Democracy in Chains

The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

De: Nancy MacLean

Narrado por: Bernadette Dunne

Duración: 11 h y 32 m

Resumen del Editor

Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Finalist for the National Book Award

The Nation's "Most Valuable Book"

“[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.” (The Atlantic)

“This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains.... If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be.” (NPR)

An explosive exposé of the right's relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution.

Behind today's headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.

In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last-gasp attempt to preserve the white elite's power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority 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 only too eager to support Buchanan's work in teaching others how to divide America into "makers" and "takers". And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multiarmed machine to carry out Buchanan's strategy.

Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as vice president, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on 10 years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of 20th-century American self-government.

©2017 Nancy MacLean (P)2017 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"[A] remarkably important book...this book is a superb contribution to our understanding of the rise of libertarian notions and right-wing political power in the US. If you wonder how the Supreme Court came to define speech as money or corporations as people, this volume will help you to figure it out.... The melting ice caps, if nothing else, stand as testament to the folly of listening mainly to the rich and powerful." (Bill McKibben, The Times Literary Supplement)

"Democracy in Chains leaves me with hope: Perhaps as books like MacLean’s continue to shine a light on important truths, Americans will begin to realize they need to pay more attention and not succumb to the cynical view that known liars make the best leaders." (New York Times Book Review)

"A remarkable new book which argues that the radical right revolution engineered by Charles and his brother David is not just about accruing political and economic power, but about restricting democracy itself." (The New Republic)

Important political book

This book helped me greatly to understand today's political climate in America writ large. I always struggled to understand what those on the right meant when they spoke of freedom, as their concept of that idea seemed to be the opposite of mine. This book helped me understand that difference. If you have a cognitive dissonance with people on the right, this book is well worth your time.

Mind Blowing

This may be the most important political commentary of this generation. If you want to know why the GOP has moved farther and farther to the right, listen to Professor MacLean. I immediately restarted it when I finished. Well done.

Eye opening!

This book is without a doubt the most eye opening review of what the Libertarians have been planning for America for years by using Republicans to get what they want. The sad part is how Americans have been used to hand power to a few American oligarchs at their own expense. Democracy as we have known it is in a death spiral.

powerful, terrifying

a must-read for anyone trying to understand the Kochtopus and the impending libertarian dystopia

Scary to imagine this could be true.

Hatred, greed, and the worst of human nature is leading America away from democracy towards an oligarchy. It is up to the people of our great country to heed the warnings and fight to maintain America as the beacon of light, before America becomes a democracy in chains. Do we want an America that only works for the wealthy? Do we want America to become Chile?

This is a must read book for any citizen that wants to understand the master plain of the Koch brothers and their master plan to rule America as kings of fortune, while the dream of America dies for the rest of the American Citizens.

Should be required reading by everyone

Accurately describes the diabolically frightening threats that American democracy faces at every level of government

An honest, fair and frightening assessment

Learned things every minute of listening that I probably should have learned decades ago but was not ready too accept. A work that elucidates and explicates the tragedy of our current state of affairs. You will not be bored perhaps saddened but never bored.

This book has info all US Citizens should learn.

Democracy in chains is a frightening expose of an attempt to quash liberty in the name of liberty! It details the evolution of "libertarianism" from a far right cult into a violent totalitarian movement.

If you’re a patriotic American, this is a must read.

Nancy MacLean’s scholarship has removed the veil and reveals the plan to destroy American democracy by the minority: wealthy white landowners.

Crucial for understanding the attach on Democracy

Thia book is crucial for understanding the attack on American democracy and the people of the United States by would-be oligarchs and autocrats, and how that plan to disenfranchise the majority was first hatched in response to desegregation in the 1950s and has been been implemented with increasing devastation over the decades since. If these men have their way, Flint is but a pleasant precursor of things to come.