whether he can get enough support in the Senate, where an unprecedented number of bills in recent years has required a 60-vote supermajority in order to overcome filibusters. Many progressives and civil rights groups have urged Democratic leaders to kill the filibuster, warning that if they don't, Senate Republicans will obstruct Biden's plans just as they did with the Obama administration. Former Senate aide Adam Jentleson, author of the new book "Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy," says the filibuster has historically been used to stop racial progress and thwart majority opinion. "The framers … did not want the filibuster to exist," he says. "When they created the Senate, it was an institution that had no filibuster power. It was designed to be a majority-rule body."<h5 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Transcript</h5>AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! The Quarantine Report. I'm Amy Goodman.Democratic lawmakers are moving ahead with plans to hold an impeachment trial of former President Trump for inciting the deadly January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. House impeachment managers are walking the single article of impeachment to the Senate today. The Senate trial will begin the week of February 8th. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke Friday.<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);">MAJORITY LEADER CHUCK SCHUMER: Now, as I mentioned, the Senate will also conduct a second impeachment trial for Donald Trump. I've been speaking to the Republican leader about the timing and duration of the trial. But, make no mistake, a trial will be held in the United States Senate, and there will be a vote on whether to convict the president.
</blockquote>AMY GOODMAN: As senators prepare for the impeachment trial, lawmakers are also debating how to move forward on President Biden's proposed $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill. The Senate is split 50-50, but the Democrats control the Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as a tiebreaking vote.Schumer and former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are locked in negotiations over how the Senate will be run over the next two years. McConnell is pushing to preserve the filibuster, which allows any senator to block a bill's passage unless it's supported by 60 senators. Critics say the filibuster is a relic of the Jim Crow era that preserves minority rule. A group of civil rights and social justice groups are pushing Democrats to eliminate the filibuster to limit McConnell's power and give Biden a chance to enact his agenda.On Sunday, Senator Bernie Sanders, who's the incoming Senate Budget Committee chair, appeared on CNN and promoted using a process known as reconciliation to quickly pass part of Biden's COVID relief plan.<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);">SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: What we cannot do is wait weeks and weeks and months and months to go forward. We have got to act now. That is what the American people want. Now, as you know, reconciliation, which is a Senate rule, was used by the Republicans, under Trump, to pass massive tax breaks for the rich and large corporations. It was used as an attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And what we are saying is, "You used it for that. That's fine. We're going to use reconciliation — that is, 50 votes in the Senate plus the vice president — to pass legislation desperately needed by working families in this country right now. You did it. We're going to do it. But we're going to do it to protect ordinary people, not just the rich and the powerful."
</blockquote>AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the state of the Senate, we're joined by Adam Jentleson, the public affairs director at Democracy Forward, former deputy chief of staff to Democratic Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. Jentleson's new book is titled Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.So, let's start with what's happening in the Senate right now. You say it's the most unequal body in the U.S. federal government. Explain why, and how that impacts everything from reconciliation to the filibuster.ADAM JENTLESON: That's right. And thanks for having me here. It's great to join you today.So, you know, the Senate was created to provide a counterbalance to the House, which was supposed to be — the House was supposed to be sort of the direct body that represented the people. And the Senate was always designed to provide sort of an elite counterweight. And it was designed to be a little bit anti-democratic, in its inception.You know, in the House, apportionment is determined by population, so every district is about the same size, and every state has about the same number of House members proportional to their population, so the bigger states have a lot more representatives. California has many more representatives in the House than, say, Wyoming, which has one representative.In the Senate, every state gets equal representation. So, Wyoming has two senators, and California has two senators. California's population is about 39 million people. Wyoming's population is about 600,000 people. So, by that proportionate representation, it actually creates a disproportionate voting power. So, every citizen in Wyoming has many more times the voting power than a citizen in California.This was something that the framers were aware of when they created it, but some of them decried it at the time and said