Agent: Susan Rabiner, Susan Rabiner Literary. Her work here is a feat of American intellectual and political history. She has delivered another deeply important book that will interest general readers and scholars alike. MacLean examines the reach of this powerful group and its think tanks, such as Charles Koch’s Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Moreover, the cadre of wealthy libertarians he inspired still persists in contemporary politics. It establishes the Jim Crow roots of the modern right, not just through the GOP’s southern strategy but through shared doubts about the compatibility of property rights and democratic rule. His theories, according to MacLean, influenced the push for privatizing education. Democracy in Chains assembles all of these fragments into a much more coherent, and much more frightening, whole. In a thoroughly researched and gripping narrative, she exposes how Buchanan’s strategies shaped trends in government in favor of “corporate dominance” and against the welfare state. MacLean makes the convincing argument that an American “paloecapitalist” elite has sought to destroy our institutions in pursuit of their own “economic liberty.” Focusing on Buchanan, winner of the 1986 Noble Prize in Economics and mastermind behind public choice theory, MacLean traces his career and influence, including over former Virginia governor Harry Byrd and Chile’s former military ruler, Augusto Pinochet. MacLean ( Freedom Is Not Enough) constructs an erudite, searing portrait of how the late political economist James McGill Buchanan (1919–2013) and his deep-pocketed conservative allies have reshaped-and undermined-American democracy.
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