Nancy MacLean: Democracy in Chains

Nancy MacLean:

It was never empirical work with Buchanan, it was always theory. But to set up theory that would prove that when we have instances of market failure and in our time, climate change. The impending climate catastrophe is the biggest example of market failure.

When you have market failure, his arguments was most people would go to government, but he wanted to show that you shouldn't go to government.

Amanda Weinstein:

This is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions. My name is Amanda Weinstein, and I'll be guest hosting today's episode.

My guest today is Nancy MacLean, a historian and professor at Duke University. Her book, Democracy in Chains details how the radical right funded by billionaires has slowly molded the American political landscape to change the rules of democracy in their favor, all with the help of an economist you may likely never have heard of.

Nancy, welcome to Burn the Boats.

Nancy MacLean:

It's great to be with you, Amanda.

Amanda Weinstein:

I'm so glad and relieved that you agreed to do this interview because I'm going to tell you, economists don't come off so well in this book. And I just want to say, we're not all trying to destroy democracy.

Nancy MacLean:

I know that. I know some really wonderful economists who are pushing the other way.

Amanda Weinstein:

Oh, good. So, I thought let's start there. So, at his death in 2013, economist and Nobel Prize winner, James Buchanan, was hardly known outside the world of economics and libertarians.

But you suggest that anyone who is concerned about our democracy should probably know who he is. So, who is he?

Nancy MacLean:

Yeah, good question. So, I could give you the long version or the short version.

But the short version is he grew up in Tennessee during The Great Depression, served in the Navy, went on to the University of Chicago where he imbibed Chicago school and Austrian school economics. Basically, what many people call neoliberalism today, or market fundamentalism sometimes.

But I actually was not looking for him. I was tracking the story of the state of Virginia's response to Brown versus Board of Education and its program of massive resistance which involves shutting down any public school that desegregated. This is in 1956 and thereafter, that's when the legislation was passed.

But anyway, to make a long story short, I discovered James Buchanan at a new center that he had set up in Charlottesville Virginia at the University of Virginia, essentially aligning with the massive resistors and the most arched segregationists who were determined to set up tax funded private schools to send white kids off to schools that wouldn't be integrated.

And so, I just got fascinated and I kept pulling on the string and like who is this guy? Where is this going? What's happening?

And it ended up leading me to the present and to Charles Koch and the hundreds of organizations his donor network funds. And to a story that really blew me away as the researcher. Like I didn't know where I was going, but I was really, really stunned by the destination.

Amanda Weinstein:

Oh, it's very kind of like Nancy Drew pulling on that string. And you are like actually finding the mystery, not just like a who'd done it. You're actually also finding the mystery.

Nancy MacLean:

I love that you say that because I was such a Nancy Drew fan as a kid.

Amanda Weinstein:

I mean, who didn't love some Nancy Drew.

Nancy MacLean:

And historians are kind of like that. You're looking for clues, you're following hints, you're doing all these things to try to figure out what the real story was. And it can take some time, but yeah, eventually …

Unfortunately, I don't have the sports car Nancy Drew had, but I like the idea.

Amanda Weinstein:

That's alright. So, we're going to dig into the story.

But when you look at Buchanan and what he did as an economist, so he argued, I don't know, kind of intuitive, like, “Well, politicians, they're self-interested like the rest of us. So, they're not out there doing what's in the public's interest.” And we all have plenty of examples of politicians who are self-interested.

So, what's wrong with this idea? What's wrong with Buchanan's approach to politics?

Nancy MacLean:

Yeah. As scholars would say, it's a really interesting heuristic tool, like a hypothesis to go to politics with.

And as you said, certainly there are people that you can find who do that. Actors in public life who are ultimately seeking their own self-interest rather than the public interest as they claim.

So, going out with that toolkit and that set of questions is fine. But what happened is that over time, the questions kind of ossified, especially with donor pressure into an agenda to …

And it was never empirical work with Buchanan, it was always theory. But to set up theory that would prove that when we have instances of market failure and in our time, climate change. The impending climate catastrophe is the biggest example of market failure.

When you have market failure, his argument was most people would go to government, but he wanted to show that you shouldn't go to government.

