Oliver Wiseman<\/a><\/p>\n 29 August, 2017<\/p>\n The rise of America\u2019s radical Right is one of the most underappreciated stories of the last 50 years of American history. <\/p>\n You\u2019ve doubtless read about the counter-cultural Left, the Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock, but are you familiar with, say, the Young Americans for Freedom and their 1969 convention, where an angry young libertarian burned his draft card, starting a brawl with the meeting\u2019s more conservative delegates and opening up a lasting split on the American Right? If you want to understand the US today, these shenanigans are just as important as Pete Seeger protest songs. <\/p>\n The Right\u2019s revolutions and fissions also make for a colourful tale, featuring bold ideas \u2014 some good, others abominable \u2014 and an irresistible cast of iconoclasts, zealots, scoundrels and heroes.\u00a0 <\/p>\n That, however, is not how Nancy MacLean, Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke Univeristy, sees it. To read Democracy in Chains<\/em> is to see what should be an ensemble play put on as a one-man show. That man is James M. Buchanan, the Nobel prize-winning architect of public choice theory. According to MacLean, to recount Buchanan\u2019s career is to tell the \u201cutterly 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\u201d.\u00a0 <\/p>\n Given the importance she gives to Buchanan, MacLean starts with a surprising confession: before she started work on Democracy in Chains<\/em> she hadn\u2019t heard of the famous economist. Should we admire her honesty or be appalled at her ignorance? That an expert on public policy had never heard of one of the 20th century\u2019s most influential theorists of how and why public servants do the things they do is hardly a good start. But when his name kept cropping up in Milton Friedman\u2019s footnotes, MacLean was intrigued. \u201cHe seemed to be someone with big ideas,\u201d she writes. Her curiosity takes her to the \u201cunlisted\u201d Buchanan archives at George Mason University, Virginia, where he once taught. We are treated to an account of her trip to the \u201cdeserted\u201d clapboard mansion: \u201cThere were file cabinets everywhere \u2014 even, I soon learned, in a closet under a stairwell.\u201d In the over-excited language of an airport thriller writer, she describes Buchanan\u2019s old study and her discovery there of confidential letters from the Koch brothers, the billionaire backers of Buchanan and numerous right-wing causes and, in the eyes of the Left, the essence of all that is wrong with American politics: \u201cCatching my breath, I pulled up an empty chair and set to work.\u201d <\/p>\n The intrepid MacLean had made it into the belly of the beast. The vast right-wing conspiracy \u2014 the evil geniuses corrupting American democracy \u2014 had \u201cfailed to lock one crucial door: the front door of 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\u201d.<\/p>\n Given that it claims to expose a \u201cfifth column assault on American democracy\u201d, Democracy in Chains<\/em> has excited exactly those whom you\u2019d expect to get excited. MacLean is a good enough writer for her version of events to sound plausible if it confirms what you already believe: everything now makes sense for George Monbiot. MacLean\u2019s screed gives its New York Times<\/em> reviewer \u201chope\u201d. The Atlantic<\/em>, the New Republic<\/em> and NPR all agree. Oprah \u2014 the Midas of US publishing \u2014 lists it as one of the summer\u2019s 20 must-reads. <\/p>\n But for this enthusiastic reception, Democracy in Chains<\/em> would be a book best ignored. Instead, its shamefully sloppy scholarship, deceitful elision and, maybe most importantly, misreading \u2014 deliberate or otherwise \u2014 of Buchanan and his acolytes\u2019 ideas deserves some attention. <\/p>\n Perhaps the strangest thing about Democracy in Chains<\/em> is MacLean\u2019s line of intellectual attack. She correctly identifies in Buchanan a suspicion of the excesses of majority rule, before equating a desire for constraints on state power with a wish to put democracy \u201cin chains\u201d. This, of course, is an oddly limited definition of democracy, and one to which liberals, conservatives and libertarians would all object. <\/p>\n All of this is a rather obscure angle from which to approach Buchanan\u2019s thinking. His big idea, explained most famously in The Calculus of Consent<\/em>, which he co-authored with Gordon Tullock, was that traditional political science mistakenly assumed public servants would act in the public interest. Instead, he argued, public servants are just as likely to act in their self-interest as those in the private sector. As a result, government is especially susceptible to being captured by special interests, and, left to its own devices, the state will grow and grow.\u00a0 <\/p>\n Through selective quotation and idiosyncratic interpretation, MacLean paints this as \u2014 first and foremost \u2014 a distaste for democracy. She reduces Buchanan\u2019s intellectual project to little more than a cynical attempt to undermine public confidence in government. She gives no thought to whether or not he is right, doing little more than questioning his motives and pointing out the possible blind spots of rich white men. <\/p>\n In fact, race is the means by which MacLean tries to land her lowest blows on Buchanan, particularly when discussing Brown v. Board of Education<\/em>, the Supreme Court\u2019s landmark desegregation decision. When, rightly, the court imposed desegregation on the states (a constitutional restriction on the will of the majority that MacLean seems much more relaxed about), the responses of numerous small-state conservatives were dripping with racism. One of the tools the segregationists tried to use to stop the inevitable was school vouchers, which Buchanan and free-marketeers like him supported. Of a report on school vouchers co-authored by Buchanan, MacLean writes, \u201cThe economists made their case in the race-neutral, value-free language of their discipline, offering what they depicted as a strictly economic argument \u2014 on \u2018matters of fact, not values\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n The implication is that Buchanan\u2019s real motivation was opposition to black and white children being educated side by side. But MacLean offers no evidence whatsoever to suggest this. Probably because there isn\u2019t any. <\/p>\n Why look for an ulterior motive for Buchanan\u2019s support for a policy entirely in keeping with his beliefs? In order to traduce a decent (and dead) man, painting him as a racist mouthpiece for plutocrats. Any inconvenient details that muddle this caricature \u2014 such as Buchanan\u2019s support for a 100 per cent inheritance tax \u2014 are omitted. This, remember, from a professor of history at a leading university.<\/p>\n What would MacLean make of one her student\u2019s essays if they engaged in the kind of out-of-context quotation she goes in for? Take, for example, this study in academic rigour: she quotes Buchanan\u2019s prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and leading economist Tyler Cowen as writing: \u201cThe weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good outcome.\u201d It sounds damning and Cowen did indeed write those words in that order. But here is the full sentence: \u201cWhile the weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good outcome, it also would increase the chance of a very bad outcome.\u201d Hardly A+ work.<\/p>\n There is an amusing coda to the story of Democracy in Chains<\/em>. When more sceptical reviewers pointed out some of MacLean\u2019s mistakes and deceptions, the professor took to social media, rallying the troops to counter what she called a Koch-funded smear campaign. <\/p>\n At which point it is probably worth pointing out that MacLean received $50,000 in taxpayers\u2019 money, via the National Endowment for the Humanities, for her attack on a thinker who laid bare how and why government is as bloated as it is. Who, really, is smearing whom? <\/p>\n <\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n\n
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A hinge in history<\/a><\/p>\nWhat to read next<\/h6>\n
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