Republican Party veterans who believed they would be treated fairly because of their longtime service soon learned that, to their new masters, their history of dedication to Republicanism meant nothing. The new men in the wings respect only compliance; if they fail to get it, they respond with swift vengeance. The cadre targets for removal any old-time Republicans deemed a problem, throwing big money into their next primary race to unseat them and replace them with the cause’s more “conservative” choices—or at least to teach them to heel.
U.S. senator Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania, one of the first longtime Republicans to lose his seat for his failure to obey, referred to those who undermined him as “cannibals” who seek “the end of governing as we know it.” Others learned from experience how to survive. The Reagan Republican and six-term U.S. senator Orrin Hatch of Utah exploded after being targeted by a challenger from his own party in 2012: “These people are not conservatives. They’re not Republicans. They’re radical libertarians. . . . I despise these people.” He was right that they were not what they said they were, but the scare taught him to stop bucking and comply to keep his job. And, of course, there is John Boehner, the former House Speaker, who in 2015 finally gave up and walked out, calling one of the leaders of this cause inside the Capitol, Ted Cruz, “Lucifer in the flesh.”24
These are not words people use for their trusted teammates in a partisan program.
Our trouble in grasping what has happened comes, in part, from our inherited way of seeing the political divide. Americans have been told for so long, from so many quarters, that political debate can be broken down into conservative versus liberal, pro-market versus pro-government, Republican versus Democrat, that it is hard to recognize that something more confounding is afoot, a shrewd long game blocked from our sight by these stale classifications.
We don’t understand that the old Republican Party, the one my own father voted for during most of his life, exists no more. Many do grasp that the body with that name has somehow become hard-line and disciplined to a degree never before seen in an American major party; yet, not having words to fit what it has become, we assume that what we are seeing is just very ugly partisanship, perhaps made worse by social media.25 But it is more than that. The Republican Party is now in the control of a group of true believers for whom compromise is a dirty word.
Their cause, they say, is liberty. But by that they mean the insulation of private property rights from the reach of government—and the takeover of what was long public (schools, prisons, western lands, and much more) by corporations, a system that would radically reduce the freedom of the many.26 In a nutshell, they aim to hollow out democratic resistance. And by its own lights, the cause is nearing success.27
• • •
The 2016 election looked likely to bring a big presidential win with across-the-board benefits. The donor network had so much money and power at its disposal as the primary season began that every single Republican presidential front-runner was bowing to its agenda. Not a one would admit that climate change was a real problem or that guns weren’t good—and the more widely distributed, the better. Every one of them attacked public education and teachers’ unions and advocated more charter schools and even tax subsidies for religious schools. All called for radical changes in taxation and government spending. Each one claimed that Social Security and Medicare were in mortal crisis and that individual retirement and health savings accounts, presumably to be invested with Wall Street firms, were the best solution. Jeb Bush went so far as to coauthor a book with a perennial Koch favorite, Clint Bolick, urging immigration reform on terms that suited their vision.28
But then something unexpected happened. Donald Trump, a real estate mogul and television celebrity who did not need the Koch donor network’s money to run, who seemed to have little grasp of the goals of this movement, entered the race. More than that, to get ahead, Trump was able to successfully mock the candidates they had already cowed as “puppets.” And he offered a different economic vision. He loved capitalism, to be sure, but he was not a libertarian by any stretch. Like Bill Clinton before him, he claimed to feel his audience’s pain. He promised to stanch it with curbs on the very agenda the party’s front-runners were promoting: no more free-trade deals that shuttered American factories, no cuts to Social Security or Medicare, and no more penny-pinching while the nation’s infrastructure crumbled. He went so far as to pledge to build a costly wall to stop immigrants from coming to take the jobs U.S. companies offered them because they could hire desperate, rightless workers for less. He said and did a lot more, too, much that was ugly and incendiary. And in November, he shocked the world by winning the Electoral College vote.
Although Trump himself may not fully understand what his victory signaled, it put him between two fundamentally different, and opposed, approaches to political economy, with real-life consequences for us all. One was in its heyday when Buchanan set to work. In economics, its standard-bearer was John Maynard Keynes, who believed that for a modern capitalist democracy to flourish, all must have a share in the economy’s benefits and in its governance. Markets had great virtues, Keynes knew—but also significant built-in flaws that only government had the capacity to correct. I am not an economist, and I hold no special brief for Keynes; I leave it to others to debate the details of his views. But as a historian, I know that his way of thinking, as implemented by elected officials during the Great Depression, saved liberal democracy in the United States from the rival challenges of fascism and Communism in the face of capitalism’s most cataclysmic collapse. And that it went on to shape a postwar order whose operating framework yielded ever more universal hope that, by acting together and levying taxes to support shared goals, life could be made better for all.29
The most starkly opposed vision is that of Buchanan’s Virginia school. It teaches that all such talk of the common good has been a smoke screen for “takers” to exploit “makers,” in the language now current, using political coalitions to “vote themselves a living” instead of earning it by the sweat of their brows. Where Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek allowed that public officials were earnestly trying to do right by the citizenry, even as they disputed the methods, Buchanan believed that government failed because of bad faith: because activists, voters, and officials alike used talk of the public interest to mask the pursuit of their own personal self-interest at others’ expense.30 His was a cynicism so toxic that, if widely believed, it could eat like acid at the foundations of civic life.31 And he went further by the 1970s, insisting that the people and their representatives must be permanently prevented from using public power as they had for so long. Manacles, as it were, must be put on their grasping hands.
