The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

Buchanan, a Nobel Memorial Prize Laureate with deeply racist and antidemocratic leanings, parlayed a completely a priori theory based in the notion, totally lacking in empirical support, that public officials and public sector workers are greedy empire building egoists who exist to redistribute resources produced by great hearted capitalists to themselves, and who need to be crushed and chained in constitutional shackles so the will of the overwhelmingly majority will be frustrated.

MacLean traces this diabolical perversion of ideas from the massive resistance of the post-Brown v. Board south through the torture chambers of Pinochet’s Chile, and discusses how these substantively empty ideas have been weaponized by the Kochs via a (public) Northern Virginia University they purchased into an alarmingly effective assault on democracy here and abroad. Yes, Virginia (that choice of name is fortuitous), there really is a conspiracy. Buy this book and read all about it.

This book is a cautionary read that tells you why you need to vote. There is a plot, illegal or not, to subvert our country and make the rich rich. It is also behind the voter disenfranchisement of recent years. There is a reason why Republicans turned against their own Health Care design. Read this book and understand what, why and who is behind this force. The initial motivation for the primary player, James M. Buchanan, came from school desegregation. So the ideas are already tainted by the evil of segregation as implemented in the south. I lived there and I know what it was like.

The ideas in this book have been used to modify the Constitution of Chile to make it very hard to change to help the people there. This was done during and after the coup by Augusto Pinochet, the nominal dictator for 17 years. What was done to Chile is what these forces want to happen in the United States. Thank goodness they do not have enough power yet to enact Constitutional changes but they hope to gain control of the Judiciary as the next best thing. Note the total incompetence of some of the people nominated by Trump. They were and are being picked solely for their ideological stance not how knowledgeable they are in the field of law. They need to be stopped.

The forces behind this are the forces of greed, racism and lies. Their hidden agenda is being exposed in this book and also, now in the Tax Reform bill in Congress (2017). Hopefully, the light of day will eventually stop this movement in it's tracks. The Koch brothers have provided much of the money and funded many of the organizations that help to move their agenda forward. I believe the Koch's are just motivated by greed and the rest are just a function of who they needed to appeal to to get in place what they want. Please read this book and take what you can. I read the Libertarian books of Ayn Rand and realized, when I was 12 that they were basically just screeds to justify greed and so stopped reading them when i grew up. I have read Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead. So I know the underlying ideas of this movement and it isn't pretty or a joke.

Democracy in Chains is a book that should be read by anyone that cares about American democracy as a society and is as salient as Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” of 1776! The revelations of the radical right extremist James McGill Buchanan driven by “Southern Lost Cause” mentality and exemplified by Jim Crow eventually merging with the 1% and evangelical fundamentalism. The author is commended for her courage to research and publish this work in the present political environment which is reflected in author’s acknowledgements where she “refrains” naming any research archivists/librarians to prevent retaliation by radical rightists.

Nancy MacLean's new book, Democracy in chains is long past due. It's about time a scholar of MacLean's stature has devoted her talents to a close examination of the origins, intentions, methods, and particularly the identities of the individuals and foundations long-dedicated to undermining American democractic institutions and culture. This is an important crtical historical analysis of the emergence of the campaign (as MacLean shows, it IS a well-funded, organized, campaign) by a national network of well-funded hard right crusaders dedicated to promoting and justifying a plutocratic oligarchy the outlines of which have been increasingly evident over the past 40 years.
The most important aspect of MacLean's book is to trace the roots of the right-wing onslaught on democracy not in the machinations of a class of Wall Street capitalists, but in the ideas of a newly-hired, young economist, James Buchanan, teaching at the University of Virginia in the 1950s. Buchanan was the founder of a new school "of political economy and social philosophy "built on inidividual liberty," at Thomas Jefferson's university, the pride of the Commonwealth. Buchanan's new program would train "a line of new thinkers" to oppose "the increasing role of government in economic and social life." Borne out of the social and cultural impact of Brown vs Board of Education, and the Southern reaction epitomized by Virginia's officially-sanctioned "massive resistance" to school de-segregation, Buchanan's ideas were the "ideological origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionnaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance."
In this regard, and of particular significance, she uncovers the political ideas currrently being given a patina of academic legitimacy via financial largess from the Charles Koch Foundation to establish free market schools in universities throughout the country, such as the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia ("mercatus" is Latin for markets) The Foundation also donated $10 million to establish a law center in honor of the late Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia. Between 2011 and 2014 the Foundation donated about $48 million to GMU, from an annually renewed $20 million fund to US universities for such purposes. The GMU donation has given the university braging rights to promote Mercatus, which offers to teach "economics with attitude," as "the world's premier university center for market-oriented ideas." Ideas such as those offered rrecently by Mercatus Center director, Tyler Cowen. dedicated to "stop the eroding of liberty in the body politic," MacLean notes that his goal is to rewrite the social contract so that people will be "exected to fend for themselves much morre than they do now." Acknowledging that some will "fall by the wayside," others wll flourish. The "worthy idividuals" who succeed "will make it easier to ignore those who are left behind." In policy terms, Cowen is quoted as predicting, "we will cut Medicaid for the poor." For those who suffer the cutbacks in benefits, he recommends that they move to low cost of living states, like Texas, because, while the welfare and Medicaid benefits "are skimpy," they have jobs available, and "very cheap housing." Mercatus offers a Ph.D in such ideas.
It is also important to note that the aim of the Center is to bridge the gap between ideas and policy, and they encourage government service for their participants. For example, it was recently announced by the Center's public affairs office that Msrk Warshawsy, a scholar who joined the Center in 2015, was recently appointed Deputy Commissioner at the Social Security Administration.

