By The RIGHT Of It or It Just Doesn't Seem RIGHT

[Rebecca Kalamata]

So many of us can't figure out what is going on or why what is going on continues to do so. Though this post is long, it does answer some of my questions.

Democracy In Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,

Matthew Fox

This book rips open the veil which is covering up what is really happening in Washington—and it is far deeper than President Trump (whom the media fetishes and fixates on breathlessly), or the Republicans vs the Democrats; or left vs. right. There is a strategy, albeit stealth, at work. A movement whose pet name for the federal government is “the American Leviathan” which is a “monster on a rampage.”  (Buchanan)  (117)  The Leviathan is, of course, a Biblical figure whom God would destroy at the end of time.

A Sobering Tale of the Demise of American Democracy (Part I)

Historian Nancy MacLean’s book, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, is scarier than a Stephen King novel or a movie such as “The Exorcist.”  Yet the former is non-fiction through and through!  The author declares she is offering up “the utterly chilling story of the ideological origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance.”[1]

Chilling as it is, Democracy in Chains is also necessary reading for anyone interested in the purposeful unraveling of American Democracy that is racing ahead so furiously and that the current Paul Ryan/Donald Trump Republican party is pushing forward relentlessly.  It is a must-read for anyone asking: “What happened to the Republican Party?  Where did the Tea Party come from?  Where is it going?  What is its agenda?  What rabbit holes are we being asked to enter next?  What is the end game?”

The bottom line to this book can be summarized as follows: You can kiss government “of the people, by the people, for the people” Good-Bye if the principal players in this book have their way.  And much is going their way at this time.  (How ironic that it was the first and greatest Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who left those words of government of, by and for the people, in our collective memories.)  The goal of this movement is a government of the few, by the few and for the few along with a government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations.

MacLean has done a masterful job of laying bare the philosophy and thinkers that lay behind the activism of the deep right movement of our generation.  She tells us whose intellectual shoulders the Koch brothers (and their countless progeny of think tanks, universities, law departments, economic departments, politicians, judges, etc) stand on and how it all came about.  The litany of institutions spawned by the Koch brothers and their wealthy donors include the following: the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth, the State Policy Network, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Tax Foundation, the Reason Foundation, the Leadership Institute, the Charles Koch Foundation, Koch Industries and more. 

(One has to marvel at the fecundity of the right-wing—and ask where are more progressive thinkers and corporations putting their wealth?  Where is the fecundity from the left?  Where are the scholarships for young thinkers and activists from the left?  Is all the money sitting offshore making interest for shareholders?  Is it all going to create prettier campuses for tech schools?  Where is the support for authentic values education?  I don’t see anything of that happening frankly and I have been in the field of values education for over forty-five years and that includes support for spirituality and progressive politics.  Do you?)

Among the most revered “intellectual saints” of the extreme rights movement are Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Friedrich A. Hayet and—here lies the heart of this book’s revelations—James McGill Buchanan and his “Buchanan Center for Study of Public Choice.”  MacLean had unusual (and almost accidental) access to Buchanan’s private papers and this forms the meat of her book.  What does she find?  She puts it bluntly: The stealth agenda and supreme value is “To save capitalism from democracy—permanently.”   Theirs is “a quest to ensure the supremacy of capital.” (xxxi)

Buchanan began his movement at the University of Virginia in 1956 and relocated to George Mason University “to train a new generation of thinkers to push back against Brown and the changes in constitutional thought and federal policy that had enabled it.” (xix)  He also had in mind "a much more audacious project, one that was national in scope,” that is to train operatives who would eventually staff the Koch brother’s network of think tanks alluded to above.  Koch, of course, gave multi-millions of dollars over the years to Buchanan and all of these enterprises.  These think tanks advised many Republican actors over the decades including Trump administration hires along with their staffs, Virginia governors, presidential candidates and Supreme Court judges.  One hire is Vice President Mike Pence who “has worked with many of these organizations over the years and shares their agenda.” (xx)  No one could say this movement has not been successful in their efforts.

