Jul 13, 2017
KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Professor Nancy Maclean about her latest book, 'Cemocracy in Chains'.
Nancy MacLean attempts to show how ideas were forged in a last-gasp attempt, she believes, to preserve the white elite's power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. By recasting the era's legal and social-movement successes, James M. Buchanan developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the majority's ability to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were eager to support Buchanan's work in teaching others how to divide America into ‘makers’ and ‘takers'. And, she alleges, when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan's strategy.
Based on ten years of research, this work tells what many will consider to be a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok, and is a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.