Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

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 businessmen like the Koch brothers 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. A chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok, Democracy in Chains is not only a revelatory work of scholarship, but also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government and democracy itself