While many scholarly treatments of American conservatism owe an intellectual debt to Louis Hartz and his important work, The Liberal Tradition in America, situating the development of American conservatism within that tradition, MacLean's historical analysis identifies the specific point of origin and follows its unique development through its various stages in response to historical and political exigencies. She is one of the few to recognize the significance of the infamous memo written by a Richmond lawyer in the early 1970s, named Lewis Powell, who was later to be an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court. His memo, written while he was counsel to the US Chamber of Commerce, was a battleplan that outlined a clear strategy to promote and instutionalize the ideas and priorities first articulated at the University of Virginia.
MacLean's analysis is indispensible for gaining an understanding of the individuals, institutions, goals and strategies of the radical right and their allegiance to the idealization of the "free market" as the appropriate model for the American poitical order. It is not a vision rooted in the democratic republican values of the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. Its vision is drawn from the "objectivism" of Ayn Rand (Paul Ryan's favorite author), or Hobbes' war of all against all.
MacLean's analysis is an important contribtion to our understanding of how we got where we now find ourselves. She provides a deeper understanding and heightened sense of urgency to those resisting the current willingness of much of our political class as well as American citizens, to rush headlong into a nightmare future envisioned by a Southern academic more than 60 years ago.
Shortly after the Constitutional Convention when the delegates were finally heading for home in 1787, a spectator on the street asked a departing Benjamin Franklin what the delegates had created. Franklin is said to have responded, "A republic, sir, if you can keep it." We're much better off with MacLean's book for meeting that challenge--Randy Ihara, South Riding, VA.

Incredibly important read for the common citizen and any person that believes that compassion, many voices, and democracy is important in the United States. This details the history of libertarianism including what happened in Chile when this vision was most fully implemented. It is a stark warning. Highly recommended.

This is definitely one of the outstandlng books that have recently come out. Perhaps one of the 3 or 4 I'd include if a friend wanted my recommendation on "Must Have" books. I've done enough reading over the past few months to feel safe in saying this is one of the best researched, most comprehensive, and most important books to come out on the current political and governing situation we now face. Everyone should read this! Unfortunately, most of the people who most need to read it, probably touch it with the proverbial "ten foot pole".

In Dark Money, New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer exposed the dominant role of what Bernie Sanders calls "the billionaire class" behind the rise of the Radical Right in America—what then-First Lady Hillary Clinton famously called "the vast Right-Wing conspiracy." In Democracy in Chains, Duke University professor Nancy MacLean probes the historical roots of the radical libertarian ideology they profess. Together, the two books deepen our understanding of the misleadingly-named "conservative" movement that has come to dominate American politics in the second decade of the 21st century.

