Democracy in Chains

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Democracy in Chains Page 44

by Nancy MacLean


  76.Barry Friedman, The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 168; Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 163; Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), Tarbell quote on 72. Painter’s title captures the consensus of several generations of historians on the explosive divisions of this era; if the Koch cause continues to advance, we may again find ourselves “Standing at Armageddon.”

  77.Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013). For a stark contrast to Katznelson’s cogent comparative analysis, see the Buchanan-influenced account by libertarian journalist Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). For the internal evolution of legal doctrine on the court, see Alan Brinkley, et al., “AHR Forum: The Debate over the Constitutional Revolution of 1937,” American Historical Review 110 (October 2005): 1047. As the brilliant refugee economist Karl Polanyi observed in 1944, looking out on a world in flames, a self-adjusting market “could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society”; Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), 3.

  78.Clint Bolick, David’s Hammer: The Case for an Activist Judiciary (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2007). For an apt description of the overall project and the headway it had made by 2005, see Jeffrey Rosen, “The Unregulated Offensive,” New York Times Magazine, April 17, 2005.

  79.Monica Davey, “Concerns Grow as Court Races Draw Big Cash,” New York Times, March 28, 2015, A1, 15; Sharon McCloskey, “Win the Courts, Win the War,” in Altered State, 51. Koch grantee Clint Bolick offered another reason: “state constitutions . . . can be amended more easily than the U.S. Constitution”; Bolick, Two-Fer: Electing a President and a Supreme Court (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2012), 88–91. In January 2016, in what one smart journalist dubbed “the most chilling political appointment that you’ve probably never heard of,” Arizona’s Tea Party governor named Bolick to the state supreme court, after Bolick himself had advised that the cause required “judges willing to enforce [the new] constitutional provisions” coming from “skilled advocates” (Bolick, Two-Fer, 95, also 96). Bolick is no longer a bit player on the margins. Jeb Bush, then the expected establishment “moderate” frontrunner, who had just coauthored a book with Bolick, pronounced it a “fantastic” appointment. Ian Millhiser, “The Most Chilling Political Appointment That You’ve Probably Never Heard Of,” ThinkProgress, January 6, 2016.

  80.Jeffrey Toobin, “To Your Health,” The New Yorker, July 9 and 16, 2012, 29–30. For deeper context, see Adam Liptak, “The Most Conservative Court in Decades,” New York Times, July 25, 2010, A1, 20–21; and Adam Liptak, “Justices Offer Receptive Ear to Business Interests,” New York Times, December 19, 2010, A1, 32.

  81.Pamela S. Karlan, “No Respite for Liberals,” New York Times Sunday Review, June 30, 2012.

  82.Nicholas Fando, “University in Turmoil Over Scalia Tribute and Koch Role,” New York Times, April 28, 2016; David E. Bernstein, Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Michael S. Greve, The Upside-Down Constitution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Also see the works of two Koch grantees not at the Scalia School of Law: Clint Bolick’s Death Grip: Loosening the Law’s Stranglehold over Economic Liberty (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2011); and Levin, The Liberty Amendments, which conveys the impression that altering the Constitution is the ultimate reason for the push to control a supermajority of states.

  83.For the rationale today, see Clint Bolick, Leviathan: The Growth of Local Government and the Erosion of Liberty (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2004). North Carolina’s General Assembly, for its part, has altered the rules of representation in specific local bodies; as one Democratic critic aptly noted, they aimed “to reshape the rules to dictate the outcomes so that they win at every level of government, whether or not the voters want them to win”; Richard Fausset, “With State Control, North Carolina Republicans Pursue Some Smaller Prizes,” New York Times, April 7, 2015, A12.

  84.Editorial, “G.O.P. Statehouse Shows the Locals Who’s Boss,” New York Times, February 21, 2017, A22; Alan Blinder, “When a State Balks at a City’s Minimum Wage,” New York Times, February 22, 2016; Kate Scanlon, “In Texas, State Leaders Attack Local Governments for Going Big on Regulations,” Daily Signal, March 15, 2015; Shaila Dewan, “States Are Overturning Local Laws, Often at Behest of Industry,” New York Times, February 24, 1915, A1.

  85.Even such an architect of the GOP right as the Reagan kingmaker William A. Rusher knew this. Taking issue with the endorsement by his colleagues at National Review of measures to turn over federal revenue to the states, he reminded them in private, as the magazine’s publisher, of “the indisputable fact that state and local governments in this country are, commonly, far more corrupt and corruptible than the federal government.” Rusher went on to explain that “the Washington bureaucrats may be snakes in the grass, but ordinarily they are honest snakes in the grass.” So, he pushed, was the right’s answer to be that “at least the state and local bureaucrats are our snakes in the grass”? William Rusher to William F. Buckley, Priscilla Buckley, James Burnham, Jeffrey Hart, and Frank Meyer, February 3, 1971, box 121, Rusher Papers. For an incisive social science analysis of how state governments became sites “in which the foes of liberalism could consolidate their power, refine their appeals, and develop their evolving justifications for restricting the scope of federal activism,” see Margaret Weir, “States, Race, and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism,” Studies in American Political Development 19 (Fall 2005): 157–72.

