Sunday, July 09, 2017
By Mark Karlin,
Truthout
Many individuals who follow
politics and journalists think that the right-wing playbook began with the Koch
brothers. However, in her groundbreaking book, Nancy MacLean traces their
political strategy to a Southern economist who created the foundation for
today's libertarian oligarchy in the 1950s.
Mark Karlin: Can you summarize
the importance of James McGill Buchanan to the development of the modern
extreme right wing in the United States?
Nancy MacLean: The modern
extreme right wing I'm talking about, just to be clear, is the libertarian
movement that now sails under the Republican flag, particularly but not only
the Freedom Caucus, yet goes back to the 1950s in both parties. President
Eisenhower called them "stupid" and fashioned his approach -- calling
it modern Republicanism -- as an antidote to them. Goldwater was their first
presidential candidate. He bombed. Reagan, they believed, was going to
enact their agenda. He didn't. But beginning in the early 2000s, they
became a force to be reckoned with. What had changed? The discovery by
their chief funder, Charles Koch, of the approach developed by James McGill Buchanan
for how to take apart the liberal state.
Buchanan was a very smart
man, the only winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics from the US South, in
fact. But his life's work was forever shaped by the Supreme Court's Brown
v. Board of Education decision. He arrived in Virginia in 1956, just as
the state's leaders were goading the white South to fight the court's ruling, a
ruling he saw not through the lens of equal protection of the law for all
citizens but rather as another wave in a rising tide of unwarranted and
illegitimate federal interference in the affairs of the states that began with
the New Deal. For him what was at stake was the sanctity of private property
rights, with northern liberals telling southern owners how to spend their money
and behave correctly. Given an institute to run on the campus of the University
of Virginia, he promised to devote his academic career to understanding how the
other side became so powerful and, ultimately, to figuring out an effective
line of attack to break down what they had created and return to what he and
the Virginia elite viewed as appropriate for America. In a nutshell, he
studied the workings of the political process to figure out what was needed to
deny ordinary people -- white and Black -- the ability to make claims on
government at the expense of private property rights and the wishes of
capitalists. And then he identified how to rejigger that political process not
only to reverse the gains but also to prevent the system from ever reverting
back. He sought, in his words, to "enchain Leviathan," which is
why I titled the book Democracy in Chains.
Why, until your book, has his
importance to the right wing been largely overlooked?
There are a few reasons
Buchanan has been overlooked. One is that the Koch cause does not advertise his
work, preferring to tout the sunnier primers of Hayek, Friedman and even Ayn
Rand when recruiting. Buchanan is the advanced course, as it were, for the
already committed. Another is that Buchanan did not seek the limelight like
Friedman, so few on the left have even heard of him. I myself learned of him
only by serendipity, in a footnote about the Virginia schools fight.
His importance to the right
wing could only be identified by working through the archival sources that
provide context for his published work. That's what I did after discovering
that Buchanan had urged the full privatization of Virginia's public schooling
in 1959, and then learning that he later advised the Pinochet regime on a
capital-protecting constitution that could withstand the end of the
dictatorship. Even with both of those data points, I don't think I could have
gleaned the full import of his project had I not moved to North Carolina in
2010, where a strategy informed by his thought has been applied with a
vengeance by the veto-proof Republican legislative majority that came to power
in the midterms that fall. After Buchanan died in 2013, I was able to get
access to his private papers at George Mason University, where the
documentation is incontrovertible.
In fact, Buchanan's records
provided a kind of birds-eye view into collaboration between the corporate
university and right-wing donors that at least I have never seen before, and
I've done a lot of research in this area over the last two decades.
How would you draw a line
connecting Buchanan to the Koch brothers?
