Harry Targ
What
we are seeing today is a new iteration of that very old impulse in America: the
quest of some of the propertied (always, it bears noting, a particularly
ideologically extreme-and some would say greedy-subsection of the propertied)
to restrict the promise of democracy for the many, acting in the knowledge that
the majority would choose other policies if it could. (Nancy
MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep
History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, New York, Random House,
2017, 5).“Democracy in Chains”: Multiple Themes
Friends of mine insisted I read Nancy MacLean’s recent book, Democracy in Chains. Their enthusiasm for the book was so great that I finally picked it up. I found it profound as to how it addressed issues of political theory, consciousness, and political practice.
First, the book is a narrative biography of one
scholar of political economy, James Buchanan, who has had a significant impact
on the development of “public choice” theory in political science, sociology,
and economics. In addition, the text uses his biography to develop larger theoretical,
historical, and political themes.
Second, it is a book about what used to be called the
“sociology of knowledge”; that is how ideas are developed, disseminated,
institutionalized, and become dominant ways in which academic disciplines
address the subject matter they study.
Third, Democracy in Chains addresses the development
of democratic theory, relating contemporary ideas about public participation in
decision-making to eighteenth and nineteenth century American political theory.
Significantly, it addresses Professor Buchanan’s attraction to Southern
anti-federalist John C. Calhoun.
Fourth, the book provides a rich description of the
theory of “free markets” developed by the Austrian school of economics founded
by Ludwig von Mises and Fredrich Hayek and institutionalized by the economics
department at the University of Chicago.
Fifth, the book describes in some detail how scholars
such as James Buchanan and wealthy advocates of “free market” philosophies have
worked to influence higher education and public
policy, not only at the national level but through the states and local
government. The book describes how enormously wealthy free marketeers led by
Charles and David Koch, their association, the American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC), and hundreds of think tanks, lobby groups, and funded
politicians have been implementing their policy agenda.
Each of these themes richly developed by MacLean
deserves detailed examination and evaluation. As my exuberant friends suggested
to me, the MacLean book is a major work of political theory and policy analysis
that should significantly energize those progressives who see democracy in the
United States as an endangered species.
The
Threat to Democracy
But for starters, it is critical in 2018 to address
one of the central themes developed in her book, the contradiction between
democracy and capitalism.
MacLean analyzes central premises of the so-called
Austrian school of economics. Nineteenth and twentieth century luminaries from
this tradition, particularly Van Mises and Hayek, articulated the view that the
main priority of any society, but particularly democracies, is the extent to
which markets are allowed to flourish, unencumbered by governments.
According to this view in a truly free society markets
remain supreme. In fact, “liberty” exists in a society to the extent economic
actors are able to act in the market place. Virtually all limitations on
economic liberty so defined constitute a threat to “real” democracy.
Governments exist only to maintain domestic order (the police power) and to
defend the nation from external aggression (defense of national security).
Governments provide police protection and armies. And that should be all. In sum, as President Ronald Reagan
expressed the market vision: “Government is not the solution. Government is the
problem.”
To further illustrate, MacLean describes the brutal
dictatorship that overthrew the democratically elected president of Chile,
Salvador Allende. Allende, a socialist, was elected by a plurality in the 1970
presidential election in that country and in the spring, 1973 in municipal
elections held across the country, Allende’s coalition of parties drew even
more votes for their candidates than did Allende in 1970. The United States,
based on directives from President Nixon, had already moved to make the Chilean
economy “scream” and had initiated contacts with Chilean generals who would be
prepared to carry out a military coup against the popular government. The military coup, ousting Allende from power,
was launched, ironically on September 11, 1973.
As MacLean points out, in the aftermath of the coup,
General Augusto Pinochet rounded up and killed thousands of Allende supporters,
destroyed the long tradition of electoral politics, abolished trade unions, and
began the process of ending government involvement in the economy and public
institutions. Social security and education were privatized. Policies of
nationalization of key industries were reversed. All of the shifts to what the
Austrian school called economic liberty were imposed on the Chilean people with
the advice of University of Chicago economists, such as Milton Friedman, and
later, George Mason University economist, James Buchanan, who was instrumental
in recommending “reforms” to the Chilean constitution making return to
democracy more difficult. Subsequently only a few other dictatorships in Latin
America showed any sympathy for the Pinochet regime with most of the world
condemning its domestic brutality. But as MacLean reports, Milton Friedman and
his colleagues never condemned the Chilean regime and Buchanan regarded it as a
paradigmatic case of economic liberty, a model which the world should emulate.
Although the Chilean case represents an extreme
example of dictatorship and free market capitalism, she uses it to illustrate a
central point. In most societies, and the United States is no exception,
majorities of people endorse government policies that can and often do serve
the people. As a rule citizens support public transportation, schools,
highways, libraries, retirement guarantees, some publicly provided health care,
rules and regulations to protect the environment, as well as police and
military protection. The problem for Buchanan and his colleagues is that each
one of these government programs. except for the police and military, constrains
the “liberty” of entrepreneurs to pursue profit.
To put it simply, if citizens of the United States were
asked if they support public programs, majorities would say “yes.” Although there
have been extraordinary constraints on majority rule, even enshrined in the US
constitution, the history of the United States can be seen as a history of
struggle to improve and achieve majoritarian democracy. Demands for voting
rights for women, African/Americans, non-propertied and low-income workers and
others have been basic to the American experience. The great anti-colonial
struggles of the twentieth century all across the globe were premised on the vision
of individual and collective sovereignty of the people. If economic liberty is
conceptualized as inversely related to majoritarian democracy, then capitalism
and democracy are incompatible.
Nancy MacLean, based on this fundamental
contradiction, develops a narrative of efforts by celebrants of economic
liberty, the Koch brothers and their allies, to build campaigns in virtually
every state and locale to disenfranchise people. ALEC affiliates in state
legislatures over the last decade have promoted legislation to suppress the
right to vote, eliminate the rights of workers to unionize, disempower city
councils, eliminate the right of local governments to make fiscal decisions,
and to enshrine in curricula in K to 12 education systems and the universities
ideologies about the virtues of economic freedom. There are powerful political
pressures to privatize every existing public institution. Again, the best
government is no government (except for the maintenance of police force to
squelch demands for change and military power to protect the nation at home and
abroad).
So Democracy in Chains is as rich in analysis and
warning as my friends have suggested. Much more needs to be disaggregated and
discussed. But for starters Nancy MacLean is warning us that there is a
powerful drive, based on wealth and power, in the United States to destroy
democracy. This democracy, while flawed, has been fought for since the founding
of the United States. Its continuation, leaving aside its need for improvement,
is under fundamental threat.
