 if you can prove your point with research, with findings of whether it's statistics or archival research, then we can settle some of these vex debates. But what I learned in seeing the attacks on my work from some of these co-funded professors is that they're not interested in the truth. They're not interested in an honest look at this history of the movement or of some of its leading thinkers and actors. What they want to do is take down the messengers. This is Rob Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with Nancy McLean. She's the William Chaff Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University and she's recently written a paper, How Milton Friedman Aided and Abetted Segregationists in his quest to privatize public education. Nancy, thanks for joining me. It's a pleasure to be with you, Rob. I'm a great admirer of Inet. Well, Inet's a great admirer of you, so a lot of smiling to do here. At any rate, let's start with what inspired you. This, I mean, obviously coming out of discussions related to James Buchanan and others, your awareness of the Mount Pellerin Society, its funders like the Volcker Foundation was. I can see some momentum, but it's leading you to what you might call the front porch of Milton Friedman and this context of, how would I say, continuing and perhaps fortifying racial problems in the United States. So let's start with where, what brought you to this beachhead? What brought you to this beachhead? Yeah, it's actually a really interesting question because I never set out to find Milton Friedman or in the previous work, James Buchanan, Charles Koch, any of them. I'm a historian of the modern U.S., deep interest in political economy and social movements and a particular interest in the South. And in 2006, I had just finished another book and I was at a conference in Philadelphia and I went into the American Friends Service Committee Archives and there they had a display involving the shutdown of the public, entire public education system in Prince Edward County, Virginia from 1959 to 1964 to punish the students there for having struck for a decent high school in one of the cases that was folded into brown. And I was very moved by what I found, I knew, and I quickly found out that vouchers were involved and so I started digging into this and I started to find people I never would have expected to find in a trail of Virginia's massive resistance to Brown versus Board of Education. The first of those was a gentleman I named in the paper Leon Durer, a former Washington Post reporter who went on to Winston Salem and actually helped destroy the first civil rights union in America. So, and he was saying things like, the market solves all our problems, freedom is the solution, while he was raising money for two segregation academies. So I started following Durer, but once I got into Durer's papers, there was Milton Friedman and there was James Buchanan and there were all these other organizations and so I became very interested in that and I thought initially that my story in the book would involve Friedman primarily, but as I learned about James Buchanan and his connections to supplying the ideas that the Koch Network has operated on, the book shifted to Buchanan. So in coming back to this research on Milton Friedman, it was almost like it was unfinished business for me. I had thought that it was really interesting, that it was really important that it spoke powerfully to our own time, to our own historical moment, but it was research that had not gone into democracy and change. So I wanted it to stand independently and I thought, what better site to publish it with than I net because you have such a global network of people who are deeply engaged with these questions of political economy and probably feel the lack of good economic history or history of the profession in some of the things that you're doing. So I was hoping to find some new conversation partners, I guess you would say, and it's delightful to be here with you. Yeah, it's a delight to have you here as well. And I'm always reminded of a book that I read in my formative years by a man named Mary Ferner called Advocacy versus Objectivity. And the book was really about at the time of distributional tensions late 19th century, how the abstract marginalists took over the profession from the institutionalists. Now, what you might call reintegration of political economy and the reintroduction or reinvigoration of the history of thought and economic history actually, how would I say, catalyzes a bridge to people like yourself that are in history departments and what you might call inherently multidisciplinary. And I think that, so you set an example, particularly for our young scholars of the kind of things and kind of ways of approaching problems. And then I'm gonna use my silly joke, the pandemic unmasked how sterile things were in economic science. And there's some great rigorous evidence-based analysis and so forth, but clinging to the abstract, what I'll call idolization of the economy and not seeing these more textured elements like healthcare, like climate, like notions of the common goods. It'll go back to Henry George and like the question of race. And I often, in my formative years, I grew up in Detroit, Michigan, but I remember reading things by the Chicago School, which we're suggesting that the market was the tool that was going to end racism because if somebody's