The Deep Delusions of The GOP Stripped Down

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2. A little-known economist, James Buchanan, also played a role in destroying government.

His ideas caught the attention of the Kochs, and they funded the dissemination of his radical right ideas. If you have not read Democracy in Chains, by Nancy McLean, it is a fascinating read. Here’s an excerpt from a brief summary of the book.

“Behind today's headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect - the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan - and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.

In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite's power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.”

From https://www.bookbrowse.com/bb_briefs/detail/index.cfm/ezine_preview_number/12452/democracy-in-chains