Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America.

• Author: Horwitz, Steven
• Position: Book review

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

Nancy MacLean

New York: Viking Press, 2017, 366 pp.

Although not her intent, Duke historian Nancy MacLean's new book has been a great make-work program for libertarian scholars across several disciplines. Democracy in Chains tells the story (and I use that word purposefully) of the "radical right's stealth plan for America." The unsurprising central figure of her story is billionaire Charles Koch. However, his surprising partner in plotting to destroy American democracy is the late James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986 for his contributions to public choice theory. MacLean sees that theory as the missing piece that Koch needed to put his "master plan" into effective practice.

Public choice theory is the application of the economic way of thinking--or "rational choice theory"--to politics. The theory starts from the assumption that political actors are no different from economic ones in wanting to improve their own well-being through exchange. Therefore both markets and politics can serve as institutional contexts for exchange, and public choice theory attempts to identify the results of such exchanges under those alternative institutional contexts. The analytical goal is to determine when "private choice" (the market) works better or worse than "public choices" (politics or other forms of collective choice). Public choice theory challenges the public-interest view of politics. It often shows how public-interest justifications for political action are unlikely to work because there's no incentive for political actors to produce those outcomes via political exchange. It is, in Buchanan's words, "politics without romance." And, because public choice theory helps show why many things government does are really about benefiting particular individuals rather than the public at large, it is a theoretical framework that is often, though far from exclusively, deployed by people with libertarian inclinations.

There's nothing especially radical about this theory. In fact, when Buchanan won the Nobel Prize, some in the media wondered why it was really necessary to give the Nobel to someone who had the ground-breaking insight that politicians are self-interested! Of course public choice theory is more sophisticated than that, but it is also true that we see its basic ideas as part of our nightly entertainment. The popular British TV series Yes, Minister was written with the explicit intent of illustrating public choice theory's understanding of the political process. Shows such as House of Cards and Veep also give us a perspective on politics that nicely aligns with the insights of public choice. The characters in those shows are self-interested, if not often egomaniacal. They want to get reelected, so their behavior is partially dictated by an awareness of voter preferences, as well as an acute understanding of what voters are oblivious to. In fact, they often like it when voters are unaware because it allows them to work in the shadows. Deals are struck with special interests, and others are stabbed in the back. Meanwhile, characters, such as Veep's Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), offer public-interest justifications for legislation that viewers know are mere rhetorical smokescreens for the real rationale: the trading of political favors that occupies the days of most politicians. And do viewers regard those shows as nefarious, anti-democracy, right-wing propaganda? No, in fact, most probably believe that they are roughly accurate portrayals of what goes on in our hallowed halls of government. Part of Buchanan's project was to systematically explain such behavior with existing rational choice concepts. So, despite MacLean's efforts to make public choice seem both obscure and radical, not only is the theory widely used in economics--and not just by "right wingers"--but we also see its influence in popular culture.

In MacLean's telling, however, it was Buchanan's contributions to public choice theory that provided Charles Koch with the intellectual framework and vision he needed to institute his radical "stealth plan" to take over America's political institutions and restrict the power of democratic majorities in the name of protecting the wealth, power, and privilege of a rich, white, and male minority. Classical liberalism becomes not an intellectual inquiry with a long and noble history and deep concern for the least well off, but an intellectually bankrupt smokescreen by which various "Koch operatives" and "Koch-financed academics" serve as lackeys for the will to power of the capital-owning elite. MacLean believes she has revealed the full depths of this "master plan" by discovering Buchanan's key role, which has been overlooked by previous treatments of the evolution of libertarian ideas or the nefarious influence of the Koch brothers.

In particular, MacLean makes a great deal out of what she claims are two intellectual influences on Buchanan that explain the particular intellectual path he took. She argues that he was strongly influenced by the pre-Civil War politician and political theorist John C. Calhoun and the 20th century Southern Agrarians, especially the poet Donald Davidson. MacLean argues that Calhoun's defense of minority rights in the context of the Constitution made him the "intellectual lodestar" of the Buchanan-Koch "movement." Calhoun, of course, was a defender of slavery, which fits MacLean's narrative that Buchanan and public choice theory serve to defend the privileges of rich white men and frustrate the desires of everyone else to use the political process to exercise countervailing power.

It also fits her claim that the key event in motivating Buchanan's work was the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that desegregated U.S. schools. Her evidence for this claim is an article by Warren G. Nutter and Buchanan (1959) that laid out the case for competing private schools as a better educational system in light of the deep controversy over Brown. In that article, written while both were at the University of Virginia, they back mandatory universal education funded by government through a voucher-type system. They argue that the institutions that deliver the actual education should be private. It's fair to say that Nutter and Buchanan left themselves open to MacLean's criticism by not explicitly mentioning the racially charged social and political context into which they made their argument, in particular the way it could be used to resist integration.

But the argument for school choice has a long history outside the context of race. For example, it appears in nearly identical form in John Stuart Mill's On Libertij (1859) exactly 100 years earlier. Like Mill, Nutter and Buchanan genuinely believed that their proposed system would provide a better education for all students. Given the way integration had been so strongly resisted by state governments in the south, their proposal, with all of its imperfections, would have plausibly been better than the status quo at delivering more integration. This is consistent with Buchanan's career-long objections to utopian policy proposals, preferring instead imperfect changes that have a more realistic chance of improving people's lives on the margin, even if they fall short of an imagined ideal.

Nonetheless, because she contextualizes it within the pro-segregation forces of 1950s Virginia, MacLean sees Nutter and Buchanan's article as a thinly veiled defense of segregation and thereby opposing Brown. Combined with her claim that Buchanan took his concept of "Leviathan" from the racist Southern Agrarian Davidson, it becomes easy for her to tar Buchanan's entire project as racist, even as...