Abstract
Question: Why review a historian’s book in Journal of Communication Inquiry? Along with their other functions, information and research (particularly their dubious variants) have long been (and increasingly are) weaponized. As Oreskes and Conway (2010) demonstrate, the production of weaponized information was evident in the decades-long cigarette industry campaign to befog the dangers of their products in informational smoke; a campaign that has furnished the template for today’s carbon discourse hustlers. In each case, as the scientific evidence solidified, the issue was relitigated within the arena of communications as a “debate” among “experts.” The advent of new media across the past two decades has endowed informational warfare with new theaters in which to operate. As concerns the campaign for “neoliberal,” “free-market” economics, the recruitment of ostensible think tanks and the prestige of university affiliations are not new, as Soley (1995) demonstrated more than 20 years ago. However, the effort has been endowed with a steroid diet in the era of the communications revolution.
Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains operates on this terrain of cross-examining neoliberal research programs. The volume presents a commanding research effort that enacts what scholarship should be: massively researched (60 pages of endnotes, 18 pages of sources including extensive archival work) and narratively interesting. And, finally, the book channels white-knuckle urgency that concerns the long-waged “libertarian” campaign to empower the unregulated market and moneyed interests while circumscribing representative governance. This version of predatory capitalism is one that the Adam Smith of The Wealth of Nations and his more principled inheritors would surely not endorse for being so rigged in the first instance toward extreme wealth and its concomitants (notably, monopolies).
In the “Introduction,” MacLean asks whether contemporary libertarian political economy intends to “destroy our institutions, or at least change them so radically that they become shadows of their former selves?” (p. xvii). Government interventions and protections are overwhelmingly supported by likely U.S. Republican, Democrat, and Independent voters—specifically, interventions for full employment, progressive taxes on rich people, a “Green New Deal,” as well as to arrest student debt and offshore tax loopholes (Progressive Change Institute, n.d.). Given the blindingly obvious appeal of better government, in MacLean’s recounting, “The puzzle that pre-occupied” libertarian, uber-strategist, and billionaire funder Charles Koch was how to hollow out government “in a democracy where most people did not want what he did” (p. xxv). To wit, as a baseline matter of decency as well as of self-interest, most people do not want a market regime without recourses against market predation; a regime that excises public investments (from all levels of education, to public health and safety, to research on “sunrise” industries) from the social contract. MacLean suggests that this variant of contemporary libertarianism is a “back-to-the-future” movement, with the “small-government,” 19th-century southern U.S. taken as the model to emulate.
The foundations of post-World War II Keynesianism/Fordism have been under bombardment for decades (Harvey, 2005). MacLean’s contribution to the literature traces the process of theorizing strategies and tactics for a “libertarian” new order; strategies and tactics that have implicated funding and training libertarian “movement intellectuals” and technocrats to enter the cultural apparatus (media, academics) and the government’s third branch, the judiciary. To be clear, the libertarian project is not just a campaign for handsome tax cuts. The project is to gut government—hard-assed policing of streets, not suites, notwithstanding—and leave behind a sparse toolbox for the public and its representatives to intervene in market machinery and its social consequences. By 2018, the project is beginning to demonstrably bend the contours of the social contract.
James M. Buchanan and his career arc as an economist are plotted into the central role in MacLean’s narrative. In MacLean’s narration, Buchanan long cultivated foundation and corporate sponsors and was active in circles that summoned neoliberalism’s leading international exponents (notably, Mont Pelerin Society, founded by Friedrich Hayek). By the closing decades of the 20th century, Koch strategically and aggressively backed Buchanan and his many fellow travelers’ turbocharged promotion of an unbridled market order.
A couple of chapters were of particular interest to this reader. In Chapter 7, entitled “A World Gone Mad,” MacLean discusses Buchanan’s coauthored book-cum-manifesto during the campus convulsions of the late 1960s. In MacLean’s narration, Buchanan aimed to depoliticize the student body and tame unruly campus culture via strong doses of “market discipline.” In this view, hefty tuition/student debt, with its attendant constraints on life trajectories, can (re)shape universities with a force that does not rely on coercion. Similarly, academic disciplines that entertain reservations about the prevailing system, rather than resolutely reproducing it, should feel the lash. Regardless of whether the manifesto was followed by anyone in particular in a programmatic manner, Buchanan put memes into circulation that still waft through public discourse and have been at least partly realized (pp. 102–105). Also notice that, beyond Buchanan’s memes, stepped-up surveillance and harassment of the university have become evident in recent years, in part through summoning brigades of “flying monkeys” from the internet (Quintana & Read, 2017).
Chapter 10, “A Constitution with Locks and Bolts,” examines Buchanan’s discreet consultations in 1980 with the Pinochet junta that was terrorizing Chile’s population; conditions to which some peculiar “libertarians” responded with stiff cocktails of agnosia or apology. Following primary and secondary sources, MacLean posits Buchanan’s advice to the junta for a new constitution as an effort to champion the market and skew political representation toward right-leaning segments of the population—and to also set out rules that made the constitution not merely difficult, but all but impossible to amend. “Interestingly,” MacLean deadpans, “Buchanan never spoke of the Chilean consultation in his later publications” (p. 162). Buchanan appeared alert to the scorn toward the more flamboyant Milton Friedman for his technical support to Chile’s junta.