this is a big problem. Madison, who's often cited as the chief framer and constructor of the Senate, actually strongly opposed this kind of equal representation. And when I say "equal," I mean the same number of senators; the way it plays out is actually, you know, dramatically unequal representation for the actual voters. Madison, at the time, said that it would be a great source of — he used the word — "injustice" to give states equal representation. At the time that he called this an injustice, the biggest state was Virginia, and it was about 10 times as big as the smallest state, Delaware. Madison was right that it creates an injustice, but that injustice is several orders of magnitude bigger now than at the time. You know, Virginia was 10 times the size of Delaware in 1789. Today, California is about 70 times the size of Wyoming. So, it is an unequal body. The way this —AMY GOODMAN: Seventy times the size. And for people who listen to this globally, each of them, because they're each a state, have two senators, have equal representation in the Senate.ADAM JENTLESON: That's right. And because a lot of — and, you know, the way this plays out is that what that translates to is not just disproportionate representation geographically, but disproportionate presentation in terms of racial, ethnic, minority voting power. California, obviously, is an incredibly diverse state. Wyoming is an incredibly monolithic state demographically. But Wyoming has equal voting power to California. And this continues throughout, if you go down the chamber, because the general pattern is that the more rural states, the lower-population states, tend to be overwhelmingly white. And so, what that translates to in our modern era is a dramatically disproportionate amount of voting power to white conservatives in America.AMY GOODMAN: So, take this to the history of the filibuster. I want to play just a clip of President Obama speaking about the filibuster at the funeral of the late Georgia Congressmember John Lewis.<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that's what we should do.
</blockquote>AMY GOODMAN: "Another Jim Crow relic," says Obama. You take this back, Adam, to slavery.ADAM JENTLESON: That's right. And Obama is 100% right. He's been consistent on the filibuster. He's always wanted to get rid of it. In his new memoir, he says he wishes he had started his first administration by rallying Democrats to get rid of it, so that he could have passed more and bigger things. But, yes, he's absolutely right about the history.The history, you know, it's important to understand that the framers, for all their own racism and slaveholding status, even they did not want the filibuster to exist. When they created the Senate, it was an institution that had no filibuster power. It was designed to be a majority-rule body. It was designed to discourage obstruction. They were very clear about this; this wasn't just sort of a coincidence or sort of a gray area. The reason they were clear about it was that they created the Constitution in the shadows of the Articles of Confederation, and the widespread view at the time was that the reason the Articles of Confederation failed was that its Congress required a supermajority threshold to pass most major legislation. And so, the framers saw that that had been a disaster, and they created a Senate that was majority rule.And they wrote very clearly in The Federalist Papers, in their own correspondence and other sources that they believed that a minority, a numerical minority, in the Senate should not be given the power to obstruct what the majority wanted to do. By all means, the Senate was supposed to be deliberative. It was supposed to be thoughtful. It was supposed to take things a little slower than the House. But there was a certain point at which debate was considered to have run its course. And at that point, a majority was allowed to end debate, bring the bill up for a vote and pass or fail it on a majority vote.What happened was, over the course of several decades, after all the framers had passed away, other senators did use some obstructive tactics over the early decades, but it was very rare. John C. Calhoun came along, the "Great Nullifier," senator from South Carolina, sort of a grandfather of the Confederacy, and he innovated some of the tactics that became known as the modern filibuster. And he did it for the express purpose of increasing the power of the slaveholding class. What he saw at this time — this was around the 1830s and 1840s — was that slaveholders and slave states were becoming steadily outpowered in Congress. And so, he knew that if majority rule was allowed to continue, slavery was going to end. And they needed to — he felt a very compelling desire, from his perspective, to increase their power in the Senate.And so, what he did was innovate what we would describe as the modern talking filibuster, the sort of Jimmy Stewart-style holding the floor, joining with allies, to delay a bill that he opposed, and, at the same time, doing it all in the service of this lofty principle of minority rights. And what he — the minority that he sought to protect was not a vulnerable population, by any means. It was the planter class, the slaveholders. And so, that was the origin of this essential principle of minority rights being tied to the filibuster. It was a desire to protect not a vulnerable minority, but the minority of the planter class against the march of progress, that Calhoun thought would progress under a majority-rule system.AMY GOODMAN: So, take that to today