• • •
In writing this book, in telling the story of Buchanan and his progeny from 1956 to the present, I have found myself more and more fixated on one gnawing question. Is what we are dealing with merely a social movement of the right whose radical ideas must eventually face public scrutiny and rise or fall on their merits? Or is this the story of something quite different, something never before seen in American history? Could it be—and I use these words quite hesitantly and carefully—a fifth-column assault on American democratic governance?
The phrase originated in the Spanish Civil War, when one of Francisco Franco’s subgenerals in the military rebellion against the elected government, according to the contemporaneous New York Times report, “stated that he was counting on four columns of troops outside Madrid and another column of persons hiding within the city who would join the invaders as soon as they entered the capital.”32 Since then, the term “fifth column” has been applied to stealth supporters of an enemy who assist by engaging in propaganda and even sabotage to prepare the way for its conquest. It is a fraught term among scholars, not least because the specter of a secretive, infiltrative fifth column has been used in instrumental ways by the powerful—such as in the Red Scare of the Cold War era—to
conjure fear and lead citizens and government to close ranks against dissent, with grave costs for civil liberties.33 That, obviously, is not my intent in using the term. I believe we have an urgent need for more open and probing discussion, not silencing.
Yet, imperfect though it may be, the concept of a fifth column does seem to be the best one available for capturing what is distinctive in a few key dimensions about this quest to ensure the supremacy of capital. For a movement that knows it can never win majority support is not a classic social movement. Throughout our history America has been changed, mostly for the better, by social movements, some of them quite radical—the abolition movement, above all. Our national experience over the past two and a half centuries has demonstrated time and again that the citizenry can learn and grow from social movements, sifting through their claims to adopt and reject as we see fit. Where movement activists win over majorities, they make headway; when they fail to, they in time falter.
This cause is different. Pushed by relatively small numbers of radical-right billionaires and millionaires who have become profoundly hostile to America’s modern system of government, an apparatus decades in the making, funded by those same billionaires and millionaires, has been working to undermine the normal governance of our democracy. Indeed, one such manifesto calls for a “hostile takeover” of Washington, D.C.34
That hostile takeover maneuvers very much like a fifth column, operating in a highly calculated fashion, more akin to an occupying force than to an open group engaged in the usual give-and-take of politics. The size of this force is enormous. The social scientists who have led scholars in researching the Koch network write that it “operates on the scale of a national U.S. political party” and employs more than three times as many people as the Republican committees had on their payrolls in 2015. This points to another characteristic associated with a fifth column: the tactic of overwhelming the normal political process with schemes to disrupt its functioning. Indeed, this massive and well-funded force is turning the party it has occupied toward ends that most Republican voters do not want, such as the privatization of Social Security, Medicare, and education.35
Again, this program is distinct from social movements that build on the basis of candor about their ultimate aims in order to win over majorities. Certainly, the people who created and back this program have every right to fight hard for what they believe in. But they should do it honestly and openly—in all their operations. Rather than subverting democratic processes, they should fully inform the American public of their real goals and leave the decision to the people, once the people have been told the whole truth.
• • •
The dream of this movement, its leaders will tell you, is liberty. “I want a society where nobody has power over the other,” Buchanan told an interviewer early in the new century. “I don’t want to control you and I don’t want to be controlled by you.”36 It sounds so reasonable, fair, and appealing. But the story told here will show that the last part of that statement is by far the most telling. This cause defines the “you” its members do not want to be controlled by as the majority of the American people. And its architects have never recognized economic power as a potential tool of domination: to them, unrestrained capitalism is freedom.
For all its fine phrases, what this cause really seeks is a return to oligarchy, to a world in which both economic and effective political power are to be concentrated in the hands of a few. It would like to reinstate the kind of political economy that prevailed in America at the opening of the twentieth century, when the mass disfranchisement of voters and the legal treatment of labor unions as illegitimate enabled large corporations and wealthy individuals to dominate Congress and most state governments alike, and to feel secure that the nation’s courts would not interfere with their reign.
The first step toward understanding what this cause actually wants is to identify the deep lineage of its core ideas. And although its spokespersons would like you to believe they are disciples of James Madison, the leading architect of the U.S. Constitution, it is not true.37 Their intellectual lodestar is John C. Calhoun. He developed his radical critique of democracy a generation after the nation’s founding, as the brutal economy of chattel slavery became entrenched in the South—and his vision horrified Madison.
