Democracy in Chains

by Nancy MacLean

  33.Eric Lipton, “Working So Closely Their Roles Blur,” New York Times, December 7, 2014, A1, 30–31. By the 1990s, the antienvironmental right was “making slow but steady inroads [in the courts], thanks to a carefully calculated effort to transform the judicial landscape,” notes one authoritative study; Judith A. Layzer, Open for Business: Conservatives’ Opposition to Environmental Regulation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 185.

  34.“Secession is, of course, the most dramatic form of exit,” Buchanan noted, but was “only the end of a spectrum of institutional-constitutional rearrangements” the cause should promote, “all of which embody exit as a common element.” The spectrum included elements that had become core to Republican practice: “decentralization, devolution, federalism, privatization, deregulation.” They were all part of a continuum whereby wealthy minorities could evade “exploitation” by majorities, enlisting “the discipline of competition” to tame them. The core theory was simple. As Buchanan summarized: “If you have exit options, you are free—you have liberty.” In constitutional terms, his vision was that “we have to have a genuine competitive federalism” among the states to discipline their policies and national power. Unveiling a major “new initiative on federalism” soon after this, Buchanan’s Center invited officers of dozens of corporations, including Amoco, America Online, General Dynamics, Lockheed, and Philip Morris, alongside representatives of such leading right-wing foundations as Heritage, Scaife, Bradley, and, of course, Koch, to learn how to apply it. James M. Buchanan, “The Moral of the Market,” typed interview transcript [c. 2004], BHA; James M. Buchanan, “Secession and the Economic Constitution,” draft prepared for presentation, Berlin, October 1999, 2, 4, ibid.; John H. Moore to William D. Witter, February 20, 1996, ibid.; Ann Bader to Bob Tollison et al., May 3, 1996, ibid.; Gordon Brady to Bob Tollison et al., February 12, 1997, ibid.; Gordon Brady to Bob Tollison et al., February 5, 1997, ibid. “The only beneficiaries of federalism run amok are large corporations that can use a threat to relocate as leverage in bargaining with state legislatures,” notes Michael Lind, Up from Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America (New York: Free Press, 1996), 218.

  35.Julie Bosman, “Agency Bans Activism on Climate Change,” New York Times, April 9, 2015.

  36.Every single “environmentally skeptical” book published in the 1990s, one academic study found, was connected to one or more right-wing foundations; Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt, 234, 236.

  37.Klein, This Changes Everything, 35. For the broader, devastating impact, see Layzer, Open for Business, 333–60. On the willful deception, see Ari Rabin-Havt and Media Matters for America, Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics (New York: Anchor Books, 2016), 34–57.

  38.Lindsay Wagner, “Starving the Schools,” in Altered State: How Five Years of Conservative Rule Have Redefined North Carolina (NC Policy Watch, December 2015), 15–18. And for contrast, see Motoko Rich, et al., “In Schools Nationwide, Money Predicts Success,” New York Times, May 3, 2016, A3.

  39.Lindsay Wagner, “Paving the Way Toward Privatization,” in Altered State, 26–27; see also Valerie Strauss, “The Assault on Public Education in North Carolina Just Keeps on Coming,” Washington Post, May 18, 2016.

  40.Wagner, “Starving the Schools,” 15–19; Chris Fitzsimon, “The Wrecking Crew,” in Altered State, 3.

  41.Alexander Tabarrok, ed., Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime (Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 2003), 1, 6.

  42.Stephen Moore and Stuart Butler, Privatization: A Strategy for Taming the Federal Budget (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 1987), 1, 8, 10. For a critical empirical view of the impact of privatization, see Elliott D. Sclar, You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

  43.Alex Friedman to Hon. Patrick Leahy, May 9, 2008, BHA. Just as in the days of Buchanan’s grandfather, when convict labor helped generate income, so, too, prison corporations have managed to end New Deal–era restrictions that outlawed profiting from incarcerated workers; see Heather Ann Thompson, “Rethinking Working-Class Struggle Through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards,” Labor 8 (2011): 15–45, on CCA as a pioneer in such profiteering, 34.

