 Hello, welcome to NewsClick. We have with us Professor Nancy McLean, who is a professor of history at Duke University. She has come out with a new book that's called Democracy in Chains that exposes the right-wing Americans who are hell bent on seeing that democracy is destroyed and see that the fruits of democracy don't reach all the population and equality remains a dream. So we have with us Professor Nancy McLean. Welcome ma'am. It's nice to be with you. So this democracy in chains, can you give us a brief, a small brief about how you began with this project and how you think it is. I mean the reviews in the media are very positive. Everybody is saying it's a must read book. So can you give us a background of how this book and this project developed? Sure. This book is the story of the ideas that are being used to guide the effort by the radical right. And by that I mean the billionaire backed radical right in the United States to transform our political system and our legal system. That right is led by a man named Charles Koch, a multi-billionaire with a multinational corporation that operates in 60 countries. And they have applied, I learned through my research, the thinking of a U.S. economist named James McGill Buchanan, who was the first U.S. Southerner to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. They've taken his ideas and turned that into a technology to enchain our democracy, to make it so that it will not be responsive to the will of the people. You said the Southerners were unhappy with the judgment which made it illegal to have separate schools for the African American children and the white children. And with that judgment, they were not happy and from then the right wing started to think that we have to do something so that there are roadblocks, so that there is not proper integration. Do you think that was the idea or why do you think that was... It's kind of a longer story than that. In the United States, in the 1930s, the Southern white elite, which had a system of racial capitalism, a system of capitalism that depended on subordinating most of the working class and particularly African Americans, that system was partially undermined by the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the labor unions in the 1930s and so forth. So they were already on edge and didn't like the involvement of the federal government in their social matters, in their economy and so forth. And then in 1954, the Brown decision that outlawed segregation in public schools came on top of that. So this Southern white elite was very determined to keep the national government out of its affairs to protect that system of racial capitalism. And so it was in that context that this James Buchanan moved to Virginia and saw what was happening, how the elite was feeling embattled and responded to that. But it is just not James Buchanan. It's also intellectuals from the other developed worlds who were part of it. And you mentioned that they met in Switzerland. I mean, can you throw some background on that? Yeah, there is an organization that was started in 1947 called the Mont Pelerin Society, which is the main neoliberal organization, thought collective, some people have called it, that brought together people who were certainly against communism and fascism, but also were more focused on fighting social democracy of the kind that existed in Western Europe and in a more diluted form in the United States with the New Deal. And so that organization involved Friedrich Hayek, most famously who convened it. Milton Friedman attended the first meeting and was involved for years. And of course, James Buchanan, the person I wrote about, joined the year after he came to Virginia and started working on these school issues with the Virginia elites. So from the beginning, they started targeting the policies or how did they go about, because it's a political project where in the public discourse, it is not popular. I mean, to say that people will not accept such reforms that undermine education or health or even for that matter, housing or even voting rights. But how did they go about unleashing their project from behind the curtains? Yeah, what you point out is so important that this is not a popular project. This is not a project that most people would support if they knew what they were getting. You know that you wouldn't have any social security. You wouldn't have public schools. You wouldn't have public health, etc. This kind of completely privatized corporate world. And so that's why the story that the book opens with, I think is especially important, because it shows that their first breakthrough moment came with this white racist response to the Supreme Court's desegregation decision. And it showed, the story I tell shows that these neoliberal economists were willing to take advantage of that white supremacist response to Brown in order to move this on popular agenda. And that's something that we're seeing in the United States right now where this causes again using strategic racism in order to get people to vote for its agenda, which they otherwise would not. You also mentioned that they started targeting institutions, delegitimizing them. And you said that if media shouldn't report the failures of capitalism, but they should definitely focus on the failures of public institutions and legitimize them and push for privatization. And do you think they also had any other such deals, I mean, so that the people were not aware of what was actually happening with their policy recommendations? Yeah, so part of the story that I tell in the book is the story of the building of a whole institutional infrastructure to move these ideas. So in our country now in the United States, there are literally hundreds of organizations working on parts of this project. There are national organizations. There are organizations out in the States. There are campus bases of this project with affiliated faculty. You also have several related organizations in India, too, if you want to get into them. But anyway, so that organizational infrastructure helped them to move these ideas. So this guy, Charles Koch, for years invested in libertarian thinkers in the Academy and beyond has helped build up organizations like the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society and so forth. So all of these organizations then have dozens, at least dozens in most cases, sometimes hundreds of employees. So there's a lot of people working on pushing this agenda out to the public and coming up with laws, coming up litigating through the courts, pushing their agenda through the courts. So it's really, it's very powerful. You had