And that's actually what I found in his papers and his appeals to donors, including many fossil fuel donors. He would say that there were people out there making the positive case for markets.

But that he believed that the more important case and the more devastating case was the case against government because that would make it so, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, there is no alternative.

So, again, the hypothesis is fine and sometimes you can confirm that hypothesis with elected officials or others in public life or seem to confirm it.

But what he did, and his heirs did is let it congeal into a dogma that was complimentary to the corporate libertarian project that has sought to undermine our government and render it non-functional for the great majority so that it can better encase the economy that corporations profit from.

Amanda Weinstein:

So, I think you did this very nice job of putting his ideas in a historical context, which sometimes I feel like sometimes as economists we might think, “Well, these are just series of ideas. They don't have historical context.” But they absolutely do.

And so, you very sweetly point out a lot of his theories are backlash to things like Social Security and the New Deal and safeguards on the banking industry. And it's really kind of a backlash against what a lot of the majority actually wanted.

Nancy MacLean:

Yes.

Amanda Weinstein:

And what is so wrong about the majority? Why the backlash against the majority?

Nancy MacLean:

Well, it depends where you sit, right?

Amanda Weinstein:

True.

Nancy MacLean:

Because I thought the majority did some pretty great things over the course of the 20th century.

And interestingly, by the way, some of these people who were part of Buchanan's project and who are still living colleagues at George Mason University said that part of the problem in the 20th century was the enfranchisement of women.

I mean, because women don't think in their terms like natural economists. And women wanted things like the welfare state, provision for the ageing, and children, and people who are unemployed, and all of those kinds of things that libertarians don't like.

Amanda Weinstein:

There are not very many well-behaved women as it turns out. And they don't like that.

Nancy MacLean:

Yes. So, it's really important to understand, and it took me a while to get my mind around this because it's such a stark vision.

But to Libertarians, government has only three legitimate functions. Providing for the national defense (a pretty limited view of that), providing for the rule of law, and guaranteeing social order.

So, as one person translated that back to me, “Oh, I get it. Armies, courts, and police.” And that's it.

So, these kind of tight, punitive functions of the state, but they think anything else is illegitimate and it involves taxing people of wealth or corporations for things that the majority wants. And that is therefore as illegitimate as a bank robber.

And Buchanan would use examples like this, like a mugger in Central Park taking someone's wallet.

So, they have a very stark understanding of what government does and of what the common interest is. I mean, basically they don't think that there is a common interest or a common good.

And so, so many of the things that happened in the 20th century, they saw as infringements on liberty.

And that included the regulations of the progressive era and on behalf of consumers and others, the social security, as you mentioned during the New Deal, workers' rights to collective bargaining, which they saw as ganging up on employers, thought that you should just have a one-to-one relationship with your boss.

And all the environmental regulations that came later, the civil rights regulations, protections against discrimination for women and for lesbian and gay bisexual and transgender folks. So, all of those things are anathema to libertarians.

But they have a problem because these things are most of them supported by the majority. And people like having security in their old age and like being free from discrimination and so forth.

So, as time went on that this vision, and as the donor money came in and in larger quantities, the vision became much starker. And they began to realize that they would never persuade people of the vision that they were trying to impose on the society, the agenda they had.

So, what they had to do is actually change how government operated.

And James Buchanan was really clear about this. He started telling from pretty much like the late ‘70s and ‘80s on, he would say over and over again, “If you don't like the outcome of public policy over a long period of time (and think 20th century, and I'm not exaggerating for libertarians) stop thinking about who rules (the candidates, the parties, et cetera) and start thinking about the rules and how to change those rules to get the outcomes you want.”

And that's exactly what we have seen with a vengeance beginning in the 1970s, but really, really accelerating after 2010 when a Republican party that was captured by these donors. And we can discuss how they did that if you'd like.

But when that radicalized Republican party got control of 30 state governments and began imposing this agenda in a quite dramatic way with really arche and sophisticated gerrymandering, with voter suppression on a scale the country had not seen since black men were driven from the polls at the turn of the 20th century.

With destruction of unions, with trying to capture the judiciary at the state level and at the federal level and more.

So, we have seen that kind of rules change on a quite, quite breathtaking scale.

Amanda Weinstein:

Wow. So, I think it's interesting that you said they couldn't persuade the majority, so they just have to change the rules.

