Democracy in Chains.. [View all]

[JHan]

There have been some good posts about this book already, but it's a good reminder given the forces influencing the Trump administration.

http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/533763/democracy-in-chains-by-nancy-maclean/9781101980965/

The most starkly opposed vision is that of Buchanan’s Virginia school. It teaches that all such talk of the common good has been a smoke screen for “takers” to exploit “makers,” in the language now current, using political coalitions to “vote themselves a living” instead of earning it by the sweat of their brows. Where Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek allowed that public officials were earnestly trying to do right by the citizenry, even as they disputed the methods, Buchanan believed that government failed because of bad faith: because activists, voters, and officials alike used talk of the public interest to mask the pursuit of their own personal self-interest at others’ expense. His was a cynicism so toxic that, if widely believed, it could eat like acid at the foundations of civic life. And he went further by the 1970s, insisting that the people and their representatives must be permanently prevented from using public power as they had for so long. Manacles, as it were, must be put on their grasping hands.

Is what we are dealing with merely a social movement of the right whose radical ideas must eventually face public scrutiny and rise or fall on their merits? Or is this the story of something quite different, something never before seen in American history? Could it be—and I use these words quite hesitantly and carefully—a fifth-column assault on American democratic governance?

The term “fifth column” has been applied to stealth supporters of an enemy who assist by engaging in propaganda and even sabotage to prepare the way for its conquest.

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 party” and employs more than three times as many people as the Republican committees had on their payrolls in 2015.

Upon publication, this book received a barrage of criticism from Koch "academics", and even a few concerned liberal scholars, mainly about the author's claims of "conspiracy". None of this criticism negates the fact that the Koch Brothers, and we can add the Mercers, have invested billions in an anti-government world view which works to their benefit. For all the book's supposed flaws, it is worth getting for insight into Buchanan himself and his , arguably, undemocratic vision of America.

This article dives into the dust up the book caused once published:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/12/historian-alleges-coordinated-criticism-her-latest-book-which-critical-radical-right?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=ea083d44ac-DNU20170712&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-ea083d44ac-226064745&mc_cid=ea083d44ac&mc_eid=1d560e0d46