marginal product was more than they were getting paid for, there was a profit opportunity. So I saw those arguments being used and market versus state arguments being used on the right. And I guess what's awkward now is there are so many people that are worried about concentration of wealth, money and politics, like my research director, Tom Ferguson, that we're in a place where people on the left don't trust the government now. It's almost like George Stigler's work at Chicago was prescient from their standpoint. But let's, I need to, your help in unpacking what Milton Friedman did as an economist, what he was after and how this relates to intensifying segregation in schools and racial polarity. Yeah, you know, it's interesting because Milton Friedman is, you know, such a huge name in the field today and certainly among, you know, whatever we want to call them, civilians, those of us. And in other arenas, he's really a household name. But in this period, he was the young guy. You know, when he went to the Montelloran Society Founding Meeting in 1947, he was kind of a kid, you know, among the big luminaries at the time, you know, Hayek and Van Mises and his own, or his colleague, Frank Knight. And he was not a big player. And I think part of what happened, you know, he came home and he wrote this piece that, you know, is well known, neoliberalism and its prospects in 1951. And he was very anxious to turn the tide of public opinion, to really find a way to shift people from the kind of Keynesian world that prevailed then, the support for the New Deal, for labor unions, social security, you know, public goods of all kinds. And I think what happened as near as I can tell is that when the fights began over equal schooling in the South, he was noticing, you couldn't help but notice, he was in all the national newspapers. The strike in Prince Edward County by the Black High School students was in 1951, you know, when, you know, became involved in the NAACP litigation. And you had Southern reactionary governors saying that they would shut down the public school systems before they'd integrate. You know, you had James Jackson Kilpatrick in, at the Richmond News Leader, the day that the Black students filed in Prince Edward County, their lawsuit, he said, it's time to start talking about private schooling. So all this news is bubbling up. I mean, I can't prove or deny that Milton Friedman read this, but any regular newspaper reader of the time would have known this was bubbling. And he used the occasion of a festrift to publish this piece called The Role of Government in Education, which was really, and he wanted it to be a kind of a manifesto to say, even if government funds education, why should government provide it? And he even fought on language. He said, why do we call them public schools? We should call them government schools, right? And he used in that piece all the kind of language that has become part and parcel of the school choice movement today, language of choice and liberty and parental rights and parental control. But he was writing this piece, issuing this piece just at the moment when resistance to the Brown versus Board of Education decision was heating up in the South. And one of the crucial elements of massive resistance was tax-funded vouchers for private segregation academies because they actually understood that white solidarity was a myth, that there weren't enough white parents who cared deeply enough about segregation to dig deeply into their own pockets and fund private school tuition for their kids. So they needed those public dollars. And Friedman, I think, appreciated that. He saw that and he saw it as an opportunity. By this point, he had spoken of his economic views as a new faith. He used a language of conversion. And so he was deeply of the mind that what he had imbibed through the Montpelerin Society and beyond was really a kind of gospel that would free the world and make it better. And he just couldn't take in any evidence to the contrary. And he rebuffed it when it came from his contemporaries such as Robert Solo, not Robert Solo, the Nobel Prize winner, but another economist with the same name and no W on the end. He raised all the questions you or I would raise today in the correspondence that I cite in the paper and Friedman would hear none of it. He wouldn't respond to a single particular of what Solo raised. In fact, he said to even consider questions of prejudice would put one on a par with the Nazis, with Hitler enforcing, what did he call it, tastes and tastes and something else, but language of taste in neoclassical economics. But anyway, so that intrigued me, finding that correspondence and the deeper I dug, the more I found that seemed really important to surface because we're also in a situation today in our current moment when we see the libertarian right in this country, particularly the organizations and operations funded by Charles Koch, being willing to recognize prejudice of all kinds, use disinformation and so forth to achieve their ends. We've just seen that Koch funded an organization that was promoting vaccine denial and school board fights about mask wearing. We know the climate denial runs back for decades, the work with the tobacco companies in the 1980s, the funding of these politicians who were involved in the January 6th election. So it just seemed like to me this was a good time for some deep truth telling. And