mentioned that actually it's a threat to the Constitution as well because the provisions in the Constitution are being undermined by plan. And you said that civil servants and judicial officers were being trained in their thought process. Can you throw some light on this? Ultimately, this cause wants to transform our legal system in the United States and amend the Constitution in order, essentially, to make it impossible for the government to adopt the kinds of public policies that citizens push for over the course of the 20th century, workers movements, women's movement, the civil rights movement, environmental, all these groups pushed government to act on problems that people saw and to spend money addressing those problems and this cause wants to make it impossible for that to happen. They're actually pushing for a constitutional convention in America, the first constitutional convention to be convened by the states since that document was ratified in 1787. So it's an incredibly radical thing. And at that constitutional convention, they would essentially put what one person is called locks and bolts on our Constitution so that it doesn't work for the people. Now, as part of the movement toward that, this particular school of thought developed by James Buchanan has also tried to discredit government over the years, right? And to say, essentially, to spread a very pervasive cynicism about government and about any public sector actors, whether labor unions, civil rights activists, public health workers, et cetera, to say that they're only seeking their personal self-interest. They're not really working for the common good or the public interest, as they say. It's a lot more elaborate than that, but that's kind of the core gist of it. These ideas have now become quite pervasive in the United States. When Donald Trump, our current president, speaks of the swamp, that's language that comes from this cause. Okay. But the background for this you had mentioned is that they had targeted, I mean, for undermining democracies functioning, they have targeted public employees, then they have targeted adult vote franchising, then they have targeted the public education system by handing it over to the corporates. And also that there is a link between industry and academics that is taking place in higher education, where public good is not discussed, but there is a discourse that government is only catering to people who don't pay taxes who are... Yeah. Yeah. Can you throw some light on this? Yeah. Yeah. So this libertarian intellectual cause that I wrote about is the source of a language that is now pretty widespread of makers and takers, they call it. So the makers would be like the corporation people and business people of different kinds, and the takers are the rest of us, right? People who need things like social security payments or, you know, retirees who need social security or people who depend on public schools or, you know, anybody else who relies on government and taxation, they call takers. And this man, James Buchanan, that I wrote about, actually used an even uglier language. He spoke of parasites and predators of wealthy taxpayers as the prey. And so these ideas have been used to discredit everything from public schools to environmental protections to public health measures. And so it's very serious stuff. And it's also become a technology to change power relations in the United States. So, for example, we just had a big Supreme Court decision this past week that will undermine public sector labor unions, the unions of teachers and nurses and firefighters and so forth. And those are our main powerful unions at this point in the United States. So there's that. And they're also trying to weaken those unions so that they can privatize public education and put it into the hands of profit-making companies. You had mentioned in the book that if things are not working out, change the institutions that make market policy-oriented programs difficult. Yes. So this cause is trying to undermine all of the things that, all the ways in which people have used government as a kind of countervailing power against corporate dominance. And so we see that in many ways. I mean, the most obvious is weakening the collective power and voice of workers, right, through labor unions. But they are also trying to defund groups who get federal contracts for various things, you know, to provide for things like public health. So there's a lot of effort to do that. And going back to your previous question, too, this libertarian cause and particularly this one particular donor, Charles Koch, who is the kind of strategic thinker behind all this, they've been investing much more on campuses in the United States. So they now are giving money to 350 campuses. They do have very powerful centers in a number of places, including one institution that I write about, a public university called George Mason University that's right across the river from Washington, D.C. So with a campus based like that, with organizations that are designing these policies that are promoting them, that are training people, they have access to power in Washington, D.C. in order to move this agenda. But how did Charles Koch take control of this project? Because if you see, you had mentioned that James Buchanan at the later stage was embarrassed to be associated with Charles Koch. How do you think Charles Koch took control over this thought process or the project itself? Yes, that is really, really an interesting thing. And I'm glad that you raised that because it shows how instrumentally this cause treats people, even its own, you know, loyal workers get pushed aside in the end. But Charles Koch is one of the richest people in the world. That's how this happened. So I believe his net worth is four to five billion now, his personal wealth. And he has been investing in this libertarian cause since the 1960s, so for more than 50 years now. And through that process, he has been very single-mindedly looking for ideas that would enable a breakthrough, that would enable the imposition of this libertarian system in functioning democracy, but against the will of the people, right? And so he supported hundreds of literally hundreds by his own count of libertarian thinkers looking for such ideas. And finally concluded by the mid-1990s that he had found those ideas in James Buchanan School of Thought, which is called Public Choice Economics. And so at that point, they began turning these ideas into a weapon, basically, into a strategy, an operational strategy for how to undermine the 20th century state as social movements had shaped it to reflect the popular will and things