Nancy MacLean is the William H. Chafe distinguished professor of history and public policy at Duke University. Her 2017 book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, was a landmark study of the papers of the economist James M. Buchanan at George Mason University in Virginia. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction; it won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Current Interest, the Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Award, and the Lillian Smith Book Award. We spoke by telephone in early March.
“If we’re ever going to get out of the situation we’re in now, we have to go back and recognize the dark money donors that are behind all this mayhem.”
Q: Let’s start with your book, Democracy in Chains, where you looked at how the philosophy of James Buchanan ended up becoming a playbook for the Koch brothers and others. You talk about it rising from the original attempts to counter desegregation in schools.
Nancy MacLean: James Buchanan was the first Southerner to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. His whole corpus of work over his career was really a more sophisticated way for the neoliberal or market fundamentalist right to attack the public [sphere]. Rather than just making a case for free markets—markets freed from regulation or social obligation, as Milton Friedman did—Buchanan was more sophisticated. He realized that you couldn’t just make a case for the market, you had to undermine the government.
Buchanan developed this body of ideas he called public choice economics. But also, and crucially for our time, he developed a way of understanding the sources of twentieth-century public policy and how those policies came from organized collective efforts by social movements, including labor.
Nancy MacLean
And from that, he developed a vision and a strategy for essentially reversing these public policies through elaborate rules changes, culminating in Constitutional change. So all the things that we’re seeing come from the Republican Party, as it’s been taken over by the Koch donor network; they really are a weaponized version of Buchanan’s ideas.
That helps us explain the focus of the Koch donor network and many of the operations it funds on changing the composition of the judiciary to the point where we now have six Koch network justices of the nine on the Supreme Court, and also the changing curricula in law schools and the changing of Constitutional understanding through litigation, including decisions like Citizens United, Shelby v. Holder, the Janus case, and so on.
Q: You also have a chapter about the Koch network in a new book called Capitalism Contested: The New Deal and Its Legacies. Talk a bit about how rightwing donors are supporting this transformation of our voting rights in the United States.
MacLean: It’s really quite dramatic. Almost as soon as the 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision gutted the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the political radical right [declared] open season on voting rights around the country. They understand their agenda is terribly unpopular, that nobody wants the extreme, libertarian agenda. So the only way that they can win is by weaponizing prejudices of different kinds to drive [their] voters to the polls and suppressing the vote [of others]. This has been a focus of groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, an intrinsically antidemocratic project.
Q: ALEC has been the source of a lot of the model legislation that led to these different voter ID laws around the country, laws designed to address a problem that does not exist.
MacLean: Yes. All based on these accusations of mass voter fraud, which again depend on prejudice—the assumptions that Black and brown voters are somehow illegitimate. These are the same kinds of people and organizations that earlier got their start with the tobacco industry disinformation and then climate science denial. They have engaged in decades of deliberately trying to misinform the public. So we shouldn’t be surprised then that they also whine about voter fraud.
Q: Draw that line for us a little bit more clearly. Who are the players in that, and where’s the thread of the money?
MacLean: There’s a fascinating book called Poison Tea, about the Tea Party and its connection to this whole previous tobacco effort. It points also to the role of Citizens for a Sound Economy, an organization started by Charles Koch and Richard Fink, his lead adviser at George Mason University. And what they did was a trial balloon in the 1980s with Citizens for a Sound Economy, which essentially tried to get [corporate] buy-in to a political project that would mobilize allegedly grassroots power out in the states to help embattled companies. They had the idea—partly derived from Buchanan—of going out to the states and the districts and putting pressure on members of Congress.
Q: This is really all about money, ultimately. It’s about how the rich can keep what they have and get more of it. In your book Democracy in Chains, you say the leaders of this Koch-funded movement “had no scruples about enlisting white supremacy to achieve capital supremacy.” Talk about using these white supremacist groups basically as pawns or, as in the case of the Capitol insurrection, as shock troops, to push this deeper economic agenda.
MacLean: They have done this repeatedly, showing this willingness to rely on pretty creepy shock troops, funding causes that recruit at gun shows, and agitating these forces who were involved in the reopening protests. Current researchers on the Koch network, including DeSmogBlog and True North Research, have shown that many of the groups leading these really ugly reopen protests during the pandemic were funded by the Koch network and its allies.
Similarly, the Republican politicians who encouraged the January 6 insurrection are longtime beneficiaries of Koch network money. It’s really important that journalists begin to connect these stories, because if we’re ever going to get out of the situation we’re in now, we have to go back and recognize the dark money donors that are behind all this mayhem. So it is clearly important to expose the donor role and to demand accountability, particularly from brand-sensitive corporations.
Q: What does the Koch infiltration into academia mean in the long term?
MacLean: There are Koch-funded centers at a growing number of campuses. The flagship operation is at George Mason University, which also houses the Antonin Scalia School of Law. But they are all over the place now, including on my own campus, Duke University. These Koch-funded centers do a number of things. First, they falsely credential faculty members and have their own alternate network of journals and associations, so these dogmatic libertarians look like they have a publishing history and can get positions in universities.
They also use programs directed at undergraduates to get students involved; they talk about it as a talent pipeline for the Koch operations, which they never had before. They’re finding, identifying, and buying off students. These university centers also act as defense for the whole Koch operation. They come after anyone who challenges them or who exposes them. I experienced that myself.
Another example of this dangerous infiltration of campuses is something called “campus reform” that Koch donors fund. And this is really almost a kind of a vigilante operation to try to entrap progressive faculty members and run campaigns against them that make their lives hell and try to get them fired or censured or out of the classroom. And they particularly come after faculty of color and contingent faculty without tenure who are more vulnerable. As the group, UnKoch My Campus, wrote in an early report, it is a kind of Trojan horse in higher education and it really needs attention. And faculty and students need to organize to expose it.
Q: In a recent email newsletter, you spoke about what the Biden Administration should watch out for from Koch-funded groups.
MacLean: It’s really important that Biden and Congressional Democrats understand that what these people really want to do is to end social insurance of any kind—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, et cetera. They need to help members of the general public turn their eyes to the donors and this arch-right agenda that’s coming from some of the richest people in the world.
They are very attuned to how to manipulate rules and change structures. They’ve taken great advantage of that, essentially using the power of Senators who represent a tiny minority of the country. Things like statehood for Washington, D.C., and statehood for Puerto Rico (should the voters of Puerto Rico seek that), these are critical to changing the balance of power.
Look what a difference that would make to the Biden Administration right now. Also, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has a very important project called Captured Courts, where he has really exposed more powerfully than anyone else in Congress, the way in which the Koch network has stacked the judiciary through very suspect means. So that’s another place where we need to pay attention.
Q: What do you see as possibilities if people are able to expose the financial interests of these forces that are manipulating the U.S. public?
MacLean: Progressive groups have learned a tremendous amount from their own experiences and observations over many years, but particularly in the Trump era. The Trump era was ironically a real wake-up call, seeing how much the donors were able to achieve and recognizing that all of our futures are on the line, unless we really come together to defend and renew democracy. We’ve seen much more cooperation across sectors on the progressive side, from environmentalists to unions, to community organizations, to civil rights groups and feminists.
There’s much more communication and coordination and cooperation going on. There’s a pervasive sense that we are facing an existential threat from the right, which has shown itself to be deeply and profoundly anti-democratic. But people also realize, too, that this crisis has created an opportunity for the kinds of needed reforms to our democracy.
There’s tremendous energy, talent, and vision out there on our side, but we need to break through these shackles to bring that better world into being.