and this battle over the filibuster in the Senate, the trajectory you see from slavery to Jim Crow to the new Biden administration and the Democratic majority, and what they're trying to do —ADAM JENTLESON: Sure.AMY GOODMAN: — whether we're talking about COVID relief or talking, for example, about impeachment.ADAM JENTLESON: Sure. So, the key development in the history of the filibuster, from the time of Calhoun to now, is the transition from this talking filibuster, you know, the Jimmy Stewart-style holding the floor, into a supermajority threshold that can be applied to block any bill. And just to underscore, for the first 200 years of its existence or so, the Senate was majority rule. Even as the filibuster started to develop in Calhoun's time, all that senators could do was delay a bill. They had to talk on the floor, and eventually they had to give up. There was no ability to impose a supermajority threshold.That didn't arise until after 1917, when the Senate put a rule on the books that, ironically, was designed to end filibusters. It implemented a supermajority threshold under the principle that after debate had gone for long enough, two-thirds of the body would be able to come together and say, "You know what? This is enough. Let's cut this off. Let's move to a final debate — a final vote on the bill."It took a long time for this to happen, but Southern senators, in the Jim Crow era — and this gets back to what President Obama was talking about — started to reverse the purpose of that rule, and instead of using it to end debate, as it had been designed to do, started using it as a higher threshold for civil rights bills to have to clear. And it's important to underscore how transformative the power of racism was in this evolution. The only category —AMY GOODMAN: And then, we just have a minute.ADAM JENTLESON: Oh, OK.AMY GOODMAN: We just have a minute, but I wanted to take this forward to what's happening now and play a clip of the incoming Senate Budget Committee chair, Bernie Sanders, speaking on CNN, defending his call for using reconciliation to pass the COVID relief bill, and then ask how that fits into this paradigm you're describing.<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);">SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: And I criticized the Republicans, yeah, for using reconciliation to give tax breaks to billionaires, to create a situation where large, profitable corporations now pay zero in federal income taxes. Yes, I did criticize them for that. And if they want to criticize me for helping to feed children who are hungry, or senior citizens in this country who are isolated and alone and don't have enough food, they can criticize me. I think it's the appropriate step forward.
</blockquote>AMY GOODMAN: So, that is Bernie Sanders, yes, Senator Mittens, for those who have been following the, to say the least, viral meme of him wearing his Vermont mittens at the inauguration. But, Adam Jentleson, if you could end by talking about what this means for the COVID relief bill, who gets helped, and who doesn't?ADAM JENTLESON: Sure. So, what Sanders has done is accurately identify a process called budget reconciliation, that is an end run around this supermajority threshold that I was describing. That threshold has gone, from the Jim Crow era, from being only applied to civil rights bills to today being applied to every bill. And this is the primary source of gridlock in the Senate.As the budget chair, Sanders can use reconciliation to go around it. That can be used for the COVID relief bill. He's absolutely right about that. That may be where we go. It will enable us to pass COVID relief over the objections of Republicans and not have to clear a 60-vote threshold.Long term, though, the filibuster will rear its head, because anything involving civil rights, democracy reforms or those types of reforms cannot go through reconciliation. Reconciliation is a restrictive process that has tight rules. They have to be budgetary items to conform with its rules. So, ultimately, we're going to have to face this question of the filibuster, if we want to do things like D.C. statehood, Puerto Rico statehood, any kind of civil rights expansions, automatic voter registration. All of that stuff can't go through reconciliation. If we don't reform the filibuster, it will die by the filibuster. So, that's where this issue will really come to a head for Democrats.AMY GOODMAN: Well, Adam Jentleson, I want to thank you for being with us, public affairs director for Democracy Forward, former deputy chief of staff to the Democratic majority leader, Senator Harry Reid. His new book, Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.Next up, as the number of U.S. COVID cases hits 25 million, we'll speak to the Reverend Barber about the challenges ahead. He gave the homily at the post-inaugural prayer breakfast. We'll talk about inequality. And what does unity really mean? Stay with us.<div class="around-the-web" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="from-your-siteheadline" style="font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase;">FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.446px; list-style: none;"><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/filibuster/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Dems blast McConnell for threatening to filibuster power-sharing ... ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/fillibuster/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">'Kill the filibuster': Senate Democrats urged to act quickly to end era ... ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/democrats-filibuster/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">'Even David Brooks agrees' Democrats should 'absolutely kill the ... ›</a></li></ul><div class="around-the-webheadline" style="font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase; margin-top: 10px;">RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.446px; list-style: none;"><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/25/us/senate-filibuster.html" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Senate Filibuster Debate Roils Chamber - The New York Times ›</a></li><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Filibuster_Cloture.htm" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">U.S. Senate: Filibuster and Cloture ›</a></li><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_States_Senate" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Filibuster in the United States Senate - Wikipedia ›</a></li><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/what-is-the-senate-filibuster-and-what-would-it-take-to-eliminate-it/" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-weight: lighter; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">What is the Senate filibuster, and what would it take to eliminate it? ›</a></li></ul></div></div><div>=primer?<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/meet-the-hidden-architect-behind-americas-racist-economics/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/meet-the-hidden-architect-behind-americas-racist-economics/</a>
Nobel laureate James Buchanan is the intellectual linchpin of the Koch-funded attack on democratic institutions, argues Duke historian Nancy MacLean<div style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Ask people to name the key minds that have shaped America’s burst of radical right-wing attacks on working conditions, consumer rights and public services, and they will typically mention figures like free market-champion Milton Friedman, libertarian guru Ayn Rand, and laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.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, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/533763/democracy-in-chains-by-nancy-maclean/9781101980972/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Democracy in Chains</a>, 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.An Unlocked Door in VirginiaMacLean’s book reads like an intellectual detective story. In 2010, she moved to North Carolina, where a Tea Party-dominated Republican Party got control of both houses of the state legislature and began pushing through a radical program to suppress voter rights, decimate public services, and slash taxes on the wealthy that shocked a state long a beacon of southern moderation. Up to this point, the figure of James Buchanan flickered in her peripheral vision, but as she began to study his work closely, the events in North Carolina and also Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker was leading assaults on collective bargaining rights, shifted her focus.Could it be that this relatively obscure economist’s distinctive thought was being put forcefully into action in real time?MacLean could not gain access to Buchanan’s papers to test her hypothesis until after his death in January 2013. That year, just as the government was being shut down by Ted Cruz & Co., she traveled to George Mason University in Virginia, where the economist’s papers lay willy-nilly across the offices of a building now abandoned by the Koch-funded faculty to a new, fancier center in Arlington.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.A Theory of Property SupremacyBuchanan, a 1940 graduate of Middle Tennessee State University who later attended the University of Chicago for graduate study, started out as a conventional public finance economist. But he grew frustrated by the way in which economic theorists ignored the political process.Buchanan began working on a description of power that started out as a critique of how institutions functioned in the relatively liberal 1950s and ‘60s, a time when economist John Maynard Keynes’s ideas about the need for government intervention in markets to protect people from flaws so clearly demonstrated in the Great Depression held sway. 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?In thinking about how people make political decisions and choices, Buchanan concluded that you could only understand them as individuals seeking personal advantage. In an interview cited by MacLean, the economist observed that in the 1950s Americans commonly assumed that elected officials wanted to act in the public interest. Buchanan vehemently disagreed — that was a belief he wanted, as he put it, to “tear down.” His ideas developed into a theory that came to be known as “public choice.”Buchanan’s view of human nature was distinctly dismal. Adam Smith saw human beings as self-interested and hungry for personal power and material comfort, but he also acknowledged social instincts like compassion and fairness. Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were primarily driven by venal self-interest. Crediting people with altruism or a desire to serve others was “romantic” fantasy: politicians and government workers were out for themselves, and so, for that matter, were teachers, doctors, and civil rights activists. They wanted to control others and wrest away their resources: “Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves,” he wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty.Does that sound like your kindergarten teacher? It did to Buchanan.