PROLOGUE
THE MARX OF THE MASTER CLASS
Those who are leading today’s push to upend the political system are heirs to a set of ideas that goes back almost two centuries: the pushback of imperious property against democracy. Its earliest coherent expression in America came in the late 1820s and ’30s, from South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, a strategist of ruling-class power so shrewd that the acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed him “the Marx of the master class.”1 Hofstadter’s label gestured, with his signature sense of irony, to the revolutionary nature of Calhoun’s strategy for how the wealthiest one percent (actually, far fewer) of his day could wield outsize power in a constitutional republic. A former vice president and, at the time he devised his plan, a U.S. senator, Calhoun was America’s first tactician of tax revolt, and arguably the nation’s most influential extremist.
It’s not a secret legacy. Some of James M. Buchanan’s intellectual heirs have remarked on how closely his school of political economy mirrors that of John C. Calhoun’s. Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, two economics professors at the core of the operation funded and overseen by Charles Koch at George Mason University, Buchanan’s last home, have called the antebellum South Carolina senator “a precursor of modern public choice theory,” another name for the stream of thought pioneered by Buchanan. Both Buchanan and Calhoun, the coauthors observe, were concerned with the “failure of democracy to preserve liberty.” In particular, Buchanan and Calhoun both alleged a kind of class conflict between “tax producers and tax consumers.” Both depicted politics as a realm of exploitation and coercion, but the economy as a realm of free exchange. And both designed inventive ways to safeguard minority rights that went beyond the many protections already enshrined in the Constitution.2 Calhoun and Buchanan both devised constitutional mechanisms to protect an elite economic minority against “exploitation” by majorities of their fellow citizens, and advocated a minority veto power that, as the acolytes note, had “the same purpose and effect.”3 Both thinkers sought ways to restrict what voters could achieve together in a democracy to what the wealthiest among them would agree to.4
Appreciation for John C. Calhoun turns out to be not an aberration but a recurrent theme in the brain trust the Kansas-based billionaire Charles Koch has funded over the years. What is so valuable to them in Calhoun’s antidemocratic theorizing, notably in his Disquisition on Government and in his long magnum opus, A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States?5
One of the first scholars subsidized by Koch, the Austrian economist Murray Rothbard, spoke openly of the cause’s debt to Calhoun, crediting his class analysis of taxation as foundational to the libertarian cause. “Calhoun’s insight,” Rothbard explained, was “that it was the intervention of the State that in itself created the classes and the conflict,” not the labor relations of the economy, as previous thinkers believed. Calhoun saw “that some people in the community must be net payers of tax funds, while others are net recipients.” (In today’s parlance, makers and takers.) By his theory, the net gainers of tax monies were “the ‘ruling class’ of the exploiters”; the net losers of tax funds were “the ‘ruled’ or the exploited.” Most crucially, Calhoun and Rothbard inverted how most people would construe who had power over whom. A man whose wealth came from slavery was a victim of government tax collectors, and poorer voters were the exploiters to watch out for. “Calhoun was quite right,” Rothbard instructed, “in focusing on taxes and fiscal policy as the keystone” of democracy’s threat to economic liberty.6 To see how Calhoun’s project unfolded in his day is to better understand the stealth plan for transformation under way in our
own.
• • •
By 1860, two of every three of the relatively few Americans whose wealth surpassed $100,000 lived below the Mason-Dixon Line. New York at that time had fewer millionaires per capita than Mississippi. South Carolina was the richest state in the Union. The source of southern wealth was staple crops—particularly cotton—produced by enslaved men, women, and children for world markets. So matchless were the profits that more money was invested in slaves than in industry and railroads.7
And no one thought harder about how to safeguard those investments than John C. Calhoun. One female contemporary referred to him as “the cast-iron man,” in reference to his hammering manner. With blazing eyes and a raw-boned face, he had a countenance as stern as that of the militant abolitionist John Brown, but with a mission fully opposite. In his day—indeed, for more than a century thereafter—Calhoun had no rival in the sheer wizardry of what one famous political scientist called the “set of constitutional gadgets” that Calhoun engineered to constrict the operations of democratic government.8
Calhoun had enjoyed the kind of education available to only a sliver of the elite in early America, including an undergraduate degree at Yale and legal training. He enlisted that education to advance what he took to be the interests of his peculiar class, a richer one than the world had ever known, and one whose interests were not adequately protected, Calhoun believed, by the Constitution as then understood.
There was something alarming, even to his allies, in the monomania with which Calhoun conducted ideological warfare against the political liberalism of his day. He wore people out with his certainty that “the force of destiny” guided him, his relentless reductionist logic, and the nakedly instrumental manner with which he approached human relationships. Compassion, patience, and humor all seemed as foreign to him as the notion that the people he owned had intellects and dreams of their own. President Andrew Jackson, the leader of Calhoun’s political party, suggested that the man be hung for treason. That was imprudent. But there was a logic to it, and not only because Calhoun was so unlikable. His ideas about government broke sharply from the vision of the nation’s founders and the Constitution’s drafters, and even from that of his own party. He wanted one class—his own class of plantation owners—to overpower the others, despite its obvious numerical minority.9
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