In “ Democracy In Chains,” MacLean draws a connection between billionaires, politicians and the practice of law in America and how all of it is weighted heavily toward the side of property owners using ideals that were in place when slavery was still legal. The subject matter of the book, along with its academic language, appealed to a very specific demographic, though the unfortunate truth is all U.S. She was recently at the Greenwood Senior Center as part of the Town Hall lecture series, and there was an interesting age range of people present for the hourlong talk. And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan's strategy.īased on ten years of research, this revelatory work tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok, and is a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.Is there a conspiracy to keep cash from the common folk? Or does it just seem like it? In her book, “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,” author Nancy MacLean describes the division of dollars between the haves and have-nots to the detriment of democracy. By recasting the era's legal and social-movement successes, Buchanan developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the majority's ability to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.? Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were eager to support Buchanan's work in teaching others how to divide America into ‘makers’ and ‘takers'.

In a brilliant, engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how these ideas were forged in a last-gasp attempt to preserve the white elite's power in the wake of Brown v. This book names its true architect - Nobel Prize–winning political economist James McGill Buchanan - and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.? But billionaires did not launch this movement a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter democratic governance.

An explosive exposé of the man and the ideas behind the well-heeled right's relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatise public education, and curb democratic majority rule.īehind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over US government is a secretive political establishment with deep and troubling roots.

Democracy in chains review