Nancy MacLean & Anastasia Mann—Democracy in Chains

Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. We invite you to hear about and discuss author Nancy McLean’s exposé of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, and change the Constitution. McLean is Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University; she will be joined by Anastasia Mann, Lecturer in the Humanities Council and the Program in American Studies at Princeton University.
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’ (Viking Books) 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.