Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, by Nancy MacLean

For those dizzied by the speed and apparent capriciousness of right-wing politics over the past decade, Nancy MacLean discovers a unifying logic to both the assaults on the gains that social movements have made and the democratic institutions that have historically secured those rights. MacLean traces the spread – albeit crucially, not a popularization – of American economist James Buchanan’s ‘public choice theory’ as an organizing principle of contemporary conservatism. The author follows Buchanan’s career across the country, beginning at the University of Virginia, briefly at Virginia Tech, tumultuously at UCLA, and portentously at George Mason. It was back in the state of Virginia that the alliance with Charles Koch solidified, bringing a billionaire’s money and unrelenting political fervency to Buchanan’s intellectual program. MacLean’s work can be situated within scholarship contending with ‘neoliberalism’ broadly defined, but with a different accent. For many critical scholars (Harvey 2005, Klein 2008), the story of the last 50 years is a story dominated by the intellectual leadership of Chicago-school ‘neoliberal’ economics. Even Peck (2013), skeptical of a one-way, diffusional model of neoliberalism, and indeed of a univocal story of the ‘Chicago school’ itself, still foregrounds the school of thought in narrating the rise of neoliberalism. MacLean tells a different story, starting from Virginia (via Austria) and extending outward to statehouses, courts, and countries worldwide.

MacLean makes a provocative assessment of Buchanan’s ‘public choice theory’, contending it contains a poison pill capable of dissolving the social bond: What if the subject of liberalism in economics is identical to the subject of liberalism in politics? Buchanan’s major innovation, for which he won a Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986, and in whose shadow we now subsist, is that political actors behave selfishly, just as economic ones do. To MacLean, this flavor of political-economic thought amounts to a ‘fifth column assault on American democratic governance’ (p. xxx). MacLean writes of the theory,

Politicians must be understood as rational human beings who served their own interests (reelection) above all else. The authors recast notions such as ‘the common good’ and ‘the general welfare’ as smoke screens that blocked from view the way in which individual public officials and those who sought to influence these officials pursued their own gain through government. (p. 78)

According to public choice, politicians rationally maximize their utility – their chances of being re-elected and remaining in power – by promising to raise taxes upon the wealthy to pay for programs that voters support. Since the poor can vote (and because there are more of them) but do not pay federal income taxes, all redistributive political action is prima facie illegitimate, because it inefficiently redistributes social wealth downward to those who have not ‘earned’ it. Once this simplifying assumption is made, there is no such thing as ‘the public good’, or even ‘the public’, only greedy politicians promising programs with other people’s money.

The problem, Buchanan and his colleagues admit, is that is exceedingly difficult to convince a majority of voters that their rights deserve to be curtailed, and that the state should brutally enforce the private property rights of the minority ‘makers’ against the majority ‘takers’. As MacLean traces Buchanan’s intellectual biography, she concludes that he and his colleagues eventually settle on a distrust of democracy itself and support erecting constitutional safeguards around the kind of state they aim to produce – one with no social safety net and tasked solely with protecting private property rights. Buchanan warns in The Limits of Liberty, ‘Democracy may become its own Leviathan … unless constitutional limits are imposed and enforced’ (quoted in MacLean p. 151). As MacLean puts it: ‘There was no sense glossing over it anymore: democracy was inimical to economic liberty’ (p. 152). Since representative democracy is designed to expropriate money from the most productive members of society, representative democracy as such must be rewired.

As mentioned, MacLean traces the intellectual biography of Buchanan across the various institutions that employed him, but I hesitate to term this an intellectual development. That is, his conceptualization of public choice theory remained virtually identical, whether it be defending school segregation in Virginia or supporting the firing of Angela Davis at UCLA. It is not simply that private property rights must be enforced – violently if necessary – but that those with the most property to lose must necessarily be prioritized. After Buchanan settles into George Mason University to set up an institute to promulgate right-wing thought, MacLean’s narrative expands beyond Buchanan himself onto other characters, institutions, and settings, all necessary for the successful metastasis of public choice onto new areas. Although Buchanan serves as MacLean’s entry point, she demonstrates how fertile (and lucrative) the mid-twentieth century was for take-no-prisoners critiques of the American welfare state, with sections on Henry G. Manne’s burgeoning field of ‘law and economics’, F.A. ‘Baldy’ Harper’s Institute for Human Studies and his intellectual mentorship of Charles Koch, and the 1974 founding of the Cato Institute.

