Regularly in the news, the VCCG also had support from the state’s flagship campus. Colgate Darden accepted appointment to it, for example. As Buchanan and Tullock began their work on constitutional matters, Darden and Jack Kilpatrick were planning an extended UVA seminar on constitutional law that would feature federalism as a restraining device on Washington’s power. They gave up on the plan only because the law school dean insisted, to their surprise, on having “both viewpoints fully represented.”23 This was, after all, an institution of higher learning. But the interest of powerful Virginians in advancing a more sophisticated Dixie interpretation of the Constitution was hard to miss for anyone with ambition and like inclinations. Buchanan paid attention.
Core VCCG ideas, in fact, became part of the approach of the Virginia school of political economy. Chief among them was, in the words of its chair, a well-regarded corporate lawyer, “that [we] carefully distinguish between the growth of federal power due to the amazing changes in the world since 1787 as contrasted with the needless increase in bureaucracy by those seeking to puff up their jobs or who think that they can best run all the people’s affairs.”24 Buchanan and Tullock added more academic vocabulary as they elaborated the idea of self-seeking as the motor of illegitimate government expansion. But the driving analysis was less original in its basic convictions than later reviewers imagined. It was midcentury Virginia wine with a Mont Pelerin label.
With so many of its own allies supporting the VCCG, the Thomas Jefferson Center helped out as it could. Richmond businessman Eugene B. Sydnor Jr. and Darden must have appreciated the economics department’s hire of yet another University of Chicago Ph.D., the British economist Ronald Coase, then working out a case for how more strictly defined property rights could obviate the need for government regulation—one that later won him a Nobel Prize. But Buchanan’s operation also provided more direct assistance in the form of contracted research for the VCCG, such as a multiyear study of Virginia’s tuition grant system. It was outsourced to the man Buchanan dubbed the “father” of the freedom-of-choice approach, Leon Dure, who had personally helped destroy the South’s most promising interracial union before going on to promote private schooling. The study reported the private school subsidies to be a great success and, indeed, a model for evading government control. With Buchanan as intermediary, the Virginia Plan method would make its way across the Atlantic and eventually into the think tank advice with which Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher revolutionized British policy to achieve kindred ends.25
• • •
Buchanan’s project was intellectual—creating a new field of scholarship—but in the end, it was not simply ivory tower acclaim that he was after. It was real-world impact. He understood that cultivating thinkers who could alter the public conversation was essential to the quest to transform political economy in a lasting way. And that is no doubt why, as S. M. Amadae notes in her groundbreaking study of Buchanan’s work in those years, “he consistently made a point to expressly locate the candidate’s place within the political spectrum,” a highly unusual and disturbing practice.26 The Mont Pelerin Society taught that ideas could trickle down, as it were, to the man in the street, or at least be sold to him by what Professor Hayek called “second-hand traders in ideas.” It may have been at society meetings that Buchanan first thought about how a carefully crafted intellectual system could advance the cause’s prospects—what he called, privately, among comrades, “the grand strategy.”
The Volker Fund had also made clear that it wasn’t just supporting intellectual work but seeking real change—indeed, radical change. While it believed that such change required a new cohort of thinkers, it also believed that their ideas must then be put to work. “We can learn a great deal from Lenin and the Leninists,” suggested Murray Rothbard, the Manhattan-based talent scout for the Volker Fund, in 1961. He did not mean to suggest violent revolution, he clarified, but that the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution had an unrivaled grasp of strategy and tactics. A Leninist approach for the current cause, Rothbard argued, called for the “advancement of the ‘hard core’ of libertarian thought and libertarian thinkers,” from which all else would in time flow. He was pleased with the Volker Fund’s recent investments, which showed recognition of “the overriding importance of the intellectuals and scholars in forming a libertarian cadre.” Economists, the most reliable advocates of unlimited liberty, could lead in building that hard core for the future.27
Virginia was the most promising outpost for the cause to connect ideas with action. “Let’s hope that you soak up a little more states’ rights spirit down there,” Rothbard had said to Gordon Tullock on his original assignment there, in 1958, as the massive resistance school closures flouted the Brown ruling.28 Buchanan ensured that an investment would yield good dividends. With Volker Fund monies, he brought leading lights of the libertarian cause to Virginia, who in turn helped him to spread the influence of Virginia school thought in Europe. After coming to Charlottesville, Peter Bauer “almost single-handedly” arranged for Buchanan’s yearlong visit to Cambridge University in 1961–62, while Bruno Leoni, after his Virginia visit, got his host to “Pavia, Stresa, and elsewhere” in Italy.29 So, too, Buchanan, Nutter, and Coase made it to the approved list of speakers for Volker-funded lectures at other U.S. colleges.30
The Volker Fund also sent representatives to learn from “the private school movement in the Charlottesville area.”31 Milton Friedman visited Charlottesville in 1960, invited by Buchanan and Nutter to give a public lecture on the economics of education, at which the faculty who spoke up in defense of public education “were openly ridiculed” by the economists who commanded the floor.32 Friedman went home sounding like Lincoln Steffens after his trip to the USSR: “I’ve seen the future, and it works.”33 After an extended return visit as a guest of the Jefferson Center to give Volker-funded lectures in 1961, F. A. Hayek, too, endorsed Virginia’s tuition grants.34 If Ludwig von Mises had not been eighty years old and homebound in New York, he probably would have come south to see the future, too.
