Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Nobel Prize-Winning Economist James McGill Buchanan’s Racism and the Foundation of the Right-Wing’s Project to Destroy Democracy

September 3, 2020

American economist James Buchanan won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economics (Atlas Network)

By Bill Berkowitz 

Origin stories are a dime a dozen; people trying to take credit for building a start-up company, an historical event, or even a starting a political movement.  Determining the origin of the modern conservative movement’s development and growth over the past forty years is at best a messy task. Nancy MacLean’s book New World Order, Democracy in Chains, The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, (Viking, 2017), details the inner workings of the right-wing project, highlighting the contributions of James McGill Buchanan, a white intellectual and Nobel Prize-winning economist, who provided key strategic direction to the billionaires of the radical right. 

FDR’s New Deal established  the social contracts and economic structures that became the targets for the modern day conservative movement’s anti-regulatory, anti-labor, anti-social safety net project, marked by market-based solutions and culture wars

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, in a moment of enlightened self-interest, the conservative movement consolidated its religious and secular arms, through the work of such Religious Right leaders as Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, Pat Robertson, and the development of such well-funded institutions as The Heritage Foundation and The Heartland Institute.  The financial support of conservative billionaires was critical to building the right-wing infrastructure that endures today. The presidency of Ronald Reagan, the advent of Falwell’s Moral Majority and Robertson’s Christian Coalition, and the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress, spearheaded by soon-to-become, and later disgraced, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, dramatically shifted the political landscape. 

Michael McHale, a Professor of Philosophical & Religious Studies at Saint Francis University, recently posted his observations about MacLean’s book on his Facebook page, stating that Democracy in Chains, a National Book Award Finalist,“is the most disturbing book I have read since The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer.” 

Encouraging people to read MacLean’s book, McHale writes: “The plan literally being put in place [by conservatives] goes all the way back to the school integration ruling of the Supreme Court of 1954. The book lays out very clearly the big money-backed plan led by John McGill Buchanan, and funded by billionaires like the Koch brothers, [whose aim was] to reverse the New Deal policies and end people's democracy as we know it, replacing it with a system controlled by a small minority of rich donors.” 

So who was James McGill Buchanan? According to Democracy in Chains’ MacLean, a Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, the work of Buchanan, the only winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics to have been born and based in the U.S. South, “was shaped by one singular event – the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.” He saw that decision as “yet another wave in a rising tide of unwarranted and illegitimate federal interference in the affairs of the states.” 

“At stake,” according to MacLean, “was nothing short of an attack on the sanctity of private property rights, with northern liberals telling southern cities how to spend their money and behave correctly. Given an institute to run on the campus of the University of Virginia, he promised to devote his academic life to understanding how the other side became so powerful and, ultimately to figuring out a strategy for breaking down the liberal state they had created in order to return it to its proper roots.” 

Buchanan, “specialized in public finance and disapproved of most government spending…. so he came to view groups such as labor unions, civil rights organizations, and even the … AARP as grasping ‘special interests.’…He came to describe these groups as ‘parasites on the productive’” …takers preying on makers.” 

“He came to the conclusion,” MacLean stated, “that the only way to stop this form of predatory behavior was to sharply curtain majority rule and restrict what voters and their representatives could decide.”     

In his recent Facebook post, Professor McHale claims that “The game plan includes mass privatization, including education, prisons, Social Security, most government functions, and to abolish all forms of public investment in any type of public institution from the public schools to the National Parks, the Post Office and literally every government function but the police and military.” One might easily add the delegitimizing of the media to the list. 

All of these privatization initiatives have to varying degrees been in play for more than four decades. Trump’s assault on the US Postal Service is only the latest effort. “Deconstruction of the administrative state” was a term coined by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. "If you look at these [Trump] Cabinet appointees, they were selected for a reason and that is the deconstruction, the way the progressive left runs, is if they can't get it passed, they're just gonna put in some sort of regulation in -- in an agency," Bannon said at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference. "That's all gonna be deconstructed and I think that that's why this regulatory thing is so important." 

[Note: Bannon is now under indictment for his fraudulent We Build The Wall scam.]

MacLean describes the details of “plans to destroy labor unions, lower wages, abolish all forms of regulation especially environmental legislation, drive down voter participation, and lay the legal foundation to do away with progressive taxes, and any social insurance help including all forms of access to public health care.

The conservative’s movement’s capital supremacist master plan “lays out very clearly the importance of destroying the Social Security system [and provides] clear details how to do it.” 

In a June, 2017 interview, MacLean further clarifies Buchanan’s contribution to this increasingly successful, but under the radar approach.  “From Buchanan, Koch learned that for the agenda to succeed, it had to be put in place in small incremental steps, many distinct yet mutually reinforcing changes of the rules that govern our nation. Koch’s team used Buchanan’s ideas to devise a roadmap for a radical transformation could be carried out largely below the radar of the people, yet legally.” 

Over the past three-+ years, the conservative movement has positioned itself within the narcissistic orbit of Donald Trump. For someone with no discernable ideological predilections beyond racism and a tilt towards authoritarianism, it is paradoxical that Trump would be the person who has done the most to successfully advance this conservative movement’s multi-decade stealth strategy. And advance it he has!

According to Professor McHale, control of the Senate is another essential key to the right’s strategy. “It's much easier investing in control of Senate seats in small states with tiny populations. After all, Who needs the millions of people from New York and California when you can get four seats from Idaho and Montana.”

McHale noted that he has “watched all of this unfold in my lifetime, and wrote my doctoral dissertation on the shift in economic policy under Ronald Reagan. I was under the impression that I drove stakes through the vampires including all the supply-side, budget balancing, monetarist thinkers but alas, I missed one, and he was the brains behind the stealth campaign.” 

Professor McHale concluded his post by stating that “If you have any questions about what has happened to America over the last 40-50 years and how we arrived at this fateful moment of 2020, Democracy in Chains tells the full story. There are no accidents, its all carefully planned and well-funded. The only thing that stands in the way? We, the people.”