as a historian, I believe passionately, it's the nature of my craft that history is powerful. As James Baldwin said, it's with us in all we do. And William Faulkner, the past is never dead, right? So, until we come to terms with what human actors did in our past and the consequences of that, I don't think that we can solve the problems that we're faced with right now in our world. So let's talk a little bit about Friedman in the correspondence that you saw with Robert Solow. Spelled like Napoleon Solow, but different than the Nobel laureate from MIT who happened to be my undergraduate advisor. Oh, really? He was my colleague at the Russell Sage Foundation. Oh, there's a fellow there. And, but coming back, is the sense that you get from reading this that Milton Friedman is talking like he's a racist and that's his motivation or is his motivation more related to wanting more market, smaller government, government's not responsive. And this was a place in the spectrum of things that are provided in society where reducing the size of government was what mattered to him. And then I'll ask the second dimension of this, which is even if he wasn't on board with race, did he see these what you might call strange bedfellows like the Ku Klux Klan or explicitly racist groups as a conduit to his mission just as they might see him as a conduit to their mission in keeping schools segregated? How conscious do you think he knows of that partnership's consequences? Important questions. The first thing I do is rule the Ku Klux Klan out of court. The Ku Klux Klan was not playing a big role here actually. And I think that is kind of telling too what we were talking about, particularly in Virginia, which is the side of my story, is an elite that had profited from and worked to maintain racial capitalism since before the US was a country, right? The plantation elite there were the first to adopt racial slavery. They created one of the most undemocratic systems in America. The great political scientist, V.O. Key in his book about Southern politics, said that compared to Virginia, Mississippi was a hotbed of democracy. So in other words, these are mainly elite actors. They are not the Northern stereotype of who is a racist and who is enforcing this system. This was a system that Virginia's elite profited from mightily and they had the tightest political organization in the South in that period of the, it was interlocking corporate and political elites. Nothing went on without Harry Bird's organization ruling it okay. And this elite had first tried to defend segregation of public education in the Brown case. Actually, the president of the University of Virginia, Colgate Darden testified for segregation and then went on to hire James Buchanan later and set up this center for political economy. Anyway, so first I think we need to really understand how racism works in a way that African-American and many white scholars have been encouraging us to do for a long time, but I don't think our media does such a good job with or many of our churches because they ask us to think about racism as a sin of the heart, right? A personal kind of ailment. And that is the language in which James Buchanan was defended by many of his colleagues when I tried to point out his history and democracy in chains. And that's really not the relevant question. I mean, I don't know what was in James Buchanan's heart. I don't care. I don't know what was in Milton Friedman's heart. I don't care. I don't think he was primarily activated by racism, not at all, but I think he clung to an economic dogma that said that freeing markets from any government interference would solve every problem in the world. And that's why he opposed federal fair employment practices laws when they were supported by every major African-American organization in the country and the labor movement. That's why he opposed the Civil Rights Act and worked as an economic advisor to Barry Goldwater who was against social security, against minimum wage, et cetera. So I don't think, you know, Milton Friedman wasn't going down there and speaking in the same tones as the White Citizens' Councils. But he was working with, the Virginia and I show him working with this former New York Times reporter who had retired to a huge horse farm outside Charlottesville. You know, Friedman was working with him. This guy was publicly known as a fundraiser for two segregationist academies in Charlottesville, one named after Robert E. Lee. You know, he worked with James Buchanan and Warren Nutter at the University of Virginia. They were all supporting this effort to get tax-funded school vouchers in the name of freedom. But the problem was those vouchers were opposed to a person by African-Americans, to a person by the NAACP who knew that this was an effort to steal the victory they won in Brown versus Board of Education. So I actually quote in the paper, Oliver Hill, who was the lead Virginia attorney involved in the Brown versus Board of Education decision. And he just said it plainly. He said, no one has a right to have his private prejudices subsidized by tax dollars. And that's what these guys were trying to do. They were trying to make taxpayers subsidize the parents who did not want their white children to go to school with black children. I mean, it was that simple. There's no getting around the reality on the ground there. And Friedman said he supported their right to do that in the name of freedom. He also said he opposed forced segregation. But at the same time, he never recognized the complexities that Robert Solow tried to point out to him. Robert Solow said, hey, how can you say this? Black people can't even vote in the South. They can't control the government that's taking their tax dollars to fund these segregation academies. How can you even be talking about freedom in a context like this? They need collective action. They need the courts. They need force, basically, to break up this otherwise rock-solid system. And Friedman would have none of it. And he worked closely with the people who were trying to get those tax dollars to segregation academies. So again, what's in his heart? To me, as a historian, it's not really relevant. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a mind reader. I'm not a personal biographer. But it doesn't matter. And to me, to be honest though, because I can ask this question so much about James Buchanan, if I were an ethicist and I were asked to choose, what's worse, someone who operates in the heat of passion from a deeply believed commitment that a whole other group of people are inferior to them? Is that worse? Or is it worse for someone who doesn't hold that view? Who knows those views are wrong? Who knows they're pernicious and they have human costs, but says, you know what? I'm gonna use these people to get this thing I want. In a lot of ways, that's what Republican, wealthy Republican voters do now. They're saying, okay, get up on the black people and the immigrants, take away their voting rights, take away abortion rights for women, but just don't raise my taxes. It's all a care about, right? And to me, again, I'm not a religious person, but I have a lot of respect for many really good people of faith. And I think the ethics would say, it's a greater sin if you don't believe it, but you're willing to use dark forces like that. And in fact, we see the Koch Network doing this trans-nationally. Peter Buttke, who's the outgoing past head of the Mont Pelerin Society, based at the Koch operation at George Mason, is quoted in Ian Wasserman's book about Austrian economics saying, we have to give up the label of Austrian economics because it's been too corrupted by the alt-right and the racist forces who have enlisted that. And he's saying that because part of the Hayek Society in Germany and in Austria, they're playing footsie with neo-Nazis. Top people in those organizations that are part of the Atlas Network are starting to work with street fascists and talk about getting somebody like Trump to carry their movement because they know their ideas will never be popular otherwise. They can't get masses of people to line up for an agenda of privatizing social security and public education, stopping action on the climate, not having anti-discrimination enforcement. So we're talking about a cause here that is really far outside of the normal pale, but because it's so wealthy, they have been able to create what James Buchanan called a gravy train to bring many people, mostly young men, into this. And get them in for the long term. So it looks really academically respectable, but they don't act like normal academics. It's not a disinterested pursuit of truth. They engage in a form of denialism whenever any inconvenient evidence comes along. One thing that I did love about researching freedmen is he was very honest and open. And so when I went through his papers, he said what he thought to everybody. So I'd be writing to my husband from the archives, can you believe, he's saying this like over and over again. He talked about how vouchers were not an end in themselves. They were a tactic. School choice was a tactic. He wanted to privatize education completely so that parents, as he said, would pay for their children's education like they do for their food and shelter. In the libertarian dream world, we have no public education. We have no post office. We have no national parks. That is the dream world. And freedmen, to his credit, was honest about it. And in 2005, I saw him saying, you know, why don't we just wrap up the Montpellor in society? You know, we've won. Everybody believes in markets now. You know, enough is enough. But these other figures like Coke and James Buchanan are like, no, we want to go on and rig the rules of the game to get what we want. So I think that poses a challenge to folks like us who are in, you know, academic spaces and spaces that, you know, where we think, well, empirical research should be the deciding factor, right? If you can prove your point with research, you know, with findings of whether it's statistics or archival research, you know, then we can settle some of these vexed debates. But what I learned in seeing the tax on my work from some of these Coke-funded professors is that they're not interested in the truth, right? They're not interested in an honest look at this history of the movement or of some of its leading thinkers and actors. What they want to do is take down the messengers. You know, so character assassination of, you know, established respected scholars, denial of the substance of what they've written, refusal to engage in the core findings of the research, and instead a kind of silly, you know, kind of bait-and-switch operation which we see in all denialist movements. They try to change the subject. You know, they pick some microscopic little point