Power consolidation sometimes seems like a perpetual motion machine, continually widening the gap between those who have power and money and those who don’t. With this book MacLean joins a growing chorus of scholars and journalists documenting the systematic, organized effort to undermine democracy and change the rules. Nevertheless, her overt moral revulsion at her subject can sometimes make it seem as if we’re getting only part of the picture. As a historian of American social movements, she brings this expertise to her study of Buchanan, showing how his work helped to sow doubt that anyone - whether individuals, groups or institutions - can act in the public good. MacLean doesn’t hide her antipathy to Buchanan’s goals. But that same intensity of feeling has inspired her to untangle important threads in American history-and to make us see how much of that history begins, and still lives, in the South. MacLean’s undisguised loathing of him and others she writes about will offend some readers. Yet as MacLean convincingly shows, his effect on our politics is at least as great, in part because of the evangelical fervor he brought to spreading his ideas. He is not so well remembered today as his fellow Nobel laureates Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. But what sets Democracy in Chains apart is that it begins in the South, and emphasizes a genuinely original and very influential political thinker, the economist James M.

Her book includes familiar villains-principally the Koch brothers-and devotes many pages to think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, whose ideological programs are hardly a secret. All of this, so plainly in view but so strangely ignored, makes MacLean’s vibrant intellectual history of the radical right especially relevant.

Democracy in chains book review