That is a fundamental realization of they're not trying to persuade the majority, they've stopped that. The Republican playbook and this extremism and their playbook is just simply trying to change these rules.

Nancy MacLean:

Yeah. I mean, it is both because network funded groups are always trying to recruit young people for their talent pipeline. And they do that with what James Buchanan recommended, a gravy train.

So, they have outposts in over 300 colleges and universities that the Charles Koch Foundation alone is given to with big centers on many campuses, including sadly, my own at Duke.

So, they try to win over young people and they start with the kind of positive pro liberty vision. They even call themselves the freedom movement now. And it's kind of glossy and inviting.

But the advanced course for the people who become really committed is the Buchanan idea of radical rules change. And so, we've seen that rollout in a very, very significant way. So, it's a both, and not either or the persuasive effort goes on.

But also, even the think tanks who do that persuasion, like the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, members of the state policy network, they're also at the same time advocating rules changes to further restrict the vote.

In fact, in my state, North Carolina, Cleta Mitchell was just here, if your listeners remember her from the Trump conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election.

She was caught on tape at the Heritage Foundation talking about ways to keep young people from voting because they would vote for the rights agenda.

And she's now, in North Carolina advising the Republicans on their newest round of voter suppression legislation.

So, the two things tend to go together and to fuse now.

Amanda Weinstein:

So, I think it's interesting that you talk about they're attracting them with this idea of freedom.

And it's interesting when you think about the rules changes he is suggesting and the things that he and many of them want to roll back would really take freedoms away from very many people that it's interesting of, do you think James Buchanan like fundamentally thought that democracy is at odds with the free market?

Because as if the free market gives you freedoms, but democracy doesn't give you freedoms. Is that really kind of what he thought about those two things?

Nancy MacLean:

Yeah. I struggled with this for a long time trying to get a deeper understanding of what seemed to be as you're putting out like contradictory or paradoxical. And what I came to realize over time is that the vast majority of us have a different definition of freedom from libertarians.

And they've started using freedom because it's a nicer word, but really they were always about economic liberty.

And so, freedom from. Freedom from regulation, freedom from voters, having any say over what you do with your corporation, including your fossil fuel corporation, freedom from the obligation to pay taxes for things that the vast majority thinks are a good idea, like public education. So, it's a very negative agenda.

And whereas for most of us, freedom means freedom from domination. If you're at work like the freedom to not have your boss be able to sexually harass you or fire you because he doesn't like the way you sneeze.

I mean, if you're in at will employment situation, if you don't have a union or other contract to protect you, we have in the United States at will employment, so bosses can fire you for anything. So, to us, that's not freedom, that's domination.

But to the libertarians, it's almost like a black and white negative, they think about it as the opposite.

I actually have suggested to many audiences, I think we should just have a national linguistic divorce and we should give them the term liberty, which goes back to southern slave holders who were doing so much in the name of Liberty, and Cape Freedom for the majority project because the two sides mean fundamentally different things by these terms.

Amanda Weinstein:

Oh, that makes sense. I would be for that. I'm on your side there. I like, I'll take freedom.

I think it's one of my favorite quotes too is from actually an economist, Joan Robinson, who says, “The purpose of studying economics is to learn to avoid being deceived by economists.”

Nancy MacLean:

That's great.

Amanda Weinstein:

So, then we can start to think about what does this actually mean? And I think it's interesting when you see the rise of extremism in America.

So, when I was reading your book, I almost came to a full stop when you started talking about James Buchanan advising Chilean dictator Pinochet.

This is like when we take these ideas to an extreme, when we have these ideas in its extreme form, you get something very extreme on the majority of the population.

So, can you tell us a little bit what happened in Chile, what happened with Pinochet. So terrible. How was this kind of the extreme version of Buchanan's ideas?

Nancy MacLean:

Yeah. So, Chile in 1973 had its first socialist elected government of Salvador Allende, or in 1970 rather. And for the next three years, the Chilean elite, along with the Nixon Presidential administration, schemed for how to overthrow that government.

And Nixon's people, actually Henry Kissinger, I believe it was, said they should make the Chilean economy scream, was his language, his verb, his construction.

