Charles Koch, 79, in his office at Koch Industries in Wichita, Kansas, on
July 29, 2015. (photo: Nikki Kahn/WP/Getty Images)
The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America
By Kristin Miller, Moyers & Company
16 July 17
A Q&A with author Nancy MacLean about the elusive James McGill Buchanan.
Author Nancy MacLean has unearthed a stealth ideologue of the American
right. Her book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical
Right's Stealth Plan for America, tells the story of one James McGill
Buchanan, a Southern political scientist and father of "public choice
economics." MacLean details how this little-known figure has had a massive
impact on the ideology of the far right. None other than Charles Koch looked
to MacLean's theories for inspiration. They are libertarian - but with a
twist: bluntly, it "entails restrictions on the freedom of the great
majority in order to protect property rights and the prerogatives of the
most well off." MacLean shows how this idea can be traced down through the
last 60 years of right-wing politics, starting with Brown v. The Board of
Education and continuing with the Koch brothers' empire. And she
demonstrates that those followers and those in thrall to the Koch billions
are pumping up their fight under the new administration.
Kristin Miller talked with Nancy MacLean about her books and the influence
of James McGill Buchanan on our politics both overt and covert. Read an
excerpt of Democracy in Chains.
Kristin Miller: Did you know anything about Buchanan before you started your
research?
Nancy MacLean: I did not. I had actually never heard of him, probably like
most people in the country. I found him in the course of researching
something else and I kept finding him in the archives on different important
matters that shocked me, and so I began to make him the focus of the
research.
KM: Just what is his theory of "public choice economics"?
NM: Buchanan was trained at the University of Chicago and was part of the
same milieu as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek and others whose names
are more well known. What he did that was different from them is take the
tools that he learned at the University of Chicago and apply them to public
life. So he looked at public actors, including elected officials, as
self-interested, as people who were not really seeking the common good, not
really trying to advance the public interest, but really serving their own
interests.
So in the case of elected officials, he said that their real interest, their
main interest was being re-elected. He was in public finance, so his
contribution there was to say that because they were interested in being
elected and because they weren't paying for the things that they were doing
from their own pockets, they didn't care about running up deficits. They
would promise one thing to environmentalists, say, and one thing to retirees
and another thing to public schools and not care about raising adequate
revenue to cover those things. He was not entirely wrong about that. But his
theory of the motives of public actors was so cynical as to be utterly
corrosive of the norms of a democratic society, as people pointed out along
the way, but he would not listen.
KM: How does that theory flow into the idea that it is democracy versus
liberty?
NM: He was setting to work in Virginia in the late 1950s. Virginia had the
most oligarch elite of the entire South. And he understood the system in
Virginia as a kind of outpost of liberty and he posed as his own mission to
preserve liberty, the liberty advocated by the leaders of Virginia, like
Sen. Harry Bird. That liberty was very compatible with restrictions on the
freedom of the great majority. So labor unions did not have free ability to
operate in Virginia. Civil rights activists certainly did not. There was
very poor transparency in the state in terms of reporting about the things
that were going on. His version of liberty entails restrictions on the
freedom of the great majority in order to protect property rights and the
prerogatives of the most well-off systems.
KM: How does this differ say from libertarianism as preached by Ron Paul and
that sort of wing of the Republican or libertarian parties?
NM: I was really entering a whole new world here. I mean, not just
Buchanan's public choice school of economics, but I had actually not paid
much attention to libertarianism before either. But it turns out that most
of them do draw from these common sources and one of the key figures in that
- a guy named Murray Rothbard, who Charles Koch sustained for a while - he
traced the core libertarian idea to John C. Calhoun, the pro-slavery
theorist of the 19th century, who had his own version of liberty and
basically looked at taxes as exploitative. So here a man who made his living
and his wealth by enslaving men, women and children said that that was not
exploitation but what was exploitation was when less-wealthy citizens went
to government for things like public education, good roads, canals and all
those kinds of things. So he actually posed it as what we would call today
makers and takers. So Calhoun saw himself as a maker and saw other citizens,
white citizens at the time, who were the ones voting for these things, as
takers, and that idea flowed into modern libertarianism - this notion that
there isn't exploitation in the economic realm, the exploitation comes from
the political realm, where majorities gang up on minorities of propertied
individuals.
