Historian Nancy MacLean and economist Tyler Cowen clashed publicly over the release of her 2017 book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America. Critics, including Cowen himself and Russ Roberts, accused MacLean of misrepresenting Cowen's views on democracy by selectively editing a quotation from his work to fit her thesis. [1, 2, 3]

The specific points of contention and their aftermath include:

The Quote Alteration: In her book, MacLean quoted Cowen's 1998 paper regarding democratic processes. Critics and economists like Russ Roberts demonstrated that MacLean omitted key contextual words from Cowen's sentence, fundamentally altering his meaning to suggest he held anti-democratic views. [1, 2]

The Call for an Apology: The truncation led to widespread demands from libertarian scholars and commentators that Nancy MacLean issue a public apology for the distortion. The controversy over this citation was a major focal point in the heavily polarized debate surrounding her book. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

MacLean's Defense: In a response to her critics published in the Washington Post, MacLean defended her work. She pointed out that it was Cowen and his George Mason University colleague Alexander Tabarrok who had previously noted parallels between the thought of John C. Calhoun and modern public choice theory. [1]

For a detailed look at the broader criticisms regarding the book's handling of Cowen and James Buchanan, you can read Russ Roberts on Nancy MacLean on Tyler Cowen or review the counter-perspective documented by EconLib contributor David Henderson. [1, 2, 3]

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seems ok

the-controversy-over-democracy-in-chains

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[### Can History Survive Duke University's Nancy MacLean?

Independent Institute

https://www.independent.org › News Article](https://www.independent.org/article/2018/05/19/can-history-survive-duke-universitys-nancy-maclean/)

May 19, 2018 — ... Tyler Cowen for her clear, incontrovertible misrepresentation of his views on democracy. (Not only did she decline to apologize, but she ...Read more

Missing: cowan ‎| Show results with: cowan

[### Stealth Attack on Liberal Scholar?

Inside Higher Ed

https://www.insidehighered.com › news › 2017/07/12]

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/12/historian-alleges-coordinated-criticism-her-latest-book-which-critical-radical-right

Jul 11, 2017 — MacLean's critics alleging inaccuracies and other problems with her book, MacLean in turn alleging a coordinated attack against her by libertarian scholars.Read more

COllusion, alternative facts, shadowy billionaires: the words sound ripped from the political headlines, but they also describe the controversy surrounding Duke University historian Nancy MacLean’s new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America(Viking). And story keeps unfolding, with MacLean’s critics alleging inaccuracies and other problems with her book, MacLean in turn alleging a coordinated attack against her by libertarian scholars with ties to dark money, and others still accusing MacLean of trying to dishonestly promote favorable online book reviews.

MacLean declined comment on the matter through her publisher, which said it hopes discussions will soon return to the content of the book. Her named critics, meanwhile, deny any coordination in their takedowns of her work.

“The allegations she raised are fanciful and potentially libelous,” said David Bernstein, University Professor of law at George Mason University, who recently wrote unflatteringly about MacLean’s book in a post on a blog at The Washington Post. No one “urged me, asked me, beseeched me, paid me or otherwise tried to influence me to blog about the book.”

Some nevertheless say they worry that swarm-style attacks on progressive scholars’ works -- especially in an era of online harassment of professors and plummeting public trust in academe -- could become a new normal. MacLean, they say, is the victim of just such an effort.

There’s “absolutely no question that left-wing scholars and scholarly ideas are under attack,” said Jacob Remes, an historian and clinical assistant professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Citing a recent pattern of threats against liberal professors, Remes said cases involving even more vulnerable faculty members “show how we need to defend scholarly norms and insist that debates over scholarship remain that -- scholarly debates -- and not become Fox News-like partisan free-for-alls.”

Referring to MacLean’s case in particular -- in which she's asked supporters to police websites for seemingly inauthentic comments about her book, and supporters have called out her critics for not disclosing their ties to anti-regulation, libertarian philanthropist Charles Koch -- Remes added, “Voting down one-star reviews from people who clearly haven't read a book, or asking that beneficiaries of Koch largesse identify themselves as such in reviews, seems a small way of doing that.”

A Book for the Times

MacLean, the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke, released her new book last month to immediate praise. Democracy in Chainstraces the roots of capitalist libertarianism -- the kind today embodied and funded by the Koch and his brother, David -- back to the late Nobel Prize-winning economist James McGill Buchanan, who taught at George Mason. Her thesis is that Buchanan was the architect of a long-term plan to take libertarianism mainstream, raze democratic institutions and keep power in the hands of the wealthy, white few.

Unsurprisingly, the book resonated with many critics, who tended to describe it as a book for our time (one NPR review called it "2017 Bingo"). But others began to take issue with MacLean’s scholarship, describing it as another symptom of an alternative facts-driven era. One of the first negative reviews, by Russell Roberts, the John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, accused MacLean of deliberating taking out of context the work of Tyler Cowen, the director of the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason. (Roberts has taught economics at George Mason, a favored campus of the Charles Koch Foundation, whose growing financial influence in academe is well-documented; George Mason accepted nearly $48 million from Koch from 2011 to 2014 alone, according to a 2016 Associated Press report. The university's law school also was last year renamed after the late, conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as part of a $30 million deal involving funds from Koch and an anonymous donor.)

“She ignores anything in Cowen’s essay that conflicts with her portrayal of Cowen as a sinister enemy of American institutions and democracy,” Roberts wrote, explaining that MacLean had, for example, suggested that Cowen had once written that the free market would be better off with fewer democratic checks and balances. In fact, Cowen had written that while such a change could lead to good outcomes, it could also lead to “very bad” ones.

MacLean responded to Roberts, accusing him of selectively quoting and misrepresenting statements from her own book (and questioning if he actually read it). Ultimately, she asked, “Is it true that Koch-subsidized libertarian scholars, including Buchanan and Cowen, have posed democracy as a problem for their arch version of capitalism?”

:{Soon, though, the criticism came rapid-fire, with a number of academic reviewers with either past or present ties to the Koch Foundation making similar claims against MacLean: misleading quotations; questionable links between people, events and ideas; and a misunderstanding of some of the economic theory underpinning her arguments.

Jonathan Adler, the Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University and a graduate of George Mason’s law school and one-time visiting professor there, published a running account of the allegations in a Washington Postblog post on the same day Bernstein published his piece in the Post. Soon even MacLean’s Duke colleague Michael C. Munger, a professor of political science, economics and public policy, called her out.}:

In an article for the *Independent Institute*, Munger said MacLean had crafted a well-written but merely speculative history, such as by including imagined conversations between historical figures that come across as real.

“The problem with history, of course, is that many narratives about a few cherry-picked events and documents are ‘plausible,’” he wrote. “The task of the historian is to try to distinguish among plausible accounts ‘through careful sifting of evidence and respectful encounters with opposing points of view.’ There is none of that here. Even a casual familiarity with the basic facts of James Buchanan’s life and scholarship, and of the growth and success of the public choice movement, reveal far simpler, and more plausible, explanations.”

Many of MacLean's supporters question the critics, however, who they argue are offended by a tough look at libertarian heroes.

Ideological Comment War

Apart from the academic reviews, MacLean and others said, anonymous critics were trolling her online, posting uninformed, biased reviews ofDemocracy in Chainson Amazon. In a social media post that MacLean did not authenticate to Inside Higher Ed, but which has been widely shared online by her supporters, she allegedly asked friends and colleagues to help defend her book against an apparent coordinated attack.

“I really, really need your help,” MacLean is said to have written. “This will sound nutty, I know, but it’s actually happening: the Koch operatives and the riders of their academic ‘gravy train,’ as James Buchanan called it, are working very hard to kill Democracy in Chains -- and to destroy my reputation (as they have done to climate change scientists and others bearing inconvenient truth).”

By using thePostblog posts, the note says, critics "make it appear to the ordinary web surfer that the [newspaper] itself is trashing my book when it’s really the Koch team of professors who don’t disclose their conflicts of interest and the operatives who work full-time for their project to shackle our democracy. The other side was getting top placement because their team was clicking and reclicking and sending embedded links, and the velocity of their activity drove up their links.” (It should be noted that the blogs in question are affiliated with the Post, but authors' views are solely their own.)

The note suggests that supporters can help by googling MacLean and her book and clicking on “real” listings to push them above allegedly paid returns, and promoting as "helpful" Amazon reviews that appear authentic. "The operatives are juking the Amazon stats so that their hit jobs (by people who in nearly every case never read the book) come up first by the number of 'helpful' votes," it says. MacLean also warned readers about a propaganda-style wiki page set up by someone with a pseudonym.

“People: this is real,” the post reads. “I won’t be the last they set out to get."

MacLean did not respond to a request for hard evidence of the Amazon review gaming. But there is an unusual preponderance of top five-star and bottom one-star scores forDemocracy in Chains. Back-and-forth-style comments on the reviews abound, amounting to what Connor Gibson, a research associate for Greenpeace, called an "ideological comment war." MacLean’s Wikipedia page already includes much of the controversy surrounding her book.

"They want her publisher to fear promotion, and that's a real threat, since bookstores are also inclined to drop promo efforts if Amazon reviews are low," Gibson said.

Some academics on social media have said that they support MacLean but question asking supporters to police her online reviews. And it appears that the online review police don’t like it either: Fakespot and Trustwerthy, Amazon review authenticity analytics sites, downgraded the book’s rating, to a D and 1.5 stars, respectively.

Still, it’s not hard to imagine that such a close reading of her book by so many scholars with affiliations to Koch -- largely undisclosed in the critiques -- could be some kind of conspiracy.

Asked why he didn’t disclose the fact that he’s received Koch-funded grants within his review of MacLean’s book, Munger said he’s never hidden the relationship (the grants are included on his faculty webpage, for example). Moreover, he said, he wasn’t defending Koch within the piece, just Buchanan.

No Knowledge of Coordination

“I have no knowledge of any coordination” among MacLean’s critics, Munger said. “My interpretation is that MacLean's near total lack of knowledge of basic political science simply independently offended many different people.”

Phillip W. Magness, a historian and former academic program director at the Koch-affiliated Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason, and another of MacLean’s public detractors, said History News Network invited her to respond tohis critique at that site. (She hasn't.) Magness also said he knew of no coordinated attack, “only that Buchanan was a widely respected scholar who she has misrepresented to the point of caricature. It can't be surprising that his many former students, faculty colleagues and friends would scrutinize a book that makes bombastic and conspiratorial charges against him.”

Gibson, the research associate at Greenpeace, tracks Koch-funded higher education programs. The fact that scholars have not cited their ties to Koch while using their academic affiliations to respond to MacLean is a fundamental problem, he said. And given that Koch money is central to MacLean’s narrative, he added, disclosure would matter in any kind of response to the book.

“This is how these guys get away with a guise of independence when their research hits the public realm, or the policy maker's desk,” he said, noting that many of the critiques he’s read focus solely on MacLean's preface -- the least referenced, most dramatized section of the book.