And so, in 1973, the dictatorship took over incredibly brutal dictatorship, killed several thousand people, shut down every kind of freedom that you and I would recognize. Universities, the trade unions in rural areas, et cetera.

And then proceeded to impose this radical, what we would call today, neoliberal agenda of privatizing education, privatizing Social Security, finding ways to make it impossible for workers to exercise collective power, et cetera.

So, they did all that, but they were also, coming under really critical attack from the rest of the world for all these human rights violations.

And so, there was great pressure ultimately even from the Reagan administration by 1988 to go back to a representative system and stop the military rule. But they wanted to lock in the things that they had done in the dictatorship. And the way that they did that was with a new constitution.

And many people over the years, at least people of a certain age, have heard about the Chilean military hunter and about Milton Friedman coming to Chile and advising on how to counter inflation. And even Friedrich Hayek, another economist, paid I believe two visits.

But the things Friedman was talking about were temporary. The things they brought Buchanan in to talk about were permanent and they were putting shackles on the Constitution in order to make this minority agenda untouchable by the population when they went back to some form of democracy. It was actually called restricted democracy.

And that's the constitution that many Chileans died over trying to challenge a few years back. So, it was really, really a serious thing.

But it was also, a preview of the kinds of constitutional changes that the Koch donor network and its allies in these donor-funded operations like Heritage, like the Federalist Society, like Cato, what they would like to do in America.

Amanda Weinstein:

That’s a scary picture.

Nancy MacLean:

And so, something that hasn't gotten nearly enough attention, but they're actually pushing for a constitutional convention here.

I had the book just came out this summer in a new edition with a new preface that updates the story from when it was published in 2017 to now.

And one of the things I talk about at length is this push for a constitutional convention to literally put democracy and chains in constitutional terms in the US.

Amanda Weinstein:

Oh my gosh. I don't mean to make light of this, but it is very Barbie movie. So, I have to ask, have you seen the Barbie movie?

Nancy MacLean:

I was so happy when … yes, I have seen the Barbie movie and my husband and I were sitting there and when they started talking about the patriarchs wanted to change the constitution and how all the women had to get out to vote, I was like, “Oh my God, do you think the director knows? This is fabulous.” Yeah, so, we were very excited about that.

Amanda Weinstein:

Oh, I was too. So, it also reminded me-

Nancy MacLean:

Because also this constitutional convention is coming to a theater near us. Like they're saying they have a 28 of the 34 states needed, but some of them, including some of these people allied with the Federalist Society are saying, “Oh no, no, no.” What did they call it? Aggregation.

They say if they aggregate all these state measures that were nonrestrictive over the years for a constitutional convention, they have more than enough.

So, this tells you the stakes of the 2024 elections at the state level. If they are able to get a majority of states, they absolutely will go to Congress.

And if there's a Republican Congress, it's pretty clear that a Republican Congress in today's terms would sign off on this constitutional convention and then they would alter the fundamental rules of our society.

Amanda Weinstein:

A United States Constitution. It's very scary.

Nancy MacLean:

Yeah, I do have some citations in that new preface to the book. And they can also go to Common Cause, the civic organization that has done a lot to try to alert people about this danger and to try to organize against it.

Amanda Weinstein:

So, you brought up an important point of like they could actually change our United States Constitution. This is not a farfetched Barbie movie thing, although the Barbie movie did portray it quite entertainingly.

But it is also a state and local thing. This is not just about the federal government, this is about where we currently live. This is about our communities, this is about our states. So, I'm not sure if you're a following Issue 1 in Ohio, but they also tried to change the constitution in Ohio-

Nancy MacLean:

Yes.

Amanda Weinstein:

… to take away the power of the majority. And what they did in Ohio is something that they could do in any state. So, how do you see this playing out at the state and local level basically coming to be.

And I would also say Issue 1 also funded by, in that case a different billionaire, Richard Uihlein, but another billionaire throwing some money into politics.

Nancy MacLean:

Yeah. So, that is a really serious issue and you're absolutely right, it's going on at the state level.

One of their legal theorists, someone whose work Charles Koch has subsidized different litigation firms over time, Clint Bolick in Arizona, who's now on the state Supreme Court in Arizona, wrote a number of books for the Cato Institute.