So actually, Ron Paul is connected to that whole set of ideas. It's kind of
like the revolutionaries of the left, the Bolsheviks and all the groups they
wrought. So there are various differentiations among them, but for the
people who are the core ideologues of libertarianism and the core architects
in building this movement, there are certain common views and what I'm
describing is one of them, the notion that property rights are the crucial
human right and that they are central to liberty and that liberty includes
the ability of individuals to veto what a democracy comes up with.
KM: You referred to a movement as a fifth column. Is it still a stealth
movement, do you feel, or is it more in the open these days?
NM: I think it's both, and that's its strength. It's not actually a
conspiracy in the legal definition, because a conspiracy involves illegal
behavior, and this cause is so rich, so wealthy, that they can hire the best
legal talent to make sure that they're operating within the law - with the
possible exception of nonprofit law. But at the same time, it is so vast and
so well-funded - the amount of money being circulated through these
operations is larger than the major political parties. There are literally
dozens - not just dozens, but hundreds of organizations, if you count the
state level ones and the international ones, that are ostensibly separate
but really working together on this. So I don't think "fifth column" is
necessarily the best term, but it identifies that element of their thought,
which is really so far on the radical right that they have such a hostile
attitude toward our democracy; it's almost as if they're outsiders bent on
what one of them called a hostile takeover.
KM: Who are the people now that we should be watching, and what kind of
tactics should we be looking out for?
NM: Well, the first thing I'd say is stop paying such attention to Trump's
tweets. They're a total distraction. I think we should instead be carefully
watching the actions of groups like Freedom Partners, Chamber of Commerce,
the Koch's big donor operation. The Club for Growth is another part of this,
and Americans for Prosperity on the ground.
I think you could also watch for their language. This is a cause that has
opposed social security from its creation. These people are totally hostile
to the principle of social insurance. They think we should all be
individually responsible for our needs, ultimately. But they also know that
that's a terribly unpopular thing to say. Huge majorities of American people
support Social Security, support Medicare, want to make them better and
stronger. Buchanan advised in great detail about Social Security at the
beginning of the early 1980s. What they need to do is fear monger and create
a sense of crisis that these programs are unsustainable, they'll never be
solvent. So they use an Orwellian language of reform when really what they
want to do is undermine the program. I think the first thing to do would be
ask them fundamental questions, like do you support the principle of Social
Security, do you support the principle of Medicare?
I think people should also resist any further effort to privatize anything
until we get to the bottom of this. They are using privatization not because
it was more efficient, as they would say publicly, but as they talked about
among themselves, privatization radically alters power relations in our
society by weakening groups like public employees and public school
teachers.
There is really a calculated effort going on to undermine all of our
collective institutions and some of the great social reforms of the 20th
century - such as labor unions, the AARP, civil rights groups. We've seen
the attacks, beginning in Wisconsin, on the right of workers to collective
bargaining. We've seen passage of right to work legislation in many states
and efforts even to put right to work legislation into the constitutions of
states so that it cannot be changed by future generations.
So I think if we understand what the strategy is and what the endgame is,
we'll be in a better position to stop it and get the country back on a
course that most of us would want of fairness, of sustainability, of one
person, one vote.
KM: And I mean, Trump himself said he was not one of these people, but do
you see things that he's done in his administration that are right out of
their playbook already?
NM: Yes. I don't think there's as much light between Donald Trump and the
Kochs as they would all like us to believe. I'm a historian, not a
journalist. That will be for future journalists to cover. But I will say
that Trump certainly shares much of this ideology. When he speaks of the
swamp, he's using a language and a code that's different from what most
liberals think. So people keep saying, "You're not fulfilling your promises
of draining the swamp in your conduct in office," but his view of the swamp
is a Buchananite view of the swamp, so it refers to all of those who make
claims on government for things they cannot get alone in the market. So he
has actually acted to destroy basically our system of environmental
regulations, to undermine workers' power, to stop civil rights enforcement.