  44.Silja J. A. Talvi, “Cashing In on Cons,” In These Times, February 28, 2005, 16–29.

  45.Jon Hurdle and Sabrina Tavernise, “Former Judge Is on Trial in ‘Cash for Kids’ Scheme,” New York Times, February 8, 2011, A20. See also Charles M. Blow, “Plantations, Prisons and Profits,” New York Times, May 26, 2012, A17; and Talvi, “Cashing In on Cons,” 16–29.

  46.Detention Watch Network and Center for Constitutional Rights, “Banking on Detention: 2016 Update,” www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/sites/default/files/reports/Banking%20on%20Detention%202016%20Update_DWN,%20CCR.pdf. See also In the Public Interest, “Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’ Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations,” September 2013, www.inthepublicinterest.org/wp-content/uploads/Criminal-Lockup-Quota-Report.pdf.

  47.Sabrina Dewan and Gregory Randolph, “Unions Are Key to Tackling Inequality, Says Top Global Financial Institution,” Huffington Post, March 5, 2015. Among the now dozens of scholarly expositions, I have found these to be among the most illuminating: Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011); Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012); Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), and, in a more prescriptive mode, Robert B. Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015); Anthony B. Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

  48.Lydia DePillis, “West Virginia House Passes Right-to-Work Bill after Harsh Debate,” Washington Post, February 4, 2016. This made West Virginia the twenty-sixth state with such a law.

  49.Michael Cooper and Megan Thee-Brenan, “Majority in Poll Back Employees in Public Unions,” New York Times, March 1, 2011, A1, 16; “The Hollow Cry of Broke” (editorial), New York Times, March 3, 2011, A26; Roger Bybee, “After Proposing Draconian Anti-Union Laws, Wis. Gov. Walker Invokes National Guard,” In These Times, February 15, 2011. Walker himself notes that his approval rating fell to 37 percent because the act was so unpopular, so he was clearly not acting on the will of most voters; Scott Walker, Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge (New York: Sentinel, 2013), 225.

  50.Dan Kaufman, “Land of Cheese and Rancor,” New York Times Magazine, May 27, 2012, 30, 32; Dan Kaufman, “Fate of the Union,” New York Times Magazine, 55. Walker later bragged that the furor over the bill had enabled his team “to pass a raft of other measures” that usually would have set off “protests and controversy” but “went virtually unnoticed”; Walker, Unintimidated, 215.

  51.Monica Davey, “Decline in Wisconsin Unions Calls Election Clout into Question,” New York Times, February 28, 2016, 12, 20.

  52.Patricia Cohen, “Public Sector Jobs Vanish, Hitting Blacks Hard,” New York Times, May 25, 2015, B1, 5; Michael B. Katz, Mark J. Stern, and Jamie J. Fader, “The New African American Inequality,” Journal of American History 92 (June 2005): 75–108, quote on 77; also Virginia Parks, “Revisiting Shibboleths of Race and Urban Economy: Black Employment in Manufacturing and the Public Sector Compared, Chicago 1950–2000,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (2011): 110–29.

  53.Summarizing years of activism and scholarship, Ruth Rosen used that rubric in a lead article, “The Care Crisis: How Women Are Bearing the Burden of a Nation
al Emergency,” The Nation, March 12, 2007, 11–16. For a case study that exposes the multi-sided impact, see Jane Berger, “‘There Is Tragedy on Both Sides of the Layoffs’: Public Sector Privatization and the Urban Crisis in Baltimore,” International Labor and Working-Class History 71 (Spring 2007): 29–49. For a sample of the long tradition of women’s activism on these issues, see Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justices and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); on addressing them in theory, see Nancy Folbre, The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (New York: New Press, 2002).

  54.Tyler Cowen and Veronique de Rugy, “Reframing the Debate,” in The Occupy Handbook, ed. Janet Byrne (New York: Little, Brown, 2012), 414–15, 418, 421. See also Norquist, Leave Us Alone, 92. To win over young people to such public-choice-derived ideas, the apparatus is funding extensive efforts to organize college youth; see Lee Fang, “Generation Opportunity, New Koch-Funded Front, Says Youth Are Better Off Uninsured,” The Nation, September 19, 2013.

