Our First Tuesday Talk,  Sept. 2nd, will offer a lively Book Club discussion on Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean.  Start reading now so you can join in the discussion.
 
We will meet at the Blacksburg Police Department Community Room on Clay Street from 11:45 a.m. until 1:00 pm. Bring your lunch and come share your thoughts on the work of political economist and Nobel Prize winner James Buchana and his coterie of wealthy  millionaires and politicians and their efforts to reshape our democracy. Even if you haven’t read the book, come to listen, ask questions, and join in the discussion as you can.
 
This book is of particular interest to our League members because it focuses on a former Virginia Tech economics professor and his work with a Who’s Who of Virginia political leaders to develop strategies for curtailing majority rule (in favor of rule by a select group of privileged people) and maintaining our state’s segregated public schools.
 
Jim Bohland, a professor emeritus in urban affairs and planning who specializes in studying “Democracy, Civil Society, and the State,” will lead our discussion. Bohland has been the energizing force in organizing the Defending Democracy movement in Montgomery County and beyond.

Nancy MacLean details how Buchanan, while on the faculty at the University of Virginia in the 1950s and 60s, worked with the “Byrd Machine” and other Virginia politicians to support massive resistance to integration of Virginia’s public schools. The book also traces his work with the Koch Brothers and others to reshape American politics. Their plan included undermining unions; privatizing schools, health care, and Social Security; and keeping as many as possible from voting.

Take notes as you read Democracy in Chains and bring your ideas and questions to our League Book Club on Sept. 2, 2025. 

Democracy in Chains

Democracy in Chains. The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Nancy MacLean 2017, 382 pp.

Summary: The capitalist radical right, funded by billionaires, has been working to change who rules, but also to 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 architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority. The plan includes undermining unions; privatizing schools, health care, and Social Security; and keeping as many as possible from voting. Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government attempting to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing f ield between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. The Koch brothers and others provided the money.