Excerpts from Democracy in Chains

robert gordh
13 min readJul 20, 2022

Introduced and assembled by Bob Gordh

As is well known, the political system of the United States, though popularly referred to as a democracy, actually falls far short of being a genuine democracy, a government by the people. For starters, there’s the electoral college that allows presidents to be elected whose opponents got more of the popular vote than they did. Then there’s the U.S. Senate, where the policy of two senators per state, regardless of how populous the states may or may not be, resoundingly mocks any pretense of one person — one vote representation. And then there’s the widespread practice of gerrymandering, etc., etc. Also requiring mention is the enormous and overbearing influence of giant corporations on U.S. politics through anonymous campaign contributions, through lobbying, and in a host of other ways.

I do think that democracy is a matter of degree. We should think not in terms of a democracy/non-democracy binary but rather in terms of a continuum. Intelligent people can certainly disagree about where to place the U.S. system on that continuum. Personally, when I add to the points mentioned above the consideration that in a capitalist society, most people spend the majority of their work lives under the authoritarian rule of their bosses, I place all capitalist societies quite low on the democracy scale, with the U.S. lower than most.

In short, even in the best of times, the U.S. is really not very democratic. That said, however, it is clear that we are far from living in the best of times right now. Instead, whatever level of democracy the U.S. does possess is in serious crisis. Whether or not Donald Trump is finally charged with crimes for leading an attempted coup to keep himself in power, a majority of the Republican party is hell-bent on transforming the U.S. political system into one in which — to a degree that is drastically more severe than it has been previously — autocratic minority rule (especially by rich white men) is overwhelmingly the norm — and not just during a certain administration, but permanently.

How has this come about? Demographic changes in concatenation with endemic white supremacist ideology are certainly one important factor. So is the enormous loss of decent paying working-class jobs to automation and globalization. And there are the culture wars and the influence of the Christian right. These factors are pretty widely recognized. There is another enormously important factor, however, that is much less widely recognized. This is a kind of anti-democratic social cause or economic and political movement that had its origins during the 1950’s, whose adherents and operatives have intentionally kept a low profile because they know that most citizens of the U.S. do not want what it wants. Though largely clandestine, at least with respect to its ultimate aims, this movement has exercised tremendous influence because it has been lavishly funded by billionaires and millionaires, the most influential and famous of whom is Charles Koch. In Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, historian Nancy MacLean tells the story of how this right -wing movement began, developed, and continues to operate.

By far the leading theorist of the movement under discussion here was James Buchanan (not the U.S.) president. Buchanan was a right-wing American economist and political philosopher who lived from 1919 till 2013. It is important to realize that although Buchanan learned to stay away from explicit mention of race, his thinking was heavily influenced by his deep-seated allegiance to the ideology of White Supremacy. This is true in at least two important senses. First, James McGill Buchanan, born in Tennessee, was definitely one of those Southerners who hated the idea of anyone — be it the Federal Government or a powerful Civil Rights movement — presuming to interfere with “the Southern way of life” by trying to tell white people how they should relate to black people. Any such interference, from Buchanan’s standpoint, violated both states’ rights and his own individual right to live as he pleased. Not surprisingly, Buchanan’s first major political endeavor was to strategize in favor of the privatization of public schools in Virginia (to which state he had moved upon becoming an economics professor at the University of Virginia) as a gambit to resist Brown vs. the Board of Education and preserve the “right” of white parents to avoid sending their children to racially integrated schools.

Second, Buchanan was adamantly opposed to any attempt to redress past injustices, including racial injustice, by redistributing accumulated wealth and power. In fact he sought to make government dramatically less responsive to the needs of those whom U.S. history has systematically disadvantaged and marginalized. If the result is greater suffering for the latter, so be it, as far as Buchanan and his followers were and are concerned.

Though I recommend this book to one and all, I know that in our busy lives there is only so much time for reading. That is why I have put this document together. It is not a review or analysis. It is mainly just a compilation of key quotations from MacLean’s book, which I offer with the goal of helping to make its essentials more widely known and more widely discussed.

Excerpts from Democracy in Chains

Xxvii. [McClean’s book tells ]“the utterly chilling story of the ideological origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance.”

Xix “In 2010, the brilliant investigative journalist Jane Mayer alerted Americans to the fact that two billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch, had poured more than a hundred million dollars into a ‘war against Obama.’ She went on to research and document how the Kochs and other rich right-wing donors were providing vast quantities of ‘dark money’ (political spending that, by law, had become untraceable) to groups and candidates whose missions, if successful, would hobble unions, limit voting, deregulate corporations, shift taxes to the well-off, and even deny climate change. But still missing from this exquisitely detailed examination of the money trail was any clear sense of the master plan behind all these assaults, some sense of when and why this cause started, what defined victory, and most of all, where that victory would leave the rest of us.”

“The missing piece of the puzzle was James McGill Buchanan.” [Buchanan was a right-wing American economist and political philosopher who lived from 1919 till 2013. He is by far the leading theorist of the movement under discussion here.]

