Democracy in Chains

by Nancy MacLean

  40.Ibid.

  41.Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis, “Achieving a ‘Leninist’ Strategy,” Cato Journal 3 (Fall 1983): 547–56.

  42.Ibid.

  43.Ibid.

  44.Ibid.

  45.Ibid.

  46.Ibid. So that no one expected miracles overnight, the authors reminded that “as Lenin well knew, to be a successful revolutionary,” the cadre “must be prepared for a long campaign.”

  47.Koch, Good Profit, 41.

  48.Jeffrey R. Henig, “Privatization in the United States: Theory and Practice,” Political Science Quarterly 104 (Winter 1989–90): 649–50; see also Jeffrey R. Henig, Chris Hammett, and Harvey B. Feigenbaum, “The Politics of Privatization: A Comparative Perspective,” Governance: An International Journal of Policy and Administration 1 (October 1988): 442–68; and Monica Prasad, The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3, 14, 22, 24, 27.

  49.A case in point of underestimation: Jeff Faux, president of the Economic Policy Institute, quoted in Peter T. Kilborn, “Panel Urging Public-to-Private Shift,” New York Times, March 7, 1988.

  50.Butler thus applied Buchanan’s approach to produce plans to sharply alter the political dynamics of budget growth in a manner that would be nearly impossible to reverse, becoming so deft at shaping measures that could be pushed by allies in Congress that Heritage promoted him to director of the Center for Policy Innovation. For his earlier career and his interest in public choice, see Richard Crockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931–1983 (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 281–82; for his detailed explanation of how privatization would alter the core dynamics of American popular politics, see Stuart M. Butler, Privatizing Federal Spending: A Strategy to Eliminate the Deficit (New York: Universe Books, 1985).

  51.For Kemp’s enthusiasm for the cause from the Goldwater campaign of 1964 onward (save for his belief that collective bargaining was “a sacred right”), see Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes, Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America (New York: Sentinel, 2015), 25, 27, 119.

  52.For staff listing, see front matter of President’s Commission on Privatization, Privatization: Toward a More Effective Government (Washington, DC: GPO, 1988). For Moore’s career history and writing, see: http://premierespeakers.com/stephen_moore/bio; and Zach Beauchamp, “Why the Heritage Foundation Hired an Activist as Its Chief Economist,” ThinkProgress, January 21, 2014.

  53.James M. Buchanan, “Can Democracy Be Tamed?” confidential preliminary draft prepared for presentation at Mont Pelerin Society General Meeting, Cambridge, England, September 1984, in box 58, John Davenport Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA; see also James M. Buchanan, et al., The Economics of Politics (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1978).

  54.Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 116, 122, 129–30, 207–16.

  55.“A Nobel for James Buchanan” (editorial), Washington Post, October 17, 1986; Teles, Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, 116, 122, 129–30, 207–16.

  56.Henry G. Manne, “An Intellectual History of the George Mason University School of Law,” George Mason University Law and Economics Center (1993), www.law.gmu.edu/about/history.

  57.John S. Saloma, Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984), 75; The Attack on Corporate America: The Corporate Issues Sourcebook, ed. M. Bruce Johnson (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), xi–xv.

  58.Ruth S. Intress, “Winner of Nobel Seen As Brilliant But Opinionated,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 1986, reproduction without date or page numbers in Friedman Papers; Werner, “George Mason U.: 29.”

  59.Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 35–36; James M. Buchanan, “Notes on Nobelity,” December 17, 2001, www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1986/buchanan-article.html.

  60.Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, press release for Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, October 16, 1986. The award produced some carping among top economists over the quality of the laureate’s work, which irked Buchanan well into retirement, aggravating his bitterness. See Hobart Rowen, “Discreetly Lifted Eyebrows Over Buchanan’s Nobel Prize,” Washington Post, October 26, 1986. Challenged after the award to identify what would be said about public choice two decades hence, the committee’s chair replied that it explained “how politicians and public administrators think.” Jane Seaberry, “In Defense of Public Choice: Chairman of Nobel Panel Discusses Economics Winner,” Washington Post, November 23, 1986.