Let us look briefly at the origins of this movement/cult/political-economic crusade dedicated to the proposition that democracy must not interfere with capitalism.  The movement burst on the scene in Virginia’s response to the Supreme Court decision Brown v Board of Education to desegregate schools. (While it was born of racism, part of the strategy of the movement, however, is to never bring up the subject of race or racism and of course to deny it if someone else brings it up.)  Its roots go back to Jim Crow days and to the slave times and the philosophy of then Senator John C. Calhoun as well as to mid-fifties Virginia, that of Senator Harry Byrd, Sr. who “exhumed Calhoun’s theories of government” in his battle against school integration.  (10)

Feast on some of the wisdom of Calhoun who pronounced thus: “Slavery is an institution ordained by Providence, honored by time, sanctioned by the gospel, and especially favorable to personal and national liberty.”  Notice the word “liberty” because that is central (that and the word “freedom”) to the ideology that followed, civil war included.)  Comments MacLean: “If he [Calhoun] deemed it necessary to punish one of his workers with '30 lashes well laid on’ and a diet of ‘bread and water,’ as he did a young runaway slave named Aleck, such was his prerogative as an owner.  How he disciplined his labor force to keep his enterprise profitable should be no one else’s business.”  (9f) 

That is what liberty meant to Calhoun and its meaning is not that different in the rhetoric intoned today.  To ensure the endurance of one’s profits, the idea of a federal government was a menace.  That is what “liberty” still means to his admirers in the extreme right.  The dominance of “the aggressive few over the collective rights of the many” is alive and well in moves the red states are taking today including of course the push to limit voting rights (winked at by today’s Supreme Court which dismantled the voting rights act). (p. 5)

What is the agenda?  The goal of this movement is not merely to change who rules by achieving success in election; but rather to change the rules.  Only by changing the rules can they succeed since the majority of Americans, when they eventually wake up, do not see their goals as, well, all that American.  To accomplish this “revolution” (a word common in their parlance), their goal has to remain under wraps and as stealth as much as possible because if out in the open it would be roundly defeated in elections.  But truth-telling also suffers (“fake news,” anyone?) for where the agenda “could not be fully disguised, where necessary they had to be presented to the American public as the opposite of what they really were—as attempts to shore up rather than ultimately destroy—what the majority of American wanted, such as sound Medicare and Social Security programs.”  The argument put forward is that “we are protecting these programs so they won’t go bankrupt;” but in fact “the real goal was to destroy them.” (193f)

Thus the word reform is inserted whenever the truth is in danger of coming out.  Consider the recent “reform” of the tax code (the media in its intellectual laziness invariably succumbs to the language they are fed) that helped you-know-who the most and not those near the bottom or even middle of the economic ladder.  In a recent tweet by house speaker Paul Ryan, he lauds the new “tax reform bill” because it increased the pay of a secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, Pa, by $1.50 per week.  (sic)  Meanwhile, the same new” tax reform bill” will allow Ryan himself a $19,000 annual tax cut and the Koch brothers an estimated tax cut of $1.4 billion and Mr. Trump very likely much more than that.[2]  In their excited largess the Koch brothers, immediately on the tax “reform” bill passing, poured $500 billion into Paul Ryan’s coffers for the 2018 elections.  

How successful have the extreme right zealots been?  Consider that by 1990 “more than two of every five sitting federal judges had participated in his program—a stunning 40 percent of the U.S. federal judiciary had been treated to a Koch-backed curriculum.” (195)  Consider the number of laws being passed currently in state houses to curtail voting rights, increase gerrymandering, tell women what they can and cannot do with their bodies, etc.  Consider the make-up of the Supreme Court and its decisions, especially Citizens United, that has opened the floodgates for inviting an oligarchy to the head of the table.  (The newest supreme court judge was chosen by the Heritage Foundation along with many other lower court judges as well.)  Consider the complete frozenness of congress to pass legislation or govern.

Not all Republicans have gone along with Koch’s efforts to take over the party and declare all who disagree with him RINOS or “Republicans in name only.”  But throwing big money into primary elections proved immensely successful over time to seize the party and to expel all non-believers in their goals.  U.S. Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, one of the first longtime Republican senators to lose out to the movement, called those who attacked him “cannibals” who are eager to bring about “the end of governing as we know it.”  (xxvii)  Orin Hatch at first said “they’re not Republicans” and “I despise these people.”  But then, like so many others, he relented, learned the new rules of the game and came on board.  Former House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio called one of their leaders, Ted Cruz, “Lucifer in the flesh.”  And of course, he fled the new Republican Party, retired as leader, and gladly returned to Ohio.

MacLean warns that our accustomed mindset (and surely that of the media) where we still think in terms of Republican vs. Democrat is so outdated and knee-jerk that we are not seeing what is truly underway. “A shrewd long game blocked from our sight by these stale classifications” is happening right under our noses.  (xxviii)

 

Edited February 10, 2020 by Rebecca Kalamata
typos