Harry
Targ
(We
are witnessing many forms of voter suppression. Gerrymandering continues.
Reactionary minorities move to pact the court. Politicians work to undermine
the desires of majorities on education, health care, jobs, and the environment.
In short, the processes and substance of democracy are under threat. Nancy
MacLean, see below, told us how some of the threat to democracy in recent years
has unfolded. October 14, 2020).
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.
