Another teacher I wish to thank is S. M. Amadae, whose groundbreaking first book, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, alerted me to the existence of the Buchanan House Archives. When I called her to ask how she gained access, not only did she generously share her experience with research in this unusual setting, but she also allayed my fear that I might somehow be imagining things, because no one else had discovered the plan I was seeing take shape in the sources—and on the floor of the North Carolina General Assembly after 2010. There was a long pause on the other end of the line; then she said, “You have to realize that most of the critics of neoliberalism never read the theory.” That observation was a turning point; it made me determined to keep following the trail I was on to its end, wherever it led. The conversation also proved the start of another enlightening and sustaining friendship. No one I have read or met understands Buchanan’s philosophy of political economy as astutely as Amadae does; in her most recent book, Prisoners of Reason, she demonstrates the predatory will to power at the level of theory that I have shown in its practical application.
My deepest gratitude, though, is to my agent, Susan Rabiner, the most exacting teacher I have ever had and the dream coach for this project. From our very first conversation, Susan understood like no one else the stakes of this story, and she worked far beyond the call of duty to help realize its potential. She was, I thought more than once, the Anne Sullivan to my Helen Keller, patiently yet firmly teaching me how to speak to be understood outside my academic world. She has been the most brilliant interlocutor, supportive coach, and talented advocate a writer could dream of—and she has made the work fun. My editor, Wendy Wolf, showed tremendous faith in this project from the outset, and her reading of the manuscript taught me much about storytelling for a general readership. Will Palmer proved a peerless copy editor; his was the most meticulous and helpful review my work has ever enjoyed. I also thank Georgia Bodnar and Megan Gerrity at Viking for their expert work. Pamela Haag improved the book immensely with her incisive freelance editing. Her hard queries and helpful suggestions brought it to a new level.
I could never have persuaded Rabiner and Wolf to take me on had it not been for teachers closer to home: the members of my writing group. Laura Edwards, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, and Lisa Levenstein are a dream team of relevant historical expertise, as well as some of the smartest critics and most loyal friends a writer could hope for. For generously taking time from their own summers to read the entire penultimate manuscript and send me comments and suggestions that vastly improved it, I am also deeply grateful to another dream team of scholars: Alice Kessler-Harris, who believed in and supported this project and its author from the very beginning; Jason Brent, whose grasp of the varied traditions of economic thought saved me from missteps and sharpened the overall analysis; Joseph A. McCartin, whose knowledge of public sector workers and their history is unrivaled; and Sonya Amadae, whose critical command of the relevant body of theory is unrivaled and who took time from her research appointment in Finland to help me get it right. I also want to thank two leading Latin Americanists, John French and Jeffrey Rubin, for reading the chapter on Chile and offering keen insights. Thanks, too, to my colleagues in the Labor and Working-Class History Association, from whom I have learned much about the substance and stakes of the history recounted in this book.
Lisa Levenstein deserves a paragraph all her own for additional brilliant editing at the eleventh hour. I will never forget her generosity over the Christmas and New Year’s break, carrying out heroic and inspired surgery to shorten and sharpen each chapter, sometimes more than once. Possessed of an amazing editorial mind, she is a singular friend I am incredibly lucky to have.
I am profoundly grateful to the other distinguished historians who believed in this work enough to write letters in support of my applications for fellowship support: Linda Gordon, Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, Charles Payne, Michael Sherry, and Daniel T. Rodgers. And thank you to these institutions for heeding those letters and underwriting the research and writing: the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research.
I would also like to thank some people I have never met but have learned from immensely: the dedicated journalists who have been covering the impact of big money on American politics. Many are named in the notes but all merit collective recognition here because I could never have pieced together the last two decades of this book’s story without their intrepid investigations.
One of the many joys of teaching is the two-way flow of information and insight. My graduate students have enriched my understanding of many topics touched on in this book; I thank them for sustaining me with the inspiration of their own research and fellowship. So, too, do I appreciate the many undergraduate students whom I have had the pleasure of learning from in the course of writing this book. I also want to thank the outstanding research assistants who helped at various stages of this project, first at Northwestern and later at Duke: Anthony Abata, Eladio Bobadilla, Jon Free, Alexander Gourse, Natalie Jean Marine-Street, Parvathi Santhosh-Kumar, Hunter Thompson, Brad Wood, and Martin Zacharia.