And in one of them he talked about how state constitutions are so much easier to alter and amend than federal constitutions. So, it would be very wise to start the work there in order to kind of prepare the way for bigger changes down the road. So, absolutely.

And they're also taking advantage of something. The radical right is taking advantage of the fact that most of us don't pay close attention to state politics.

We tend to look at national and who's going to be the president, who's going to be the nominee. Or local, we care about our mayor and our city council and things like that.

But that whole element of state politics is much more in the dark and people don't pay attention to it as much.

And also now, with the crisis of journalism since the rise of the internet, the number of reporters in state capitals has been decimated. There are now, very few full-time.

And so, so much is being done to move this radical corporate agenda through the states. And it's also important because many get out the vote groups, talk about who's on the top of the ticket and maybe the presidential races and the Senate, House races, but they don't urge people to know the whole ballot and to vote the whole ballot.

So, that's how some of these state supreme courts have been, have gone to the right and state legislatures.

So, we kind of need a massive program of civic education for people to understand how many fundamental decisions go on at the state level.

And at this point, most of the people are not paying attention. And these most radical corporations, often from dirty industries are essentially like they are writing legislation with the American Legislative Exchange Council, which has its 50th anniversary this fall.

And they were of course behind what Scott Walker did in Wisconsin and what's happened in states like mine North Carolina and much of the South and the mountain states.

So, yeah, again, really important for people to learn what's ahead so that we can get ahead of it, so that we can deal with these pressing issues that so many of us are concerned about and frustrated, understandably, that we haven't had more progress on.

But it's hard to have progress when you have an apparatus as complex, integrated, and sophisticated as what these radical right corporate libertarian donors have built up.

Amanda Weinstein:

Absolutely. I mean, constitutional change coming to a state near you, now with less freedoms for the majority.

Nancy MacLean:

And actually, for Supreme Court, if I can just say too, the Supreme Court, and it's not just me saying this like Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has written a great book about it called The Scheme, but our-

Amanda Weinstein:

Oh, I like that name.

Nancy MacLean:

… Supreme Court has been captured by the radical, Federalist Society members, the conservative majority on the court all has roots in the Federalist Society.

And we can see by their jurisprudence that they're committed to taking away freedoms and rights that most of us really cherish. And by doing it with like ridiculous interpretations of the Constitution and of American history. But because they have that power, they've been able to do that.

Amanda Weinstein:

Oh, I'm so glad you brought up the Supreme Court because we've also been learning, especially recently about this relationship between certain Supreme Court justices and very rich, wealthy Americans who are influencing their decisions.

So, I would love to talk more about, so how does this tie happen between Buchanan and this billionaire Koch brother, and how can we think about, what can we do about these ties between these billionaires and our democracy?

Nancy MacLean:

Yeah. Well, the early 20th century Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, “Sunshine is the best disinfectant,” famously. So, I think exposing this is really important.

And this court is really losing legitimacy. And if we look back at history, the times when the court has changed in a significant way has been at moments when it does lose legitimacy for the kinds of decisions that it's making.

And particularly if it's aligned with special interests like segregationists or like corporations in the early 1930s against everybody else or what they're doing now. So, yeah, I mean, Clarence Thomas-

Amanda Weinstein:

Okay. Can I just say you are giving me a lot of hope here.

Nancy MacLean:

Oh, good.

Amanda Weinstein:

That I've never been so hopeful in a court that is less legitimate because that means change might be coming soon. Okay, that was very helpful.

Nancy MacLean:

Yes, absolutely. And it's so interesting too because so many of them got on the court illegitimately.

So, like Clarence Thomas when he was proposed, this guy I mentioned before, Clint Bolick back then had worked for Clarence Thomas in the Reagan administration and he ran a group called the Institute for Justice.

And they basically lied to like the NAACP and others and misled them about what kind of Judge Thomas would be and really pushed hard to get him on the bench. And as we've seen with these recent exposures, what was it? I think it was 43 trips paid for by billionaires.

Amanda Weinstein:

43? So many.

Nancy MacLean:

It was just ridiculous amounts of luxury that he didn't bother to report. And I think the whole country is also coming … and actually majority of Republicans as well as Democrats, which is really heartening.

