2018 has been the year of the teacher, as
waves of protest in mostly Republican-dominated
states starting in West Virginia, Kentucky,
Oklahoma, Arizona, and most recently North
Carolina have challenged not only low pay,
but tax cuts and the privatization that have
crippled public education.
The state keeps asking more of us every year,
but giving us less resources.
So that's one of the big reasons we're here
to fight today.
These states have all adopted policies backed
by right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers,
whose network of dark money funders has poured
untold sums into transforming the American
political landscape by shackling the government's
ability to fund social services and enforce
regulations while cutting taxes on the wealthy
and increasing protections for corporations,
all while passing a slew of restrictive voter
laws, in the name of advancing so-called liberty.
A number of reporters and scholars have written
works that have shed light on the workings
of the shadowy networks of the right-wing
billionaires like the Koch brothers.
But until now there has been little understanding
of the origins of the ideology behind this
assault on democratic institutions.
That led our next guest, Nancy MacLean, the
William Chafee Professor of History and Public
Policy at Duke University, to look into the
ideological foundations of this movement.
And what she uncovered is deeply shocking
and troubling; the subject her explosive book,
"Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of
the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America."
Really happy to have you on.
Great to be with you.
So for the first part of this discussion,
let's start at George Mason University, where
you stumbled upon a remarkably unguarded trove
of documents belonging to the late Nobel Prize-winning
economist James McGill Buchanan, and what
you were able to piece together about his
role in the Koch brothers' plans to reshape
America and its democratic institutions.
Talk about how you came across this, and what
you started to piece together.
Well, James Buchanan had been on my radar
from some historical research that I had done
on the state of Virginia's massive resistance
to Brown vs. Board of Education in the late
1950s, and I became intrigued with him.
And when I finally was able to get into his
private archive at George Mason in 2013, I
found all of my suspicions confirmed about
the ways that his ideas were being weaponized
by the Koch donor network in order to effectively
disable our democracy, and to do things like
privatizing public education, inflicting these
radical cuts in necessary social services
in the country, changing constitutional law.
All kinds of things I was able to find in
that archive.
And ironically, I got into the archive in
September of 2013, just as Buchanan's ideas
were guiding a government shutdown in Washington,
D.C. led by Ted Cruz, a figure deeply steeped
in both this thinking and rooted in the Koch
network.
So very, very, I would say, unsettling experience
to be in the archives during the day while
watching the damage being inflicted on Americans
who needed the federal government's services,
and needed the government open during the
time I was at the archives for the first time.
So, limiting democratic participation and
empowering the wealthy is nothing new in American
history.
What's different about Buchanan's work?
What makes his ideas so radical and so dangerous
to democracy?
Yeah, Buchanan was playing on that same team
as the wider right, with people like Milton
Friedman and others who believed in a kind
of free market fundamentalism, believed that
government was the problem, believed that
the solution was to turn decision making over
to the market for just about everything.
But what was different about Buchanan is that
he came up with a theory of how government
grew over the 20th century, and particularly
the domestic part of government, what is sometimes
called the liberal state.
So things like Social Security and Medicare,
worker's rights, environmental protection,
antidiscrimination, and so forth.
He produced a theory that was aimed really
to discredit government so that people would
not automatically look to government in cases
of market failure, and that turned out to
be a much more insidious, and in the long
run effective, approach to to undermining
the popular achievements of the 20th century.
So Buchanan's approach was complementary to
that of Friedman and the Chicago school and
others, but again, much more devastating.
And we see it today in all the language about
the swamp, the notion that all public figures
are corrupt and misleading the public.
All of those ideas really stem from a school
of thought that Buchanan developed called
'public choice economics' most broadly, and
his particular variant was often called the
Virginia school of political economy.
So a historic figure sort of plays big in
this, in your book.
James C. Calhoun, who was a slave owner, a
former vice president, a statesman from South
Carolina who had a lot of influence in the
first half of the 19th century in the United
States.
What role-.
So, talk about who he is and his significance,
and what role he had on the thinking of Buchanan
and other influential figures in this libertarian
arch-right movement.
.
Yes.
Before James Buchanan, John C. Calhoun was
the most significant antidemocratic thinker
in America.
He was a Southern slaveholder from South Carolina,
onetime vice president, South Carolina member
of the U.S. Senate.
And he produced two big treatises reinterpreting
the constitution and the purpose of American
government in a way that would protect slaveholders'
interests.