  86.“States Get a Poor Report Card” (editorial), New York Times, March 20, 2012, A22. For the full report, see Caitlin Ginley, “Grading the Nation: How Accountable Is Your State?” Center for Public Integrity, March 19, 2012, www.publicintegrity.org/2012/03/19/8423/grading-nation-how-accountable-your-state, and later editions.

  87.Andrew Young to the Editor, New York Times, June 11, 2015. Calling voters who do not share the cause’s economics “a public nuisance,” one Mercatus economist said it would be wise “to reduce or eliminate efforts to increase voter turnout”; Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 197, 199.

  88.Lori C. Minnite, The Myth of Voter Fraud (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 154–57; “The Success of the Voter Fraud Myth” (editorial), New York Times, September 20, 2016, A22.

  89.Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 260, 263. For Walker’s earlier efforts to hold down the vote as Milwaukee County executive, see Minnite, Myth of Voter Fraud, 103–8.

  90.Wendy Weiser, “Voter Suppression: How Bad?” American Prospect, Fall 2014, 12–16.

  91.Jane Mayer, “State for Sale,” The New Yorker, October 10, 2011; Mayer, Dark Money, 240–67, quote on 263. Mayer emphasizes the partisan and policy motives for the gerrymandering; I believe another goal is to line up states for a constitutional convention to amend the Constitution. See, for hints of this endgame, Wines, “Push to Alter Constitution, via the States.”

  92.David Daley, Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy (New York: Liveright, 2016), xxvi, 110, 181–84, 187, 199–200. A colleague of Buchanan’s going back to the Virginia Tech days, W. Mark Crain, had led in thinking about how to redistrict while on the GMU economics faculty and won recognition from the two Virginia Republican governors associated with the Koch
base camp at George Mason; CV at https://policystudies.lafayette.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/41/2016/02/Mark-Crain-CV.pdf. Apparently wanting still more power, the cause is seeking additional ways to underrepresent the urban and suburban voters from whom it expects opposition. In a rule-rigging scheme worthy of the Constitution’s three-fifths clause and Harry Byrd’s midcentury Organization, cadre attorneys have litigated to require that those ineligible to vote (such as noncitizen immigrants, disenfranchised felons, and children) go uncounted for purposes of apportioning representation and funding. The Supreme Court rejected such a bid in early 2016, but, as The American Prospect rightly prophesied, the new-style “‘one person, one vote’ battle [is] just starting.” One voting expert and court watcher warns that the outcome would be “an enormous transfer of political power”; Scott Lemieux, et al., “‘One Person, One Vote’ Battle Just Starting,” American Prospect, April 18, 2016; Eliza Newlin Carney, “How Scalia’s Absence Impacts Democracy Rulings,” American Prospect, February 18, 2016.

  93.Norquist, Leave Us Alone, 217, 222.

  94.Kenneth P. Vogel, “The Koch Intelligence Agency,” Politico, November 18, 2015, www.politico.com/story/2015/11/the-koch-brothers-intelligence-agency-215943#ixzz47cZ8Bqci. Koch employees claim to have disbanded that particular operation, but such methods have become central to the operation’s functioning. Members of the State Policy Network, for example, have initiated “Mapping the Left” projects that, like their massive-resistance-era predecessors, try to create the appearance of a single, coherent, unified enemy to rally their base against, as they also enable assessment of their targets’ defense capabilities, and seek to smear and intimidate individuals; see, for example, Susan Myrick, “Mapping the Left in NC: Roots of Radicalism,” NC Capitol Connection 7, no. 2 (February 2015): 1, 10; Paul Krugman, “American Thought Police,” New York Times, March 28, 2011, A27. For the best-documented state inquisitionary body of the civil rights era, see Yasuhiro Katagiri, The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States’ Rights (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001); and Rick Bowers, Spies of Mississippi: The True Story of the Spy Network That Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2010).

  95.Shulman, Sons of Wichita, 285–86.

  96.John Hope Franklin, “History: Weapon of War and Peace,” Phylon 5 (1944): 258. I thank Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham for this reference.

  97.The author notes, too, how Buchanan’s ideas “threaten to become self-fulfilling” by discrediting the aspirational behavioral norm of public spirit; Steven Kelman, “‘Public Choice’ and Public Spirit,” The Public Interest 87 (March 1987): 80–94, quotes on 81, 93. See also the extended close analysis of how Buchanan’s theory, in effect, makes a case for the supremacy of property rights backed by brute force, by Amadae, Prisoners of Reason, 175–203.

  98.For recognition of how much jurisprudential ground the cause has conquered, see Brian Beutler, “The Rehabilitationists,” New Republic, Fall 2015.

  99.Norquist, Leave Us Alone, xv; Daniel Fisher, “Inside the Koch Empire: How the Brothers Plan to Reshape America,” Forbes, December 5, 2012.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Author’s note: This bibliography includes only works cited, not all those from which I have learned. To keep the book inviting for general readers, a full listing of all the sources that have informed my understanding was not possible. I ask the forbearance of the scholars and journalists who do not see their relevant works listed here. I deeply appreciate the rich literature on which I was able to draw for so many areas, even if citations had to be limited to particular points in the text.

  ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS

  AFL-CIO George Meany Memorial Archives, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park, MD

  Civil Rights Department Records

  American Friends Service Committee Archives, Philadelphia

  Community Relations Department

  Southern Program Project

  Southside Virginia School Desegregation

  Buchanan House Archives, Center for Study of Public Choice, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

  David R. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC

  William Volker Fund Records, 1953–1961

  Ford Foundation Records, Projects, Ford Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY

  Educational Program of Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy, University of Virginia

  George Mason University Special Collections and Archives, Fairfax, VA

  C. Harrison Mann Papers

  Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

  Roy A. Childs Papers

  Ed Clark Papers

  John Davenport Papers

  Roger Freeman Papers

  Milton Friedman Papers, 1931–2006

  Friedrich A. von Hayek Papers

  Institute of Economic Affairs Records

  Mont Pelerin Society Records

  Henry Regnery Papers

  Gordon Tullock Papers

  James Branch Cabell Library, Special Collections and Archives, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA

  Edward H. Peeples Jr. Collection

  Richmond Crusade for Voters Archive

  Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Special Collections, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN

  Donald Grady Davidson Papers

  Lewis F. Powell Jr. Archives, Washington and Lee University School of Law, Lexington, VA

  Lewis F. Powell Jr. Papers

  Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, DC

  William J. Baroody Papers

  William A. Rusher Papers, 1940–1989

  Robert Russa Moton Museum, Farmville, VA

  Barbara Rose Johns Manuscript Memoir

  Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, CA

  Thomas G. Moore Papers

  Office of Domestic Affairs

  Ronald Reagan Governor’s Papers

  White House Office of Records Management

  White House Office of Speechwriting

  University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center, Chicago

  Frank Hyneman Knight Papers

  University of Oregon, Special Collections & University Archives, Eugene, OR

  T. Coleman Andrews Papers

  Robert LeFevre Collection

  University of Virginia Library, Special Collections Department, Charlottesville, VA

  Harry Flood Byrd Sr. Papers

  Leon Dure Papers

  John Segar Gravatt Papers

  James J. Kilpatrick Papers

  Papers of the President of the University of Virginia

  Louise O. Wensel Papers

  Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Special Collections, Blacksburg, VA

  T. Marshall Hahn Papers

  William E. Lavery Records

  Yale University, Manuscripts and Archives, New Haven, CT

  William F. Buckley Jr. Papers

  NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES, AND ONLINE PUBLICATIONS

  American Prospect

  Atlantic

  Bloomberg News

  Carolina Israelite

  Cavalier Daily

  Charles Rowley’s Blog

  Christian Century

  Commentary

  Daily Caller (Cato Institute)

  Daily Progress (Charlottesville, VA)

  Daily Signal (Heritage Foundation)

  Dissent

  The Economist

  Equal Times

  Farmville Herald

  Forbes

  Fortune

  The Freeman

  Guardian

  Huffington Post
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  Human Events

  In These Times

  International Business Times

  Investigative Reporting Workshop (American University School of Communication)

  Jet

  Lew Rockwell.com

  Los Angeles Times

  Lynchburg News

  Mason Gazette

  El Mercurio

  The Nation

  National Journal

  National Review

  New Republic

  The New Yorker

  New York Times

  News & Observer (Raleigh, NC)

  Politico

  Potomac Magazine

  The Public Interest

  Reason

  Richmond News Leader

  Richmond Times-Dispatch

  Salon

  Saturday Evening Post

  Staunton (VA) Daily News

  ThinkProgress

  Time

  U.S. News & World Report

  Virginian-Pilot

  Wall Street Journal

  Washington Post

  Yahoo News

  DISSERTATIONS AND THESES

  Corley, Robert Gaines. “James Jackson Kilpatrick: The Evolution of a Southern Conservative, 1955–1965.” Master’s thesis, University of Virginia, 1970.

  Currin, Scovill. “An Army of the Willing: Fayette’Nam, Soldier Dissent, and the Untold Story of the All-Volunteer Force.” PhD diss., Duke University, 2015.

  Glickman, Andrew Ziet. “Virginia Desegregation and the Freedom of Choice Plan: The Role of Leon Dure and the Freedom of Association.” Master’s thesis, University of Virginia, 1991.

  Gourse, Alexander. “Restraining the Reagan Revolution: The Lawyers’ War on Poverty and the Durable Liberal State, 1964–1989.” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2015.

  Hershman, James H., Jr. “A Rumbling in the Museum: The Opponents of Virginia’s Massive Resistance.” PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1978.

  Kay, Bryan. “The History of Desegregation at the University of Virginia, 1950–1969. Master’s thesis, University of Virginia, 1979.

  Mound, Joshua M. “Inflated Hopes, Taxing Times: The Fiscal Crisis, the Pocketbook Squeeze, and the Roots of the Tax Revolt.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2015.

 

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