Yet without Buchanan’s academic success, the Leninist long march might have come to naught. The reception of The Calculus of Consent proved a boon to the cause, with academic reviews—many, but not all, by like-minded thinkers—praising the book as “brilliant,” “original,” “ambitious,” “eloquent,” and “important.” They highlighted its new theory to explain how governments made decisions about how to allocate resources and how different constitutional rules might change those outcomes. “The public sector is the most understudied part of the economy,” noted Anthony Downs of the RAND Corporation, “in spite of the fact that it is very large and is the fastest growing sector” worldwide.35 Even those who faulted the logic of the book on key points and disputed the “implicit ideological emphasis” praised it as intellectually stimulating.36
The University of Virginia promoted Buchanan to a chaired professorship that very year, and the Southern Economic Association elected him president in 1963. The Mont Pelerin Society, for its part, invited Gordon Tullock to become a member, too.37
• • •
It seemed the perfect time to launch a formal group to develop the new school of thought that could serve as a magnet for drawing together and grooming like-minded intellectuals, building a cadre to advance the cause. In 1963, Buchanan and Tullock organized the first conference of what came to be called the Public Choice Society. The range of scholars who came to Charlottesville for the meeting pleased Buchanan, who noted in his journal that it “takes the right-wing onus off us to an extent, and it establishes our claim to scholarship, so to speak.”38 The field of public choice economics indeed created useful tools for analyzing the incentive structures of public life. Liberals, too, could use the resulting insights.39 Yet, for the inner circle, the ultimate purpose was never in doubt.
Buchanan’s “grand strategy” was humming along brilliantly. He and his colleagues had not only created a new
field of inquiry, in an academy that regards nothing so highly as innovation that spurs new research; they also were using that field to advance the cause of economic liberty in ways none could have imagined prior to the era of massive resistance. “Underneath its abstract analysis,” Buchanan allowed in hindsight, “the Virginia research program has always embodied a moral passion.”40
Indeed, as they convened their conference, a political mobilization was under way that brought many threads together. Men of the right all across Dixie were then working with like-minded organizers up north, among them those who had backed Virginia’s T. Coleman Andrews in his run for president in 1956, to make Arizona senator Barry Goldwater the next Republican presidential nominee. Jack Kilpatrick captured their thinking. “The South is Goldwater country,” he announced in 1963; Virginia “is fairly panting with suppressed Republican desire.”41 Indeed, Professor Warren Nutter would become the candidate’s only full-time economic adviser, and Buchanan would teach five weeks of Nutter’s class so he could travel with the campaign.42
Off to his first faculty position at the University of South Carolina, Tullock readied groundwork for Goldwater’s run by cultivating a cohort of young Republicans. “The student body,” Tullock told the Volker Fund, had “particularly good targets.” Most were very conservative, “but a minority are converted to the Nation–New Republic type of ‘liberalism.’” Even as the majority lacked “an articulate and rational social philosophy,” they instinctually spurned the liberal students and the social sciences faculty, finding them “useless.” This tension, Tullock reported, “provides an opportunity to have an effect considerably greater than would be found in most institutions.” He was confident that he could “exploit” it for the cause.43
With that in mind, he met William F. Buckley for dinner in 1960 to discuss the launching of a campus Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter. Its members were no doubt thrilled when the national organization gave their own senator, the veteran Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, its Freedom Award in 1962. With help from the YAF chapter, Tullock sent news of “the beginning of a healthy Republican Party in South Carolina.” He predicted that “it should at the very least shift the southern branch of the Democratic Party further to the right”—a move few informed contemporaries would have believed possible.44
Before long, he was also boasting to Buckley about the new school of political economy. “Virginia is a sort of center,” Tullock informed the National Review editor, of “a very small but growing movement of scholars” doing an exciting new kind of research, a “science of politics” with “practical implications.” It would soon be time, he said, “to move out of our ivory towers and offer worthwhile assistance in the mundane activity of getting votes.”45
It was a long-term strategy, granted, but Tullock expected public choice thought to yield notable “improvements in propaganda strategy.” And their Virginia location and contacts put the team in a position to “make the results we obtain available to people who can use them.”46 Always the more dedicated scholar, Buchanan concentrated, for his part, on building up a libertarian intellectual hard core. His more sensitive hearing registered, even if he did not heed, the mumbling of critics. “Of course, we continue to be called ‘eccentric right-wingers,’” Buchanan informed Hayek in 1963, “but this does not especially bother us.”47 Academic critics could carp, but the enterprise was moving forward with the backing of the most powerful men in the state. “In twenty years,” Tullock exulted to an audience of kindred spirits, “we may be able to carry out a small revolution.” One problem ahead, though, he confessed, was “persuading people to make the requisite changes” that their new field of study deemed necessary.48
That problem of unpopularity never went away. For when the revolution came, it turned out to be not the one they anticipated—and its impact made the challenge of majority persuasion all the more intractable.