He did this a generation after the founders,
and he did it because he could see that national
majorities were developing that would challenge
slavery and he wanted to protect what had
become the most profitable capitalist institution
in the mid-19th century when he was writing,
or I should say the early 19th century, the
first third of it, and the 1820s and '30s
in particular.
And basically he was a theorist of what I've
come to think about as property supremacy,
a kind of property supremacy that reinterprets
the constitution in a, in order to protect
the absolute prerogatives of property holders,
the most dramatic being slaveholders, in order
to keep democratic government at bay.
And what's really interesting about Calhoun
is that Buchanan's own colleagues at George
Mason University have called John C. Calhoun
a precursor to modern public choice theory,
in particular to the ideas of this figure
James McGill Buchanan, their former colleague.
And they actually said that the two systems
of ideas had the same purpose and effect.
And I could not agree more with that because
I think the purpose is to protect the rights
of property holders, particularly the wealthiest
among them, from the reach of majoritarian
democracy.
I think that, that kind of sums it up.
And can you talk about the response from George
Mason University before and after they were
recently forced to admit that this tremendous
amount of money they were getting from the
Koch brothers came with strings attached which
actually compromise their entire department?
Because the Koch brothers had veto power over
who served, you know, who, who could work
at George Mason?
You talk about that, and their evolving response
in this case.
Yeah, it's a really chilling story.
I will say that I have direct personal experience
of how poisonous a presence this Koch donor
network is in our public life, because after
my book came out, you know, the initial review
attention and media attention was universally
positive and favorable from professional reviewers
from historians and others.
And about two or so weeks in, two to three
weeks in, there was this kind of libertarian
pile on.
And much of it came from faculty at George
Mason University, who had been funded by the
Koch network, who were working with the Koch
implant on the campus at George Mason in the
economics department, the law school.
And something called the Mercatus Center,
which, interestingly, is housed on the campus
of this public university but in no way accountable
to it, and Charles Koch has sat on its board
for years.
So, what we saw there is how the Charles Koch
Foundation and the operatives that it funds
basically are weaponizing their implants on
our public university campuses in order to
come after anyone who is critical of this
operation.
And there were a few researchers from Greenpeace,
and a wonderful group of young people who
have built a group called UnKoch My Campus
that researched the people who were attacking
me and my book, and found that in 90 cases
these were people who were, received-.
Faculty members who received direct funding
from Charles Koch, or operatives in his various
operations, who in most cases never declared
their conflicts of interest, basically violating
ethics 101 in these attacks.
And the important thing about this is not
the personal thing, the attacks on me, but
what it tells us about how our higher education
system is being used for this larger political
project.
And as you say, the recent revelations over
the last few weeks of what has happened over
the years at George Mason are quite breathtaking.
In one case a faculty member was chosen, hand
selected by a donor for a tenured position
at this public university.
And ironically, he was also the first out
of the gate to attack me, this individual.
So it is really stunning.
The other thing that has come out in these
revelations from George Mason is the extent
of donor influence over faculty hiring and
assessments of faculty performance.
They were actually able to have a voice in
getting rid of faculty if they didn't adequately
advance the Koch donor project.
And especially chilling was revelations from
the law school, I should say all made possible
by FOIA inquiries associated with UnKoch My
Campus, and a group called Transparent GMU,
FOIA inquiries that found that the Federalist
Society, the body that has been vetting and
recommending federal judges to Republican
administrations since Ronald Reagan, the Federalist
Society had actually set up a front group,
a front group of the kind usually used, in
legal terms, for money laundering, to funnel
money to the now-named Scalia School of Law
at George Mason, in order to use that law
school as a base of operations for moving
our judiciary to the right in terms of faculty
appointments, setting up programs that could
assist in this political project, and placing
students in clerkships with judges on the
right.
So it is really mind blowing for scholars
to see what is being done to our universities.
And although George Mason's administration
at first denied this for years to their faculty
senate and to the students who were concerned
on campus, they have had to admit, now that
these FOIA requests have become public, that
in fact the donors had grossly undue influence
on the campus that has corrupted academic
integrity at this public institution.
Well, that's really tremendous.
And you know, it sort of demonstrates the
ideological conviction over the academic,
academic conviction of this group.
So this wraps up the first part of this discussion
about Democracy in Chains, by Nancy MacLean.
In our next part we'll focus on public education
and why this assault on democracy has been
so closely focused on it.
Thanks so much for joining us.