The historical roots of today's "conservative" movement

MacLean's argument is essentially simple. Dig down to the intellectual roots of today's Radical Right, she asserts, and you'll find John C. Calhoun's spirited defense of slavery in the 19th century and Harry Byrd's campaign of massive resistance to desegregation in the 1950s and 60s. Contemporary "conservatives" don't acknowledge the racist roots of their ideology in the "states' rights" arguments of the past. They advocate "economic liberty" grounded in a "free market," citing the work of Right-Wing economists Ludwig von Mises, Friedich A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman. While acknowledging the influence of these and other intellectuals on what has come to be called the conservative movement, MacLean persuasively argues that instead the principal figure in the evolution of the ideas at the core of today's Radical is a lesser-known Nobel Prize-winning economist, James M. Buchanan.

"The vast Right-Wing conspiracy"

In a detailed exploration of Buchanan's work at a succession of Right-Wing campuses, chiefly the University of Virginia and George Mason University, MacLean points to his decades-long partnership with Charles Koch and other ultra-wealthy donors as the central thread in the ascendancy of the Right. "In the eventual merger of Koch's money and managerial talent and the Buchanan team's decades of work monomaniacally identifying how the populace became more powerful than the propertied," she writes, "a fifth column movement would come into being, the likes of which no nation had ever seen." She characterizes her account as "the utterly 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 . . . a stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and national levels, back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation." This movement's hidden agenda—and it has been consciously hidden for many years—is to end public education, abolish Social Security and Medicare, close down the U.S. Postal Service, repeal minimum wage laws and prohibitions against child labor, eliminate foreign aid, close the Environmental Protection Agency, and eventually end taxes and government regulation of any kind. In other words, given the stealth nature of this radical libertarian movement, Hillary Clinton was right on-target when she called it a "vast Right-Wing conspiracy." But why has so much time and money gone into this effort? Buchanan had a simple answer to that question: "'Why must the rich be made to suffer?'"

Criticism of Democracy in Chains

Given MacLean's obviously negative perspective on these developments, it's no surprise that her book has been bitterly criticized by commentators on the Right. For  example, one critic, writing in the Washington Post, referred to "dubious claims" in MacLean's account, challenging the importance she ascribes to Buchanan's work and the relevance of the resistance to desegregation in 1950s Virginia. Others have questioned her scholarship. Judging from what I've seen, I'm not convinced that these critics have actually read MacLean's book.

What "economic liberty" really means

Buchanan espoused "public choice theory." In his view, which won him the Nobel, democracy inevitably leads to overspending because the majority continually forces politicians to fund new government services. The taxes required to fund these services constrain the "economic liberty" of wealthy people and corporations. Buchanan's intellectual descendants call these privileged people and their business enterprises “makers,” as opposed to the rest of us, who are “takers.”

MacLean observes in her conclusion that "There is another, biting irony to note: the goal of this cause is not, in the end, to shrink big government, as its rhetoric implies. Quite the contrary: the interpretation of the Constitution [they seek] to impose would give federal courts vast new powers to strike down measures desired by voters and passed by their duly elected representatives at all levels—and would require greatly expanded police powers to control the resultant popular anger."

A shocking account of how oligarchs have plotted for more than 30 years to subvert democracy in the U.S. I'm skeptical of, "Chicken Little", alarmist theories. But this well researched, scholarly work is persuasive and a worthy read. There is a powerful, wealthy faction of capitalists in the U.S. who believe that their wealth and capital influences should justifiably warrant control of governmental decision-making. They have developed a brilliant strategy, well-within the system, to acquire control of state legislatures, governors' mansions and other influential bodies. Every US citizen owes it to him/herself to read this well written, credible treatise.

This should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand what the h*ll is going on. It truly is a deep history by the far right of protecting the wealthy and scorning anyone who isn't wealthy enough to be worthwhile. It didn't just happen overnight, and I must confess I learned many things I didn't know. I am an avid consumer of news, but I really needed this background. It's rather depressing and scary, but we need to understand why things are the way they are. Perhaps the more people are aware, the more they will understand how important it is to protect our democracy by voting well.

This is probably the most important book of the decade, but certainly of the year, especially now as we prepare for the GOP tax bill to become law. This tax bill follows much of the criteria that Nancy MacLean has meticulously laid out as the dogma behind the James Buchanan/Charles Koch ideology. First, do everything in a “flurry” before the majority has the opportunity to understand what this means for them, because they won’t like it, and in fact will be horrified by it. Second, “starve the beast,” meaning the federal government, so that the deficit becomes so huge that all New Deal/Great Society legislation can be decimated. There is so much more going on at the federal level right now that corresponds to what Prof. MacLean has brought to light that it is staggering, and very disturbing. We are at the precipice, and for now it looks like they’ve won. My only hope is that the majority of Americans will learn about the contents of this book before it is entirely too late and these radical rightwingers have achieved their Constitutional Convention. I am often left with the question “how do these people sleep at night?” and then I remember that sociopaths sleep just fine. They have no consciences. This book is a wake-up call, and it may very well be the last one we get before our democracy is irretrievably enchained.

