Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America” is the single most important new book for progressives to read this year if they want to understand how we got to the dark moment of the present.
As I noted in my recent column on the right-wing assault on public sector unions, MacLean takes us to the roots of the current crisis via an intellectual history of James McGill Buchanan, the thinker whose work, more than anyone else’s, informs the machinations of the Kochtopus, that shadowy network of interlinked billionaire-funded right-wing think tanks driving American politics.
If you want to know the central ideas behind the “dark money” that Jane Mayer’s seminal book addresses and the philosophical origins of the neoliberalism that Naomi Klein analyzes in her work, MacLean’s text is the key. In it, we learn that Buchanan is the intellectual godfather of an intentionally dishonest, stealth movement by the right to “save capitalism from democracy—permanently.” [Read more…]