All of those things flow from the Buchanan-Koch playbook. And Donald Trump
is surrounded by people who are veterans of this Koch apparatus. So, I saw
by one report, 70 percent of his top senior appointees are coming from that
network, and that includes of course his vice president, Mike Pence. It also
includes the White House liaison to Congress, Mark Short. It includes Scott
Pruitt at the EPA.
KM: How do we make the Koch organization more visible, if it's not for work
like yours and Jane Mayer's?
The crucial thing for people to realize that this cause is doing what it is
because it knows it is a permanent minority cause. And if the vast majority
of people ever understood what it is really about or what it is trying to do
to our society and our politics, they would rally against it. You see it
again and again where they realize, "Oh my gosh, people will never support
us" you know, "if we tell the truth," from Barry Goldwater's campaign
forward. Frankly, our legislators in Washington are going to need to be
reinvigorated by the grass-roots understanding of these things.
We're trying to expose this and to help people to understand that what
they're telling even the voters they're relying on is not the truth. And
that to me is especially chilling. There are a couple of great social
scientists, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, who wrote a book about the
tea party in which they went out to talk to as many tea party groups in the
country as they could. They met with just hundreds and hundreds, I think, of
rank-and-file tea party members, and they could not find a single
rank-and-file tea party member who wanted the privatization of Social
Security and Medicare, and yet that's what the Koch operation is doing in
putting itself at the head of these tea party groups. It's using them as a
kind of battering ram to get this billionaire donor agenda.
Most Americans believe in fairness; we believe that people should work hard
but there should be a safety net. We believe in saving the quality of our
air and water for our children. Most Americans want action on climate
change. You can just go through the list. Most Americans believe in
progressive taxation. The people are not as divided as this operation has
made us with its endless agitation of kind of culture war issues.
And one more thing I think I should add on that front is we also need to pay
attention to the state level, because this cause has very strategically gone
after power over state governments. We saw, after 2010, the most radical
gerrymander in history, and with that gerrymandered power, they've pushed
through very unpopular agendas in numerous states. What you're seeing at the
state level, what you're seeing at the federal level, what you're seeing in
pulling out of the Paris climate talks - all of these things come together
and are being driven by this huge apparatus. I think just having that
clarity to see the connections and realize that it's not our fellow citizens
who are doing this to us so much as that class of radical-right donors. I
think that will be hugely empowering to people.
KM: And you believe that they have that messianic strain to them?
NM: I think the left and liberals have grossly underestimated Charles Koch.
I think he's an absolutely brilliant man. The guy has three engineering
degrees from MIT. He refuses to take his company public because he doesn't
want to answer to stockholders who will want to think about the next quarter
when he'd like to be thinking about 30 years from now. I think he is a very
deep and strategic thinker and I think he is also - yes, has a messianic
vision. He's compared himself to Martin Luther - saying that he wants to
unleash the kind of force that propelled Columbus to his discovery.
Now, he's also though enough of a good manager to think about the
self-interest of others. What he's done is beautifully exploit the
self-interest of varied people who can get him what he wants. Maybe they
believe in these things, maybe they don't, but they share an interest in
moving the ball down the field.
Similarly, he's exploiting the religious right. I mean, this is a man who,
from everything I've read, is not very religious himself, and libertarianism
as a cause has always had lots of committed atheists who sneer at people who
believe in God. You certainly think of Ayn Rand, right? But they are
activating the religious right to provide a source of votes that otherwise
they would lack.
I do not believe he's acting from crude self-interest, venal self-interest,
as many people have implied. I think this is his mission, to change the
world and to enshrine his version of liberty. But he's a shrewd enough actor
to bring all these other people into the fold.
I think another really interesting approach would be for voters around the
country to start holding their elected officials accountable, and I hope
that would include moderate Republican voters too. Are you willing to stand
on principle even if they primary you and drive you from office?
The Senate health care bill's support is under 20 percent around the
country. In not a single state is there majority support for this bill, and
yet most of the Republican candidates in the Senate are lining up to support
this bill. Why is that? That's because they're afraid of the Koch donor
network. We have to just really help people to understand the deep spine of
this - to X-ray what's happening and understand where the real forces of
power are moving and be able to focus on those.
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