MacLean, N. (2018).
Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for
America. New York, NY, USA: Penguin Books.
I recently discovered “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” (p. xvii).
A Quiet Deal in Dixie
This is how the story
begins: Virginia state officials were outraged by
Brown v. Board of Education and “responded with legislation to force the
closure of any school that planned to comply” (p. xv). Darden (president of UVA)
and Buchanan (newly appointed economics department chair who founded the
Virginia school of political economy and later
Nobel Prize winner) saw it as an
incursion on states’ rights. States’ rights were yielding to individual rights;
other Virginia laws would be under threat (p. xvi).
If I were of a libertarian bent, I would throw money at trying to discredit
MacLean (who accidentally stumbled upon the documents that supplied the
critical content of this book). That’s what the chemical industry did to
Rachel Carson and still does today.
