I sat down on Sunday to read the recent buzz-getting, backlash inducing political book Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean. The primary narrative of the writing is a quasi-biographic look at the life and oeuvre of James M. Buchanan. From his depression-era upbringing in Gum, Tennessee to the fading of his academic star in the mid-late 1990s, the author presents a person that seems to have had an outsized (relative to his notoriety) influence on the way modern American Libertarians think about macroeconomics and market ethics. There are no exactly straight lines to draw, say, between the Buchanan and the Tea Party movement in 2009/10, but there are kernels of faith that seem to have born fruit in how the Conservative judicial movement has been oriented to abdication of jurisprudence in cases involving corporate personhood, market regulation, &c. From that point of view, one could be sympathetic to the idea that this movement is a “fifth column” assault on American democracy. However, I think it could be said that the entire Conservative and Neo-Liberal movements are each more to blame for poisoning the well of political discourse with ideas that “any government is bad government”, which sufficiently normalized to the point that anyone not chanting that mantra (gooble gobble!) loud enough is deemed a limp centrist or some other rank innuendo.
I find it fascinating, though, that the book has become a bit of a touch point for one to lay down their partisan markers on the Right and Left. Personally, I enjoyed it less as the Liberal campfire horror story that some seem to think it is meant to be and more as an academic analysis of the historical context according the subject’s own writings and their influence on certain American Libertarian activists. Unlike the authors of the linked Vox article, I think the references and copious footnotes in the ~100 pages of backmatter provide a solid place for one to look deeper into any particular claim being made. Despite the fair amount of research done, it is certainly not an iron clad case being made; not all of the conclusions reached are convincing. But I do think that it brings some of the ideas behind the rightward lurch of the past some fifty years, and for that it is worth a read.
As a small tangential criticism, the way that Tyler Cowen is presented is a bit less than generous. To be clear, I do not agree with Tyler Cowen on his reasons for optimism concerning the outcomes of a deregulated market economy, but I do think he communicates from a place of intellectual honesty that others in his circle willfully do not approach. I feel like her point could have been made more clearly on the way the ideas have percolated through academia, media, politicians, and back with the example of someone like Ron Paul who has occupied in some form or the other each of those spaces and has been a more popular figure spouting some of the same weak arguments.
My ultimate reaction to and takeaway from the book is that the current state of exchange and discourse is insufficient to undo most of the damage done by the shift to a blinkered, short-sighted view of the potential contained in American democratic institutions; at least it will not be fixed in my lifetime. That said, I came away feeling energized with a desire to enter into the public sphere and excise the mental rot, the social cancer that the people behind this intellectual fraud have inflicted. After all, why the hell has cultural and intellectual ground been ceded so that the Teds Cruz, Stephens Miller, and Mitchells McConnell have any political oxygen to breathe?
