( it's very long so I will edit out parts of it)
Meet
the Economist Behind the One Percent’s Stealth Takeover of America
By Lynn
Parramore
...
If
Americans really knew what (James)Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively
his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close
the country is to a transformation most would not even want to imagine, much
less accept.
That
is a dangerous blind spot, MacLean argues in a meticulously researched
book, Democracy in Chains, a
finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. While Americans grapple
with Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency, we may be missing the key to changes
that are taking place far beyond the level of mere politics. Once these changes
are locked into place, there may be no going back.
...Buchanan,
MacLean notes, was incensed at what he saw as a move toward socialism and
deeply suspicious of any form of state action that channels resources to the
public. Why should the increasingly powerful federal government be able to
force the wealthy to pay for goods and programs that served ordinary citizens
and the poor?
In
thinking about how people make political decisions and choices, Buchanan
concluded that you could only understand them as individuals seeking personal
advantage. In an interview cited by MacLean, the economist observed that
in the 1950s Americans commonly assumed that elected officials wanted to act in
the public interest. Buchanan vehemently disagreed — that was a belief he
wanted, as he put it, to “tear down.” His ideas developed into a theory that
came to be known as “public choice.”
Buchanan’s view of human nature was distinctly
dismal. Adam Smith saw human beings as self-interested and hungry for personal
power and material comfort, but he also acknowledged social instincts like
compassion and fairness. Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were
primarily driven by venal self-interest. Crediting people with altruism or a
desire to serve others was “romantic” fantasy: politicians and government
workers were out for themselves, and so, for that matter, were teachers...
...The
people who needed protection were property owners, and their rights could only
be secured though constitutional limits to prevent the majority of voters from
encroaching on them, an idea Buchanan lays out in works like Property
as a Guarantor of Liberty (1993). MacLean observes that Buchanan saw
society as a cutthroat realm of makers (entrepreneurs) constantly under siege
by takers (everybody else) His own language was often more stark, warning the
alleged “prey” of “parasites” and “predators” out to fleece them.
In
1965 the economist launched a center dedicated to his theories at the
University of Virginia, which later relocated to George Mason University.
MacLean describes how he trained thinkers to push back against the Brown
v. Board of Education decision to desegregate America’s public schools
and to challenge the constitutional perspectives and federal policy that
enabled it. She notes that he took care to use economic and political precepts,
rather than overtly racial arguments, to make his case, which nonetheless gave
cover to racists who knew that spelling out their prejudices would alienate the
country.
...Suppressing
voting, changing legislative processes so that a normal majority could no
longer prevail, sowing public distrust of government institutions— all these
were tactics toward the goal. But the Holy Grail was the Constitution: alter it
and you could increase and secure the power of the wealthy in a way that no
politician could ever challenge.
Gravy
Train to Oligarchy
MacLean explains that Virginia’s white elite and
the pro-corporate president of the University of Virginia, Colgate Darden, who
had married into the DuPont family, found Buchanan’s ideas to be spot on. In
nurturing a new intelligentsia to commit to his values, Buchanan stated that he
needed a “gravy train,” and with backers like Charles Koch and conservative
foundations like the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts, others hopped aboard.
Money, Buchanan knew, can be a persuasive tool in academia. His circle of
influence began to widen.
...With
Koch’s money and enthusiasm, Buchanan’s academic school evolved into something
much bigger. By the 1990s, Koch realized that Buchanan’s ideas — transmitted
through stealth and deliberate deception, as MacLean amply documents — could
help take government down through incremental assaults that the media would
hardly notice. The tycoon knew that the project was extremely radical, even a
“revolution” in governance, but he talked like a conservative to make his plans
sound more palatable.
...Most
Americans haven’t seen what’s coming.
MacLean
notes that when the Kochs’ control of the GOP kicked into high gear after the
financial crisis of 2007-08, many were so stunned by the “shock-and-awe”
tactics of shutting down government, destroying labor unions, and rolling back
services that meet citizens’ basic necessities that few realized that many
leading the charge had been trained in economics at Virginia institutions,
especially George Mason University. Wasn’t it just a new, particularly vicious
wave of partisan politics?
It
wasn’t. MacLean convincingly illustrates that it was something far more
disturbing.
MacLean
is not the only scholar to sound the alarm that the country is experiencing a
hostile takeover that is well on its way to radically, and perhaps permanently,
altering the society. Peter Temin, former head of the MIT economics department,
INET grantee, and author of The Vanishing Middle Class, as well as economist
Gordon Lafer of the University of Oregon and author of The One Percent Solution, have provided eye-opening analyses of where America is
headed and why. MacLean adds another dimension to this dystopian big picture,
acquainting us with what has been overlooked in the capitalist right wing’s
playbook.
...Buchanan
was not a dystopian novelist. He was a Nobel Laureate whose sinister logic
exerts vast influence over America’s trajectory.
...The
rules of the game are now clear.
Research
like MacLean’s provides hope that toxic ideas like Buchanan’s may finally begin
to face public scrutiny. Yet at this very moment, the Kochs’ State Policy
Network and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that
connects corporate agents to conservative lawmakers to produce legislation, are
involved in projects that the Trump-obsessed media hardly notices, like pumping
money into state judicial races. Their aim is to stack the legal deck against
Americans in ways that MacLean argues may have even bigger effects than
Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court ruling which unleashed unlimited
corporate spending on American politics. The goal is to create a judiciary that
will interpret the Constitution in favor of corporations and the wealthy in
ways that Buchanan would have heartily approved.
“The
United States is now at one of those historic forks in the road whose outcome
will prove as fateful as those of the 1860s, the 1930s, and the 1960s,” writes
MacLean. “To value liberty for the wealthy minority above all else and enshrine
it in the nation’s governing rules, as Calhoun and Buchanan both called for and
the Koch network is achieving, play by play, is to consent to an oligarchy in
all but the outer husk of representative form.”
Nobody
can say we weren’t warned.
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