No book about neoliberalism is complete without a discussion of Chile: MacLean asserts it was ‘Virginia’, not ‘Chicago’, that impacted the long-term future of the Chilean people. While Milton Friedman may have consulted Pinochet on monetary policy, Buchanan’s influence was much deeper. Upon his advice, Chile privatized its social insurance program, curtailed union power, and deregulated university tuition among other curbs on the electoral process; these reforms were constitutionally codified, immune even to electoral challenges. As Buchanan put it: ‘We are formulating constitutional ways in which we can limit government intervention in the economy and make sure it keeps its hand out of the pockets of productive contributors’ (quoted in MacLean, p. 158). The final part of Democracy in Chains outlines what the public choice school aims to destroy in the United States: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, federal income tax rates, voting rights, public education (at both the K-12 and university level), and perhaps surprisingly, feminism. Governor Scott Walker’s Wisconsin is held up as paradigmatic for how these attacks destroy the social bases of working-class and Democratic Party politics, setting up a virtuous circle of electoral, material, and ideological victories. MacLean concludes by warning readers that the Koch brothers have set their sights on amending the US Constitution in the same fashion as the Chilean – perpetually insulating the capitalist class from popular challenges and redistributive justice.

MacLean’s book is noteworthy for documenting how the public choice school has focused on what Hall called ‘discursive struggle’, which according to Jameson (1996)

[s]ucceeds by way of discrediting its alternatives and rendering unmentionable a whole series of thematic topics. It appeals to trivialization, naivete, material interest, “experience,” political fear, and historical lessons, as the “grounds” for decisively delegitimizing such formerly serious possibilities as nationalization, regulation, deficit spending, Keynesianism, planning, protection of national industries, the security net, and ultimately the welfare state itself. (p. 4)

Public choice theorists’ long-term thinking, their focus on capturing institutions, providing scholarships for ambitious faculty, and a commitment to honing ideas prior to action (p. 133) have paid off, shifting the discursive terrain upon which their opponents stand. That market metaphors seem impossible to dislodge from public discourse is perhaps the broadest ideological effect of public choice theory. Paradoxically, the school’s obsessive documentation, professionalization, and institutionalization (particularly in public universities) mean that MacLean had a wealth of archival data to draw upon to craft this story, particularly in Buchanan’s personal papers housed at George Mason University. Although they disdained ‘the public’, adherents to the school never kept their plans private. MacLean thus provides a model for critical scholarship: By unearthing the ‘deep history’ of public choice thought, she simultaneously indicates the hard road that lies ahead for those who aim to produce alternatives. The book meticulously documents exactly what is at stake and names the institutions that incubate these ideas (it should surprise no one that Koch-supported academics at Texas Tech, Samford, Berry College, and George Mason, among others, have already attacked MacLean and her claims in print). Below, I explore some limits to MacLean’s approach, and how one might affirmatively re-interpret the insights without denying their original value.

According to MacLean, public choice theory’s first sustained political engagement was the fight to preserve legal segregation in Virginia public schools after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. The solution, for Buchanan and his collaborators, was to encourage a private voucher system – an end-run around the 14th Amendment under the moniker of ‘school choice’. In so doing, white parents could enroll their students in private schools, which, in turn, would be at liberty to exclude Black children. Such a plan would ensure de facto segregation would continue, private institutions would be enriched on state money, and Virginia would be drained of funds to educate children whose parents could not afford, or did not prefer, private education. If someone were tasked with devising a plan even more inhumane than legal segregation, this would have to be it. MacLean’s underlying argument is that ‘property rights’ functioned discursively as an alibi for unrepentant anti-Black racism; and ‘government overreach’ was metonymic for ‘civil rights’. Seen through this lens, all of public choice theory expresses a yearning for a racially stratified society and a clear hierarchy of ruler and ruled. The conservative emphasis on hierarchy, and not ‘economic efficiency’, also provides the basic building blocks of Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind (2017).