in hopes that they can discredit the whole, you know, case by some little tiny point. And anyway, it's kind of fascinating to see it work, but I don't think we as a country are prepared for the levels of disinformation that are coming from self-interested actors. You know, and certainly we saw that in the Trump presidency, you know, we see that on the issue of voter suppression, climate denial, you know, the anti-abortion movement, so many of these things, you know, you have powerful, well-funded interests who are deliberately polluting the public debate. You know, I know, for instance, the scholar Naomi Oreskes. Yes, she's the friend. She's written books, you know, Merchants of Doubt. You were referring earlier to the tobacco era and how that propagated Michael Mann at Penn State who was a guest on this podcast a few months ago on the nature of what you might call disinformation strategies to arrest the attempt to bring fossil fuels, how would I say, to a lower value as assets because of the side effects that they produce. And so there's, I think there's a lot of anxiety now, particularly after the onset of the pandemic that we can identify climate change, the IPCC reports and so, but we don't have a strategy in the context of our real political economy and information systems and concentrations of wealth and money, politics, et cetera, to move forward. And I think it's starting to scare people a great deal that it's almost like being sent to the doctor and getting diagnosed for a critical illness, but then not being able to be treated. Yes, that's a really, really good analogy. And that's scary, that's haunting. But if our democracies were functioning well and normally, we would be able to address these issues. But what we see instead, and I'll just now talk about the U.S. case, is strategic actors. And again, I don't think anyone of them, a few scholars and independent researchers has really come to grips with and journalists, heroic journalists like Jane Mayer, but how big the COPE network is and what they have wrought. But what you see is state after state is really smart strategy to get control of state legislatures, state governments, where so many of the rules about democracy, about labor, about education are made, and then use that control of state governments, now 30, to systematically rewrite the rules. So to engage in the most radical redistricting we've ever seen in our political history using the most sophisticated technology and the most audacious power grabs that really misrepresent the citizenry on all questions in many of our state legislatures, including my own in North Carolina, to engage in voter suppression, mass voter suppression under the misleading rubric that this is somehow election integrity when there is no problem of voter fraud, to undermine the power of labor unions, which they know will add at least 3% to their side from the other sides. I mean, this is very, very smart strategic stuff. Going back to our earlier discussion, this is not the Ku Klux Klan crowd in hoods coming out of the gas station. No, this is really determined actors and some of the richest men in the world, and here I point to Charles Koch, who understand who see an existential threat to their current and future profit stream from action on the climate and are willing to wreck democracy and stir up all these demons in order to make sure that that doesn't happen. So my conclusion from my book research, but I think it would also be true from this paper, is that informing people of what's happening and prioritizing democracy reform are the most critical things that we can do in this moment to make sure, at the time I wrote Democracy in Chains, it's probably worse now. We were, I believe the figure was it's in the conclusion 132 of 178 democracies in the levels of voter participation. That's a scandal, right? We should be ashamed of that. We should be doing everything that we can to make sure that people are participating in elections. But instead, we have this cause, which is use donor control and Fox News and weaponizing the base to stir up, essentially capture one of our political parties. And they are preventing us from taking action on any of this. And they're actually making it worse as we speak. And I don't think a lot of the mainstream media has gotten on top of this. What it means that we have two different media universes. I don't know if you've ever interviewed Yokai Benkler at Harvard, a really interesting communications scholar, but who has written about how Fox News and Breitbart are just a bubble, like in the rest of the spectrum, we all go around. I read the way, you know, I'm not a fan of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but I read it, the paper. You know, and you read, you sample this broad media. Well, for the core base that they have there, which is now the base of voters of the Republican Party, they don't get out. And what they get is a daily diet of having their identity consolidated and then they're made to feel embattled. So it's almost like a stress response and you have to go out and fight the other side. So you're right that it's just so frustrating because on issue after issue, the vast majority, including Republican voters, you know, knows that there's things we need to do, you know, as people, as societies, and we're not being able to do it because of the way that our democracy has been shackled and distorted by these forces.