But to say, “Hey, guys, this is ridiculous. We shouldn't have our highest court in the land have no ethical rules, not even the minimum that are put on other representatives in government and every other level of the judiciary.”

So, again, I think sentiment is building for at least that kind of ethics reform, which seems minimal, but at least it's something that they have to declare who's taking them on these luxury junkets.

And I will say in my book research too, and in fact on Thomas too, but I happened on an early version of this with the field of law and economics and James Buchanan helped bring a guy named Henry Manny to George Mason to essentially transform their law school.

But Henry Manny was already at that point, famous for these law and economics seminars, these summer seminars where they would bring sitting justices to luxury every expense paid vacation, and kind of inculcate them with law and economics thought.

And there's a environmental researcher in Boston, who came up with this great natural experiment to look at the judges who had gone to those junkets who had cases pending versus the ones who had cases pending who didn't go.

And he could actually chart that these seminars had an impact on their judicial thinking and on their rulings, which is why so many corporations gave Henry Manny money to run these seminars.

So, it's really once you start to pick up the rock, it's just so smelly under there. So, again, I think the sunshine is really important.

And also informing ourselves about the strategy. And I have heard that from many readers and it makes me feel good because I had my dark days doing this research and seeing the scale of this.

But when people say, as you said, “Well, now, I feel kind of hopeful. I feel like there's something that we can do,” or, “I feel like I understand how this works or why they're saying this, that, or the other.” To me, that's a real step forward because then we're empowered to do something about it.

Amanda Weinstein:

So, I'm going to guess the Koch brothers and the Cato Institute are not your biggest fans.

Nancy MacLean:

Yes, that is absolutely true. That is absolutely true. The Cato Institute, in fact, was originally called the Charles Koch, it actually had his name and then they switched to Cato.

But yeah, when I did this book, I knew that I would be kicking the hornet's nest. And I wanted to, and I willingly did it because I felt like the country needed to know about, or at least people wanted to read the book, needed to know about all of this

What I didn't understand then, and I knew they had bases in universities, because I'd written about George Mason University, which is the flagship Koch University in its economics department, political science, philosophy, and the law school.

Anyway, so I knew this, but what I didn't realize is how many of them there were, so particularly academics with these fancy chair names funded by donors and stuff.

So, when the book came out there was like, I don’t know, several weeks where it was just great doing all these interviews and reviews were coming out.

And all of a sudden, like the libertarians learned of it and it was just like this pile on and just like really … when I look back, I've learned much more about the climate denial industry now, which is also using a strategy the tobacco industry used.

And so, I realized they're playing from that playbook. All the kinds of arguments they'd make and the rhetorical tools, and just the piling on to try to destroy someone and undermine their reputation. So, they didn't succeed, but they surely tried.

But also, I got so many readers who said, “I'd never heard of you or your work, but I saw these guys on the right going crazy. And I thought, ‘Wow, she must have done some worthwhile, I'm going to read that book.’”

Amanda Weinstein:

That's awesome.

Nancy MacLean:

I'm serious. I've so much mail, I never even got to file it.

Amanda Weinstein:

Oh. So, I do have to say, so the picture of the cover of your book is a very like mad menisque kind of picture. And the book is noticeably mostly about men, mostly white men who want to reshape the government and change the rules, again, very kind of Ken Barbie movie.

I know you also studied gender. Where does gender fit into this story?

Nancy MacLean:

Such an important question and actually have one of my mentors, because I was in the first graduate program in US women's history in the country. And if Gerda Lerner were alive today, she'd be like, “How can you write a book without talking much about gender?”

But anyway, I was writing this for a broad audience. And interestingly, these guys didn't really talk much about gender, the ones I was writing about or about women.

I mean, there were hardly any women among them except as secretaries. And they did try to do justice to that story with one who — and this economist seemed to expect her to scrub his shower curtain when he got back from research leave abroad. I was like, “Crazy stuff.”

So, I did kind of follow their preoccupations in the way that I wrote this.

And so, I didn't talk as much about it, but it's a question that I, at least pre COVID when I was on the road a lot, would get from many audiences and particularly women who would say also like, “What are these guys thinking? You can't sustain a society with the kind of vision they're trying to bring in to be. Like that's not possible. What are they thinking?”