Xxi-xxii “It took me time — a great deal of time — to piece together what these documents were telling me. They revealed how the program Buchanan had first established at the University of Virginia in 1956 and later relocated to George Mason University, the one meant to train a new generation of thinkers to push back against Brown and the changes in constitutional thought and federal policy that had enabled it, had become the research-and-design center for a much more audacious project, one that was national in scope. The project was no longer simply about training intellectuals for a battle of ideas; it was training operatives to staff the far-flung and purportedly separate, yet intricately connected, institutions funded by the Koch brothers and their now large network of fellow wealthy donors. These included the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Citizens for a Sound economy, Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth, the State Policy Network, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Tax Foundation, the Reason Foundation, the Leadership Institute, and more, to say nothing of the Charles Koch Foundation and Koch Industries itself. Others were being hired and trained here to transform legal understanding and practice on matters from health policy to gun rights to public sector employment. Still others were taking what they learned here to advise leading Republicans and their staffs, from Virginia governors to presidential candidates… . Mike Pence, a case in point, has worked with many of these organizations over the years and shares their agenda.

With these records, combined with those I found elsewhere, I started piecing together the first detailed picture of how this movement began and, more important, how it evolved over time both in its goals and in its strategy. I learned how and why Charles Koch first became interested in Buchanan’s work in the early 1970’s, called on his help with what became the Cato Institute, and worked with his team in various organizations. What became clear is that by the late 1990’s, Koch had concluded that he’d finally found the set of ideas he had been seeking for at least a quarter century by then — ideas so groundbreaking, so thoroughly thought-out, so rigorously tight, that once put into operation, they could secure the transformation in American governance he wanted. From then on, Koch contributed generously to turning those ideas into his personal operational strategy to, as the team saw it, save capitalism from democracy — permanently.

These papers revealed something else as well: how and why stealth became so intrinsic to this movement. Buchanan had realized the value of stealth long ago, while still trying to influence Virginia politicians. But it was Koch who institutionalized this policy. . . . [Koch realized that] the American people would not support their plans, so to win they had to work behind the scenes, using a covert strategy instead of open declaration of what they really wanted.”

xxiv “What animated Buchanan, what became the laser focus of his deeply analytic mind, was the seemingly unfettered ability of an increasingly powerful federal government to force individuals with wealth to pay for a growing number of public goods and social programs they had no personal say in approving. Better schools, newer text books, and more courses for black students might help the children, for example, but whose responsibility was it to pay for these improvements? The parents of these students? Others who wished voluntarily to help out? Or people like himself, compelled through increasing taxation to contribute to projects they did not wish to support? To Buchanan, what others described as taxation to advance social justice or the common good was nothing more than a modern version of mob attempts to take by force what the takers had no moral right to: the fruits of another person’s efforts. In his mind, to protect wealth was to protect the individual against a form of legally sanctioned gangsterism.”

Xxiv. “Buchanan believed with every fiber of his being that if what a group of people wanted from government could not , on its own merits, win the freely given backing of each individual citizen, including the very wealthiest among us, any attempt of that group to use its numbers to get what it wanted constituted not persuasion of the majority but coercion of the minority, a violation of the liberty of individual tax payers.”

Xxix “The Koch team’s most important stealth move, and the one that proved most critical to its success, was to wrest control over the machinery of the Republican Party, beginning in the late 1990’s and with sharply escalating determination after 2008. From there it was just a short step to lay claim to being the true representatives of the party, declaring all others RINO — Republicans in name only. But while these radicals of the right operate within the Republican Party and use the party as a delivery vehicle, make no mistake about it: the cadre’s loyalty is not to the Grand Old Party or its traditions or standard-bearers. Their loyalty is to their revolutionary cause.”

Xxx “The Republican Party is now in the control of a group of true believers for whom compromise is a dirty word. Their cause, they say, is liberty. But by that they mean the insulation of private property rights from the reach of government — and the takeover of what was long public (schools, prisons, western lands, and much more) by corporations, a system that would radically reduce the freedom of the many. In a nutshell, they aim to hollow out democratic resistance. And by its own lights, the cause is nearing success.”

Xxxiii-xxxiv “Where movement activists win over majorities, they make headway; when they fail to, they in time falter. This cause is different. Pushed by relatively small numbers of radical-right billionaires and millionaires who have become profoundly hostile to America’s modern system of government, an apparatus decades in the making, funded by those same billionaires and millionaires, has been working to undermine the normal governance of our democracy. Indeed, one such manifesto calls for a “hostile takeover” of Washington, D. C.

That hostile takeover maneuvers very much like a fifth column, operating in a highly calculated fashion, more akin to an occupying force than to an open group engaged in the usual give-and-take of politics. The size of this force is enormous. The social scientists who have led scholars in researching the Koch network write that it ‘operates on the scale of a national U.S. political part’ and employs more than three times as many people as the Republican committees had on their payrolls in 2015. This points to another characteristic associated with a fifth column: the tactic of overwhelming the normal political process with schemes to disrupt its functioning. Indeed, this massive and well-funded force is turning the party it has occupied toward ends that most Republican voters do not want, such as the privatization of Social Security, Medicare, and education.”