“MacLean has plenty of her own disclaimers in the book, often at times, I think, voluntarily undercutting her own legitimacy as an expert in this subject matter, for the sake of making it clear when she resorted to speculation or educated guesses,” Gibson said. “The rest is strongly footnoted. About a third of the entire text is references at the end.”

Gibson said that MacLean calls into question the entire premise of public choice economics, Buchanan’s field, with which many of her critics are affiliated. So they’re fighting like their professional lives depend on it, he said, and they’re fighting dirty.

Culture War on Academe

“The criticism is actually an incredible case study in the very thing that MacLean is exposing -- these guys are getting called out on wrapping very unpopular policy lobbying with words that the masses are more likely to support, to the point of dishonesty,” Gibson said. Government needs to “stay evil,” and universities need to stay "too liberal" for critics to maintain their legitimacy.

L. D. Burnett, a teaching fellow in history of the University of Texas at Dallas who has defended MacLean on social media, referred requests for comment to a recent blog postaddressing more attacks on the legitimacy of liberal academics more generally.

“The ‘culture war’ against higher education has been an astroturfed conflict, a well-funded propaganda campaign bankrolled for decades” by billionaires such as the Kochs, Burnett said. “‘Conservative’ figures from the business world (there is nothing conservative about unfettered capitalism that commodifies everything and makes ‘the market’ the arbiter of all moral questions) have funded a decades-long attempt to delegitimize higher education in the eyes of American citizens.”

Karl Jacoby, a professor of history at Columbia University who also has called public attention to MacLean’s case, said libertarians’ attacks on those who disagree with them are nothing new. But what makes MacLean’s case important “is the precedent that it sets,” he said via email. “If the current critiques end up undermining her book, it will embolden libertarian/conservatives to adopt similar tactics next time someone writes a history that calls into question some of the accepted tenets of their movement.”

As for questions some have raised about MacLean’s academic integrity in asking supporters to police online book reviews, Jacoby said authors try to “game” the Amazon review process all the time. It may be “something of a moral grey area,” he added, “but it is certainly not a major violation of ethics. It’s not as if she was interfering in the academic review process.”

Jacoby emphasized that debate about scholars’ historical methods is welcome. Yet the critiques of Democracy in Chains he’s read so far “have not grappled with these questions of historical method — perhaps not surprising, since almost all come from non-historians.” To say that MacLean’s selectively quotes from Buchanan’s writings, as Munger does, for example, “is a meaningless critique: all historians distill out key quotes from an otherwise vast body of documents. Similarly, Munger’s assertions that one has to exhibit ‘charity’ towards one’s subject and take their writings at face value would seem laughably naive to most historians.”

Tony Forde, a spokesperson for Viking, said via email that both MacLean and the publisher were declining comment on attacks on her credibility, “in hopes that they remain in their respective spheres, and we can reassert focus on the book itself. … We’re hoping to keep the attention on the book itself and the history it reveals, rather than the attacks that have appeared online.”

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For nearly half a century, billionaire Charles Koch has quietly funded, initiated, and supported efforts to dismantle democracy in the United States, two professors wrote for Progressive Magazine.

Nancy MacLean, the William H. Chafe distinguished professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, and Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research and a co-creator of the websites Koch Exposed and Koch Docs, detailed a seemingly never-ending list of ways one of the richest people in the world and his wealthy allies continue to “divide the American electorate.”

The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has long been funded by Koch and his late brother, David, has strategized on ways to enforce voter suppression efforts by passing voter ID laws – which began when Barack Obama was first elected in 2008.

Last year, the Center for Media and Democracy, for which Graves sits on the board, found that a handful of Koch-backed groups collectively spent more than $1 billion on the 2020 election.

One of the organizations, Americans for Prosperity, spent around $70 million leading up to the 2022 midterms, involving itself in over 450 races on efforts that heavily targeted swing voters.

Soon after the election, Koch released Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World, a book in which he claimed he was ready for “a final act building bridges across political divides.” No more political involvement. MacLean and Graves noted that a few days prior to the book release, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled, “Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake.”

The book even contained phrases like, “Boy, did we screw up.” “What a mess!” “This is crazy! Are we going to have a civil war?” He had convinced the public that his time toying with democracy was over.

But, MacLean and Graves said that “mainstream news editors seemed to forget that” they were reporting on “a specialist in strategic disinformation, who had perfected the practice of deceiving the public during his network’s three decades of climate change denial” – a mastermind of finesse.

Even with that, what Maclean and Graves call Koch’s “most diabolical” move thus far, is how he bandwagoned the “white supremacist” reaction to nationwide civil unrest following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, by initiating a campaign that geared fear-mongering language towards the idea of teaching race in schools – also known as critical race theory.

The Koch network proceeded to fund organizations that actively fought against CRT, although a spokesperson from a Koch-funded group claims that is untrue.

Two examples of Kock-backed anti-CRT initiatives include ALEC’s financial support of a workshop titled “Against Critical Theory’s Onslaught,” featuring the main figurehead of anti-CRT rhetoric, Christopher Rufo in 2020; and when a coalition of Koch-funded groups including the Manhattan Institute and Heritage Foundation advocated against the idea of teaching race in schools in a published letter.

Aside from funding organizations that promote anti-CRT language, Koch also funds Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) and Independent Women’s Voice (IWV), which work in tandem to promote anti-trans language. For example, the groups created a “Women’s Bill of Rights” which asserts that trans women are not women.

MacLean and Graves wrote, “Just as Koch-funded operations weaponize and intensify racism to secure political power, they also exploit and escalate misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia by any means to boost Republican power.”

Despite his claim that he was removing himself from politics two years ago, it’s clear that with the success of a majority conservative Supreme Court, the continued push to control the bodies of women; anti-CRT, anti-trans, and other discriminatory laws that Koch’s behind-the-scenes funding and staunch support of those who can bring he and his allies' vision of a fully dismantled democracy to life presses on.

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this year, CMD exposed how the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and right-wing groups like Convention of State Action are spending close to $25 million annually to push their stealth plan to rewrite the U.S. Constitution in order to lock in minority control and cripple the ability of the federal government to protect our rights, regulate big corporations, and deal with climate change.

Their goal? Forcing Congress to convene a constitutional convention that gives GOP leaders supermajority control over any amendments that get sent out to the states for ratification. And CMD released a report this year, “Convention of State Politicians,” documenting how voters would have zero say in the process.

But you don’t have to take my word for it.

CMD obtained audio from an ALEC meeting where former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum actually said, “We have the opportunity, [through a constitutional convention], to have a supermajority, even though we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.”

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https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2020/08/27/democracy-in-chains-author-nancy-maclean-says-u-s-pivotal-moment/3438951001/

libtard morality ~ all world religions eg help poor

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300 pp bk mention koch network

“Since We Are Greatly Outnumbered”: Why and How the Koch Network Uses Disinformation to Thwart Democracy Nancy MacLean

...The program offers a case study in corporate propaganda. In its bid to convince listeners that the American way of life depends on the free market – and that any move toward social democracy presents a threat – the show dramatizes argumentative and rhetorical procedures that continue to shape American political culture.

Chapter 5 by Nancy MacLean examines an important source of the strategic disinformation now rife in American public life: the Koch network of extreme right donors, allied organizations, and academic grantees. She argues that these architects of the radical transformation of our institutions and legal system have adopted the tactic of disinformation in the knowledge that the hard-core libertarian agenda was extremely unpopular, and therefore required stealth to succeed.

The chapter tells the story of how Charles Koch and his inner circle, having determined in the 1970s that changes significant enough to enable a “constitutional revolution” (in the words of the political economist James McGill Buchanan) would be needed to protect capitalism from democracy, then went about experimenting to make this a reality. In the 1980s, they first incubated ideas for misleading the public to move their agenda forward, as shown by the strategy for Social Security privatization that Buchanan recommended to Koch’s Cato Institute, and by the operations of Citizens for a Sound Economy, the network’s first astroturf – or fake grassroots – organizing effort.

Subsequent practices of active disinformation by this network, for a project that could not succeed by persuasion and organizing alone, become more comprehensible when understood as driven by a mix of messianic dogma and self-interest. Later cases include tobacco “scholarship” for hire by Buchanan’s colleagues at George Mason University to deter the public health campaign against smoking; climate science denial to stop action on global warming; promotion of the myth of mass voter fraud to leverage racism to restrict the electorate; assurances of the benefits of an Article V Constitutional Convention, restricted to a few pre-announced changes; and the use of concocted memes of violent mobs requiring restraint, in order to win passage of new legislation to criminalize protest, particularly against the fossil fuel industry.

The next section bridges the historical roots of the problem with the challenges of making contemporary policy to regulate these abuses of transparent communication. Chapter 6 by Dave Karpf explores how online conspiracy theories, disinformation, and propaganda have changed over the twenty-five-year history of the World Wide Web. Drawing a historical comparison between digital disinformation in the 1996 presidential election and the 2016 presidential election, the chapter explores how the mechanisms of online diffusion, the political economy of journalism and propaganda, and the slow, steady erosion of load-bearing norms among political elites have combined to create a much more dangerous context today than in decades past. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how technology platforms, political elites, and journalistic organizations might respond to the current state of online disinformation. Chapter 7 by Heidi Tworek explores five historical patterns in information manipulation and suggests how these patterns can guide contemporary policy-making about the Internet...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/1F4751119C7C4693E514C249E0F0F997/9781108843058AR.pdf/The_Disinformation_Age.pdf?event-type=FTLA

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very long

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cash_for_Comments_Economists_Network

The Cash for Comments network of 127 (in total over ten years) American Professors of Economics (with a few law and business professors), was one of the most successful, and long-lasting of all the scams run by the tobacco industry. It was the brain-child of Professor Robert D. Tollison at George Mason University's libertarian think-tank, the Center for the Study of Public Choice (CSPC), and James M Savarese of Ogilvy & Mather Public Relations.

Savarese later took the lobbying operation out of O&M and ran it through his own private lobbying company James Savarese & Associates with a skeleton staff -- and in partnership with Tollison and his wife Anna Tollison. Later Savarese turned up, once again, as a key lobbyist with Ogilvy Adams & Rinehart, so clearly this had always been a surreptitious O&M operation - kept at arms length and legally separated from that large company - probably for legal reasons.

Essentially, Savarese and Tollison recruited as network members at least one Professor of Economics in each State University (they were poorly paid and welcomed the chance to make money on the side). He used his list of members and associates within the Center for Study of Public Choice and the Public Choice Society which he jointly controlled with Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan at George Mason University.

The foundation document of this network was a memo "Excise Tax Speaking Forums" sent by Ogilvy & Mather to FredPanzer at the Tobacco Instituteon the 20th November 1984 [2]. It refers to a forum sponsored by the Public Choice Society to be held in New Orleans (Feb 21-23 1985) which had four core-group network speakers on a major panel, which was being organised for the tobacco industry by Tollison and Savarese. This early manifestation came to be called the Committee on Taxation & Economic Growth.

