Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's

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Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Finalist for the National Book Award
The Nation's "Most Valuable Book"

â€œ[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.â€â€”The Atlantic
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â€œThis sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be.â€â€”NPR
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An explosive exposÃ© of the rightâ€™s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution.

Behind todayâ€™s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architectâ€”the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchananâ€”and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.

In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white eliteâ€™s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority 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 only too eager to support Buchananâ€™s work in teaching others how to divide America into â€œmakersâ€ and â€œtakers.â€ And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchananâ€™s strategy.

Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.
Country USA
Brand Random House Books for Young Readers
Manufacturer Penguin Books
Binding Paperback
ItemPartNumber 9781101980972
Color Multicolor
ReleaseDate 2018-06-05
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781101980972

Country	USA
Brand	Random House Books for Young Readers
Manufacturer	Penguin Books
Binding	Paperback
ItemPartNumber	9781101980972
Color	Multicolor
ReleaseDate	2018-06-05
UnitCount	1
EANs	9781101980972

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

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