CHAPTER 6
A COUNTERREVOLUTION TAKES TIME
Democracy, especially as it became more inclusive, kept causing trouble for the men who wanted economic liberty—trouble that illuminates for us why they later adopted the strategy they did. “Prepare the lifeboats for possible emergency,” Gordon Tullock advised William F. Buckley in late October 1964. By then it was clear that Barry Goldwater, the candidate whom right-wing activists had worked so hard to make the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, was sinking fast in the polls and threatening to take the movement’s “morale” down with him.1 The ever shrewd Buckley was already one step ahead.
In September, the National Review editor had warned a convention of young conservatives, still giddy from having secured the nomination for their preferred candidate, to prepare for “the impending defeat of Barry Goldwater.” Some wept. But Buckley went on to deliver the hard truth they needed to hear. Thanks to their Herculean efforts, a historic opportunity had come—but far before its time. For a candidate such as Goldwater to be elected would presuppose “a great sea change in American public opinion.” That had not been achieved; the effort had barely begun. Buckley urged his listeners to see “the necessity of guarding against the utter disarray that sometimes follows a great defeat.” The young activists had to accept that “a counter-revolution” takes years of careful preparation.2
That work had barely begun, especially outside the South. Goldwater was campaigning on a vision of economic liberty that sounded much like that of Virginia’s 1956 States’ Rights presidential candidate, T. Coleman Andrews.3 And Andrews had garnered the largest share of the vote in only one community in the United States, Prince Edward County, not exactly the kind of place from which most Americans would want to take cues, especially with that county’s public schools still closed and black children going without education as the campaign season of 1964 approached. How in the world could Goldwater articulate their shared view of the just society and still get elected?
The man given “major staff responsibility for every one of the campaign’s important speeches,” as well as an equally important say in “every statement that left the [Republican] National Committee” in the campaign, “including political principles,” was Warren Nutter.4 Nutter would boast that he had personally written most of the candidate’s “speech to the platform committee (including [its section on] ‘civil rights’),” a section that rightly outraged veteran African American Republicans, because it replaced the party’s long-standing support for civil rights with a call for states’ rights. It also shocked moderate white northern Republicans, veteran GOP voters who were not eager to enforce full citizenship for blacks but also did not like stepping in line with the refractory white South. “For those of us who revere the memory of Abraham Lincoln,” a New Jersey woman on the Republican National Committee complained, “this is a difficult pill to swallow.”5
Part of the problem in reaching moderates lay with the candidate. Enamored of economic liberty and priding himself on calling things as he saw them, Goldwater was determined to make his run a referendum on the cause’s ideas. And so, even before his candidacy was official, he went to Tennessee to ask why Washington, D.C., was producing hydroelectric power in Appalachia. “I think we ought to sell the TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority],” the senator said. But that did not play well in Tennessee. “I have contributed to your campaign and helped organize the Goldwater club here, but since you have . . . come out . . . for the sale of the TVA, I am taking off my Goldwater stickers,” wrote a Chattanooga resident, one of thousands to recoil in alarm. “Why in the hell did you say that about the TVA?” an Atlanta fan demanded. “The Southeast will never vote for anyone who advocates turning over the TVA to the . . . monopolists.”6
Goldwater next took on the most popular New Deal program—Social Security—and in a state with one of the nation’s largest ratios of retired voters. On the hustings in New Hampshire, he called for the program to be made “voluntary,” knowing that this would cripple—and in time end—the system, because, like Obamacare
in the new century, Social Security relies upon a vast pool of contributors to spread risk and ensure adequate provisioning. In an attempt to deal with the backlash, his advisers insisted that he explain that he meant only to see Social Security “strengthened” and made “sound,” but most voters knew he had said what he meant originally. For many, the proposed alternative—investing their money in the stock market—raised painful memories of the crash of ’29, when families lost their life savings. For others, investing elsewhere was not an option, because they had never earned enough money to save for old age. Without Social Security, they could not get by.7
Goldwater was not done educating the American people on the principles of freedom. Medicare, he then argued, was nothing but “socialized medicine.” Alas, “the idea of medical insurance for the aged” was a federal initiative that even “most South Carolinians liked,” one history of the campaign notes.8
Still, the chance to argue their ideas to the American people was so intoxicating that none of the libertarians could resist doing so. The Chicago school’s Milton Friedman, who served as Goldwater’s scholarly surrogate, explained to the press that the goal of the campaign was “to stop the drift toward centralization and collectivism.” That drift had helped “to undermine individual responsibility and to weaken the moral fiber of the people.”9 On a visit to Harvard, Friedman devoted most of his speech to criticizing the Civil Rights Act, complaining that it used “coercive” means to make all “conform to the values of the majority,” in violation of the liberty of the white minority that opposed reform. Friedman urged reliance instead on “free market principles”: prejudice would cause lower wages for black workers, which in turn would reduce production costs for those who employed them, so more employers would hire African Americans, he said—and, presto, “virtue triumph[s].”10
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