Public Choice Libertarian ideology

'Public Choice Economics' in the context of the day, was a catch-phrase meaning "free-markets, less government, reduced regulation" of goods and services. It was the ultra-libertarian economic ideology of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher which was followed (as much as he was capable of understanding it) by President Ronald Reagan in the USA. It's main emphasis was on deregulation of industries -- even those with poisoning and polluting proplems - and in Reagan's case it led to major scandals with the forced retirement of over 20 top staff from the EPA, and the hurried exit ofThorne Auchter as head of the Occupational Safety & Health Administration and his (later) lobbying partner J:{ames J Tozzias the administration's "Deregulation Czar" (Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs - OIRA/OMB).}:

Payment system

The tobacco industry paid no retainer fees to the general Cash-for-Comment network members. However they did retain some of the core network and paid higher fees to a half-dozen of the Society economist recruited as part of the Committee on Taxation & Economic Growth. Network members were employed purely on pay-for-service transactions, and expected to also make some extra cash from the newspapers which accepted their op-eds.

RELATED ENTRIES
Com. on Tax & Economic Growth
Economists' network
Robert Tollison & James Savarese
C4C Network Documents
C4C Network Members

Savarese and Tollison would put out a request to each network member, specifying the subject to be covered and including a few of the key themes to be promoted, together with any essential statistics. The professor-member was then expected to:

write an op-ed piece following the theme and guidelines provided (usually 1000-1500 words), but in layman's language.
send the article to the editor of a local city newspaper (specified by the minders). It was probably assumed that some would be paid a token freelance writer's fee by the newspaper. ($100-$250 at this time)
if the article was published (and many were since they were essentially free) then photocopies of the article were to be sent to two local Representatives or Congressmen (specified by the tobacco staff)
copies of the published piece would then be returned to Savarese for payment.

The professors would then be paid between$600 and $3000 for their efforts by way of the Center for the Study of Public Choice at George Mason University; the amount varied over time.

The articles were commissioned via Savarese's staff, and the draft article was expected to be returned to the Institute for checking. They would make any necessary changes, and pass it through one or more of their major outside law firms for vetting. Sometimes Savarese or his staff might make changes also. Newspapers were designated in each region, so two or more articles didn't conflict.If the article was published (and sometimes even if they weren't) copies were to a designated Representative or Senator, with a note bringing the economist's 'independent opinion' to the Congressman's notice.

They were also paid to write letters-to-the-editor whenever the opportunity arose to promote the cigarette industry's line. For a period in 1987-88 the network was extended to also include Professors of Law and Business.

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/7/14/15967788/democracy-shackles-james-buchanan-intellectual-history-maclean

version of this piece was first published in July. Last week, Democracy in Chains, by Nancy MacLean, was named a :{finalist for the National Book Award:(style="box-sizing:border-box;vertical-align:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}::]

It’s always hard in politics for people to take their opponents’ views seriously, but it’s become ever harder in Trump’s America. People are more engaged with politics, but only because they want to beat the other side, not understand it. This means scholars have a greater responsibility than ever to help ordinary citizens understand how the people with whom they disagree think, and what their opponents are actually doing.

Most scholars get this. Political scientists and historians, who admittedly tend to range from the political center to the left wing, have written extensively about the origins and development of American conservatism, for instance.*

This kind of work is not just important because it involves scholarly objectivity and generosity — although that is true. It also promotes smarter politics. Superficial scare narratives about the other side may make us feel good, but they can drive poor decision-making. Intelligent partisans want to understand what truly motivates their opponents so that they can learn from their adversaries and even steal their good ideas.

That brings us to Nancy MacLean’s much publicized, heavily praised (in some quarters) recent book on public choice economics, *Democracy in Chains*, which focuses on the role of Nobel Prize winner James Buchanan. Public choice economics is an approach that asks how special interests can seek “rents,” or income unrelated to economic productivity, by getting self-interested bureaucrats and government agencies to regulate in their favor. It examines the impact of institutional rules on economic outcomes, usually from the standpoint of an assumption that market processes naturally align with the public interest but governmental processes do not.

MacLean’s book, published by Penguin Random House, has been hailed as a kind of skeleton key to the rightward political turn in American political economy by intellectuals including the journalist Jamelle Bouie, who says he came away from the book :{“completely shook”:(style="box-sizing:border-box;vertical-align:inherit;font-style:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:; the novelist Genevieve Valentine, who says on NPR.org that the book demonstrates a :{“clear and present danger”:(style="box-sizing:border-box;vertical-align:inherit;font-style:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: to US democracy; and writers at publications such as :{Slate:(style="box-sizing:border-box;vertical-align:inherit;font-style:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: and :{Jacobin:(style="box-sizing:border-box;vertical-align:inherit;font-style:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:.

That the book has, quite amazingly, been shortlisted for a National Book Award will only increase its sales and influence.

A deep, historical study of public choice would be welcome, and Buchanan’s role in the development of the thought and organizational infrastructure of the right has generally been overlooked. Unfortunately, the book is an example of precisely the kind of work on the right that we do not need, and the intellectuals of the left who have praised it are doing their side no favors.

MacLean is undoubtedly correct that the ideas of Buchanan, an economist who taught at George Mason University, and his acolytes are important. Their writings reshaped the way we think about regulation, governments, and markets. For example, public choice economists have argued that many US Department of Agriculture rules for food are intended not to protect consumers, but to protect influential businesses from smaller competitors that have difficulty in complying with these standards. Public choice suggests that regulatory agencies are often “captured” by narrow interests, and that the best solution is often to minimize government bureaucrats’ ability to regulate.

This is undoubtedly a right-leaning understanding of economics and politics, and one that is limited as a guide to the actual operation of political institutions. But it provides a set of tools that should be in the organizational repertoire of any political thinker or activist. It can be turned to understanding businesses as well as politicians. Public choice–influenced economists like the University of Chicago’s Luigi Zingales are clearly right-wing, but they also provide important insights about how powerful businesses can systematically corrupt the political system. The Trump administration’s combination of sleaze and regulatory power is likely to provide many examples of the kind of government “capture” that public choice economists have warned against.[examples? participate im smash and grab?]

Conspiracy theory in the guise of intellectual history

MacLean, however, doesn’t want to explain how public choice economists think and argue. Instead, she portrays them as participants in a far-reaching conspiracy. She describes how a movement of “fifth columnists” that “congratulated itself on its ability to carry out a revolution beneath the radar of prying eyes” is looking to fundamentally undermine American democracy.

MacLean has argued that the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen has provided “a handbook for how to conduct a fifth column assault on democracy.” Washington Post/Getty Images

In language better suited to a Dan Brown novel than a serious nonfiction book, she describes Buchanan as an “evil genius,” and suggests he had a “diabolical” plan to permanently “shackle” democracy, so that the will of the majority would no longer influence government in core areas of the economy. In MacLean’s account, Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the contractual and constitutional bases of decision-making but is nearly unknown to the public, prepared the plan that the Koch brothers and other conservative funders and activists have been carrying out ever since. As she describes her discovery:

…a movement that prided itself, even congratulated itself, on its ability to carry out a revolution below the radar of prying eyes (especially those of reporters) had failed to lock one crucial door: the front door to a house that let an academic archive rat like me, operating on a vague hunch, into the mind of the man who started it all.

She says that the documents from this obscure archive demonstrate that Buchanan was the secret intellectual architect of the rise of the American right. As she describes it, Charles Koch:

…made clear he was looking for something, but what that something was, beyond a “technology” of revolution, remained unclear. When and where he found it is not: in the ideas of James Buchanan.

The problem, as we discuss at length elsewhere, is that MacLean doesn’t have the evidence that would even begin to support this extraordinary claim. Her claim that Koch found his “technology” in Buchanan’s ideas — technology that would produce “real world results” — rests on a gross misinterpretation of a speech by Koch in which he says nothing of the sort.

In fact, the speech (which is available on the internet) involves Koch showering praise on himself rather than Buchanan. The “technology” praised by Koch is the market-based approach exemplified by Koch’s own notorious home-spun management philosophy.

Arguments over quotations

While some on the left have hailed the book, libertarians and conservatives have attacked it online. Several have argued that MacLean misleadingly truncates quotes, to make it seem as if Buchanan and other libertarians such as Tyler Cowen are anti-democratic. While they obviously have a great deal of skin in the game, their critiques of the book have landed a number of solid blows.

For instance, when :{MacLean claims:(style="box-sizing:border-box;vertical-align:inherit;font-style:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: that Cowen is providing “a handbook for how to conduct a fifth column assault on democracy,” she cites as evidence Cowen’s statement that “the weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good outcome.” Unfortunately, she declines to provide the reader with the second half of the sentence, which goes on to note that “it would also increase the chance of a very bad outcome.”[evem moe context wd show he thinks worth the risk?]

MacLean’s supporters and critics have waged online guerrilla warfare over the question of whether this truncation was fair game. None of her partisans, however, have cared to defend her statement that this quote shows how Cowen was providing a handbook for fifth columnists. Nor, as she has claimed in interview, is the title of Cowen’s blog Marginal Revolution a signal to the illuminated that Cowen is undertaking a gradual revolution by stealth; it’s actually a well-known term for the birth of modern economics.

She accuses David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, of believing that “close to half of American society is intent on exploiting the rich” when he writes about a “parasite economy” of predators and prey. In fact, the :{predators Boaz is talking about:(style="box-sizing:border-box;vertical-align:inherit;font-style:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: are specific interests lobbying for subsidies, tariffs, quotas, or trade restrictions. While his claims can be contested, they are simply not what MacLean says they are.

MacLean’s critics on the right also argue that there is little to no evidence supporting her most important arguments, and some of her most trenchant examples. There is no strong evidence that Buchanan was motivated to rein in state power because he opposed Brown v. Board of Education, for instance, or helped Pinochet design his authoritarian constitution, despite MacLean’s insinuations to the contrary.

Those on the left might be inclined to think that the libertarian and conservative critics of the book are lashing out, or overemphasizing a few errors, because MacLean has revealed the dark side of one of their heroes and the unsavory modern history of their movement. Or alternatively, as MacLean has :{publicly claimed is the case:(style="box-sizing:border-box;vertical-align:inherit;font-style:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, one might see this criticism as a counter-campaign by “Koch operatives” aimed at discrediting her. Yet while we do not share Buchanan’s ideology — and we would love to read a trenchant critical account of the origins of public choice — we think the broad thrust of the criticism is right. MacLean is not only wrong in detail but mistaken in the fundamentals of her account.

Politics is partly about splitting the opposition and make political gains irreversible

Buchanan was not an evil genius who masterminded a new “‘technology’ of revolution” with profound practical consequences. Despite MacLean’s apparent shock, for example, the political tactics that Buchanan advocated are nothing unusual in politics. He advocated splitting the opposing coalition (liberals and the left), to win advantage for the pro-market agenda through stealthy tactics, and to change the terrain of politics to make the policy victories of his side hard to reverse.

Buchanan was no more inspired a political tactician than the average political scientist or economist, which is to say, not very inspired at all. As historical institutionalist political scientists have argued repeatedly, strategies of slow, incremental change are very commonly adopted by groups looking to alter an apparently immovable status quo. So too are policies that are intended deliberately to create (or split) coalitions to protect (or undermine) institutions.

