We will discuss Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean at our September 2025 First Tuesday Talk.

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.  

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