Many other colleagues and friends shared sources, ideas, and encouragement on various parts of this work, among them Ed Balleisen, Martha Biondi, Jack Boger, Christopher Bonastia, Eileen Boris, Andy Burstein, Margot Canady, Eduardo Caneda, Patrick Conway, Saul Cornell, Nancy Cott, Joseph Crespino, Emma Edmunds, Lane Fenrich, Melissa Fisher, Mary Foley, Nancy Fraser, Estelle Freedman, Paul Gaston, Jonathon Glassman, Thavolia Glymph, Sally Greene, Brian Grogan, Roger Horowitz, Nancy Isenberg, Jennifer Klein, Bob Korstad, Kevin Kruse, Matt Lassiter, Jules Law, Kelley Lawton, Brian Lee, Ariane Leendertz, Andrew Lewis, Nelson Lichtenstein, Mary Anne McAlonan, Joseph A. McCartin, Laura McEnaney, Alan McGinty, Jennifer Mittelstadt, Julie Mooney, Bethany Moreton, Alice O’Connor, Julia Ott, Joseph J. Persky, Christopher Phelps, Kim Phillips-Fein, Jedediah Purdy, Bernhard Rieger, Kyle Schaefer, Edward H. Sebesta, David Steigerwald, David Stein, Wolfgang Streeck, Shelton Stromquist, Kerry Taylor, Heather Thompson, Eckard Vance Toy (and his daughter Kelly Dittmar, for reaching out to me after his death and sending me valuable materials from his personal research collection on the far right), Kara Turner, Nick Unger, Jean-Christian Vinel, Daniel Williams, Peter H. Wood, Celeste Wroblewski, and Jack Wuest. If I have neglected to mention anyone, please know it is only from exhaustion!
As always, I am indebted to the many archivists and librarians whose knowledge, professionalism, and openhandedness assisted my research (though I will refrain from naming any, lest it cause some of them trouble). So, too, I appreciate the invitations to speak on aspects of this project and the hosts and audiences who helped sharpen the ideas.
Lastly, but most importantly, I am grateful to the many beloved friends (you know who you are, and I know how blessed I am to have you) and the family members who sustained my spirits throughout this work: Mary Anne, Ray, and Ryan McAlonon; David and Jacquie MacLean; Eli, Eve, and Les Orenstein; Celeste Wroblewski; and Ann Golden. Mary Anne arrived like a miracle in the final month, each day of which confirmed my belief that she is the world’s best sister. In a category all his own is Bruce Orenstein, my first reader and my soul mate, without whose love, vision, everyday help, sage advice, and sense of humor I could never have done this. Thank you all, so much.
NOTES
EPIGRAPH
1.Pierre Lemieux, “The Public Choice Revolution,” Regulation, Fall 2004, 29. Lemieux was writing for one Koch-funded organization, the Cato Institute, as a fellow of another, the Independent Institute.
INTRODUCTION: A QUIET DEAL IN DIXIE
1.“Working Papers for Internal Discussion Only” (December 1956), record group 2/1/2.634, box 9, Office of the President, Papers of the President of the University of Virginia, Office Administrative Files, Manuscripts Division, Alderman Library, University of Virginia. The best in
troduction to Darden’s thought is Guy Friddell, Colgate Darden: Conversations with Guy Friddell (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978). See chapters 2 and 3 for the full story of the center’s founding.
2.“Working Papers for Internal Discussion Only.”
3.Trip Gabriel, “Teachers Wonder, Why the Heapings of Scorn?” New York Times, March 3, 2011, A1, 18.
4.See, for example, Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, “GOP’s Anti-School Insanity: How Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal Declared War on Education,” Salon, February 9, 2015; Richard Fausset, “Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings at University,” New York Times, February 20, 2015; and the superb documentary Starving the Beast, directed by Steve Mims, www.starvingthebeast.net.
5.Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 260, 263.
6.Elizabeth Koh, “Justice Clarence Thomas: ‘We Are Destroying Our Institutions,’” News & Observer, October 27, 2016, 1.
7.William Cronon, “Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here),” Scholar as Citizen (blog), March 15, 2011, http://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/tag/wpri. The Wisconsin Republican Party became so nervous that it demanded his e-mails: David Walsh, “GOP Files FOIA Request for UW Madison Professor William Cronon’s Emails,” History News Network, March 25, 2011, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/137911.
8.Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War Against Obama,” The New Yorker, August 30, 2010; and, more recently, Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016). See also Lee Fang, The Machine: A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right (New York: New Press, 2013); Kenneth P. Vogel, Big Money: 2.5 Billion Dollars, One Suspicious Vehicle, and a Pimp—On the Trail of the Ultra-Rich Hijacking American Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2014), and Daniel Schulman, Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2014).
9.Numerous journalists pointed to Rand and/or Friedman. Among scholarly accounts that focus on Hayek and Friedman, see, for example, the astute work of Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (New York: Verso, 2013). A brilliant historian of neoliberal thought, Mirowski is in plentiful company in paying only passing attention to Buchanan, though he says more than most. The one notable exception is S. M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Her luminous explication of Buchanan’s thought reveals the falsity of his claim of being a classical liberal and the chilling will to power driving his intellectual program.