like workers' rights, environmental protection, civil rights enforcement and so forth. And so the way that that was done was to train a cadre, and he spoke in Leninist terms. He actually read Lenin, Charles Coke did, on the advice of one of his grantees, developing what they call the hardcore libertarian cadre of intellectuals and operatives who would be steeped in these ideas, who would be able to go into other institutions and into larger organizations and move this agenda and build even larger organizations, bend large organizations to their will. So if you look at the Republican Party in the United States now, it is an example of this process. What we have seen is that this relatively small libertarian cause by changing the incentives and the penalties in the Republican Party has bent one of our major parties to the will of these extreme right-wing donors. And the way that they've done that is to fund what are called primary challenges against any Republican and elected officials who don't carry the line of these organizations, who don't do the will of the donors, they scare them, right? They make them think they're going to lose their office, and then those elected officials do what the donors want. And that is happening on issue after issue here from health care to immigration policy to the tax bill to the Supreme Court nominations. Yeah, you had mentioned health care, where you had mentioned in your book about cancer causing or there was lead or some water, there was lead in the water, and when there was a person who was complaining and people were complaining about lead in water, there was a propaganda that said that there is nothing of this sort, people are just reporting and that research was not undermined. And only they had to take it to another state to prove that there was a major health crisis happening, can you? Yeah, so this libertarian cause is concerned about money and deficits and governments overspending. And so what they have done in the state of Michigan is to pass legislation that says that any local community, any local city or town that is overspending is in the red will essentially lose its power of self-government. They will get what is called an emergency manager. That emergency manager is kind of like a dictator, right? There's no accountability to the people, there's no election, there's no anything. And so at this point half of the African Americans in the state of Michigan are living under these emergency managers, these dictatorships. And in one community, Flint, Michigan, which had been an auto town very hard hit by the decline of manufacturing, they got one of these emergency managers and the emergency manager in order to save money, rerouted the water supply for that community away from good water to really bad water, water that turned out to be filled with lead. And so like a dozen people died, children are sick, they still don't have proper water in that community. And that was connected to this cause built by Charles Koch because that in Michigan they had pushed for those emergency managers that would be unaccountable to the people. Yeah. Similarly, I mean you had mentioned that they also pushed their agenda through pseudoscience and also, I mean, are there any such examples of where science or fake science is used to propagate their ideas among the white population? Oh yes. Yeah. So along with the wider fossil fuel industry in this country and Koch industries is based in fossil fuels, they have promoted climate science denial and they have promoted climate science denial to such a degree that they've actually led the public in America to believe that there's a debate about what's happening to the planet that scientists don't agree, which is ridiculous because like 97% of scientists know exactly what's going on and that we only have a short window of time to act to save the planet and all the people who will be harmed by this. But this Koch, excuse me, Koch lead cause is so dogmatically hostile to government, which is the only body strong enough to deal with this problem, that they are trying to deceive people about the science. And they've had such an effect on the Republican Party, as I was saying before, with their, the way they've changed the incentives and the penalties that by 2013, I cite the statistic in the book, by 2013, only eight, 278 Republicans in Congress would admit that climate change was manmade. That's astounding. I mean, that's discipline, right? I mean similarly, they have their influence internationally as well. You had mentioned that the Pinochet regime took some of Buchanan's inputs on how to run their economy and can you, I mean, share some of the readings or material that you came across on this issue? Yeah, so lots of people on the left know that Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist, went to Chile to advise the Pinochet dictatorship on how to combat inflation. Almost no one, including in Chile, understands that James Buchanan later went to Chile in 1980 to advise on a constitution that would enable the dictatorship to lock in all the things that they had done that were unpopular while the people were suppressed so that they could keep those in place when the country returned to elections and a representative system. And so Buchanan went in 1980 and advised on what is now called the Constitution of Liberty. And that Constitution of Liberty, all these years later, almost 40 years later, is still preventing people in Chile from reversing the privatization of social security, from reversing the privatization of education that made Chile's higher education system the most expensive of OECD countries. So it's been referred to by Michelle Bachelet, the previous socialist president, as a Constitution of locks and bolts. And it prevented her from delivering on the reform program that had led her to win an election with two thirds of the people backing her, and she couldn't act because of this Constitution. And that's the kind of Constitution that is being pushed in the United States and in other countries by this Koch network. They have something called the Atlas Network now that operates in more than 90 countries with over 450 affiliates. So I looked up yours in India and it's the India Institute, the Center for Public Policy Research, the Center for Civil Society, and the Amritsar Policy Group. So you have four groups that are pushing this Koch agenda. Alright. I mean, like everywhere else, even you are worried that there is a concerted effort of weakening the checks and balances ingrained into the Constitution. And that they are trying to, I mean, undermine the Constitution. Can you give some examples how the