The architects of the welfare state used such stratagems to hide their true intentions and entrench the welfare state so deeply that future politicians would be unable to roll it back. Entire books by mainstream scholars like Brown University’s Eric Patashnik, the late Martha Derthick, and the University of Oregon’s Alison Gash have explored these topics, focusing mainly (although not exclusively) on the center left.

FDR famously observed of the decision to fund Social Security through a payroll tax, “We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. … With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”

From one perspective, Buchanan was trying to stop a revolution, not start one

Indeed, what Buchanan and others thought they were doing is more aptly described as trying to undo the advantages won by their left-wing opponents, who had succeeded in building a welfare state that seemed immune to fundamental reform, even when Republicans held the presidency and both houses of Congress. Where MacLean accuses Buchanan and those he influenced of undemocratic schemes for political entrenchment, they saw themselves as engaging in a strategy of counter-entrenchment. At least in this if in nothing else, it really is the case that “everyone does it.”

If Democracy in Chains were just another overheated partisan book, it wouldn’t be worth discussing. Yet the book was written by a highly respected professor in a first-rate department, and was published by a major trade press — and has been acclaimed by well-known figures on the left (and now shortlisted for a major prize). There is every reason to believe it will shape how those on our side [?]of the political spectrum understand the history and strategies of their adversaries.

Why have so many left-wing readers embraced such a transparently flawed book? The most persuasive explanation is that MacLean confirms and extends their deep preexisting suspicions. The book tells them how a single man with a single plan united neoliberal economists, the Kochs, and Republican operatives in a secretive plot against democracy, before he was undone in an internecine clash with Charles Koch, which MacLean depicts as a titanic clash between two ambitious leaders. Leftists and liberals are left with the belief that their opponents are all working in coordination, implementing a single master plan with fiendish efficiency, while they themselves are in hapless disarray.

MacLean’s book is only the latest to make this kind of “master plan” argument, which more typically tends to focus on the so-called “Powell memo” of 1971, written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. (MacLean also discusses the memo, which urged business to organize and wield its power to preserve “the American economic system,” which Powell thought was under siege.) Seemingly unbeknownst to MacLean, the claims that the memo was the master plan for conservative mobilization has been shrunk down to size by a number of scholars (including Teles’s own The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, which MacLean cites extensively).

Conservatives have their own versions of a mythology portraying opponents as secretive plotters, focusing on such supposed puppet masters as George Soros, Saul Alinsky, and Frances Fox Piven. Each side assumes the existence of a flawless, ruthlessly executed plan on the other side, while bemoaning the chaos and excessive scruples that beset their own allies. It is always tempting to think that the other side is more organized, more motivated, and more seamlessly united than they are, since all one can see are their successes, and not the compromises, mistakes, and frustrations that lie behind those successes.

If you believe your opponents work through secret cabals, your own strategic thinking gets distorted

If what MacLean writes were true, the obvious solution for liberals and the left would be to come up with their own centralized approach. The problem, however, is that it is not true at all. In fact, the historical record suggests that the most successful conservatives, including the wealthy individuals and foundations who helped fund public choice economics, didn’t start with a preconceived master plan. They did not commit wholeheartedly to any one strategy but instead spread their bets across a portfolio of different people and organizations, understanding that most of them would probably fail but hoping that a few would survive and work.

As Koch describes his actual strategy in the document that MacLean so completely misinterprets, he supported hundreds of scholars with “many different approaches because, to me, this is an experimental process to find the best people and strategies

Public choice economics was certainly one of the success stories — but even it flourished in unexpected ways. Within economics, it remains a minority approach, but it has had a profound influence on legal and public policy thinking, including among those on the center left (such as ourselves).

Public choice economics succeeded in part because it had valuable things to say. Politicians indeed sometimes care more about reelection than doing the right thing. Voters often fail to pay attention, allowing lobbyists to persuade politicians to enact regulations that favor the few rather than the many. These arguments may have been best articulated by right-wing thinkers, but they have value for the left too, because they identify real problems. When MacLean depicts people like Buchanan and Cowen as wicked monsters, out to destroy democracy, she excludes the possibility that she or her readers could learn from them.

The left and center left should accept that not only do their opponents not have any grand master plan but that having a grand master plan is probably a bad idea. Like conservatives in an earlier era, they should recognize the limits of their knowledge and capacity to see the future, and diversify their strategies. Some of these strategies will involve mass mobilization like that pioneered by the Indivisible movement, Black Lives Matter, and Bernie Sanders supporters. Others will involve more traditional retail politics, or building strange-bedfellows coalitions with people on the right who are frustrated and angry at Donald Trump. Others still will involve building up the intellectual infrastructure for new understandings of politics.

As the political theorist Nancy Rosenblum has observed, good partisans don’t stick to their preconceptions but instead are always scrutinizing the public and their adversaries, figuring out how to amass the votes and resources they need to win elections. In a chaotic political environment, the best way to do this is to encourage experimentation, so as to figure out what works and build on it. That — not sinister Machiavellian plans — is the real lesson of the political success of public choice economics.

*There are too many examples of informative, responsible scholarship by left-leaning and center-left scholars to list. But Rick Perlstein, an independent historian, has written intelligently and sensitively on the Barry Goldwater movement and the rise of the modern US right. Angus Burgin, a Johns Hopkins historian, has thoroughly dug into the history of the Mont Pelerin Society, founded by the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek in 1947: He showed how a transnational network of free market thinkers helped change the global conversation on political economy. One of us (Teles) devoted years to making sense of how conservative foundations helped shape the academic discipline of law and economics, built the Federalist Society, and supported criminal justice reform.

Henry Farrell is professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, where he has a particular interest in the politics of economic ideas. His bookThe Political Economy of Trust was published by Cambridge University Press. Find him on Twitter :{:{@henryfarrell:(style="box-sizing:border-box;vertical-align:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;vertical-align:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:.

Steven Teles is an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow at theNiskanen Center. He is the co-author (with Brink Lindsey) of the forthcoming The Captured Economy (Oxford), co-author of Prison Break (Oxford), and author of The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement(Princeton).

:{The Big Idea:(style="box-sizing:border-box;vertical-align:inherit;font-style:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at :{thebigidea@vox.com:(style="box-sizing:border-box;vertical-align:inherit;font-style:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OmK2K2KZ0BOeM-h70y2h637IyZgt2qMmf8perHJWE5Q/edit?usp=sharing

PM sum 17 pp

Democracy in Chains

The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

by Nancy MacLean

Book Summary

An explosive exposé of the right's relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, and change the Constitution.

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.

excerpt:

https://www.bookbrowse.com/bb_briefs/detail/index.cfm/ezine_preview_number/12452/democracy-in-chains

Ga platts:

don't know if anyone would be interested to discuss Democracy in Chains (written by the Duke University professor we listened to at the last meeting) but I read the book and here is an outline of the problem as I understand it:

Democracy in Chains

Duke University history professor Nancy McLean:

On the surface it seems that Republicans "merely" prefer private over public and that wealthy interests want more for themselves and less for the middle class and poor.

It’s actually even worse: the Koch network has commandeered the Republican Party (whether GOP members realize it or not) with this goal: attack democracy.

The Koch network mindset: Democracy is bad

No fair that the majority of Americans can vote to tax the rich to pay for things like clean air and water, safe workplaces, public education… It’s like highway robbery. And you can’t convince them otherwise.

So majority rule is bad.

Goal: End majority rule— MUCH SUCCESS SO FAR

They use playbook of Vladimir Lenin and other authoritarians to create revolutions w/small numbers. (a la Koch, Mercer + Bannon, the Leninist)

The Mont Pelerin Society (Koch belongs to) advised Pinochet’s takeover of democracy.

Structural Changes under Pinochet that sound familiar: Transform judiciary. Privatize (e.g., social security, health care, school vouchers). Deregulate. Fragment group power (anti-union etc). Chilean Pay-go, balanced budget, super majority rule, voting restrictions overrepresent right-wing. Control media. (Hmmm, Freedom Caucus — freedom for whom?)

Tactics:

Given the reverence for the US Constitution a direct attack could prove disastrous, said Tyler Cowen. So:

Piecemeal but mutually reinforcing attacks on democracy

Tactic 1: Change the rules so a majority can’t force progressive taxes

Balanced budget. Law, constitutional change ordering a balanced budget: makes increases in public spending nearly impossible
PAYGO rule that new spending must be paid for/offset — makes increases in public spending difficult
2011 Obama/GOP spending cap compromise makes it difficult to boost investment in education, scientific research, transportation etc

Tactic 2: Interpret law to bind majority rule

Train judgesat libertarian institutes and fancy retreats. e.g., Kennedy and Scalia

Appoint judges who:

Favor unlimited campaign spending: corporations are people and $ = speech
Rule in favor of wealthy individuals and corporations over ordinary Americans
Don't allow class-action lawsuits (which equalize power between ordinary Americans and elite interests)

No wonder they stood strong against Merrick Garland

Tactic 3: Suppress voter participation

Suppress voter turnout
Gerrymander

Tactic 4: Anti-collectivism

Collectivism equalizes power between ordinary Americans and elite interests
Anti-union
Anti-civil rights, women's rights, etc.
- Attack feminism which is "socialistic for no apparent reason"
Anti-education. 1) nurtures community values – which is bad 2) gets people to think — also bad. (So: no public education, no grants/low interest loans, don't compensate teachers for materials they buy)
Corporations include contract clauses preventing class-action lawsuits and compelling employees to accept arbitration in which corporations write the rules and choose the decision-makers. Citizens lose constitutional right to sue in court

Tactic 5: Manipulate public opinion

The electorate is seen as 1) busy, distracted and uninformed, 2) hardwired to resist reasoned evidence — thus easily manipulable

Suppress the press
Call reliable news sources like the NYT “fake news” as a tool of authoritarian regimes who want to control media
Fixate on private peccadilloes to leave citizens jaded and suspicious
Spread rumors, gossip, conspiracy via the Internet

Tactic 6: Trick the middle classinto voting against their interests

Example: weaken appeal of Social Security

Successful programs like Social Security and Medicare add legitimacy to the work of government and must be destroyed.
Diminish its reputation by calling it a Ponzi scheme
Warn young people that it will go broke and not be around when they need it
Charge rich people more so they will see it as welfare, weakening support
Divide and conquer:
- Allow those already receiving SS to keep it

(since they will fight hardest for it)

- Those who miss the deadline will resent those who have it
- Tell young people they are subsidizing old people (and SS might not be there when they need it)
Weaken Social Security while claim to protect it — have the rich pay more, etc.
Identify who would benefit from ending Social Security: the financial sector. Make private retirement savings more remunerative to the industry: IRAs.

Liberals miss thestrategic use of privatization to limit democracy

Example: 2017 "Tax Reform”

Enclude small middle-class tax cuts that sunset and call it a “middle class tax cut plan”
Reduce tax brackets to 3 — eventually just one. Claim it’s simplification. But they’re actually trying to end progressive taxation.