  61.Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, press release; on Lindbeck, see Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg, The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 205–7. On the economics prize’s difference from the other, more venerable Nobel Prizes created by Alfred Nobel, not least that it was added six decades after the others, in 1968, on the suggestion of and with funding by the Bank of Sweden, which in the view of some critics created an inbuilt bias, see the illuminating account by Thomas Karier, Intellectual Capital: Forty Years of the Nobel Prize in Economics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  62.“Prize Virginian” (editorial), Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 17, 1986. Actually, the shutdown resulted from a clash between the president and the Democratic-controlled House over where to inflict cuts: the armed forces and foreign aid (their choice) or domestic education and welfare programs (his).

  63.Robert D. Hershey Jr., “A Bias Toward Bad Government?” New York Times, January 19, 1986, F1, 27.

  64.See the center’s annual reports in BHA.

  65.Gordon Tullock, “The Origins of Public Choice,” in The Makers of Modern Economics, vol. 3, ed. Arnold Heertje (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1999), 127.

  66.Buchanan to Gregory R. McDonald, February 25, 1980, BHA; Richard J. Seiden to Buchanan, June 26, 1981, BHA. For sample gatekeeping for Hoover, see Dennis L. Bark to Buchanan, June 5, 1978; for Mont Pelerin, see Buchanan to George J. Stigler, September 21, 1971, BHA; for the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts, see Buchanan to Richard M. Larry, March 16, 1973, BHA. His work with these groups was too abundant for citation, but files of correspondence can be found in BHA.

  67.David J. Theroux and M. Bruce Johnson to Buchanan, December 5, 1986, BHA; Buchanan to David J. Theroux and M. Bruce Johnson, December 15, 1986, BHA; Buchanan to Milton Friedman, June 8, 1987, box 171, Friedman Papers.

  68.Leonard P. Liggio to Buchanan, May 27, 1985, BHA. For a sense of what a central player Liggio was in linking individuals and organizations in the still-small transnational movement, see the dozens of tributes in Born on the 5th of July: Letters on the Occasion of Leonard P. Liggio’s 65th Birthday (Fairfax, VA: Atlas Economic Foundation, 1998).

  69.Soon after, the Charles G. Koch Foundation gave its first contribution to Buchanan’s center. It was a modest gift of $5,000, but a statement of confidence; George Pearson to Robert D. Tollison, December 27, 1985, BHA. Listing of the alumni found on IHS Web site.

  70.David R. Henderson, “Buchanan’s Prize,” National Review, December 31, 1986, 20. See also Chamberlain, “Another Nobel for Freedom,” 36, 62.

  71.Ronald Reagan to David J. Theroux, telegram, October 29, 1987, box 386, Institute of Economic Affairs Records, Hoover Institution Archives.

  72.Leonard P. Liggio to Buchanan, December 29, 1986, BHA; Edwin Meese III, “The Attorney General’s View of the Supreme Court: Toward a Jurisprudence of Original Intention,” Public Administrative Review 45 (November 1985): 701–4; Gourse, “Restraining the Reagan Revolution.” We need to know much more about the Federalist Society, as about so many other organizations in this story,
but for an excellent start, see Jonathan Riehl, “The Federalist Society and Movement Conservatism: How a Fractious Coalition on the Right Is Changing Constitutional Law and the Way We Talk and Think About It” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007).

  CHAPTER 12: THE KIND OF FORCE THAT PROPELLED COLUMBUS

  1.Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement (Philadelphia, PA: PublicAffairs, 2007), 603.

  2.Charles G. Koch, Creating a Science of Liberty (Fairfax, VA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1997), 9. Chief among the purists he once admired and subsidized but now deplored as obstacles to exercising the political power to achieve his ends was the prolific Murray Rothbard, who sounded off often about the betrayal of core elements of the libertarian creed after he was pushed out of the Cato Institute, which he had helped design. See, for example, Murray N. Rothbard, “Newt Gingrich Is No Libertarian,” Washington Post, December 30, 1994, A17.

  3.For the contract, see Patterson, Restless Giant, 343–45. For the surprising resiliency of the welfare state, owing to its political support and “the critical rules of the game” that had so far stymied the right, no doubt making a bolder plan seem necessary to break through, see Paul Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State?: Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), quote on 166.

