In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.Ĭorporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan's work in teaching others how to divide America into 'makers' and 'takers'.

In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last-gasp attempt to preserve the white elite's power in the wake of Brown v. Democracy in Chains names its true architect - the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan - and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority. But billionaires did not launch this movement a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be.” (NPR)Īn explosive exposé of the right's relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution.īehind today's headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. “This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains.

“ vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.” ( The Atlantic) Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Democracy in chains