Tactic 7: Weaken Institutions

Destroy institutions: appoint cabinet heads who want to destroy their departments
Destroy the deep state. Destroy the administrative state a la Bannon/Mercer

Destroying institutions supports autocratic rule

Tactic 8: State power-grab

The states are most easily manipulable because people and press pay more attention at the federal and local levels

Legislators deny municipal governments the right to make their own policies
- Preemption laws deny localities the right to adopt policies that apart from network-dominated state legislatures (minimum wage, environmental measures, discrimination measures)
- Flint, MI water crises. Koch network pushed hard for legislation to allow the governor to take over all aspects of local government facing a financial emergency. Powers include: impose austerity measures, abrogate collective bargaining, outsource services, privatize local resources, change suppliers at will. By 2009 more than half the economically troubled state’s black voters were under this governance. A city commissioner called it "dictatorship, plain and simple.” To save money Flint switched the city water supply to the polluted Flint River. Officials were protected by a law protecting managers from lawsuits.

Tactic 9: Change Constitution

Amend the constitution to weaken checks and balances and make it all but impossible for government to respond to the will of the majority unless the wealthiest agree
A constitutional convention. McLean doesn't mention this in her book but many states are voting to have a constitutional convention — which could be used to strictly bind majority rule.

Tactic 10: Shock-and-awe

Shock-and-awe push to implement radical change in record time, sans customary transparency or deliberative process

Dispense with multiple democratic constraints on economic liberty
Colossal displays of force to shock the population into submission

Ignited with the right opportunity (major terrorist attack or a war to create crisis and become excuse to limit our rights?)

The goal is not shrinking government

The resulting government would be authoritarian.

Federal courts would be given vast powers to strike down measures desired by voters and passed by elected representatives.
Police powers would be greatly expanded to control popular anger.

The Koch network wants democracy curbed as Chile's was, with locks and bolts on what the majority can do

What will post-Koch America look like?

Koch network is against everything but national defense and public safety.

Libertarian Tyler Cowen matter-of-factly describes the libertarian future America: widespread shantytowns that resemble Mexico or Brazil (Zika infested since no funds for public health).

Make America a third world country!?
Pottersville trumps Bedford Falls
Freedom only for a wealthy elite. Oppress everyone else.

Pro-democracy forces must unite and educate

Since the network gathers intelligence on liberal opponents resistance would be most successful if it's widespread so they can’t keep track of everyone.

Progressive activist groups. Daily Kos, Indivisible (Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg), Swing Left (Ethan Tordras-Whitehill), Together We Will, et al, liberal churches
Progressive activists. Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, Gloria Steinem…
Good governance groups: Common Cause, American Progress…
Liberal Think Tanks
News Media. New York Times. Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, POTUS radio, Progressive Radio…
- Left: Paul Krugman, David Leonhardt, Frank Bruni
- Right: Joe Scarborough, David Brooks, Charlie Sykes, David Frum …
Comedy: Stephen Colbert, Daily Show, Bill Maher, SNL…
Celebrities. Make a movie? Aaron Sorkin script and George Clooney stars? Michael Moore? Holly Mosher
Progressive billionaires join the fight. Gates, Buffet, Soros… Tech industry
Lobby lobbyists: Koch-world would collapse economy. Evaporate demand as redistribute wealth from middle class and poor to the top
Republicans who aren't bought? Susan Collins, John McCain… (Many Republicans probably don't know that they're working against democracy — Koch network doesn’t like to let on — but you can't necessarily count on them. Collins and McCain have not been in lock step. Maybe they can help block the GOP majority from anti-democratic legislation)

The Koch network works via stealth.

"Sunlight is the best of disinfectants.” (Louis Brandeis)

https://www.c-span.org/video/?441346-28/open-phones-nancy-maclean

MARCH 11, 2018

Open Phones with Nancy MacLean Professor Nancy MacLeantalked about her book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,

https://www.c-span.org/video/?441345-15/panel-discussion-trump-administration

MARCH 10, 2018

Panel Discussion on the Trump Administration A discussion on the Trump administration from the 10th annual Tucson Festival of Books that featured Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency; David Cay Johnston, It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration is Doing to America; Katy Tur, Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American HIstory, and John Nichols, Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Nancy-MacLean-Responds-to-Her/240699?cid=rclink

july 19

...Chronicle Review asked Nancy MacLean to comment on the uproar sparked by her new book, Democracy in Chains (Viking). Through her publicist, MacLean, a professor of history and public policy at Duke University, agreed to respond to questions submitted via email. Our questions and her answers, below, have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Describe the experience of coming under attack for your book.

The personal attacks have been a shock. Knowing I’m not the first helps, though. As I say in the book, climate scientists and investigative reporters, among others, have received similar treatment from right-wing critics when they published their work.

What’s your general reaction to the controversy over your book, which started with critiques from libertarians but has now come to encompass attacks from a few critics on the left as well?

On the one hand, it’s been disheartening that people — in particular, some scholars — are willing to criticize the book without having read it. On the other hand, people have pointed out to me that sometimes a vehement reaction can be a backhanded compliment: This kind of strong reaction can suggest that a work is timely and important and lead more people to want to check it out.

Many on social media have been circulating a message said to be from you in which you call for help and attack your critics for trying to destroy your reputation. Can you confirm that you wrote this message?

Yes. In short order one afternoon, after a string of very positive reviews and interviews, a number of things happened. Misleading critiques from the right had shot up so far on Google that if you searched my name, you saw these critiques before any of my usual personal or professional information (department webpage and such). Very combative "reviews" were appearing on Amazon from people who appeared not to have read the book but to be recycling the talking points from these critiques in sometimes crude terms. Someone, unbeknownst to me, had set up a Wiki page on me that featured the attacks.

And some of the comments were vicious. On Mises Wire, one commenter wrote, "No doubt she’s a rabid feminazi, anti-Southerner, socialist and pathologically focused on race and gender. She’s a historical victimologist who produces nothing of value." That same commenter actually supplied information on my home — he had gone so far as to look up where I lived.

Needless to say, the combined impact was unnerving. It made me feel vulnerable and exposed (which may have been their intent).

Do you have any evidence for your claim in that Facebook message that the attacks on your work are "coordinated"?

I’m not saying they called each other up and planned a series of critical responses to my book. What I’m saying is many of the critics come from similar backgrounds — they are libertarians who trained at or are employed by the very institutions I write about in my book.

And some of the rhetoric has been quite threatening. Jonah Goldberg, senior editor of National Review, said I should worry about the "the libertarian super-posse on my ass."

At times, the debate over your book has felt more like a political campaign fight — with partisans on both sides digging in, sometimes without even having read the book — than a discussion of a work of scholarship. What do you make of that? And how do you characterize your own politics?

The initial reviews and commentary from scholars and journalists (of no particular partisan persuasion) were based on careful reading and thoughtful engagement. And scholars and regular readers who have read the book continue to offer fact-based, well-reasoned responses to the critics, who often seem to be arguing ideologically more than factually. I have been really impressed with the corrective power of the community of fair-minded scholars.

Nevertheless, it has been disheartening how many people are willing to criticize the book without reading it. I take that as another sign of our troubling political moment. And yet this moment did not arise of nowhere. In my book, I tell the story of some of the actors who helped create the current toxicity, by making conscious efforts to poison public life to achieve their ends. As an example, I offer this quote from Grover Norquist: "We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals — and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship."

As to my own politics, I am a politically progressive person who believes deeply in democracy and fair play. Today, both my research and my observations as a citizen lead me to believe American democracy is in peril. That’s why I was willing to write this book and to risk incurring the wrath of libertarians.

Critics say that your book’s arguments leap far beyond what the evidence supports, or, worse, that you distort or make up evidence to further your case. A couple of libertarian critics focused on the aspects of your book related to Brown v. Board of Education, John C. Calhoun, and the Agrarian poets and their connection to Buchanan’s thought. Henry Farrell, a political scientist on the left at George Washington University, points to your discussion of a document Buchanan wrote laying out a strategy for dividing the coalition of groups who supported the welfare state. You suggest this was a kind of master plan that shaped much of the American right, but Farrell thinks you fail to provide evidence either for the crucial role played by this document or that Buchanan himself was more than a midlevel intellectual within a much larger movement. What’s your response?

Two of the aforementioned fair-minded scholars have written lengthy corrections to the incorrect claims regarding Brown v. Board of Ed and the midcentury Southern aspect of the book, which I highly recommend reading.

As for Farrell’s claim, I guess we have a different understanding of what would constitute adequate evidence. In the document in question, Buchanan was providing the Cato Institute with counsel for its then-top policy priority: privatization of Social Security, which Buchanan expressly pointed out had no support from any demographic group of voters, so he proposed an indirect approach designed to mislead the public about the true intent. Cato and the wider radical right have since pursued the strategy he urged. As for the second claim, of course Buchanan was part of a much larger movement. My book makes that abundantly clear. But it also shows how his ideas provided that long-marginal movement with something it had never had before: an analysis with which to create an operational strategy to take down the liberal state. And I have solid evidence for the difference that strategy made to the current success of the right.

The anger over my linking Buchanan with Calhoun at least brought me a moment of levity. George Mason’s Donald Boudreaux called it "astonishing" that I drew a parallel between Buchanan’s political economy and that of John C. Calhoun. Yet it was not I but Boudreaux’s own colleagues at George Mason’s Mercatus Center, Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, who called the antebellum South Carolina senator’s thought "a precursor of modern public choice theory" and concluded that the two systems of thought had "the same purpose and effect."

But, look, Buchanan was a gentleman, generous and kind with students and colleagues who shared his commitments and was well-liked by them in return.

And I’m getting the sense from the complaints of movement insiders that they view the book as disrespectful to heroes of the cause.

So it’s perhaps important for everyone to understand that I did not set out to critique Buchanan or other libertarians as human beings. I was not writing a biography or biographies. I was looking at these scholars’ ideas and tracing the impact of those ideas.

This is a group that has been insular since its founding. Now its members are confronted with an outsider’s view of their history. And they don’t like what they’re seeing in the mirror Democracy in Chains puts up to them.

The left-wing historian Rick Perlstein wrote in a Facebook post, "The foundation of the entire book is a conspiracy theory that suggests that if you understand THIS ONE SECRET PLAN, you understand the rise of the right in America in its entirety. Which suggests you don’t need to understand any of a score of other important tributaries. … That you don’t need to read anything else. Which is actively dangerous to historical understanding." Perlstein was commenting on an article by Farrell and the political scientist Steven Teles. Its basic thrust was that your book caricatures its right-wing subjects in a way that does a disservice to political discussion and even misleads those on the left and center searching for a way forward. What’s your response to Perlstein, Farrell, and Teles?

As a scholar, I would never say "you don’t need to read anything else." Of course there were other tributaries feeding the right; we have a huge body of scholarship now that explores them, much of which I cite in the 60 pages of endnotes that document the text. But my work draws attention to a missing piece of the puzzle that had been ignored, one that puts the current alarming state of our politics in an illuminating new light.

