Q: You also have a chapter about the Koch network in a new book called Capitalism Contested: The New Deal and Its Legacies. That helps us explain the focus of the Koch donor network and many of the operations it funds on changing the composition of the judiciary to the point where we now have six Koch network justices of the nine on the Supreme Court, and also the changing curricula in law schools and the changing of Constitutional understanding through litigation, including decisions like Citizens United, Shelby v. So all the things that we’re seeing come from the Republican Party, as it’s been taken over by the Koch donor network they really are a weaponized version of Buchanan’s ideas. But also, and crucially for our time, he developed a way of understanding the sources of twentieth-century public policy and how those policies came from organized collective efforts by social movements, including labor.Īnd from that, he developed a vision and a strategy for essentially reversing these public policies through elaborate rules changes, culminating in Constitutional change. He realized that you couldn’t just make a case for the market, you had to undermine the government.īuchanan developed this body of ideas he called public choice economics. Nancy macclean for free#Rather than just making a case for free markets-markets freed from regulation or social obligation, as Milton Friedman did-Buchanan was more sophisticated. His whole corpus of work over his career was really a more sophisticated way for the neoliberal or market fundamentalist right to attack the public. Nancy MacLean: James Buchanan was the first Southerner to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. You talk about it rising from the original attempts to counter desegregation in schools. Q: Let’s start with your book, Democracy in Chains, where you looked at how the philosophy of James Buchanan ended up becoming a playbook for the Koch brothers and others. “If we’re ever going to get out of the situation we’re in now, we have to go back and recognize the dark money donors that are behind all this mayhem.” The book was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction it won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Current Interest, the Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Award, and the Lillian Smith Book Award. Buchanan at George Mason University in Virginia. Her 2017 book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, was a landmark study of the papers of the economist James M. Chafe distinguished professor of history and public policy at Duke University.
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