10.James H. Hershman Jr., “Massive Resistance Meets Its Match: The Emergence of a Pro-Public School Majority,” in The Moderates’ Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia, ed. Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 222n49; Alfred Stepan, “State Power and the Strength of Civil Society in the Southern Cone of Latin America,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 341n13.
11.I learned of the archive from the pathbreaking work of S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), whose emphasis here was on his early involvement with the RAND Corporation. Her work has been a beacon to me.
12.George Zornick, “Vice President Mike Pence Would Be a Dream for the Koch Brothers,” The Nation, July 14, 2016. To take but one index of his reliability, Pence was one of only four governors awarded a grade of A by the Cato Institute; Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2014), 2–3, https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/fprc-on-americas-governors_1.pdf.
13.Charles G. Koch, Creating a Science of Liberty (Fairfax, VA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1997). The occasion was a speech to a Fellows Research Colloquium addressed also by James Buchanan in January 1997 at GMU.
14.Richard Austin Smith, “The Fifty-Million-Dollar Man,” Fortune, November 1957, 177.
15.Thomas Frank identified the spread of this novel understanding of corruption on the right in The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), and brilliantly conveyed the scale of the damage prior to 2008, without quite pinpointing the ideas driving it. He discovered a second-generation public choice scholar, Fred S. McChesney, but missed the long lineage that produced him, which began with Buchanan (245–49).
16.“Working Papers for Internal Discussion Only.”
17.For the premier treatment of that campaign and its import, see Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001).
18.Koch, Creating a Science of Liberty.
19.For his first invocation of constitutional revolution in print, see James M. Buchanan, “America’s Third Century,” Atlantic Economic Journal 1 (November 1973): 9–12. Scholars and journalists in many nations are now grappling with how numerous democracies have been, in effect, losing sovereignty and responsiveness to voters, and hence popularity. Yet most write in the passive voice, focusing on impact more than sources, and attributing the action to abstract nouns rather than human agents. See, for example, the powerful indictment of “democracy’s conceptual unmooring and substantive disembowelment” by political theorist Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015); and the bracing exploration of the fiscal crisis that is undermining the legitimacy of Western democracies by Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Government (London: Verso, 2014). What no one has identified with adequate clarity is the individuals and institutions that are intentionally insulating the economy from intervention, in what has become a bipartisan and transnational project. It is beyond the scope of this book, but I anticipate that when others become familiar with Buchanan’s ideas and their transnational transmission in the wake of his Nobel Prize, they will gain a better knowledge of where many of the troubling practices came from. See also Stephen Gill and A. Claire Cutler, eds., New Constitutionalism and World Order (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015); also, Jeffrey Rubin and Vivienne Bennett, Enduring Reform: Progressive Activism and Private Sector Responses in Latin America’s Democracies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press). The Koch-funded Atlas Network now has 457 partner organization members operating in 95 nations, https://www.atlasnetwork.org. For more on the global libertarian network, see Steven Teles and Daniel A. Kenney, “Spreading the Word: The Diffusion of American Conservatism in Europe and Beyond,” in Growing Apart? America and Europe in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jeffrey Kopstein and Sven Steinmo (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 136–69.
20.James M. Buchanan, “Constitutions, Politics, and Markets,” draft prepared for presentation, Porto Allegre, Brazil, April 1993, Buchanan House Archives.
21.For a sense of how the addition worked, see Grover G. Norquist, Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, and Our Lives (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).
22.Already in the late 1980s, the Cato Institute was showing nervousness about the potential impact on alliance building of the long history of libertarian “denunciations of religion, specifically targeting Christianity as deleterious to individual liberty,” and so hired a fellow who could make the case in terms evangelicals could accept; Ben Hart, “When Government Replaces God,” Wall Street Journal, December 30, 1988, A5. Because the religious right has been the subject of its own extensive literature and because it had virtually no connection to B
uchanan’s project until the organizations funded by Charles Koch began looking for partners that could help them gather the numbers they needed to prevail, I say little about this vast part of the modern American right. But for the canny ideological affinity of white evangelical Protestant political entrepreneurs and libertarian economics, see, for example, Michael Lienesch, Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 94–138; Linda Kintz, Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions That Matter in Right-Wing America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Bethany E. Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Feminist scholars such as Moreton have long pointed out that when government sheds functions, women lose twice: as public sector workers who lose good jobs and as unpaid workers in the home, on whose shoulders the additional burdens tend to fall.
Democracy in Chains Page 31