As for Farrell and Teles, I have to assume, based on what they wrote, that they did not give my book a close reading. My book is not a history of public choice (which I explained was broader than the Virginia variant on which I focused). The book traces the history of an idea — the idea of enchaining modern democratic government, as developed by James Buchanan. It shows how that idea came to appeal to an extremely wealthy and messianic individual, Charles Koch, who has harnessed it and organized other extremely wealthy donors to fund efforts, staffed by thousands of people, to radically alter our government in ways that will be devastating to millions of people and already seem to be producing an utterly unsustainable society in terms of social norms and governance.

What’s your response to critics who take issue with how you represent public-choice economics?

Those who read beyond the introduction will find that I credit some of the truly original insights of public-choice economics, among them Buchanan’s explanation of why governments run deficits in periods of prosperity, not just during recessions.

Indeed, some scholars working in the public-choice tradition who are not part of the libertarian movement have written to me to praise how the book situates the development of Buchanan’s idea of enchaining democracy in its historically specific formative context — and also for showing how once-stimulating ideas can ossify into ideology impervious to question or factual correction.

Some of the criticism from others is, frankly, bizarre. For example, the book devotes a whole chapter, backed by original research, to Buchanan’s work in Chile. He was invited there to advise on the Pinochet junta’s Constitution of 1980. The book quotes both the leading regime newspaper on Buchanan’s counsel and his own letter of thanks to a top regime official. Yet the "review" that is ricocheting around the right as the best critique of the book simply pronounces: "Nothing to see here." That’s dogma, not analysis.

Most disturbing, though, is how many of the book’s critics fail to disclose their financial indebtedness to the cause whose history my book explores. The book is critical of the network of think tanks and foundations that operate with aid from the Koch brothers. Many of the critics have benefited from grants from the Koch Foundation or related groups. Yet very few have acknowledged that financial relationship. And that’s troubling because full disclosure of such income is Ethics 101, as it calls into question the recipient’s ability to remain unbiased.

One critic, Jason Brennan of Georgetown University, went so far as to say , "I look forward to seeing Duke fire her." What kind of response, if any, have you seen from Duke?

Duke made its assessment of my scholarship clear in recruiting me from Northwestern University in 2010 with a chaired position like the one I was appointed to there, and then appointing me to the Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professors Advisory Committee, to vet the scholarship of other nominees for distinguished named chair positions. In answering this brouhaha, my department chair and many university colleagues have sent messages of concern and condemnation of the ad hominem character of so many of these attacks — and congratulations for the very enthusiastic reception of the book outside the precincts of libertarianism.

But, really, a call to fire me? I love this "Off with her head!" incitation, because it demonstrates the eagerness to abuse power in this self-styled liberty movement that I found in the primary sources. Such rhetorical bullying would be laughable if it weren’t part of a pattern on the right of escalating attempts to intimidate scholars who disagree with them. As early as 1969, James Buchanan outlined a strategy to transform higher education so that it served the interest of the right wing. I describe that vision and its current application in the book.

Some critics have made a note of the fact that the book was not peer reviewed. Is this true? And, if so, how different would the book be if it had been peer reviewed? Do you think it would’ve come under fire from critics regardless?

Another desperate charge. Just because the book was not published with a university press does not mean it was not peer reviewed. I hold myself to high standards of scholarship and eagerly seek peer input at every stage. Three distinguished and exacting area historians critiqued every chapter in draft. I sought out specialist readings from scholars of Virginia history, political theory, political economy, intellectual history, public sector labor history, Latin American history, and more.

I doubt the book would have caused the same uproar if it had come from a university press, not because it would have been better but because few would have noticed it outside the academy; it would not have changed the public conversation. What’s upsetting the right wing is that Democracy in Chains is reaching the public and the media.

Has anyone made a criticism of the book that you think has merit? What are those criticisms and how do you respond?

Yes. For example, Sam Tanenhaus, in his otherwise favorable review in The Atlantic, said, "a movement isn’t the same thing as a conspiracy. One openly declares its intentions. The other keeps them secret. It’s not always clear that MacLean recognizes the difference." As a scholar, I understand the problems of conspiracy theories and while I never called this movement a conspiracy in the book, we do face a problem that our language has not caught up to our world.

In hindsight, I wish I’d said more about that in my book because we do not yet have a conceptual system adequate to capture what is happening. On the one hand, yes, absolutely, there is a big movement out there on the right that has varied sources and whose many members are openly declaring their intentions. On the other hand, there is also an audacious elite project underway that is not open with even these rank-and-file followers about its endgame.

Economic inequality has now advanced to the point that several hundred incredibly wealthy donors, who are hostile to our democracy as it currently operates and are led by a messianic multibillionaire, have contributed vast amounts of dark money to fund dozens upon dozens of ostensibly separate but actually connected organizations that are exploiting what Buchanan’s team taught about "the rules of the game" of modern governance in a cold-eyed bid to bend our institutions and policies to goals they know most voters do not share (such as the repeal of Obamacare without replacement).

And they’re operating within the law, informed by some of the best legal talent money can buy, so it’s not a conspiracy, by definition, because that involves illegality. The world has never seen anything like it before; no wonder it’s hard to find the right term to depict it. It’s a vexing challenge to understand, let alone stop, and in hindsight I wish had been more explicit about that conceptual challenge. But so far no criticism has made me question the fundamentals of the research, the narrative, or the interpretation. I stand by those.

Any broader thoughts on the state of scholarship and academic debate spurred by this episode?

The modus operandi of today’s right wing goes well beyond normal book reviewing and customary academic debate. "Nancy MacLean is Either Grossly Incompetent or a Liar," is a sample headline. Yet this mock debate is not really about me, at the end of the day. When discussion about ideas and research gives way to insulting swagger and personal attacks, the more important damage is to our civic discourse and our society’s institutions.

In the past, publishers and media outlets often assumed "both sides are equally at fault." Those assumptions may have once applied, but in the current context they rarely do. We are experiencing what Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann called "asymmetric polarization," in a book aptly titled It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. The coarsening of dialogue that we often now see from the radical right is hurting people, norms, and all that enables a society to work. In order to deal with this shift effectively, we need to stop reacting case by case and understand the trouble as systemic. That’s part of the message of my book.

Anything else that I didn’t ask that you’d like to add?

One thing has really stood out for me. For all the thousands of words that they have written, my critics still fail to engage the central message of the book: Leading libertarian thinkers concluded they could never win over the majority to their agenda. Therefore, they decided to achieve their utopia by attempting to radically change the rules of governance in order to change society.

In their writings, Buchanan and other libertarian thinkers lay out a vision for a certain kind of society. It’s a society where capitalism has free rein and the rights of the wealthy few are protected, while the many are prevented from exercising countervailing power. It’s a society where government is so shrunken as to be unrecognizable. In the country they envision, most protections that benefit average Americans have vanished: Social Security has been abolished, worker and public-health protections are gone, and public schools are shuttered in favor of private education. It’s a country where national parks and water supplies are sold to the highest bidder.

That’s not a country most Americans would recognize. And it’s not a country most of us, from any political party, would want to inhabit. Yet it’s the America Charles Koch and his fellow donors dream of bringing into being by applying Buchanan’s insights. It’s critical to bring this vision out into the open, so we can have honest debate about the kind of country we want. That’s why Buchanan’s vision of enchaining democracy — and the frightening degree to which it has become a reality — is a central focus of my book.

Marc Parry

CHE july

Polemical books often provoke a strong response. But the argument over a new intellectual history of the right has played out with unusual intensity. A phalanx of largely libertarian critics has waged an online battle against the Duke University historian who wrote the book, Nancy MacLean, accusing her of scholarly misdeeds so egregious that she should be stripped of tenure, fired, and perhaps sued. MacLean’s sympathizers have also quickly dug in, branding the criticism a Koch-backed smear campaign. Scholars on both sides manned their ramparts without actually reading the entire book.

Confirmation Bias Unchained: Nancy Maclean on James Buchanan, the History of Public Choice Theory, and Libertarianism

20 Pages Posted: 10 Aug 2017

Steven Horwitz

Ball State University

Date Written: July 24, 2017

Abstract

A review essay on Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains prepared for Cato Journal.

Keywords: Public Choice, Libertarian, James Buchanan

JEL Classification: B25, B31, D70

interview

https://newrepublic.com/article/143561/rights-war-liberal-democracy

The Right’s War Against Liberal Democracy

Nancy MacLean discusses her new book about James McGill Buchanan, who helped shape the modern right’s antipathy toward democracy itself.

BY ALEX SHEPHARD

June 27, 2017

James McGill Buchanan, the political economist who died in 2013, had a hand in some of the most important ideological developments in the American right in the 20th century. From the 1950s to the late 1990s, when a spat with the influential billionaire Charles Koch led to his retirement, he was seemingly everywhere. Starting with Brown v. Board of Education, which he abhorred, Buchanan helped jumpstart the resistance to integration and the right’s embrace of school vouchers; worked to reduce the power of unions and the public’s trust in the government and the welfare state; and assisted Pinochet in Chile and the Kochs in America.

Above all, he was a theorist who believed that democracy and liberty—defined as free market capitalism—were incompatible and that it was necessary to limit participatory democracy to protect the property rights of the extremely wealthy. Though he did no empirical work, he was remarkably influential in the field of public choice theory, which essentially argued that markets could never fail and governments always did.

Four years after Buchanan’s death, he is largely forgotten—but his vision of a government with little power over schools, housing, or health care, toiling in the shadows of wealthy individuals and corporations, is closer than ever to being realized. Thankfully, the historian Nancy MacLean has documented Buchanan’s influence over both the Kochs and contemporary politics in a remarkable new book, Democracy in Chains, which argues that the radical right revolution engineered by Charles and his brother David is not just about accruing political and economic power, but about restricting democracy itself.

Democracy in Chains exposes the frightening intellectual roots of the radical right, as well as its ultimate ambition: to erode American democracy. I spoke to MacLean, who teaches at Duke University, about Buchanan’s remarkable life, the “velocity of change” that has occurred in America over the past six months, and how Donald Trump fits into all of this. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

James Buchanan has largely existed in the shadow of Milton Friedman, despite the fact that both won the Nobel Prize in Economics. How did you first encounter his work? Why do you think it has largely flown under the radar?

I had never heard of him either! Ten years ago when I started the research that ultimately became this book, I was interested in learning how the case for vouchers—for breaking down the government monopoly on schooling, as it was put—was first made popular in response to Brown v. Board of Education. I started looking into what happened in Virginia, which was shutting down its schools to defy the federal courts and shift public monies to new, all-white private schools that were beyond the reach of the Supreme Court. When I discovered Milton Friedman had intervened in that debate with his 1955 manifesto for vouchers, and found that others were picking up that case and pushing it in Virginia, I thought, “Wow. What’s going on here?” He was talking about a free society, but was providing academic ammunition for Virginia’s most ardent segregationists and repressive political figures.