And I do think that that goes back to kind of where we started where these ideas kind of ossified into a dogma. And that dogma is a dogma of often very isolated men who don't interact with women as equals, certainly not in their public lives or their departments or other things.

And they just come up with these notions that are so far from reality. And they have this sort of entitled comfort that if the government isn't doing things, well, that'll just fall to the women. If we don't have public education and you have to pay for-

Amanda Weinstein:

We're the safety net.

Nancy MacLean:

Yeah, exactly. So, implicitly, the whole project places a huge burden on women, but they didn't really talk about that. Like sometimes they'd say like Milton Friedman would often say something like, “That should be for the individual to do. Well, really the family.”

Amanda Weinstein:

Really the woman.

Nancy MacLean:

I take your point on that. I mean, yeah, I'm not sure how I could do that differently now. Although I will say in research that I'm doing now, I'm looking more at something I just kind of mentioned in that book, which is their alliance with the religious right.

But that has been happening with great force, not only in the US but in the international wing of all of this.

So, again and again, you see that alliance with religious right characters, whether it's evangelicals as in this country, or evangelicals in Pentecostals, as with Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, a Trump-like character or Modi in India.

There's a lot of ways in which the people who are carrying out this radical political economic agenda have effectively allied with right-wing populace who get a lot of their energy and their following from attacking queer people. And from being really reactionary as far as women's rights and autonomy is concerned.

Amanda Weinstein:

I'm going to say as a woman, I did not mind it being men in there because some of these ideas were very bad. And I am fine labeling these ideas as the ideas of men.

But I also like the idea that you get some bad theories and things that can be taken to a batting extreme when you don't have everyone's voices in there. You don't get a representative idea of our world when you don't have everyone's voices.

And that's what we see is we see something not representative clearly of the majority. You can't have a majority without women and that's what you see with what they have. So, it kind of worked for the story that you told.

Nancy MacLean:

And also, it's interesting as you're pointing that out, which is so true that the more voices and life experiences you have in a decision-making process, the better that outcome is likely to be for the vast majority. Because you've anticipated issues that could arise.

And it is very interesting now, that I mean, they were always against any kind of civil rights legislation or affirmative action libertarians and corporate figures to boot until they had to.

But anyway, now, they are taking aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion. And we had the whole critical race, moral panic that they set off in the wake of the murder of George Floyd when so many white Americans too were realizing, “Hey, we have an issue here with structural racism. It's part of the way our society operates, it's part of our history and we want to reckon with it.”

And that whole attack on so-called critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion was designed to torpedo that. To make it so that we wouldn't look at that and to divide us again to kind of weaponize white anxiety and fear.

And they're also going after ESG, what is it? Environmental and social governance for corporations where, for example, people say, “Whoa, investing in fossil fuels carries major risk in a world of these incredible heat waves and storms and rising oceans and so forth. So, it's not smart to invest in those things.”

Well, they actually have the American Legislative Exchange Council among others is now, even pushing to penalize companies who try to invest responsibly in those ways.

So, they're really, really going after a lot of these developments that you and I would think of as common sense. And I think many of your listeners would too.

Like yes, let's make sure we're bringing in a diverse class into a university or a diverse group of workers into a corporation and let's make sure we're not investing in risky fields that have incredible harmful cost for society. But they want to say no.

And again, it goes back to liberty. Except to get the kind of liberty they want for the corporations, again, they have to pass laws to punish people who are trying to do what I think many of us would consider the right thing.

Amanda Weinstein:

Oh, the thinking just becomes so convoluted.

So, I want to go back kind of where we started, but I want to go back to, so you originally said you didn't actually set out to write this book, you actually set out to write about a school in Prince Edward County.

So, can you talk to us a little bit more, how does Prince Edward County and their school system lead you to Milton Friedman? Maybe more of a household economist name for some people. Then to Buchanan and the Koch brothers and or to our schools?

It somehow all then relates back to our schools and CRT, which we're talking about.

Nancy MacLean:

Yes. It is interesting how it's come full circle back to the schools as focus.

So, in 2006 I had just finished another book and I was in Philadelphia for a conference. And I went to the archives, the American Friends Service Committee, a nice kind of quaker group that's existed for a long time, done a lot of good work.