Charles Koch supplied the
money, but it was James Buchanan who supplied the ideas that made the money
effective. An MIT-trained engineer, Koch in the 1960s began to read
political-economic theory based on the notion that free-reign capitalism (what
others might call Dickensian capitalism) would justly reward the smart and
hardworking and rightly punish those who failed to take responsibility for
themselves or had lesser ability. He believed then and believes now that the
market is the wisest and fairest form of governance, and one that, after a
bitter era of adjustment, will produce untold prosperity, even peace. But after
several failures, Koch came to realize that if the majority of Americans ever
truly understood the full implications of his vision of the good society and
were let in on what was in store for them, they would never support it. Indeed,
they would actively oppose it.
So, Koch went in search of an
operational strategy -- what he has called a "technology" -- of
revolution that could get around this hurdle. He hunted for 30 years until he
found that technology in Buchanan's thought. From Buchanan, Koch learned that
for the agenda to succeed, it had to be put in place in incremental steps, what
Koch calls "interrelated plays": many distinct yet mutually
reinforcing changes of the rules that govern our nation. Koch's team used
Buchanan's ideas to devise a roadmap for a radical transformation that could be
carried out largely below the radar of the people, yet legally. The plan was
(and is) to act on so many ostensibly separate fronts at once that those
outside the cause would not realize the revolution underway until it was too
late to undo it. Examples include laws to destroy unions without saying that is
the true purpose, suppressing the votes of those most likely to support active
government, using privatization to alter power relations -- and, to lock it all
in, Buchanan's ultimate recommendation: a "constitutional
revolution."
Today, operatives funded by
the Koch donor network operate through dozens upon dozens of organizations
(hundreds, if you count the state and international groups), creating the
impression that they are unconnected when they are really working together --
the state ones are forced to share materials as a condition of their grants.
For example, here are the names of 15 of the most important Koch-funded,
Buchanan-savvy organizations each with its own assignment in the division of
labor: There's Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the Heritage
Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Mercatus Center,
Americans for Tax Reform, Concerned Veterans of America, the Leadership Institute,
Generation Opportunity, the Institute for Justice, the Independent Institute,
the Club for Growth, the Donors Trust, Freedom Partners, Judicial Watch --
whoops, that's more than 15, and it's not counting the over 60 other
organizations in the State Policy Network. This cause operates through so many
ostensibly separate organizations that its architects expect the rest of us
will ignore all the small but extremely significant changes that cumulatively
add up to revolutionary transformation. Gesturing to this, Tyler Cowen,
Buchanan's successor at George Mason University, even titled his blog
"Marginal Revolution."
In what way was Buchanan
connected to white oligarchical racism?
Buchanan came up with his
approach in the crucible of the civil rights era, as the most oligarchic state
elite in the South faced the loss of its accustomed power. Interestingly, he
almost never wrote explicitly about racial matters, but he did identify as a
proud southern "country boy" and his center gave aid to Virginia's
reactionaries on both class and race matters. His heirs at George Mason
University, his last home, have noted that Buchanan's political economy is
quite like that of John C. Calhoun, the antebellum South Carolina US Senator
who, until Buchanan, was America's most original theorist of how to constrict
democracy so as to safeguard the wealth and power of an elite economic minority
(in Calhoun's case, large slaveholders). Buchanan arrived in Virginia just as
Calhoun's ideas were being excavated to stop the implementation of Brown,
so the kinship was more than a coincidence. His vision of the right economic
constitution owes much to Calhoun, whose ideas horrified James Madison, among
others.
And from that kind of thought,
Buchanan offered strategic advice to corporations on how to fight the kind of
reforms and taxation that came with more inclusive democracy. In the 1990s, for
example, as Koch was getting more involved at George Mason, Buchanan convened
corporate and rightwing leaders to teach them how to use what he called the
"spectrum of secession" to undercut hard-won reforms through measures
that have now become core to Republican practice: decentralization, devolution,
federalism, privatization, and deregulation. We tend to see the race to
the bottom as fallout from globalization, but Buchanan's guidance and the Koch
team's application of it through the American Legislative Exchange Council and
the State Policy Network reveals how it is in fact a highly conscious strategy
to free capital of restraint by the people through their governments.