“This worldview does not recognize that private, economic power has a capacity to coerce.”

So, at first I was on the trail of Milton Friedman. But Buchanan kept appearing. He authored a very important 1959 report that he circulated to state legislatures, and ultimately published in newspapers to try and get the state to essentially privatize the public education system—before we had “privatize” as a verb. Then I discovered that he had won the Nobel prize and invented this new school of thought: the Virginia school of political economy, which focused on political actors and public life.And then someone alerted me to a footnote that argued that the Virginia school had played a more important and lasting role in Chile under Pinochet than the Chicago school.

I had those two data points and I started to become more and more interested in Buchanan. I moved to North Carolina in 2010 just as the Tea Party was winning the majority in the General Assembly. As I watched this program roll out, which was being advertised by the Koch affiliate here as a Big Bang approach to social change, I realized, “Oh my gosh, this is what Buchanan was talking about!” I was struggling through this obtuse theory while seeing it being rendered concrete in my own state. Then, after he died in 2013, I got into his archives and found out I wasn’t crazy. In fact, his ideas really were guiding so much of what we have been seeing unfold.

Buchanan argues that any action by a political movement is coercive because they’re often attacks on the property rights of (extremely wealthy) individuals. And yet, individuals and corporations are never seen as being coercive, even as they accumulate massive amounts of power.

This worldview does not recognize that private, economic power has a capacity to coerce. They trace back to [antebellum slavery advocate and Vice President] John C. Calhoun. These libertarians, particularly Murray Rothbard, said that Calhoun gave them their fundamental core concepts. These concepts included that it’s government that creates exploitation, and that it’s the government that creates coercion, whereas private economics is about freedom and free exchange. All you have to know is that Calhoun was a slaveholder—a man making his wealth from keeping other people in shackles. This is where their notions of wealth as non-coercive comes from.

The idea that wealth cannot be coercive is also the basis of their case for freeing corporations to spend unlimited amounts in politics and harangue their workers. They argue it is merely an exercise of free speech. It’s interesting that they are also pushing these measures that make it more possible for employers to essentially have what’s referred to in union terms as captive audience meetings, where they push out their political views to their employees and try to sway their vote. That, and these huge infusions of dark money, are being represented as a First Amendment freedom, as if it doesn’t skew the outcome. But it all connects back in a perverse way to the notion that only government is coercive and that wealth is all about freedom, and enabling the free exchange between economic actors who are totally free.

As we’re talking, the Koch brothers are wrapping up their annual retreat and Mitch McConnell is plotting to take health care away from millions of people—we seem to have reached a kind of culmination of a lot of the intellectual trends that you write about in Democracy in Chains. Did you see this happening as you worked on the book? Have the past six months surprised you?

I’ve been surprised by the velocity of the change. I believed that this is where we were heading, because if you block off the political process from answering people’s needs, as the radical right managed to do throughout Barack Obama’s two terms on so many major issues, then people get frustrated. They get frustrated that politics has become so polarized between right and left and they believe that liberal democracy does not work—they start to believe that we need a radical alternative. It’s very much like the interwar period of the 20th century with the rival poles of fascism and communism.

There were times when I thought, “Am I being melodramatic?” But this seemed to be the necessary outcome of what these people were doing to the political process. I am not surprised, but I am gobsmacked by just how cynically the Republicans have been operating and the extent to which the Kochs have taken over one of our major political parties, and how the whole situation is poisoning our public life and public debate.

One thing that helped Donald Trump get elected is that he didn’t represent the Republican status quo, which is heavily tilted towards a political philosophy pushed by Buchanan and Charles Koch. Many Republican voters seem to be turned off by this philosophy—particularly its emphasis on privatization and on dismantling the welfare state.

This is a challenge in our polarized environment because I really want to reach Republican voters. It’s been said that political parties are a lot like sports teams. People have a loyalty to their team. But what longtime Republican voters need to understand is that their team is no longer playing for the home crowd.

“They get frustrated that politics has become so polarized between right and left and they believe that liberal democracy does not work.”

On issue after issue you see vast majorities of Republicans who actually agree on some of the fundamental needs of the country: They support a progressive income tax, they want to address global warming, they care about the preservation of Medicare and Social Security as originally construed as social insurance, they care about public education. They are not the enemies of Democrats. But they have been riled up by this apparatus, and by very cynical Republican leaders, to support a party that is undermining the things that they seek.

A recent study produced by the Voter Study Group found that libertarians basically don’t exist in the American body politic. And yet your book lays out the extent to which they’ve essentially taken over the Republican Party over the last few decades.

The Republican Party leadership bases its pitch to voters on a set of anodyne phrases. “We are the party of freedom, and liberty, and small government.” And that sounds good. Who is against freedom? Who wants super-intrusive government? But when you actually look at what they’re doing, they are freeing corporations to do whatever they want to their workers, the environment, retirees, and so forth and so on. When they say they’re for limited government that isn’t really true.

If you look closely, what they’re doing is limiting the branches of government that are the most responsive to voters: local government and federal government. But they are for extreme power for state governments, which they find much easier to control. We are seeing this happen all around the country where these Koch-funded state policy network organizations and the American Legislative Exchange Council are working hand-in-glove to push what is called “preemption.” They use the power over state governments to prevent localities from doing things like raising wages, enacting anti-discrimination ordinances, even passing plastic bag ordinances! It’s just a huge power grab.

One of the most fascinating and terrifying chapters in Democracy in Chains investigates Buchanan’s role in Chile, where Buchanan and Friedman pushed economic liberalization and extreme constitutional protections for the wealthy. Both have been disastrous for democracy. Do you see similar tactics right now, with the rush to push through health care legislation in the House and Senate?

Short answer: yes. They understand that sunshine and deliberation are not helpful to this project, and that it is very important to move things along as quickly as possible. I absolutely think the Chilean experience is what emboldened Buchanan and Koch to think, “Wow, we can actually do this. It’s going to be more complicated to do it in a functioning democracy, but we could actually achieve this constitutional revolution because we did it in Chile.”

Most of the resistance that has appeared over the past six months has been focused on Trump, rather than people like Mitch McConnell or Charles Koch. Is this a mistake?

It’s a huge mistake to imagine Trump as being separate from this story and sui generis. He was the logical culmination, in some ways, of this effort to derail our government and totally discredit norms of public service, the idea of a common good, and the belief that elected officials were actually working—in the flawed ways that ordinary mortals do—toward the public good. Trump’s election is the fruit of this project, even if Trump was elected, in part, because he was the only Republican candidate not carrying Koch baggage. And yet, the Koch and Trump stories are not separate at all, and it would be a terrible mistake for those trying to resist this agenda to treat them as such.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/right-wing-wants-roll-back-20th-century

TheRepublican Party's "tax reform" bill has passed both chambers of Congress. After differences between the House and Senate version are worked out, it will likely soon be signed by President Donald Trump. This legislation is more than a grotesque effort to take money from the poor and working class and give it to the very richest Americans and corporations. In reality, it is an effort to wholly remake American society by undoing the social progress of the New Deal, the Great Society and the civil rights movement.

This effort has been met with surprisingly little resistance from the American people.

Why?

Unlike the Republicans and movement conservatives, the Democratic Party is terrible at translating complex questions of public policy into simple narratives that evoke emotion and, in turn, action from the American people. Moreover, while the Republican Party systematically works to roll back the 20th century by eliminating programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act -- with the apparent goal of creating a Malthusian dystopia -- many prominent Democrats and other liberals are instead obsessed with enforcing purity tests for sexual harassment within their own party.

The mainstream news media has a very short attention span. The format of the 24/7 cable news cycle is also designed to avoid serious in-depth discussions of complex and important policy matters in favor of simple stories that generate ratings.

To a significant degree, the American people have been exhausted by Trump and the Republican Party's authoritarian and petit-fascist assaults on reality, truth and, yes, even the country's citizens. Many Americans have been driven into a sense of learned helplessness by Trump's presidential victory and the years of civic and cultural rot that enabled that outcome. Consequently, it has become difficult to imagine what a real and sustained resistance against the Republican Party, Donald Trump and the ascendant right would even look like.

How does the Republican tax bill fit into a larger strategy? Who are the "winners" and "losers"? What will the various factions in the right-wing coalition that forced through this bill receive for their machinations? In this radically revanchist effort to remake American society, how far back would the Republican Party and the Koch brothers like to take us? How can the American people fight back?

Ultimately, this assault on American democracy and society should not be a surprise. It has been operating both in the shadows and plain sight for decades. In an effort to understand the true goals and larger context for the Republican Party's tax reform legislation, I recently spoke with Nancy MacLean, the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University. MacLean is also the author of the controversial new book "Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America," which was nominated for the 2017 National Book Award.

A longer version of this conversation can be heard on my podcast, which is available on Salon’s Featured Audio page.

The Republican "tax reform" bill recently passed the Senate. It will be reconciled with the House version and signed by Donald Trump. This legislation can be described as a blueprint for changing American society in the vision of the most extreme elements of the right wing, including the Koch brothers, Christian fascists, plutocrats and others. You outlined their plan to undermine American society in "Democracy in Chains." How does it feel to be right?

I have a sinking feeling. I can see this thing happening and I can’t stop it. So it’s painful, actually, to be right.

Before we even get to the tax bill, let me point out that there are 30 states which are under the control of the Republican Party and the most extreme right-wing elements in the country. This tax bill, however one labels it, is intended to remake American society and government in order to push through an agenda that its advocates know is wholly unpopular and will only pass if they are dishonest about the goals involved. So instead, the Republican Party and right wing are operating by stealth. They’re moving with secrecy. They are planting things inside the bill that are like time bombs and the public does not seem to be paying any attention.

We have to help the American people understand the stealth dimensions of what the Republicans and the radical right have done with this tax bill, and also their efforts to destroy the Affordable Care Act. This legislation is being pushed through at breakneck speed and in violation of normal procedures. There were no public hearings. They did not have cost assessments. They did not allow debate.

When you combine this with the push for a constitutional convention, at which the No. 1 agenda item will be a balanced budget amendment -- put those things together, and this is a long-term stealth project to privatize Social Security and Medicare.In terms of the dishonest approach used to push this bill through, there are many examples. For example, in the near term, people will see tax cuts, but in the long term, they will see tax increases. That is particularly true for people [making less than] $75,000 a year in income. These are people who are probably the most stressed, probably working two jobs, who are not paying a lot of attention to what’s happening in the Senate for those reasons. Yet they are going to be the most hurt by this. This is so much more than a big giveaway of money to the rich. There will be huge automatic cuts to Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid that will come directly from the Republican decision to run up the deficit with these tax cuts.

The Republicans intentionally created a budget "crisis" with this tax bill and then will claim there is an emergency that necessitates destroying Social Security, MedicareandMedicaid. It is obvious and transparent. What role does conservative contempt for poor and working-class people play in the effort to subvert American democracy?

I think that’s crucial. Increasingly, I have started to think about this right-wing cause as being a type of economic eugenics. At the turn of the 20th century, eugenicists thought that you could breed better humans by paying attention to bloodlines, gene pools and the like.