And they had an exhibit marking their work in Prince Edward County, Virginia, which was a county in the south side old Tobacco Belt of Virginia, where students went on a 100% solid student strike in 1951, led by a young woman named Barbara Rose Johns. They wanted to have an equal high school to the white kids.

And they went, they were persuaded to go back to school to say they could take their case to court.

So, they went to the NAACP and their case became one of the five folded into Brown versus Board of Education. So, it became a taking aim at the whole system of separate and inferior schools for black children.

Anyway, fast forward after the Brown decision comes out, the county leaders in Prince Edward want to punish those students for having gone on that strike, having been part of that case.

And so, when they reach the point where they really must integrate the public schools in 1959, a lot of legal back and forth happened. They completely shut down the public school system and left black children with no formal education whatsoever for five years.

Amanda Weinstein:

No freedom for education there.

Nancy MacLean:

Exactly right. While they sent the white children to private segregation academy, the Prince Edward Academy, which depended on tax vouchers — they called them tuition grants, but what we would call a vouchers today, Tax funded tuition grants so that those white parents wouldn't want public schools because the public schools would have to integrate.

So, it was just like such a heartbreaking story. And they had oral histories, and had the correspondence, and the stories of all these people who tried so hard against this incredible, horrible thing.

And kind of fast forward, but then I found out Milton Friedman wrote his first manifesto for school vouchers, which became his lifetime public policy, something closest to his heart. Wrote the first one in 1955 in the full knowledge that it would be used by segregationists in the South.

And I was just like, “Whoa, how is this even possible? How could somebody do this?”

So, I started following him, thinking he was the main story because yeah, I'd heard of him too. I hadn't heard of James Buchanan at that point.

But then I found this other guy who was in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia, in the belly of the beast who was making an economic case for these vouchers in the name of freedom and efficiency, anti-monopoly.

And so, then I started following Buchanan and one thing led to another, led to another. I'm kind of relentless as a researcher. That historians have a name for people like me, archive rat. Just like going through the end trails of the archives, trying to find the things that can help make sense of it.

So, it was a circuitous story and it took a long time to piece together. And for a while I didn't even believe it.

Like I thought, if you've ever seen Homeland, like that Claire Danes character who like sees all of these complex things that other people don't see in these relationships that kind of tell her what's going on. But then you find out that she's bipolar and sometimes she doesn't take her meds.

Oh my God, maybe I need meds. This can't be happening. It's too audacious, it's too crazy. It's too big.

And so, anyway, at that point, I contacted someone else who had also written about Buchanan, who was more of a political theorist and she had gotten into the archives, which I hadn't been able to do.

And so, we talked a bit and then I felt like I could trust her and I felt comfortable. And so, I said, “So, let me tell you what I'm thinking.” And so, I laid it out. I said, “Does that sound crazy to you? Like what do you think?”

And there was a pause and then she said, “No, not at all.” She said, “You have to realize most of the critics of neoliberalism never read the theory.”

And that was just like a penny drop moment for me because I realized it's true. They all talk about the effects, that now we have more literature, but then they weren't talking about the ideas.

So, anyway, then I did finally manage to get into the archives in 2013, and it was just breathtaking. I write about it in the introduction to the book, but I had to keep telling myself to breathe as I was finding these things because yeah, I was not imagining it.

Like all the other evidence was pointing to evidence that was confirmed once I had access to his private papers in the records of his centers.

Amanda Weinstein:

Wow. Well, I am so glad you did. And I will leave it there so that all of the listeners out there can go get your book Democracy in Chains.

It is a fascinating read, and it is like you get to be a little archive rat with you and see and just follow this thread. And it's also a really important read to see what is going on with our democracy and how we can save it.

Nancy, thank you so much.

Nancy MacLean:

Thank you so much, Amanda. It's been a real pleasure talking with you.

Amanda Weinstein:

Thanks again to Nancy for joining me. Make sure to check out her book Democracy in Chains. The link is in the show description.

Ken Harbaugh:

Thanks for listening to Burn the Boats. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We're always looking to improve the show.

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Burn the Boats is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Our producer is Declan Rohrs, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our audio engineer. Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.

I'm Ken Harbaugh and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.