In their harsh reactions to Democracy in Chains, self-described center-left academics Farrell and Teles (2017) are unimpressed: “There is no strong evidence that Buchanan […] helped Pinochet design his authoritarian constitution” (p. 6). Farrell and Teles strain to avoid even a glance toward the big picture: At issue is not so much whether Buchanan mumbled the Chilean constitution into a dictaphone. The mere fact that he was wined, dined, and consulted by the junta, when its violent abuses were already well known, is damning in itself—and speaks loud and clear to the strange practices of some self-appointed champions of maximalist freedom. Moreover, MacLean makes the case that that Chile’s constitution broadly squares with Buchanan’s vision. Sudden thought: Can you imagine if, for example, Paul Krugman had advised and hobnobbed with Nicolae Ceauşescu and his team of thugs?
Even on market terms, Chile’s neoliberal experiments failed. MacLean observes that the privatization of Chile’s pensions system enabled paroxysms of private-sector corruption (bribes, tax evasion) that prosecutors eventually characterized as a fraud machine (p. 167)—one that left a shocking proportion of workers pauperized in retirement, as wealth was siphoned via outlandish fees for private-sector management. It is a precedent to bear in mind, MacLean suggests, in the light of Buchanan’s 1980s article for Cato Journal that prescribes an incremental method to privatize the United States’ popular social security program. The method calls for hair-on-fire insistence on a social security “crisis” that requires booby-trapped “reforms”, while playing age demographics off against each other (pp. 177–182). Plans of this sort answer to no necessity, beyond a spiteful effort to break bonds between the citizen and collective (rather than atomized and privatized) solutions to social problems, such as insurance against poverty in old age.
MacLean’s closing chapter, entitled “Get Ready,” refers to the convulsive aftershocks of “rewriting the social contract” to neoliberal specifications (p. 212). It is a fittingly bracing conclusion. MacLean cites attacks on public-sector unions, harassment of voting rights, and bulldozing into local authority when it does not exalt neoliberal deregulation (e.g., a Dallas ordinance against plastic bags). She also discusses an emerging legal environment that enables “fine print”–laden contracts that effectively immunize the private sector, come what may, and reckless outsourcing practices that have terrorized public health (e.g., Flint, MI, water supply [p. 214]). Concurrent with the publication of MacLean’s book, the “Trump-ettes” have reached for the scythe, in case anyone misses the pertinence of her thesis: from, for example, trashing the Environmental Protection Agency via a secretive administrator who is demonstrably hostile to the agency’s workforce and regulatory mission (Davenport & Lipton, 2017 to slashing tax revenue (Klein, 2017) in a move made-to-order to render functional government “unaffordable.”
As powerful as Democracy in Chains is, MacLean’s discussion of Buchanan’s public choice thesis is intermittent and shades toward cursory—although there is an admitted risk here of acting as if the political right believes in any doctrine beyond the expression of raw, hierarchal power (Robin, 2011). MacLean is also surprisingly telegraphic in her account of Buchanan’s sudden falling out with Koch (pp. 199–204).
Whereas MacLean outlines a “War of Position” for the liberated market—even as she does not employ the Gramscian term (Jones, 2006)—the only reference she makes to conspiratology in the book is unflattering. To wit, she associates conspiracy with vulgarization in the media and Internet environment that has talked over bread-and-butter issues (p. 224). Of course, conspiracies really exist; it is, indeed, a legal term. However, it is a stretch to mistake the “tree-tops” campaigns (elite, top down, and distinct from grassroots campaigns; Carey, 1995) that MacLean traces in the book with an author positing a conspiracy. The contours and implications of the neoliberal game plan have become sufficiently apparent that one would have to agree to “play dumb” and ignore the evidence that neoliberalism is a blueprint for a political and economic offensive against the majority of the population. Admittedly, the book’s subtitle likely encourages parties eager to brandish the “conspiracy” red herring. Nonetheless, characterizing the book’s discussion of fundamental class conflict as collapsing into conspiratology is as reifying as claiming that, for example, the New England Patriots are (cue feigned outrage) a conspiracy for leveraging their advantages in order to prevail over other entities.
At the end of her conclusion, MacLean also notes the attempts to harass Mayer (2016) over her superb investigatory volume on right-wing movements (Dark Money) that implicated private investigators and pressure on Mayer’s employers at New Yorker. MacLean asks, “Will I become the target of a similar scurrilous attack?” that raises professional and/or monetary “transaction costs” for critics (p. 232)? Answer: Bet money on it!
As a reviewer, I acknowledge that I cannot vouch for all of the 60 pages of endnotes—and passages with mischaracterizations have been flagged by authors whom MacLean cites (Farrell & Teles, 2017). Nonetheless, alongside criticism that presents rigor, right-wing think tankers have marched drearily to the front lines ; right-wing jobsworth Steven Hayward (2017), for example, who calls with unashamed politically correct censoriousness for the publisher to recall MacLean’s book. It bears notice that Hayward’s previous pantomimes of scholarship traffic in crudely Pavlovian partisan cues (see the title of Hayward, 2004) that are entirely innocent of original archival research but, nevertheless, endowed with the authority of a publication via longtime, right-wing discourse factory Regnery Press.
When one cross-references Nancy MacLean’s smart and outraged Democracy in Chains with external realities, her central argument is most timely: Get ready for convulsions in the economic and political sphere in the proximal future as an antisocial set of doctrines become embedded.