The irony of events in Charlottesville is it where Buchanan began his Leninist crusade to destroy democracy!

Not only is your book important, it is the obvious intellectual wedge that the democratic opposition needs to articulate to the American people: that their rights are under attack by an insidious drip by drip bleeding of majority rule. Their cheese like slicing strategy of “choice” continues to decimate our public schools, our voting, our unions and the willy nilly practice of privatization as it off loads government to monied interests.

What is new here is the documentation of the conspiratorial nature of this broad based attack that seeks to make oligarchy safe at the expense of democracy. That is what needs to be brought front and center because, as you note, the American people oppose these goals and need to awaken to this disciplined, long term attack on their rights - right down to an appalling development of cadres in government and law for their cause. There always has been room for honest opposition and conservatism in our body politic. This is of a different order.

It is likely that a majoritarian democracy will expand rights. To seek reasonable restraints on such inclinations is acceptable. But to say all earned monies used for such purposes is ‘stolen” without consent is to seek a kind of autocracy that their own ancestors fled when coming here establish a nation. Proposed is a sort of Plato’s Republic

The best one can say is that rethinking our democratic rights offers an healthy opportunity to reaffirm/redefine it. This fundamental philosophy needs to be engaged …and the stealth opponents need to come out from under a proverbial rock.

Is it too late? Thank you for spelling out the danger.

Democracy in Chains is a book that should be read by anyone that cares about American democracy as a society and is as salient as Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” of 1776! The revelations of the radical right extremist James McGill Buchanan driven by “Southern Lost Cause” mentality and exemplified by Jim Crow eventually merging with the 1% and evangelical fundamentalism. The author is commended for her courage to research and publish this work in the present political environment which is reflected in author’s acknowledgements where she “refrains” naming any research archivists/librarians to prevent retaliation by radical rightists.

Nancy MacLean's new book, Democracy in chains is long past due. It's about time a scholar of MacLean's stature has devoted her talents to a close examination of the origins, intentions, methods, and particularly the identities of the individuals and foundations long-dedicated to undermining American democractic institutions and culture. This is an important crtical historical analysis of the emergence of the campaign (as MacLean shows, it IS a well-funded, organized, campaign) by a national network of well-funded hard right crusaders dedicated to promoting and justifying a plutocratic oligarchy the outlines of which have been increasingly evident over the past 40 years.
The most important aspect of MacLean's book is to trace the roots of the right-wing onslaught on democracy not in the machinations of a class of Wall Street capitalists, but in the ideas of a newly-hired, young economist, James Buchanan, teaching at the University of Virginia in the 1950s. Buchanan was the founder of a new school "of political economy and social philosophy "built on inidividual liberty," at Thomas Jefferson's university, the pride of the Commonwealth. Buchanan's new program would train "a line of new thinkers" to oppose "the increasing role of government in economic and social life." Borne out of the social and cultural impact of Brown vs Board of Education, and the Southern reaction epitomized by Virginia's officially-sanctioned "massive resistance" to school de-segregation, Buchanan's ideas were the "ideological origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionnaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance."
In this regard, and of particular significance, she uncovers the political ideas currrently being given a patina of academic legitimacy via financial largess from the Charles Koch Foundation to establish free market schools in universities throughout the country, such as the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia ("mercatus" is Latin for markets) The Foundation also donated $10 million to establish a law center in honor of the late Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia. Between 2011 and 2014 the Foundation donated about $48 million to GMU, from an annually renewed $20 million fund to US universities for such purposes. The GMU donation has given the university braging rights to promote Mercatus, which offers to teach "economics with attitude," as "the world's premier university center for market-oriented ideas." Ideas such as those offered rrecently by Mercatus Center director, Tyler Cowen. dedicated to "stop the eroding of liberty in the body politic," MacLean notes that his goal is to rewrite the social contract so that people will be "exected to fend for themselves much morre than they do now." Acknowledging that some will "fall by the wayside," others wll flourish. The "worthy idividuals" who succeed "will make it easier to ignore those who are left behind." In policy terms, Cowen is quoted as predicting, "we will cut Medicaid for the poor." For those who suffer the cutbacks in benefits, he recommends that they move to low cost of living states, like Texas, because, while the welfare and Medicaid benefits "are skimpy," they have jobs available, and "very cheap housing." Mercatus offers a Ph.D in such ideas.
It is also important to note that the aim of the Center is to bridge the gap between ideas and policy, and they encourage government service for their participants. For example, it was recently announced by the Center's public affairs office that Msrk Warshawsy, a scholar who joined the Center in 2015, was recently appointed Deputy Commissioner at the Social Security Administration.

