I’ve been telling anyone who will listen for the last 7 years or so, read “Democracy in Chains”.
Obviously enough people did not, because the nightmare scenario outlined in the book has come to pass, the culmination of 50 years of patient work by a cadre of true believing conservative activists and billionaires.
Draws the clear connection between the fight for Democracy and the fight for a livable planet.
Americans have been so arrogant, ignorant, and entitled, that they believed that the banking regulations that kept us from being robbed, the health practices that kept us from dying or being crippled, the labor laws that give us a weekend off and overtime, the international agreements that have shaped an extraordinary period without global war, the environmental laws that protect our air and water, and the norms and behaviors that kept our democracy strong – were all some kind of unchangeable natural order.
They did not understand that people fought and died for these things, and that they could be chipped away by a greedy few acting for their own benefit.
University of Wisconsin, Department of History:
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.Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy.