It can be difficult find to understand some Republican actions and policy positions over the past few years.
How can they be so shameless about disenfranchising voters?
Why would they insist that an already built polar research satellite be dismantled?
Why are they against funding research into devastating diseases like Zika?
There are individual answers to each of these questions, of course: self-interest and racism; climate change denialism; and not caring about the health of the American people, respectively. But there is a deeper reason, and historian Nancy MacLean has uncovered it.
In her book, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan For America, MacLean lays out the intellectual development of the "Nobel Prize"-winning economist James McGill Buchanan, his ideas’ adoption by Charles Koch, and the ideology that lurks beneath the Koch apparatus’s (the Cato Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, etc., etc.) overt policy goals:
“Property supremacy.”
Buchanan believed, and Charles Koch believes, that “liberty” means control — total control — over one’s own money and property, for individuals and corporations. In that worldview, taxation is coercive, and constitutes oppression. They believe government should enforce contracts, fund the military, maintain public order… and that’s it.
Moreover, and this is crucial, they concluded that their goals — privatizing (read: destroying) Social Security, Medicare, public education, doing away even with things like the minimum wage and the basic public health functions of government, cannot win in a public battle of ideas. Their ideas are simply too unpopular.
So, to achieve their goals, they have to change the rules.
Specifically, change the U.S. Constitution through a Constitutional Convention. Such a convention might be called to, say, eliminate the Electoral College — and then be used to enact the Koch-backed libertarian agenda with amendments such as one requiring a balanced budget. At present, 28 of the 34 states needed to call a constitutional convention have already voted to do so.
Professor MacLean suggests we look to Chile under Pinochet — which Buchanan visited to give advice — for what the constitution that emerges from that process could look like.
I recommend anyone interested in issues that require government action — issues such as climate change, health care, the Fight for Fifteen, preserving Social Security — read this book.