While many scholarly treatments of American conservatism owe an intellectual debt to Louis Hartz and his important work, The Liberal Tradition in America, situating the development of American conservatism within that tradition, MacLean's historical analysis identifies the specific point of origin and follows its unique development through its various stages in response to historical and political exigencies. She is one of the few to recognize the significance of the infamous memo written by a Richmond lawyer in the early 1970s, named Lewis Powell, who was later to be an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court. His memo, written while he was counsel to the US Chamber of Commerce, was a battleplan that outlined a clear strategy to promote and instutionalize the ideas and priorities first articulated at the University of Virginia.
MacLean's analysis is indispensible for gaining an understanding of the individuals, institutions, goals and strategies of the radical right and their allegiance to the idealization of the "free market" as the appropriate model for the American poitical order. It is not a vision rooted in the democratic republican values of the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. Its vision is drawn from the "objectivism" of Ayn Rand (Paul Ryan's favorite author), or Hobbes' war of all against all.
MacLean's analysis is an important contribtion to our understanding of how we got where we now find ourselves. She provides a deeper understanding and heightened sense of urgency to those resisting the current willingness of much of our political class as well as American citizens, to rush headlong into a nightmare future envisioned by a Southern academic more than 60 years ago.
Shortly after the Constitutional Convention when the delegates were finally heading for home in 1787, a spectator on the street asked a departing Benjamin Franklin what the delegates had created. Franklin is said to have responded, "A republic, sir, if you can keep it." We're much better off with MacLean's book for meeting that challenge--Randy Ihara, South Riding, VA.

An outstanding book. So fearful is the far right of a Venezuelan populist style government that it seeks to swing the political pendulum as close as it can to a Pinochet dictatorship of the elite. As a corporate ceo, I am a believer in making government as efficient is it can be but the idea that all government is bad and privatizing things like schools and prisons is a better alternative is not only not supported by the economic facts but is actually dangerous insofar as the profit motive undermines the substance of the services provided by the privatized institutions. Also, no reasonable civilization should deprive a substantial portion of its citizens basic health care and retirement income. However much Libertarians would like every citizen to be a path finding hero in an Ayn Rand book that should be relegated to shanty towns in Texas if they do live healthy lifestyles (or have genetic health issues) or do not have the wherewithal to save for retirement, such an ideal cannot be found in any society on the Planet.

This book, now a finalist for the National Book Award, by award winning author and history and public policy professor at Duke Univ., provides documented tracing of the roots in the 1950's and development of the plan to 2017 which is so evident and important for us to understand today. For those of us who lived this period, MacLean "connects the dots" we have witnessed and shows us why the impact crosses the spectrum of our democratic way which is threatened from multiple points and with carefully selected communication with different meanings than most would give the same words. It is a fascinating and very informative "must read" even if painful for those who support a democratic U.S. and a land of opportunity for all has real meaning.

The history of the miscreant right from Calhoun to the Koch’s who feel because of their wealth that they are in every way superior and destined to rule. They feel put upon to have to pay taxes to a democracy that they don’t subscribe to and so they want to end our democracy and install an oligarchy run by their ilk.

It surprises me that I am considered a leach and a parasite by those within the money by buy minority rule. I thought they were just people not worth knowing but to learn that their philosophy means my rights mean less is . . .well, the first step in my revolution.

