Her meticulous research in forty-two archival collections- including Buchanan’s own papers-is indispensable reading.

Buchanan to political power by way of Charles Koch’s influence. MacLean traces the transit of this school of thought from the academic work of economist James M. It has been forced to dissemble, she demonstrates, because of its fundamental disdain for democratic majority rule, and its repeated failures to win adherents in the public square-as the premature Republican celebrants found for their “repeal and replace” plans.Īt the Virginia school of political economy, an important constellation of libertarian ideas developed in dialogue with antidemocratic projects of the Jim Crow South. The humiliating tyranny of a limited and largely market-based national health insurance plan, in short, finally faced defeat in the name of courageous liberty-liberty as imagined by a movie that the anti-immigrant Right calls “THE white nationalist masterwork.”īehind the dated memes and the unseemly glee, behind the straightforward payoff for the funders of the GOP, could the supporters of this bill really conceive of a coherent political philosophy that sanctified a $600 billion wealth redistribution from the sick and aged to the top-earning 1 percent of American households? In her engrossing new book Democracy in Chains, award-winning historian Nancy MacLean argues that there is such an intellectual tradition informing the specific recent wave of assaults on the public sphere. As one Missouri representative exuberantly reported on camera, “I’d say the line of the day was out of Braveheart-‘Freedom!’” In the Mel Gibson movie, that’s the word that the medieval hero of Scottish independence roars out defiantly at his execution, instead of the plea for mercy that might have stayed the axe. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy reportedly posted an image of General George Patton on the wall and read inspirational quotations from the rogue hero who was relieved of command for his laissez-faire attitude to postwar denazification. Their pep rally that morning was studded with stale pop-culture references to aggrieved white martial glory: The soundtrack included the theme song from the original Rocky, the one in which a down-and-out white fighter puts a cocky black showman in his place through sheer grit and the love of a nearly catatonic woman.

Decorum understandably slipped as they prepared to vote on one of their marquee promises: to repeal the Affordable Care Act that had extended health coverage to 20 million Americans. The morning of May 4, 2017, was one of celebration for Republican congressmen.

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

Democracy in chains book