Constitution, which you said, even James Madison now would be embarrassed to, I mean, see what's happening. Yeah. Yeah. What they're doing with the Constitution is really interesting and quite frightening because already the U.S. Constitution is the pro-property rights Constitution out there of any major country in the world and it has what political scientists call four veto points. Whereas other countries, they might have one veto point, maybe two, a couple have three. We're the only one with four. So it's very hard in America to get government to act on the will of the people because of all those veto points. But these guys, this billionaire backed libertarian cause thinks there's not enough veto points, right? They want to put still more barriers to the people being able to use government for purposes that people think are important. So they want to amend our Constitution to include things like a balanced budget amendment, which would say that like every year you have to have a balanced budget. And people think that's good. Everybody's heard that analogy with household budgets, you know, and they say, what's the matter with that? But what they don't understand is that that would undermine programs like Social Security in our retirement system. It would undermine our medical care programs and others. So they want a balanced budget amendment. They want to put it in our Constitution that voters must show a photo ID in order to vote. They want to undermine the 17th Amendment to our Constitution, which allowed the people to choose U.S. Senators or U.S. Senators in Washington used to be appointed by state governments. Then with the 17th Amendment 100 years ago, the people won the right to choose their elected officials, right? These guys want to restore that power, take it from the people and restore it to the state governments because they know it's easiest for corporations to capture those state governments. So I mean, it's just so radical. They have 10 Liberty Amendments they've come up with. That's what they call them. And together they would radically alter our country, which is already, you know, it's a haven for capitalism. You know, it's been the most pro-capitalist Constitution for, you know, since its founding. And yet they think that's not enough. They want to make it even more pro-corporate and take more power from the people. Now we're coming to the end. In the end, you had expressed that we are moving towards a stage where white supremacy wants to gain control over capital. And Calhoun, who was the founding ideologues of this movement would, I mean, be happy or that we are moving towards a racialized economy where white supremacy would take control of the society. Is that what? Well, actually what I talk about in the book is property supremacy, which has echoes of that white supremacy, right? And there's overlap, but these people would definitely not say that they're trying to promote white supremacy, right? They would say that they're supporting property rights and economic liberty. But in a country like our country that was founded on slavery in which production by enslaved people was the most pro-capital form of capitalism, you know, from the 1830s to the 1860s. And in which people were held as property, it's really impossible to separate that extreme property rights thought from white supremacy. And what I found in my research that was really interesting to me was that some of James Buchanan's own colleagues, allies in this struggle, described this 19th century property rights supremacist, John C. Calhoun as a precursor to Buchanan's thought. This man, John C. Calhoun, who said on the floor of the U.S. Senate that slavery is a positive good, right? And who wrote too long treatises reinterpreting our constitution in a way that would let him and his class protect slavery from democracy. They said that Buchanan's ideas had the same, and this is a quote, purpose and the same purpose and effect as Calhoun's, even though they tried to treat slavery as though it was irrelevant to Calhoun's thought. But basically, you know, I agree that both of these men seek to so radically transform representative government as to handicap it, except where the richest people in the society agree with everything that it does. That's their standard, this unanimity standard. And that would be the destruction, as James Madison said, of free government everywhere is what he said about John C. Calhoun. So it is incredibly radical, right wing radical, and it would transform our society into a place that few people would recognize. And I don't think almost anyone except these billionaires would want to live in. Ma'am, your book has been doing rounds in the media across the world. It has been getting positive responses. Can you share some of how people are reacting to this book? Is discussion happening and can you share some of those things with us? The book came out last summer, and essentially since then I've been traveling almost every week to speak to varied audiences who are interested in this story. And what has really excited and impressed me is that across sectors of progressive politics here in the United States from, you know, people in the labor movement to community organizations, to environmentalists, civil rights groups, feminists, senior citizens, all of these groups are understanding that we are at an emergency moment for our democracy, right? That this is kind of an all hands on deck emergency that things are being done that are very frightening and that are very dangerous. And so it's been really exciting to me to see how people are understanding the threat and the problem, that they're also understanding that what they've been doing has not been working, that people need to work together more, need to be thinking more long term, need to be building bridges among organizations and taking ideas more seriously and so forth. And so it's really been invigorating to see that. And I'm getting a sense that that's happening in other places too. You know, people write to me from various countries and ask about this project in their countries and, you know, of course there are these groups that are out there pushing this agenda. So I'm really getting a sense that, you know, it's kind of the 11th hour, it's late, but I think that we are getting it. And I think people are understanding it. And I think that this can be stopped if the mobilization is powerful enough and thoughtful enough and informed enough to bring people together to challenge this. Thank you, Professor Nancy for taking time and talking to us. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. I don't care. Thank you for watching NewsClick.