  4.Gordon Tullock, “Origins of Public Choice,” in The Makers of Modern Economics, vol. 3, ed. Arnold Heertje (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1999), 134–36; John J. Fialka, “Cato Institute’s Influence Grows in Washington as Republican-Dominated Congress Sets Up Shop,” Wall Street Journal, December 14, 1994, A16; Luke Mullins, “Armey in Exile,” Washingtonian, June 26, 2013; Richard Armey, “The Invisible Foot of Government,” in Moral Values in Liberalism and Conservatism, ed. Andrew R. Cecil and W. Lawson Taitte (Dallas: University of Texas Press, 1995), 119; David Maraniss and Michael Weisskopf, “Tell Newt to Shut Up!” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 7–8, 34, 37, 59, 73–83; Kenneth S. Baer, Reinventing Government: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 231, 236–37.

  5.John E. Owens, “Taking Power? Institutional Change in the House and Senate,” in The Republican Takeover of Congress, eds. Dean McSweeney and John E. Owens (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 58; Baer, Reinventing Government, 239; Maraniss and Weisskopf, “Tell Newt to Shut Up!” 83, 86.

  6.Patterson, Restless Giant, 343–45.

  7.Elizabeth Drew, Showdown: The Struggle Between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 97, 175. After a protest led by John L. Lewis, the portrait came down. On Smith’s history, see Oberdorfer, “‘Judge’ Smith Rules with Deliberate Drag”; and Dierenfield, Keeper of the Rules.

  8.Patterson, Restless Giant, 344–45; John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 115–16. Dubbing Armey “the true ideologue,” Elizabeth Drew also notes that he had on his staff Virginia Thomas, the wife of sitting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; see Elizabeth Drew, Showdown: The Struggle Between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House, (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 56.

  9.Elizabeth Drew, Whatever It Takes: The Real Struggle for Power in America (New York: Viking, 1997), 58; on zealotry, see 35, 121; Owens, “Taking Power?” 58; Baer, Reinventing Government, 239; Maraniss and Weisskopf, “Tell Newt to Shut Up!” 83, 86.

  10.John E. Owens, “The Republican Takeover in Context,” in The Republican Takeover of Congress, eds. McSweeney and Owens, 1; public-choice-infused allegations of “corruption” proved critical to the campaign for the House; see 2. On the slippage of the House GOP’s standing in the polls as it took on middle-class entitlements, see Owens, “Taking Power?,” 59. On public choice influence on the Contract with America, see Nigel Ashford, “The Republican Policy Agenda and the Conservative Movement,” in Republican Takeover, eds. McSweeney and Owens, 103–4.

  11.On how Gingrich’s ego, Clinton’s interpersonal skills, and the talent of the president’s team combined to block the attempted revolution, the remainder of “Tell Newt to Shut Up!” makes a rollicking good read. For Clinton’s triangulation with Gingrich, see Micklethwait and Wooldridge, The Right Nation, 117–19. Clinton differed from many in the party on what would be permanently damaging, in particular the “welfare reform” bill he signed, over the objection of the staff most knowledgeable about the issues.

  12.James M. Buchanan, Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative: The Normative Vision of Classical Liberalism (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2005), 4.

  13.Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 603–4.

  14.Koch, Creating a Science of Liberty. The occasion was a speech at GMU in January 1997, later used in fund-raising for the center; Robert N. Mottice to James Buchanan, August 13, 1998.

  15.Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 1964).

  16.Koch, Creating a Science of Liberty; “James Buchanan Center Funded with $10 Million Gift,” Mason Gazette, March 1998. The gift came in installments; for the first $3 million, see Richard H. Fink to Alan G. Merten, June 27, 1997, BHA; for Buchanan’s gratitude to Koch, see Buchanan to Koch, July 8, 1997, BHA.

  17.Koch, Creating a Science of Liberty, 12, 13. Koch sounded like John C. Calhoun, who said of his own campaign to overwhelm the majority of his day, “I see with so much apparent clearness as not to leave me a choice to pursue any other course, which has always given me the impression that I acted with the force of destiny”; Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Random House, 1948), 76.