Another way all this connects,
indirectly, to oligarchic racism: wanting to keep secessionist thought alive
for this practical utility, the billionaire-backed right necessarily gives
comfort to white supremacists. A case in point: the Virginia governors who
supported the Buchanan-Koch enterprise at George Mason University also promoted
a new "Confederate History and Heritage Month." Likewise, the Ludwig
von Mises Institute, which honors one of Koch's favorite Austrian philosophers,
is located in Alabama and led by Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr., a man who has long
promoted racist neo-Confederate thought, yet was still thought fit to run the
Koch-funded Center for Libertarian Studies. It's thus a mistake to imagine that
the Koch and so-called alt-right causes are wholly separate; there's a kind of
mutual reinforcement if you understand what Koch learned from Buchanan and how
they operated.
As I conclude in the book, as
bright as some of the libertarian economists were, their ideas gained the following
they did in the South because, in their essence, their stands were so familiar.
White southerners who opposed racial equality and economic justice knew from
their own region's long history that the only way they could protect their
desired way of life was to keep federal power at bay, so that majoritarian
democracy could not reach into the region. The causes of Calhoun, Buchanan and
Koch-style economic liberty and white supremacy were historically twined at the
roots, which makes them very hard to separate, regardless of the subjective
intentions of today's libertarians.
What would a society based on
Buchanan's principles and goals look like?
Tyler Cowen, the economist who
co-presides with Charles Koch over the cause's academic base camp (yes, that
Tyler Cowen, host of the most visited academic economics blog), has spelled
that out. You might want to sit down to hear what he envisions for the rest of
us. He has written that with the "rewriting of the social contract"
underway, people will be "expected to fend for themselves much more than
they do now." While some will flourish, he admits, "others will fall
by the wayside." Since "worthy individuals" will manage to climb
their way out of poverty, "that will make it easier to ignore those who
are left behind." And Cowen didn't stop there. "We will cut Medicaid
for the poor," he predicted. Further, "the fiscal shortfall will come
out of real wages as various cost burdens are shifted to workers" from
employers and a government that does less. To "compensate," this
chaired professor in the nation's second-wealthiest county advises,
"people who have had their government benefits cut or pared back"
should pack up and move to lower-cost, poor public service states like Texas.
Indeed, Cowen forecasts,
"the United States as a whole will end up looking more like Texas."
His tone is matter-of-fact, as though he is reporting the inevitable. Yet when
one reads his remarks with the knowledge that he has been the academic leader
of a team working in earnest with Koch for two decades now to bring about the
society he is describing, the words sound more like premeditation. For example,
Cowen prophesies lower-income parts of America "recreating a Mexico-like
or Brazil-like environment" complete with "favelas" like those
in Rio de Janeiro. The "quality of water" might not be what US
citizens are used to, he admits, but "partial shantytowns" would
satisfy the need for cheaper housing as "wage polarization" grows and
government shrinks. Cowen says that "some version of Texas -- and then
some -- is the future for a lot of us" and advises, "Get ready."
You conclude your book
ironically with a Koch maxim: "playing it safe is slow suicide." How
does that apply to those who support a robust, non-plutocratic society?
I ended the book that way
because I understand the many pressures that lead people not to act on their
anxiety over what they are seeing unfold in Washington and so many states.
Union leaders have fiduciary responsibilities that make bold action risky.
Nonprofits have boards of directors to answer to. Young faculty must earn
tenure. People in public institutions worry about their next appropriations.
Parents have to budget their time. And so on. We tell ourselves, "Well, if
it were that serious, surely others would be doing something about it."
So, I wanted to alert people that what is happening now is radically new -- and
designed to be permanent. We may not get another chance to stop it.
Having said that, though, I
also believe that panic is the last thing we need. There is great strength to
be found in the simple truth that Buchanan and Koch came up with the kind
of strategy now in play precisely because they knew that the majority, if fully
informed, would never support what they seek. So, the best thing that
those who support a robust, non-plutocratic society can do is focus on
patiently informing and activating that majority. And reminding all Americans
that democracy is not something you can just assume will survive: It has to be
fought for time and again. This is one of those moments.
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