Democracy in Chains

by Nancy MacLean

  23.For an early alert, see Jacob M. Schlesinger, “As Opponents of ‘Corporate Welfare’ Mobilize on Left and Right, Business Has Reason to Worry,” Wall Street Journal, December 18, 1996, A22.

  24.Arlen Specter, Life Among the Cannibals: A Political Career, a Tea Party Uprising, and the End of Governing as We Know It (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2012); Howard Berkes, “GOP-on-GOP Attacks Leave Orrin Hatch Fighting Mad,” National Public Radio, April 12, 2012, www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2012/04/12/150506733/tea-party-again-targets-a-utah-gop-senator-and-orrin-hatch-is-fighting-mad; Alan Rappeport and Matt Flegenheimer, “John Boehner Describes Ted Cruz as ‘Lucifer in the Flesh,’” First Draft (blog), New York Times, April 28, 2016.

  25.See, for example, the illuminating work of Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein, It’s Even Worse than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2012); Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); David Daley, Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy (New York: Liveright, 2016); and E. J. Dionne Jr., Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism—From Goldwater to Trump (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).

  26.For a very readable early sounding of the alarm about privatization, without the Buchanan angle but with a good sense of the effects, see Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich, The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005).

  27.Mark Holden, the head of Koch Industries’ government and public affairs operation, told an invitation-only audience of billionaire and multimillionaire donors that those who are worried about what is happening to American politics are “afraid of us,” but ineffectual in stopping the assembled donors and operatives. “We’re close to winning. I don’t know how close, but we should be,” he told them, because “they [the critics] don’t have the real path”; Kenneth P. Vogel, “The Koch Intelligence Agency,” Politico, November 18, 2015, www.politico.com/story/2015/11/the-koch-brothers-intelligence-agency-215943#ixzz47cZ8Bqci.

  28.Jeb Bush and Clint Bolick, Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution (New York: Threshold Editions, 2013). Bolick, a libertarian attorney who cofounded the Koch-funded Institute for Justice to litigate for the restoration of the pre–New Deal Constitution, helped the Cato Institute’s Roger Pilon get Clarence Thomas nominated to and approved for the U.S. Supreme Court, and derailed the nomination of law professor Lani Guinier to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. See Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), quotes on 179–80, 186, 198; Nina J. Easton, Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Crusade (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 89–110, 260–65; Clint Bolick, “Clinton’s Quota Queens,” Wall Street Journal, April 30, 1993, A1.

  29.For a masterful exposition of this, see Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013). For stark contrast, see the Buchanan-influenced revisionist quest by a popular libertarian financial reporter to prove that FDR was acting in his personal self-interest, a skewed case that neglects not only the global context but also the mass popular demand for a new political economy; Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: Harper, 2007). For the signal achievements of active government, see Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016). For a superb accounting of the bipartisan move away from Keynesianism in the 1970s, see Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

  30.The historical literature on Friedman and Hayek is vast, yet it typically pays far less, if any, attention to Buchanan. The works I have learned most from include Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Economics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); and Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

  31.For an early incisive critique of how Buchanan’s ideas “threaten to become self-fulfilling,” in that, by discrediting the aspirational behavioral norm of public spirit, “our society would look bleaker and our lives as individuals would be more impoverished,” see Steven Kelman, “‘Public Choice’ and Public Spirit,” The Public Interest 87 (March 1987): 80–94. In the light of the 2016 election, Kelman’s analysis reads like prophecy.

  32.William P. Carney, “Madrid Rounds Up Suspected Rebels,” New York Times, October 16, 1936, 2.

  33.On the “Brown Scare,” see Leo Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press), 178–224. The literature on the Red Scare is voluminous.

  34.Matt Kibbe, Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government’s Stranglehold on America (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 342.

  35.Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, “The Koch Effect: The Impact of a Cadre-Led Network on American Politics” (paper presented at the Inequality Mini-Conference, Southern Political Science Association, San Juan, Puerto Rico, January 8, 2016), www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/sites/default/files/the_koch_effect_for_spsa_w_apps_skocpol_and_hertel-fernandez-corrected_1-4-16_1.pdf, quote on 8. I am grateful to Nancy Cott for alerting me to this paper. “Not a single grassroots Tea Party supporter we encountered argued for privatization of Social Security or Medicare along the lines being pushed by ultra-free-market politicians like Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) and advocacy groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity,” Skocpol and coauthor Vanessa Williamson reported in an earlier work, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 61.