A terrifying book about what is happening NOW, under Trump and the Republicans who have sold their souls to radical libertarian views. A minority party and its right wing are doing now what the Koch's and Buchanan have advocated for decades-the end of all social democratic principles. I did not realize that the early Libertarians fought Southern desegration tooth and nail, and have been quietly fighting, and now plain for all to see, for limitations upon voting-voter suppression, voter ID's, gerrymandering, hatred of public education (vouchers). Recently, on-line comments have called public education "communism." Libertarian philosophy is the seeds for this kind of radical thinking. Privatization of every public aspect our our lives is the goal. Open democracy and participation is the enemy. The last chapter alone reveals the deep racism, contempt for the poor, and classism that modern Libertarians hold against the vast majority of Americans. Nancy MacLean quotes these people in their own words. Americans better get busy or corporations will absolutely control every aspect of our lives, and government for the people will die a slow death.

This book explains in detail, step by step, how the United States of America has become an Oligarchy and who has been the principal architect of the take over of the government and the economy by the ultra-rich. This extreme Libertarian Philosophy was guided and developed by an obscure economist working with wealthy and influential individuals to, by stealth, inculcate in a number of voters in the American electorate that individuals are totally responsible for their success or failure, and the successful have no responsibility to share their wealth with those that fail no matter what the reason. This pernicious, selfish philosophy began to be influential after the election of Ronald Reagan. Remember his words: "Government is not the solution, government is the problem." There is no acknowledgement of the "Common Good' as a functioning democracy requires. We are reaping the consequences of the dominance of Libertarianism as the inequality becomes vast in our impoverished population.

Very interesting read. Details the roots of Koch's Libertarian theories in slavery and racism. The libertarian project provided the economic and political theorists behind Pinochet's Chilean dictatorship and Charles Koch and his hired intellectuals see the Chilean dictatorship as the ideal form of government and are making every effort billions can buy to convert the U.S. democracy into a fascist dictatorship modeled on Pinochet's Chile.

I just finished the book I recommend it highly to anyone who thinks the "free market" is the be-all and end-all of economics and economic politics. It is a heavily researched and footnoted, yet very readable account of how the "economic freedom" crowd is incrementally taking over the USA using diabolical strategies hatched over the past 70 years or so. The funding is largely Koch in origin. My reading staple lies in the genre of mysteries, horror and the like, but I will say that MacLean's book is the scariest thing I have ever seen.

I was pleased to hear Prof. MacLean lecture today about her book. She is forceful, articulate and extremely knowledgeable and these qualities certainly manifest themselves in "Democracy in Chains".

The release of this book could have not been timed better. If you are interested in the impact politics has on the "general population," This must read expose' details the thoughtful path in how radical right operators have influenced the way government works over several decades to benefit the wealthy in society. A careful strategy has been delivered through a process of mind-shift within the republican party.

A methodical plan has been executed with precision to inform and fund a new breed of thinkers produced by way of public and private institutions of higher learning. Think tanks and policy writing organizations have effectively driven new legislation to weaken unions, public education and changing lower income voters beliefs that the democratic party was the party that gave them support. Big / Dark Money and carefully placed organization along with the Citizens United ruling has paved the way for these strategies to be executed with speed and surety.

If you want to better understand how and why our government seems to be changing and accelerating to extreme right principles, Please read this book and share with friends and family. It is riveting!

If you are interested in why all the political turmoil today, read MacLean’s Democracy in Chains. MacLean traces the Alt-Right movement from its inception in 1956 when Eisenhower ended school segregation and Virginia closed its public schools. She traces the money from the economic departments from UVA to the current residence of the James Buchanan influences economics school at James Madison University revealing the billionaire Koch brothers attempt to return American democracy into the hands of the present day industrialists (corporate elite). It is a well researched book that reveals the Alt-Right with their own words, and once you read this book, you will see the history of this movement reflected in the politics of today. Just take note of the latest payoff when the Koch brothers paid $500,000.00 to Paul Ryan following the historic tax cuts that went to the corporate world as permenant cuts. Democracy in Chains simply predicts without explicitly stating such attempts to pay off and control government. The book reveals the attempt of rich conservative white men who want to deny access to the majority of Americans with the eventual payoff being a reshaping of the American Constitution. THIS book is a MUST Read for anyone who is worried about the direction of our country.

A chilling read and one that spells out the ultra right conspiracy to attack the Constitution to pervert it for the ultimate goal of returning the status of our society to return to that of the late 19th and early 20th century with no protection for any but the robber barons and big business. To me, this book lights up the dark corners the ultra radical right wing conspiracy funded and driven by the Koch brothers aided and abetted by the constant lies and "fake news" foisted on unsuspecting viewers by Fox News.