Duke University historian Nancy MacLean has written a book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, asserting the existence of a vast right-wing conspiracy (actually a vast libertarian conspiracy) funded by the villainous Koch brothers to subvert democratic processes that result in increased government regulation.
The book, officially released on June 13, garnered such a huge amount of criticism from economists and political scientists claiming that MacLean quoted her subjects out of context and deliberately misrepresented their views that she is now asserting the existence of a vast right-wing conspiracy (actually a vast libertarian conspiracy) funded by the villainous Koch brothers to subvert sales and make her look like a sloppy, dishonest historian.
MacLean’s main argument is that today’s libertarian movement was engineered by James M. Buchanan (1919-2013), winner of the Nobel economics prize in 1986 for his “public choice” theory: that government bureaucrats aren’t neutral public servants but, rather, typically act in their own self-interest—which means growing government programs and creating huge deficits.
The libertarian billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, long a staple of progressive paranoia, started funding Buchanan’s university research centers—as well as other libertarian research centers—during the 1960s. So MacLean’s book connects the progressive-paranoiac dots: She accuses Buchanan as the intellectual leader, the Kochs as the money, and other libertarians with Koch ties (such conservative Supreme Court justices as the late Antonin Scalia) of coordinating a “stealth plan” to make libertarian ideas mainstream and ultimately replace American constitutional democracy with a regime of white male autocracy designed to further economic and social inequality—”enlisting white supremacy to ensure capital supremacy,” as Democracy in Chains puts it. If you favor, say, voter-ID laws in order to discourage fraud, it’s because you’re actually trying to suppress the votes of African-Americans, who skew Democratic and tend to support the big-government, anti-business programs that Democrats push.
It goes without saying that the media got right on board the Chains train. “If you’re worried about what all this means for America’s future, you should be,” gushed NPR, which, by the way, since it’s taxpayer-funded, is a public-choice theorist’s dream example of “I Rest My Case.” Oprah’s O magazine listed Democracy in Chains as one its “Top 20 Books to Read This Summer.”
Trouble was, libertarian professors who know Buchanan’s work immediately began ripping the book apart, accusing MacLean of cherry-picking and even twisting words from her sources. Even worse, several of those professors made their accusations on the online pages of the Washington Post, where libertarian UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh maintains a group blog, The Volokh Conspiracy.
One of them was David Bernstein, a law professor at George Mason University (which has received large Koch grants), who pointed out that he had actually met Buchanan only once, at a libertarian confab at which Buchanan, the supposed champion of wealth and inequality, had argued for a 100 percent inheritance tax so as not to give the born-rich a leg up in life.
Bernstein noted that one of MacLean’s white-supremacy claims is that Buchanan, a Southerner and thus a presumed racist, and other libertarians had opposed the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation ruling, Brown v. Board of Education—except that the only publicly available source she quoted was an article by libertarian Frank Chodorov praising Brown as “in line with what is deepest and strongest and most generous in our historical tradition.”
Another Volokh Conspiracy contributor, Jonathan Adler, a law professor at Case Western University (and, as he admitted, a recipient of a Koch grant for research) offered a laundry list of critiques from a range of scholars, some with no Koch connection (even of the six-degrees-of-separation kind), showing MacLean similarly butchering or misunderstanding her sources.
Donald J. Boudreaux, an economics professor at George Mason, wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal calling MacLean’s theory of a “stealth campaign” on the part of libertarians “utter fiction.” Boudreaux wrote:
MacLean hasn’t been very happy about all the criticism. The online academic trade paper Inside Higher Education uncovered a social-media plea, allegedly from MacLean, begging her liberal professor-friends to counter the critiques by jiggering the Internet to make her book look better:
Inside Higher Ed said it had contacted MacLean to ask whether she had any hard evidence that Koch-funded reviewers were gaming Amazon, but she did not respond. Bernstein, however, did respond, calling MacLean’s alleged allegations “fanciful and potentially libelous.” “[N]o one urged me, asked me, beseeched me, paid me or otherwise tried to influence me to blog about the book,” he said.
Meanwhile, MacLean told Slate that “conspiracy” was actually too strong a word to describe the supposed libertarian machinations to undermine her book and America in general: “But on the other hand, this is a vast and interconnected and not honest operation.”
Oh, that’s different.