However, I also find this thesis limiting because it cannot illuminate why others – those who did not grow up in Tennessee or lived in the heart of the former Confederacy – arrived independently at identical conclusions. Locating Buchanan’s regressive economic theories in his social-geographic location runs aground when identical ideas are extant in Austrian economics, as well as Chicago-school thought. Friedman (1955) himself admits in a footnote in ‘The Role of Government in Education’ that his support of private school vouchers spontaneously adheres exactly to the segregationist legal strategy, yet this does not deter him from advocating for it (p. 5). Thus, it is less that Buchanan’s Southern upbringing necessarily shaped the formation of public choice, but that public choice retroactively rendered his Southern social milieu as justifiable, even desirable. In print, Buchanan never explicitly related Austrian economics’ alliance with the Southern slave-owning class, united by a defense of property rights above all. However, two of Buchanan’s students, Tabarrok and Cowen (1992) did favorably compare rabid segregationist John C. Calhoun with Austrian giant Friedrich Hayek in ‘The Public Choice Theory of John C. Calhoun’. Thus, despite MacLean’s focus on Buchanan’s American upbringing, Austrian economic thought hangs heavily over the book’s major figures. MacLean notes how Buchanan, Gordon Tullock (Buchanan’s co-author), Harper, and Koch were all members of the Mont Pelerin society, and explicitly credits Austrian economics with their social views. Although MacLean alludes to the major methodological distinctions between ‘Chicago-school’ and ‘Virginia school’ economics, Endres (2007) argues that their differences are negligible and surmountable. MacLean tells a new story apart from the Chicago-centric scholarship regarding neoliberalism, but the strict American focus neglects the compelling, transnational story that can be told about the relations between the Austrian school of thought and public choice. As others (Jones 2014, Mirowski 2014, Mirowski and Plehwe 2015) have made clear, Austria’s influence on neoliberal thought is clear regarding the Chicago school, yet MacLean only gestures at its theoretical links to Virginia. Future scholarship can endeavor to stretch the road from Mont Pelerin to Charlottesville.

Finally, MacLean’s scholarly starting point, as ‘a historian of American social movements and their impact on public policy’, bears mention (p. xviii). MacLean’s animating conviction throughout the book is that civil, economic, political, and social rights are secured when social movements successfully petition the federal government for redress (p. 95). She writes: ‘For most of us today, the story of this period is one of righting wrongs long overdue for correction. It’s about basic fairness and equal treatment under the law’ (p. 75). From this liberal-pluralist perspective, conservatives have historically moved through state and local legislatures to secure regressive gains, protect the rights of corporations and favor the rich. However, for a reader who is skeptical of the role of the federal government in securing civil rights, or one who sees the state as a site of struggle and contest, the federal/state bifurcation may be overstated. (One could ask the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Kent State University, or striking miners during the Battle of Blair Mountain their opinions of the federal government’s position on civil rights.) The expansion of federally recognized civil rights in the mid-twentieth century is itself historically anomalous; the federal government’s role in securing rights has been contingent upon social movement power, even in the moments she identifies as high points of struggle. From a radical perspective, the federal/state antagonism is the mode of appearance of a different antagonism altogether – that of class struggle. The state is no neutral mediator of class conflict, but an entity that expresses class conflict as such.

Similarly, Buchanan presumed that the expanding federal budgets and taxation rates in post-war America were a genetic feature of the state itself, and not also a historical anomaly. The massive increase in the size and scope of the federal government (and its budget) resulted from an unprecedented period of capital accumulation after World War II. The selfsame federal government fostered this extraordinary period of economic growth by promoting consumerism, guaranteeing investments and deposits, subsidizing higher education, and providing research and development. Of course, the federal government also protected market relations worldwide through force. That is, MacLean’s liberal-pluralist model and Buchanan’s public choice agree on the basic outline of state power but disagree at a moral level. A radical critique would involve seeing the federal government’s role as a historical anomaly, as a site of struggle, and point to their overlapping deficiencies, both hypostasizing a unique moment in time as a feature of the state as such. Yet MacLean’s social-geographic account of public choice theory, as rooted in a post-Confederate milieu is admirable here, because it casts a light on the deficiencies of public choice’s account of itself. But if the Koch Foundation is able to alter the US Constitution to insulate capital from democracy permanently, then the liberal-pluralist divide between federal and state no longer holds, and certainly would be no respite for social movements in the same way as before.

The story MacLean tells is not Buchanan’s alone. It belongs to Charles Koch, Henry Manne, ‘Baldy’ Harper, William Breit, Gordon Tullock, Tyler Cowen, and others, in America. It is also a story of Hayek, von Mises, Pinochet, Rothbard, Böhm-Bawerk. It is also the story of the Pope Foundation, housed in MacLean’s state of North Carolina. The story is also that of modern economics; a vocabulary capable of being inserted into every conceivable social milieu, audaciously substituting for context itself. MacLean’s Democracy in Chains models aggressive, and ethical, scholarship in a discursive struggle for the shape of the future.