  18.Edwin McDowell, “Bringing Law Profs Up to Date on Economics,” Wall Street Journal, July 23, 1973; Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 122. See also Walter Guzzardi, “Judges Discover the World of Economics,” Fortune, May 21, 1979, 58–66.

  19.Henry Manne to Buchanan, “Draft Program Synopsis for Mont Pelerin Society Meeting in Washington, DC, September 1998,” BHA.

  20.Ibid. Reporting on the conference by the head of the Heritage Foundation, Ed Feulner, then the society’s president, can be found in Lee Edwards, Leading the Way: The Story of Ed Feulner and the Heritage Foundation (New York: Crown Forum, 2013), 260–61. Feulner called Social Security “one of the largest barriers to freedom in America” (261).

  21.Henry Manne to Buchanan, “Draft Program Synopsis for Mont Pelerin Society Meeting in Washington, DC, September 1998,” BHA.

  22.Ibid.

  23.Ibid.

  24.Ibid.

  25.Koch would help on that battlefront, too, not only by opportunistic cooperation with the religious right, the veritable antithesis of libertarianism by a dictionary definition, but also by direct funding of and staff support to the Independent Women’s Forum. In 2001, Nancy Pfotenhauer, yet another GMU economics product, was appointed its president, after serving as director of the Washington Office of Koch Industries, a senior economist at the Republican National Committee, and executive vice president at Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). Biography on the website of the Koch-funded antifeminist organization, http://web.archive.org/web/20041214151602/www.iwf.org/about_iwf/pfoten hauer.asp.

  26.James M. Buchanan, “Constitutions, Politics, and Markets,” draft prepared for presentation, Porto Alegre, Brazil, April 1993, BHA. See also James M. Buchanan, “Socialism Is Dead; Leviathan Lives,” Wall Street Journal, July 18, 1990, A8.

  27.See, for example, David Rosenbaum, “From Guns to Butter,” New York Times, December 14, 1989, A1.

  28.Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 314–15. In the lead of the push for the law was ACORN, the community-organizing network later destroy
ed by two operatives trained by the Koch-funded Leadership Institute. On ACORN’s work, see John Atlas, Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America’s Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing Group (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010); and Robert Fisher, ed., The People Shall Rule: ACORN, Community Organizing, and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009).

  29.James Buchanan, “Notes Prompted by Telephone Conversation with And[rew] Ruttan on 15 February 2001,” February 16, 2001, BHA. He was also unnerved at “taxpayer apathy” in the 1990s as compared with the 1970s; James Buchanan, “Taxpayer Apathy, Institutional Inertia, and Economic Growth,” March 15, 1999, BHA.

  30.Buchanan to Richard H. Fink, July 8, 1997, BHA; Buchanan to Charles G. Koch, July 8, 1997, BHA; James Buchanan Center Affiliation Agreement, effective January 1, 1998, BHA.

  31.Fink to Buchanan, August 18, 1998 (italics added). On Mark F. Grady, brought to GMU in 1997, see faculty profile, UCLA School of Law, https://law.ucla.edu/faculty/faculty-profiles/mark-f-grady.

  32.Wendy Lee Gramm to Robert E. Weissman, form letter, May 13, 1998, BHA.

  33.Ibid.; also, touting the support of Republican Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, Robert N. Mottice to James Buchanan, form letter, August 13, 1998, BHA. On the programs for judges, see also Law and Economics Center, George Mason University School of Law, “The Advanced Institute for Federal Judges,” Omni Tucson Golf Resort and Spa, April 25–May 1, 1998, headlined by Buchanan, in a twenty-five-year effort described as the “LEC’s most important program.”

  34.Wendy Lee Gramm to Robert E. Weissman, form letter, May 13, 1998, BHA. In his 1996 reelection bid, Gramm had been Congress’s top recipient of campaign contributions from the oil-and-gas industry, garnering more than $800,000 from this sector alone, one in which Koch Industries was the fourth-largest corporate contributor. Alexia Fernandez Campbell, “Koch: 1996 Marks Beginning of National Efforts,” July 1, 2013, Investigative Reporting Workshop, American University School of Communication, http://investigativereportingworkshop.org/investigations/the_koch_club/story/Koch-1996_marks_beginning; “Energy Sector Gave $22 Million to Campaigns,” Washington Post, December 22, 1997.