City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

Democracy in chains, the deep history of the radical right's stealth plan for America, Nancy MacLean

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 303-321) and index

no index present

non fiction

Democracy in chains

Nancy MacLean

the deep history of the radical right's stealth plan for America

Behind todayâ s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. 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. 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 eliteâ s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. 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