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.All the while, a ghost hovered in the background — that of John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, senator and seventh vice president of the United States.Calhoun was an intellectual and political powerhouse in the South from the 1820s until his death in 1850, expending his formidable energy to defend slavery. Calhoun, called the “Marx of the Master Class” by historian Richard Hofstadter, saw himself and his fellow southern oligarchs as victims of the majority. Therefore, as MacLean explains, he sought to create “constitutional gadgets” to constrict the operations of government.Economists Tyler Cowen and Alexander Tabarrok, both of George Mason University, have noted the two men’s affinities, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40751557" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">heralding</a> Calhoun “a precursor of modern public choice theory” who “anticipates” Buchanan’s thinking. 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.Gravy Train to OligarchyMacLean 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.MacLean observes that the Virginia school, as Buchanan’s brand of economic and political thinking is known, is a kind of cousin to the better-known, market-oriented Chicago and Austrian schools — proponents of all three were members of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international neoliberal organization which included Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. But the Virginia school’s focus and career missions were distinct. In an interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), MacLean described Friedman and Buchanan as yin and yang:“Friedman was this genial, personable character who loved to be in the limelight and made a sunny case for the free market and the freedom to choose and so forth. Buchanan was the dark side of this: he thought, ok, fine, they can make a case for the free market, but everybody knows that free markets have externalities and other problems. So he wanted to keep people from believing that government could be the alternative to those problems.”The Virginia school also differs from other economic schools in a marked reliance on abstract theory rather than mathematics or empirical evidence. That a Nobel Prize was awarded in 1986 to an economist who so determinedly bucked the academic trends of his day was nothing short of stunning, MacLean observes. But, then, it was the peak of the Reagan era, an administration several Buchanan students joined.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.”MacLean describes how the economist developed a grand project to train operatives to staff institutions funded by like-minded tycoons, most significantly Charles Koch, who became interested in his work in the ‘70s and sought the economist’s input in promoting “Austrian economics” in the U.S. and in advising the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.Koch, whose mission was to save capitalists like himself from democracy, found the ultimate theoretical tool in the work of the southern economist. The historian writes that Koch preferred Buchanan to Milton Friedman and his “Chicago boys” because, she says, quoting a libertarian insider, they wanted “to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root.”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 the 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.The Oligarchic Revolution UnfoldsBuchanan’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 Pinochetgovernment 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.A World of SlavesMost 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 <a href="https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/america-is-regressing-into-a-developing-nation-for-most-people" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">The Vanishing Middle Class</a>, as well as economist Gordon Lafer of the University of Oregon and author of <a href="https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/the-corporate-plan-to-groom-u-s-kids-for-servitude-by-wiping-out-public-schools" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">The One Percent Solution</a>, 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. <a href="https://www.freep.com/story/news/education/2018/04/09/flint-water-crisis-lead/478577002/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Tens of thousands of children</a> were exposed to lead, a substance known to cause serious health problems including brain damage.Tyler Cowen has provided an <a href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/2008/06/19/deregulate-water-thirdworld-tech-water08-cx_tc_0619monopoly&refURL=https://www.google.com/&referrer=https://www.google.com/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">economic justification</a> 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 <a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/02/underrated-libertarian-thinkers.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">mention</a> Buchanan on a list of underrated influential libertarian thinkers, though elsewhere on the blog, he expresses admiration for several of Buchanan’s contributions and <a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/01/what-made-buchanan-special-as-an-economist.html" target="_blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">acknowledges</a> 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.</div></div><div></div>