Today they won't use such explicit language. But there are right-wing libertarians who obviously believe that people who have not succeeded in this society always have themselves to blame. As a historian, that conclusion is just astonishing given what we know about structures and how the rules have been rigged to benefit some people and harm others.

This is the ethical system that allows people like Paul Ryan to feel heroic and self-righteous as they inflict harm on other people. At its most basic, this libertarian moral system says that it would be better for people to die than to get health care financed by government from taxes paid for by others. You can die. Period.

Whatarethe transactional politics involved in this tax bill?

Well, I actually believe that Charles Koch is not in this just for the tax breaks and deregulation. I believe that he is utterly messianic, and that he believes, just as Ayn Rand did, that entrepreneurs and capitalists are the true heroes of the world. I have a feeling that Charles Koch seethes with rage that he does not get the adulation he believes that he deserves. He’s been at this now since the 1960s. That’s a very long time. He’s compared himself to Martin Luther. When Charles Koch launched this project in earnest in the late 1990s, he said, “I want to unleash the kind of force that propelled Columbus to his discoveries.”

He has that deep an ideological commitment. Others have relative degrees of that ideological commitment. Some are just operatives who understand that this is a really good gravy train to ride, that the pockets and the bank accounts are just endless or bottomless.

For the religious right they can get tax breaks for Christian home schooling and for Christian private schools. Ultimately, they can see their enemies humiliated.

Grover Norquist explains this strategy as "one fish, one hook." In other words, they don’t have to tell anybody the whole agenda that they are pushing for. So it is not even clear to me how many of even the upper-level operatives in this right-wing plot actually understand what the ultimate plan is.

How do we fight back against pure ideologues whose beliefs are their religion? The Democrats are a loose coalition of different interest groups. Frankly, they are not equipped to fight back against a Republican Party and broader right-wing movement that operates like a political cult.

I agree with you in the broad outlines. But it is important to make some key distinctions. For example, there is the Bernie [Sanders] wing of the Democratic Party. It is pretty astonishing that a Jewish socialist is now the most trusted and respected elected official in America.

There has also been a surge of grassroots activism in the past year in places such as Virginia. So I think there are definitely some places where you can see hope with how people are trying to both reinvent the Democratic Party and also renew the idea of democracy in America for the 21st century.

I can imagine a historian 20 or 30 or 50 years from now, looking back to this moment and coming up with two stories. I can imagine the story of how we didn’t stop this Koch network push to transform our democracy, even when it was so obvious. Instead we just pushed our society, our kids and grandkids, over a cliff.

But I also think on the more positive side. As a historian who studies social movements as being fundamental to significant historical change, I hope that someday people will look back on this moment and say that, right now, in this moment, in December of 2017, we were deep in the churning that was part of our beginning to figure our way out of this. There are people in all kinds of organizations and places who are feeling new urgency, who are coming together in creative ways, who can begin to turn the tide and to churn those larger gears of the sleepy, big organizations to make them change. But is that going to happen? I don’t really know. As you say, how we react to this Republican tax bill is going to be highly predictive of which way the story turns out.

America is an oligarchy, if not just a plutocracy. Could it be that Republicans and other members of theright wingdon't really care how unpopular their ideas and policies are because in practice this country is not a functioning democracy? So what if there’s a mass movement? So what if there are new social movements that are birthed out of this moment? The Republicans have gamed the system to maintain power.

You just pointed out another element of the stealth nature of this tax plan. It is being pushed by people who say they are for limited government. But the Republicans and their allies are actually using the power of national government to prevent voters in more progressive localities and states from being able to choose more progressive policies without being penalized for it.

Consider [economist] Tyler Cowen at George Mason University, who has been working with Charles Koch for 25 years on the Mercatus Center, the main academic outpost of this Koch effort to leverage universities for their political project. Cowen said in a recent book that people on the left keep saying the masses are going to react to this. There’s going to be protest on the streets. There’s going to be revolution and the like. Cowen said, “Ah, I don’t see it. I think the people are pretty happy with their technology. They’re absorbed with Facebook and binge-watching Netflix.” You know what? I think there’s some truth to that. As a historian, I don’t think that’s going to continue forever, but I can see why the Kochs and their operatives have gotten brazen.

In plain terms, if you were speaking to the average American about the dangers posed by this tax bill and the Republican Party andright wingmore generally, what year do they want to return the country to?

James McGill Buchanan, a Nobel-winning economist who devised the playbook that the Koch network is using, was very clear that he liked the constitutional rules of 1900. Consider that the constitutional rules of 1900 had us in a situation of chaos and ever-worsening depression because only the wealthy were doing well and everybody else was screwed.

That was also the period of the Lochner Court, as it was called, which issued a Supreme Court decision that was akin to the Citizens United of our day. That court basically said that workers had no right to organize together collectively, so corporations had all the power. It was a plutocracy. America had these roving battles between labor and capital. We had horrible, almost unimaginable levels of pollution. We had terrible problems with public health care. We had a country that you would not want to live in, and that’s a world that is idealized by the Republicans, the Kochs and the other elements of the extreme right who want to radically remake America in the worst way possible.

Do not forget that this was a period when the Constitution enabled mass voter suppression and racist decisions such as Plessy v. Ferguson, which argued that "separate was equal."

So these people don't just want to get rid of Obama’s legacy. They want to reverse the whole 20th-century model of citizen-driven government and make it so that property reigns supreme. That’s the beginning and the end of it. The American people need to realize that we’re going to be in ever-deepening trouble.

Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/12/historian-alleges-coordinated-criticism-her-latest-book-which-critical-radical-right

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Collusion, alternative facts, shadowy billionaires: the words sound ripped from the political headlines, but they also describe the controversy surroundingDuke University historian Nancy MacLean’s new book, *Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America*(Viking).

And story keeps unfolding, with MacLean’s critics alleging inaccuracies and other problems with her book, MacLean in turn alleging a coordinated attack against her by libertarian scholars with ties to dark money, and others still accusing MacLean of trying to dishonestly promote favorable online book reviews.

Some nevertheless say they worry that swarm-style attacks on progressive scholars’ works -- especially in an era of online harassment of professors and plummeting public trust in academe -- could become a new normal. MacLean, they say, is the victim of just such an effort.

A Book for the Times

MacLean, the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke, released her new book last month to immediate praise. Democracy in Chainstraces the roots of capitalist libertarianism -- the kind today embodied and funded by the Koch and his brother, David -- back to the late Nobel Prize-winning economist James McGill Buchanan, who taught at George Mason. Her thesis is thatBuchanan was the architect of a long-term plan to take libertarianism mainstream, raze democratic institutions and keep power in the hands of the wealthy, white few.

(Roberts has taught economics at George Mason, a favored campus of the Charles Koch Foundation, whose growing financial influence in academe is well-documented; George Mason accepted nearly $48 million from Koch from 2011 to 2014 alone, according to a 2016 Associated Press report. The university's law school also was last year renamed after the late, conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as part of a $30 million deal involving funds from Koch and an anonymous donor.)

Soon, though, the criticism came rapid-fire, with a number of academic reviewers with either past or present ties to the Koch Foundation making similar claims against MacLean: misleading quotations; questionable links between people, events and ideas; and a misunderstanding of some of the economic theory underpinning her arguments. Jonathan Adler, the Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University and a graduate of George Mason’s law school and one-time visiting professor there, published a running account of the allegations in a Washington Postblog post on the same day Bernstein published his piece in the Post. Soon even MacLean’s Duke colleague Michael C. Munger, a professor of political science, economics and public policy, called her out.

Many of MacLean's supporters question the critics, however, who they argue are offended by a tough look at libertarian heroes.

Ideological Comment War

Apart from the academic reviews, MacLean and others said, anonymous critics were trolling her online, posting uninformed, biased reviews ofDemocracy in Chainson Amazon. In a social media post that MacLean did not authenticate to Inside Higher Ed, but which has been widely shared online by her supporters, she allegedly asked friends and colleagues to help defend her book against an apparent coordinated attack.

By using thePostblog posts, the note says, critics "make it appear to the ordinary web surfer that the [newspaper] itself is trashing my book when it’s really the Koch team of professors who don’t disclose their conflicts of interest and the operatives who work full-time for their project to shackle our democracy. The other side was getting top placement because their team was clicking and reclicking and sending embedded links, and the velocity of their activity drove up their links.” (It should be noted that the blogs in question are affiliated with the Post, but authors' views are solely their own.)

“People: this is real,” the post reads. “I won’t be the last they set out to get."

MacLean did not respond to a request for hard evidence of the Amazon review gaming. But there is an unusual preponderance of top five-star and bottom one-star scores forDemocracy in Chains. Back-and-forth-style comments on the reviews abound, amounting to what Connor Gibson, a research associate for Greenpeace, called an "ideological comment war." MacLean’s Wikipedia page already includes much of the controversy surrounding her book.

"They want her publisher to fear promotion, and that's a real threat, since bookstores are also inclined to drop promo efforts if Amazon reviews are low," Gibson said.

Some academics on social media have said that they support MacLean but question asking supporters to police her online reviews. And it appears that the online review police don’t like it either: Fakespot and Trustwerthy, Amazon review authenticity analytics sites, downgraded the book’s rating, to a D and 1.5 stars, respectively.

Still, it’s not hard to imagine that such a close reading of her book by so many scholars with affiliations to Koch -- largely undisclosed in the critiques -- could be some kind of conspiracy.

No Knowledge of Coordination

Phillip W. Magness, a historian and former academic program director at the Koch-affiliated Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason, and another of MacLean’s public detractors, said History News Networkinvited her to respond tohis critique at that site. (She hasn't.) Magness also said he knew of no coordinated attack, “only that Buchanan was a widely respected scholar who she has misrepresented to the point of caricature. It can't be surprising that his many former students, faculty colleagues and friends would scrutinize a book that makes bombastic and conspiratorial charges against him.”

Gibson said that MacLean calls into question the entire premise of public choice economics, Buchanan’s field, with which many of her critics are affiliated. So they’re fighting like their professional lives depend on it, he said, and they’re fighting dirty.

Culture War on Academe

“The criticism is actually an incredible case study in the very thing that MacLean is exposing -- these guys are getting called out on wrapping very unpopular policy lobbying with words that the masses are more likely to support, to the point of dishonesty,” Gibson said. Government needs to “stay evil,” and universities need to stay "too liberal" for critics to maintain their legitimacy.

L. D. Burnett, a teaching fellow in history of the University of Texas at Dallas who has defended MacLean on social media, referred requests for comment to a recent blog postaddressing more attacks on the legitimacy of liberal academics more generally.

Karl Jacoby, a professor of history at Columbia University who also has called public attention to MacLean’s case, said libertarians’ attacks on those who disagree with them are nothing new. But what makes MacLean’s case important “is the precedent that it sets,” he said via email. “If the current critiques end up undermining her book, it will embolden libertarian/conservatives to adopt similar tactics next time someone writes a history that calls into question some of the accepted tenets of their movement.”

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