I'm not sure I would have given the book Democracy in Chains that exact title. I might have called it The Strangulation of Democracy. Something like that.
Either way, it's telling. The movement to put power in the hands of the very rich really began about 65 years ago. The turning point, interestingly, was Brown v. Board.
That 1954 Supreme Court ruling did more than just try to eliminate racial discrimination in public education, as critics saw it, though that was devastating enough. It introduced, at least in their minds--as if it hadn't happened before--the idea that the Supreme Court could tell states what to do, that it had that kind of power. It had diminished in influence since the Civil War, but the Warren Court changed all that.
Whether or not that was already true--and it depended on whose ox was being gored--it began an attempt to limit the ability of national government to do anything more than defend the soil and police the polity. Its goal, then and now, is to do even more than what Grover Norqust has said about it: "To make government small enough to drown it in a bathtub." It wants to put power in the hands of the very few, very rich, very powerful, for the perpetuation of having as much money as they can possibly have--regardless of the cost to others, financially or socially. Anything in their way was a violation of their fundamental right to be as rich as they could possibly be, a right which should supersede all others.
The concept is called "public choice," says Nancy MacLean, the author of Democracy in Chains, who fell into the papers of James McGill Buchanan, the father of this massive intellectual and economic movement. It means, basically, that every single economic decision made by every individual should be made individually, without government intervention. If you have lots of money to begin with, this shouldn't be much of a problem. If you don't, well--your goal is to get more money. If you make bad decisions, you will be shunted to the side, as you should be.
If this sounds cruel, it is. Of course, if you have a lot of money to start with, life's not so cruel, is it? But that's the way it goes. If you were a "taker," not a "maker," someone who lived off the government trough, you got what you deserved.
Paul Ryan used those phrases because he's a doctrinaire advocate of public choice. That's why he thinks of the 2017 tax bill as a major victory--because the rich got richer and taxes on them were dropped to post-New Deal lows. That, some would say, was long in coming.
Buchanan emerged out of Virginia in 1956. Starting at Virginia Tech, then going to the University of Virginia, he eventually migrated to George Mason University and founded an economic/legal institute there. Typical of the culture, he was rigid, stubborn, right about everything, and went into paroxysms of temper whenever he didn't get what he wanted. (Sound familiar?)
He wrote, in 1962, with Gordon Tullock, a treatise called The Calculus of Consent, and extremely cynical book about what he believed to be the true motivations of collective action. Politicians are rational people who, they said, operate in their own self interests. Once they get power, their efforts are directed at keeping it. When government no longer needed the "pump priming" that it needed during the New Deal, why didn't politicians stop giving it more money? Because, the duo said, they needed to please "pressure groups" who did what was called "rent seeking" from government programs.
It informed all other governmental growth, because the more these groups demanded, the larger bureaucracies grew. And who paid for it? The rich, of course. Feeling victimized, the goal was to privatize the main sources of government money, such as Social Security and public schools.
A recent Biden ad reminds us that 45 wants to defund Social Security by 2023. That would fit right in with the plan. And why is Betsy DuVos the Secretary of Education? Because she and her husband, Dick, have led the attack on public schools and toward vouchers for decades--another crucial part of the plan.
But how to do that if the public wasn't behind it? Create a disingenuous process of propaganda and word massage that discredited public programs and reduced the support for them. This, of course, couldn't be done in a day. So they played the long game. The emergence of social issues--guns, gays, God--didn't hurt.
Settling in with university support behind him, Buchanan and others formed a group called the Mount Pelerin Society, after a site in the Alps, where they began in the '50s and invited others of like ilk (such as big names in capitalist thinking, such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman) for conversations and action plans.
The Koch brothers were looking for a champion to intellectually support their libertarianism; they found it in Buchanan, with whom they formed an uneasy but very effective alliance, starting in the early '70s. Today, the Kochs have a network of organizations, centrally funded by them (David is now deceased, but Charles is still around), that spread this malarkey through state governments, which they came to realize are the soft underbelly of government funding: ALEC, Club for Growth, Americans for Prosperity, the State Policy Network. If you've heard of any of them, they're bellweathers of the Kochs. They organize messaging and, of course, fund politicians who echo them.
ALEC's "policy discussions," are held at posh resorts on long weekends, thus buying off the Republicans they wish to influence, Thus is the victory of Citizens United: They now can throw whatever money they want at anybody they want, and need not admit it to anyone.
With control of the Republican Party, the Kochs could control much of state governmental mechanisms so that their power could be solidified, like voter suppression; right-to-work laws; gerrymandering; vouchers to reduce funding to public schools; and attacks on public employee unions. 45 is trying to scare people into not voting? Right out of the libertarian playbook. Wisconsin's Republican majorities aren't meeting in the legislature, right? Do they have to, since they're gerrymandered into control?
Believe this, though: They don't want to reduce Social Security. They want to eliminate it. And Medicare. You are supposed to save up for that yourself, so they don't have to help pay for it. That's what 45 wants to do by 2023: Take away the payroll tax so businesses have the absolute maximum amount of money to keep.
And public, "government" schools? Forget them. They're hostages to the teachers' unions.
And anything else government supports, no matter how good it is for people, except national defense and the police to hold back protesters. Whatever else is out there, they want to control it. They believe they can with that much money, and they believe they deserve to.
Really. They want this. And they won't stop until they get it. They believe they will wear you out with their constant parade of lies and deceptions. Sound like 45? Of course. With him, it's not working because he's been too obnoxious. They'll reload with someone who looks more acceptable.
Koch's demeanor is deceptive. He comes off as a friendly, reserved type, content to stay in the shadows. But his ego is enormous, and when Buchanan got in his way, he made sure to crush him. If and when Koch Industries come back with TV ads (as they do, every so often) and you see one, keep that in mind. It's all about stealth, about hiding what's really going on until it's too late to change it.
"Is this the country we want to live in and bequeath to our children and future generations?" asks MacLean. The rush to oligarchy seems inevitable at times. The income inequality is immense; NPR said just the other day that the richest 50 people in America make as much money as the lowest 50 percent--165 million people. That's one of the biggest reasons we can't allow 45 to continue. But they will be back. They're close now. They can see it on the horizon.
The mistake they made, this time, was allowing this buffoon to represent their positions too obviously. But Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court is a big stride for them--45 didn't do this, the Federalist Society did (penetrated by Buchanan and the Kochs, by the way). Next time, their presidential candidate will be smoother and less likely to offend--Pence, perhaps, or Mr. F. Gow (most recent former governor of Wisconsin, for those of you who've just tuned in). Watch for that. But whoever it is will be a purist, well-versed in buzzwords and dog whistles.
It's their methodology: Shock and awe, to do outrageous things and see what they can get away with, says MacLean. Some of it will stick, allowing them to advance. That's why Mr. F. Gow has to be in the mix for 2024; what he did to Wisconsin unions is a classic.
But first, if they possibly can, they will hold up the election in order to steal it. They did so in 2000--Remember?--and they'll have no hesitation to do it again.
Democracy in Chains is an important book, and this is an important time to read it. Keep your finger on the endnotes, too--they're important to provide context, and the bibliography is enormous. Meanwhile, get out there and vote. They don't want you to. Depend on it.
Think about Texas: One voting mailbox for each county, no matter how large or how populated? Absurd. But the courts there, obviously politically co-opted, have allowed the Republican governor to get away with it.
Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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