  36.James M. Buchanan, “Saving the Soul of Classical Liberalism,” reprinted in Cato Policy Report, March/April 2013, after his death, www.scribd.com/document/197800481/Saving-the-Soul-of-Classical-Liberalism-Cato-Institute-pdf. The same operative who spoke of ginning up hostility in Washington similarly portrays the cause’s goals in appealing language to attract the numbers needed to move the unstated antidemocratic agenda; Matt Kibbe, Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto (New York: William Morrow, 2014).

  37.For a recent claim to the Madisonian mantle by a cause insider in the course of encouraging thoroughly un-Madisonian mass right-wing civil disobedience, backed by donor-funded legal defense funds, “to open a new front” in the “war” on the federal government in order to obtain what ordinary democratic politics has blocked, see Charles Murray, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission (New York: Crown Forum, 2015), quote on 8.

  PROLOGUE: THE MARX OF THE MASTER CLASS

  1.Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Random House, 1948), 68.

  2.Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, “The Public Choice Theory of John C. Calhoun,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 148 (1992): 655, 661, 665.

  3.Ibid., 661, 665. For more appreciation from the public choice fold, see Peter H. Aranson, “Calhoun’s Constitutional Economics,” Constitutional Political Economy 2 (1991): 31–52. Cowen and Tabarrok are chaired professors of economics and leaders of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, which has been heavily funded by Charles Koch since at least 1997. Cowen has served as general director of the center since then and was originally a codirector with Koch,
who remains on the governing board. “The strategy of Mercatus is to integrate theory and practice,” supplying what in today’s parlance are called “deliverables” to policy-makers, think tanks, foundations, and media; Tyler Cowen, “Why Does Freedom Wax and Wane: Some Research Questions in Social Change and Big Government,” Mercatus Center, GMU, 2000. The piece was reprinted online in 2015.

  4.Cowen, “Why Does Freedom Wax and Wane.”

  5.A venerable publishing house on the right recently republished both in H. Lee Cheek Jr., ed., John C. Calhoun: Selected Writings and Speeches (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003). For a case that “the southern states’ rights theory has become the constitutional orthodoxy of the conservative movement,” see Michael Lind, Up from Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America (New York: Free Press, 1996), 208–34.

  6.Murray N. Rothbard, Power & Market: Government and the Economy (Menlo Park, CA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), 12–13. Rothbard credits the “devoted interest” of Charles Koch in the acknowledgments, saying that his “dedication to inquiry into the field of liberty is all too rare in the present day.” Calhoun’s analysis also appeared in the successive Libertarian Party platforms that divide the citizenry into “an entrenched privileged class” that benefits from tax funds and “an exploited class—those who are the net taxpayers”; Joseph M. Hazlett II, The Libertarian Party and Other Minor Parties in the United States (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1992), 86.

  7.Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 5.

  8.Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), 158–59, 163.

  9.Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 69–70, 72–76. On Calhoun’s resolute anti-liberalism, see Minisha Sinha, The Counter-Revolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

  10.See Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).

  11.David L. Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle Against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 99–100. On the extensive protections Calhoun considered inadequate, see David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution, from Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill & Wang, 2009), and Paul Finkelman, “The Proslavery Origins of the Electoral College,” Cardozo Law Review 23 (2002): 1500–1519. Both authors, and many others, have published extensively on these themes.

  12.Sinha, Counter-Revolution of Slavery, 64, 74, 77.

  13.John C. Calhoun to Alexandre Dumas, August 1, 1847, reprinted in The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal, February 26, 1848, and cited in Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 77.

  14.Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 9, 12, 259, 278; William W. Freehling, Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854, vol. 1 of The Road to Disunion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 37.

  15.For recognition by seasoned commentators of a kinship between the antebellum southerner and the obstructionism pushed by the post-2010 radicals in Congress, see Sam Tanenhaus, “Original Sin: Why the GOP Is and Will Continue to Be the Party of White People,” New Republic, February 10, 2013; Bruce Schulman, “Boehner Resurrects the Antebellum South,” Great Debate (blog), Reuters, January 17, 2013, http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/tag/john-c-calhoun; and Stephen Mihm, “Tea Party Tactics Lead Back to Secession,” Bloomberg View, October 8, 2013, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-08/tea-party-tactics-lead-straight-back-to-secession.

