Democracy in Chains

Nancy MacLean, a historian at Duke University, argues that a decades-long stealth campaign originating in 1950s Virginia seeks to restructure American democracy in favor of a wealthy minority. The book traces this campaign from its intellectual origins in the work of economist James McGill Buchanan through its implementation by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and an extensive network of political operatives.

MacLean opens in late 1956, when University of Virginia president Colgate Whitehead Darden Jr. reviews Buchanan's proposal to create the Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy and Social Philosophy. The Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education rulings had ordered the dismantling of school segregation, and Virginia's elite had responded with "massive resistance," including legislation to close any school that planned to comply. Buchanan recommended that the center avoid using the words "economic liberty" in its name, even though that phrase captured what he privately called "the real purpose of the program" (45). MacLean argues that what began as a regional effort to resist federal mandates evolved into a national campaign to undo democratic governance and return the country to a political economy resembling midcentury Virginia's oligarchic model.

MacLean traces the intellectual lineage of Buchanan's project to John C. Calhoun, the antebellum South Carolina senator who devised constitutional mechanisms to protect the planter class's property in enslaved people from democratic majorities. Buchanan's allies at George Mason University later identified Calhoun as "a precursor of modern public choice theory" (1), a framework that treats political actors as self-interested rather than public-minded. Drawing on historian Robin Einhorn's research, MacLean argues that the anti-government tradition Buchanan inherited originated not from ordinary citizens but from slaveholding elites who feared federal power. By the 1950s, Virginia, under Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr., was the nation's most oligarchic state, with poll taxes, malapportioned legislatures, and right-to-work laws (which bar agreements requiring workers to pay union dues) keeping most citizens from influencing government.

The Brown case arose from a 1951 student strike at Robert Russa Moton High School in Prince Edward County, Virginia, where sixteen-year-old Barbara Rose Johns organized 450 students to walk out and demand a new school. Attorneys from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the nation's preeminent civil rights organization, took the case on the condition that it challenge segregation itself. Virginia's elite mounted massive resistance, passing laws to close desegregating schools and debilitate the NAACP. After federal and state courts struck down the closure laws, Buchanan and colleague G. Warren Nutter circulated a report advocating privatization of education through vouchers, but the Virginia House of Delegates rejected the proposal. Buchanan drew lasting lessons: Elected officials could not be trusted when reelection was at stake, and radical transformation would require constitutional change. Prince Edward County closed all its public schools from 1959 to 1964 rather than integrate, leaving approximately eighteen hundred Black children without formal education. Buchanan said nothing about the tragedy.

MacLean traces Buchanan's intellectual formation from his Tennessee upbringing through doctoral training at the University of Chicago under Frank Hyneman Knight, where he converted to free-market economics. With funding from the William Volker Fund, a foundation that underwrote much of the early libertarian cause, he established his center at the University of Virginia. He and his colleague Gordon Tullock coauthored The Calculus of Consent in 1962, arguing that majority rule led to excessive government spending because coalitions of voters and politicians could impose costs on dissenting minorities. The book established the field of public choice economics, though critics noted its lack of empirical evidence.

Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, with Nutter as chief economic adviser, tested libertarian ideas electorally and produced the worst major-party defeat in over a century. Economist Milton Friedman parlayed his Goldwater association into a growing public profile, but Buchanan drew darker conclusions about the impossibility of winning popular support. A secret University of Virginia study found his department "rigidly committed to a single point of view" (96), and Buchanan departed for UCLA in 1968, then relocated to Virginia Tech. There he deepened ties to wealthy donors, including the Scaife family, and at a 1973 Richmond banquet outlined his vision for creating a "counter-intelligentsia" to change how people thought about government, insisting privately that "conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential" (117). With Scaife Foundation funding, Buchanan and allies created organizations connecting scholars with politicians and corporate donors, while law professor Henry Manne launched economics institutes that eventually trained more than 40 percent of sitting federal judges in free-market legal analysis.

MacLean devotes significant attention to Charles Koch's radicalization. Koch inherited and expanded his father's oil-refining business into the second-largest privately held company in America. His father, Fred Koch, a cofounder of the John Birch Society, a far-right anti-communist organization, instilled in his sons a hatred of collectivism. Murray Rothbard, a Koch-subsidized libertarian economist, advised Koch to study Lenin's revolutionary methods: cultivate a disciplined cadre of ideological operatives and maintain doctrinal purity. In 1977, Koch, Rothbard, and operative Edward Crane III founded the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Buchanan's 1975 book The Limits of Liberty argued that democracy had become its own Leviathan and that constitutional changes were needed to permanently constrain majority rule.

MacLean details Buchanan's 1980 consultation with Chile's military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet. After the 1973 coup against elected president Salvador Allende, the regime imposed radical reforms designed by José Piñera, a devotee of Buchanan's free-market school of thought: banning industry-wide unions, privatizing social security, and introducing school vouchers. Buchanan provided guidance on drafting a constitution with "severe restrictions on the power of government" (159), including mandatory balanced budgets and supermajority requirements for new expenditures. The constitution was ratified in a plebiscite conducted during a state of emergency with no voter rolls and no foreign observers. Buchanan never publicly discussed the consultation. When Chileans voted Pinochet out in 1988, the new democratic government inherited surging inequality and a constitution that made deep reform nearly impossible.

In 1982, Buchanan moved to George Mason University, which became what the Wall Street Journal called "the Pentagon of conservative academia" (174). Despite high hopes, the Reagan revolution failed to deliver lasting change: When the public learned of proposed Social Security cuts, "the democracy had defeated the doctrine" (176). Buchanan coached the Cato Institute on a deceptive strategy to undermine Social Security by discrediting its viability, dividing beneficiaries, and cultivating financial-sector allies who would profit from privatization. Staff at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, produced a follow-up plan explicitly titled "Achieving a 'Leninist' Strategy." Buchanan's 1986 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences validated the cause's intellectual project.

When House Republicans' mid-1990s Contract with America failed because voters rejected its proposed cuts, Koch concluded that Buchanan's ideas were the missing operational strategy. In 1997, Koch pledged $10 million to a new Buchanan Center at George Mason, telling grantees he wanted to "unleash the kind of force that propelled Columbus to his discoveries" (194-95). Koch's operative Richard Fink controlled operations, and when a fund-raising letter exposed the center's political activities, potentially violating its tax-exempt status, Buchanan called the exploitation of his name something that "verges on fraud" (201). The university sided with the operatives. Buchanan effectively retired, and when he died in 2013, neither Koch nor Fink attended his memorial.

MacLean's conclusion catalogs the movement's consequences as described by its own insiders. Tyler Cowen, a libertarian economist who succeeded Buchanan at George Mason, forecasts that "the United States as a whole will end up looking more like Texas" (213), with deteriorating public services and growing inequality. The Flint, Michigan, water crisis is traced to the Mackinac Center, a Michigan policy institute funded by Koch-linked interests, which pushed legislation enabling appointed emergency managers to override local government. Koch-funded organizations have spread climate change denial, public education is being dismantled through budget cuts, and workers' collective bargaining rights have been systematically weakened. MacLean identifies the U.S. Constitution itself as the movement's ultimate target, citing Cowen's recommendation for "big-bang style clustered bursts" of policy change to overwhelm democratic resistance (223-24). She concludes that the movement aims to create a nationwide version of midcentury Virginia's oligarchy, preserving elite control while discarding explicit racial oppression, and warns that Americans must act before "those who are imposing their stark utopia will choose for us" (234).