  55.Paul Krugman, “Republicans Against Retirement,” New York Times, August 17, 2015.

  56.Larry Rohter, “Chile Rethinks Its Privatized Pension System,” New York Times, January 10, 2006; see also Eduardo Gallardo, “Chile’s Private Pension System Adds Public Payouts for Poor,” New York Times, March 10, 2008.

  57.Nancy J. Altman and Eric R. Kinston, Social Security Works: Why Social Security Isn’t Going Broke and How Expanding It Will Help Us All (New York: New Press, 2015), 55, 61, 65, 67; Jacob S. Hacker, The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Inequality and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 109–38.

  58.Koch knew that sooner or later, as his mentor Baldy Harper taught, the day would arrive “when the bubble of illusion on which much of our current affluence floats is finally pricked by some unforeseen event,” an event that would enable his team’s project to “fill the vacuum”; Institute for Humane Studies, The Institute’s Story (Menlo Park, CA: n.d., but early 1970s), 25, in box 26, Hayek Papers. There are many excellent books and articles on the Tea Party and the Koch apparatus’s role in commandeering the energy on display in the grassroots groups for its own purposes. The most comprehensive and illuminating, to my reading, is Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. For Cato’s exultation that “libertarians led the way for the tea party,” which was pushing the GOP to become “functionally libertarian,” see David Kirby and Emily Ekins, “Libertarian Roots of the Tea Party,” Policy Analysis 705 (August 6, 2012): 1.

  59.For research grants to fund the project from the Institute for Humane Studies, see Tyler Cowen and David Nott, memorandum, May 13, 1997, BHA. Charles Koch was initially Cowen’s codirector; the CEO remains on the nine-member Mercatus board of directors, joined in that role by Fink and Edwin Meese III.

  60.Tyler Cowen, “Why Does Freedom Wax and Wane?: Some Research Questions in Social Change and Big Government,” Mercatus Center, George Mason University, 2000 (repr. online, 2015; the original has no page numbers, but all quotes are from this document).

  61.Ibid. For Charles Koch’s version of the same research agenda, see Charles G. Koch, “Koch Industries, Market Process Analysis, and the Science of Liberty,” Journal of Private Enterprise 22 (Spring 2007): especially 4–6.

  62.Cowen, “Why Does Freedom Wax and Wane?”

  63.Ibid.

  64.Economic transformation, Piñera earlier explained from his new post at Koch’s Cato Institute, had to be done rapidly and “on all fronts simultaneously”; José Piñera, “Chile,” in The Political Economy of Policy Reform, ed. John Williamson (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1994), 228. Although she was unaware of Buchanan and his writing before the Koch brothers were in the news, Naomi Klein brilliantly identified how neoliberal actors have exploited crisis situations in which public oversight is paralyzed in order to achieve their ends. See her groundbreaking work The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). Cowen was drawing out the lessons of such practice for application in the United States and other democracies, where change could not be imposed by brute force.

  65.Cowen, “Why Does Freedom Wax and Wane?”

  66.His own economics colleague at George Mason, the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor Walter E. Williams, became a fixture on right-wing radio. A mentee of Buchanan during the latter’s brief sojourn at UCLA and a syndicated columnist, Williams has for more than twenty years been acting as a guest host for Rush Limbaugh’s radio show; Colleen Kearney Rich, “The Wonderful World of Masonomics,” Mason Spirit, November 1, 2010.

  67.David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill & Wang, 2009); Waldstreicher notes the design “favoring people who owned people” (5). For the Koch project’s plan here, see the chilling report by Michael Wines, “Push to Alter Constitution, via the States,” New York Times, August 23, 2016, A1. The opening reads: “Taking advantage of almost a decade of political victories in state legislatures across the country, conservative advocacy groups are quietly marshaling support for an event unprecedented in the nation’s history, a convention of the fifty states, summoned to consider amending the Constitution.” Wines notes that the planning “is playing out largely beyond public notice” and, with control over more state legislatures, is gaining “a plausible chance of success.” For a taste of the changes the cause would like, see the summary by Koch grantee Mark R. Levin, The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic (New York: Threshold Editions, 2013).