  16.Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 68–92. See also the astute analysis on which Hofstadter built his argument, Richard N. Current, “John C. Calhoun, Philosopher of Reaction,” Antioch Review 3 (1943), especially 225, 227 for quotes.

  17.Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 71, 78, 84.

  18.Robin L. Einhorn, American Slavery, American Taxation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3, 5, 7–8.

  19.Ibid., 7. For the related case that the tradition the right now upholds is that of the Anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution, not of its authors, see Garry Wills, A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government (New York: Doubleday, 2000). For how that original alchemy continues to do its work in our own time, relying on assumptions of racial difference to justify inequality of all kinds and refusal of public policy solutions to address it, see Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (New York: Verso, 2014). For deeper roots in the tradition of political theory from which James Buchanan drew, see Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

  20.Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution. Madison believed that the more slavery existed in a state, the more “aristocratic in fact” it would become, “however democratic in name.” “The power lies in a part instead of the whole” in such states, he explained, “in the hands of property, not of numbers”; Lacy Ford Jr., “Inventing the Concurrent Majority: Madison, Calhoun, and the Problem of Majoritarianism in American Political Thought,” Journal of Southern History 60 (February 1994): 41–42.

  21.Current, “John C. Calhoun,” 230. Recent important works on slavery and capitalism include Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); and Johnson, River of Dark Dreams.

  22.Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 78–80.

  23.Ibid., 80.

  24.Calhoun to Dumas, August 1, 1847, 21, 23.

  25.Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

  26.Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 77.

  27.William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

  28.Ford, “Inventing the Concurrent Majority,” 49.

  29.For a similar point on mobilizations in the century since the income tax took effect, see Isaac William Martin, Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

  30.On the long shadow of the South’s “regime of racial capitalism,” see James L. Leloudis and Robert Korstad, To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

  31.J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974). The scholarly work on the role of race in American political development and on the fusion of race and class motives and appeals in politics since the nineteenth century is so extensive as to defy individual citation, but for concise discussion of the narrower point made here, see Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

  CHAPTER 1: THERE WAS NO STOPPING US

  1.For the most memorable treatment of the Reverend Vernon Johns as a liberation theologian, “forerunner” to Dr. King, and mentor to his niece, see Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 7–26.

  2.Kathryn Orth, “Going Public: Teacher Says She Encouraged 1951 Student Strike,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, M
ay 30, 1999, C1; Inez Davenport Jones, “Students Went on Strike to Challenge Jim Crow,” Virginian-Pilot, August 20, 2007, A15; Robert C. Smith, They Closed Our Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia 1951–1964 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 34. The strike and all that followed have been the subject of three recent and rich explorations, by a historian, a historical sociologist, and a white journalist who grew up in Prince Edward County: Jill Ogline Titus, Brown’s Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Christopher Bonastia, Southern Stalemate: Five Years Without Public Education in Prince Edward County, Virginia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Kristen Green, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).

  3.On the equalization campaign, see Doxey A. Wilkerson, “The Negro School Movement in Virginia: From ‘Equalization’ to ‘Integration,’” Journal of Negro Education 29 (Winter 1960): 17–29; and J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). I thank James H. Hershman Jr. for alerting me to the import of this campaign.

  4.For the best short treatment of Virginia’s poll tax, see Brent Tarter, “Poll Tax,” Encyclopedia Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/poll_tax#start_entry; see also the classic V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), especially 580, 594.

  5.Smith, They Closed Our Schools, 42, 61–62.

  6.Smith, They Closed Our Schools, 15–17, 19, 24.

  7.Inez Davenport Jones, speech in Farmville, VA, 1999, in Above the Storm, ed. Charles Gray and John Arthur Stokes (n.p.: Four-G Publishing, 2004), 91–93. She did not confess her role to her future husband until two days into the strike (Orth, “Going Public,” C1). For uncovering of her role and resolution of questions about it, see Kara Miles Turner, “‘It Is Not at Present a Very Successful School’: Prince Edward County and the Black Educational Struggle, 1865–1995” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2001), 197n159. Textile workers were just then gearing up for a general strike, with Virginia’s Dan River Mills as the epicenter; see Timothy J. Minchin, What Do We Need a Union For? The TWUA in the South, 1945–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).