Democracy in Chains

In 1956, the year after Brown v. Board of Education, James McGill Buchanan — a Tennessee economist at the University of Virginia — began developing the intellectual framework that would eventually provide the philosophical foundation for the Koch brothers' decades-long campaign to dismantle democratic governance. MacLean, a Duke historian with access to Buchanan's personal papers, traces the sixty-year arc from Buchanan's original insight — that democracy itself was the problem, that majority rule was a form of tyranny against those with capital — through his alliance with Charles Koch, the capture of George Mason University, and the construction of the most sophisticated and well-funded anti-democratic infrastructure in American history. The broad argument is essential: that the language of freedom, choice, and individual rights has been systematically weaponized against the democratic mechanisms by which majorities could challenge concentrated wealth. MacLean's specific claims about Buchanan's intentions and the degree of coordination have been contested by libertarian scholars, some of whom have documented conflicts of interest and some of whom have documented real evidentiary problems with her sourcing. Read it alongside Jane Mayer's Dark Money, which covers the Koch network from a journalistic angle with a more cautious evidentiary standard. Together they are the most complete account available of how the radical right built its infrastructure.