  68.Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz, “Comparative Perspectives on Inequality and the Quality of Democracy in the United States,” Perspectives on Politics 9 (December 2011): 844. Thanks to Jill Lepore for drawing public attention to this piece with her usual brilliance in her “Richer and Poorer: Accounting for Inequality,” The New Yorker, March 16, 2015.

  69.The U.S. Constitution appears so incapacitating to emerging nations with fully enfranchised adult populations that it no longer attracts emulators as it once did. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg rued, “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a Constitution in the year 2012”; “‘We the People’ Loses Followers,” New York Times, February 7, 2012, A1. See also Sanford Levinson, Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  70.Stepan and Linz, “Comparative Perspectives,” 841–56, quote on 844.

  71.Unless political means are found to serve as the equivalent of global war in righting inequality, the leading systemic account concludes, it will only get worse; Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). Summarizing the situation with stark accuracy, a leading philosopher concludes that capitalism is, again, destroying the social and political conditions for its own perpetuation; Nancy Fraser, “Legitimation Crisis: On the Political Contradictions of Financialized Capitalism,” Critical Historical Studies 2, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 157–89. On the fiscal straitjacket that bodes ill for democracy, see Armin Schäfer and Wolfgang Streeck, eds., Politics in the Age of Austerity (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013), especially authors’ essays.

  72.Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Robert Gebeloff, “Arbitration Everywhere, Stacking the Deck of Justice,” New York Times, November 1, 2015, A1, 22–23. See also Katherine V. W. Stone, “Signing Away Our Rights,” American Prospect, April 2011, 20–22. Here is some relevant GMU context: Near the time of Charles Koch’s first big gift to George Mason, Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) “launched a grass-roots lobbying drive supporting a package of bills aimed at overhauling the U.S. civil litigation system.” That multi-million-dollar effort was led by C. Boyden Gray, who had worked with Ed Meese to transform the judiciary, served on the board of CS
E as its chair, and was a founding co-chair, with Dick Armey and Jack Kemp, of FreedomWorks. Gray has since been appointed a distinguished faculty member at GMU’s Scalia School of Law. The circumstantial trail leaves many open questions, of course. But the ten-plus years of work that went into producing this outcome signal, at minimum, the patient and ambitious reach of the strategic thinking that is transforming governance in America. Indeed, one of the early litigators who sought Supreme Court blessing for such practices was John G. Roberts Jr. Then a private attorney representing Discover Bank, he was appointed chief justice in 2005. See Silver-Greenberg and Gebeloff, “Arbitration Everywhere”; Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Michael Corkery, “In Arbitration, a ‘Privatization of the Justice System,’” New York Times, November 2, 2015, A1, B4; Peter H. Stone, “Grass-Roots Group Rakes in the Green,” National Journal 27 (March 11, 1995): 521; David D. Kirkpatrick, “Conservatives See Court Shift as Culmination,” New York Times, January 30, 2006, A1, 18; FreedomWorks, “Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) and Empower America Merge to Form FreedomWorks,” undated 2004 press release, http://web.archive.org/web/20040725031033/http://www.freedomworks.org/release.php.

  73.Silver-Greenberg and Gebeloff, “Arbitration Everywhere”; Greenberg and Corkery, “In Arbitration, a ‘Privatization of the Justice System,’” A1, B4. See also Noam Scheiber, “As Americans Take Up Populism, the Supreme Court Embraces Business,” New York Times, March 11, 2016.

  74.See, for example, Charles Murray, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission (New York: Crown Forum, 2015).

  75.James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 289. One could also trace the cause’s distorted notions further back, to the Anti-Federalists who opposed the Constitution; see Garry Wills, A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government (New York: Doubleday, 2000).