Xxxiv. “Buchanan told an interviewer early in the new century, ‘I don’t want to control you and I don’t want to be controlled by you.’ It sounds so reasonable, fair, and appealing. [However,] this cause defines the “you” its members do not want to be controlled by as the majority of the American people. And its architects have never recognized economic power as a potential tool of domination; to them, unrestrained capitalism is freedom.”

211. “Today the big lie of the Koch-sponsored radical right is that society can be split between makers and takers, justifying on the part of the makers a Manichaean struggle to disarm and defeat those who would take from them. Attend a Tea Party gathering and you will hear endless cries about the ‘moocher class.’ Read the output of the libertarian writers subsidized by wealthy donors and you will encounter endless variations. David Boaz of the Cato Institute, to choose just one, speaks of the ‘parasite economy’ that divides us into ‘the predators and the prey.’ Addressing an audience of $50,000 per plate donors, Mitt Romney famously remarked that ’47 percent of voters were, in effect, leeches on ‘productive’ Americans.”

[Buchanan’s utter contempt for society’s “losers”]

212. “People who failed to foresee and save money for their future needs, Buchanan wrote in 2005,’are to be treated as subordinate members of the species, akin to . . . animals who are dependent.’ “

213. “Less well known is that these zealots do not believe that the government should be involved in trying to promote public health, period.”

212–213. “Charles Koch has always argued that his vision of a good society will bring prosperity to all. But his trusted cadres, the people he relies on to justify and advance his messianic vision, apparently believe otherwise. They have sketched out the society that will emerge if their cause succeeds . . .

Tyler Cowan, the man who succeeded Buchanan and now directs the cause’s base camp at George Mason, the Mercatus Center, has explained that with the ‘rewriting of the social contract’ under way, people will be “expected to fend for themselves much more than they do now.” While some will flourish, he says, “others will fall by the wayside.” And because ‘worthy individuals’ will manage to climb their way out of poverty, “that will make it easier to ignore those who are left behind.” Cowen foresees that “we will cut Medicaid for the poor.” Also, ‘the fiscal shortfall will come out of real wages as various cost burdens are shifted to workers’ from employers and a government that does less. To ‘compensate,’ the chaired professor in the nation’s second wealthiest county recommends, ‘people who have had their government benefits cut or pared back’ should pack up and move to lower-cost states like Texas. Granted, he says, ‘Texas is skimpy on welfare benefits and Medicaid coverage,’ and nearly three in ten of its residents have no health insurance, but the state does have jobs and “very cheap housing’ to offset its ‘subpar public services.’

Indeed, Cowen forecasts, ‘the United States as a whole will end up looking more like Texas.’ His tone is matter-of-fact, as though he is simply reporting the inevitable. . . . [Cowan]

presents himself as a pragmatic libertarian. . . . Yet when one reads his flip remarks on the fate now facing his fellow citizens with the knowledge that he has been the leader of a team working in earnest for two decades to bring about the society he is describing, the words assume a different weight. They sound like a premeditation. For example, the economist prophesies lower-income parts of America ‘recreating a Mexico-like or Brazil like environment’ complete with favelas like those in Rio de Janeiro. The ‘quality of water’ might not be what U.S. citizens are used to, but ‘partial shantytowns’ would satisfy the need for cheaper housing as ‘wage polarization’ grows and government shrinks. ‘Some version of Texas — and then some — is the future for a lot of us,’ the economist advises. ‘Get ready.’

Those who subscribe to the libertarian philosophy believe that the government is to ensure the rule of law, guarantee social order, and provide for the national defense. That is why they have long been fervent opponents of Medicare for the poor, and, most recently, Obamacare. The house budget chairman. Paul Ryan, has explained that such public provision for popular needs not only violates the liberty of the taxpayers whose earnings are transferred to others, but also violates the recipients’ spiritual need to earn their own sustenance. He told one audience that the nation’s school lunch program left poor children with ‘a full stomach — and an empty soul.’”

[Climate change]

216. “Just as the property rights supremacists would rather let people die than receive healthcare assistance or antismoking counsel from government, so they would rather invite global and social catastrophe than allow regulatory restrictions on economic liberty. . . .

[T]he Cato Institute and the Independent Institute joined a circle of less-known Koch-funded libertarian think tanks driving what two science scholars describe as systematic environmental

‘misinformation campaigns.’ They spread junk pseudoscience to make the public believe that there is doubt about the peril of climate change, a tactic they learned from the tobacco companies that for years sowed doubt about science to keep the public from connecting tobacco and illness. . . . By 2014, only 8 of 278 Republicans in Congress were willing to acknowledge that man-made climate change is real.”

[Size of government, role of police]

228, 230. “[T]he goal of this cause is not in the end, to shrink big government, as its rhetoric implies. Quite the contrary: the interpretation of the Constitution the cadre seeks to impose would give federal courts vast new powers to strike down measures desired by voters and passed by their duly elected representatives at all levels — and would require greatly expanded police powers to control the resultant popular anger.”

[ For more, read the book! Or, watch any of a number of YouTube videos of speeches Nancy McLean has given since the publication of her book in 2018]

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