This presidency can't be saved. It's all downhill from here. - By Jennifer Rubin

[Gabi Hayes]

51. You know Democracy in Chains?

This has been in the works for almost 60 years

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/nancy-maclean/


It seems inevitable the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy” will pop into your head while reading Duke University historian Nancy MacLean’s disquieting Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. After all, the phrase made famous by Hillary Clinton in the 1990s popped into MacLean’s head a few times while she researched and wrote her book.

It would seem an apt description, given the covert undermining of American democratic foundations and institutions by the extreme libertarian movement MacLean documents in Democracy in Chains. But as pernicious as the movement is, it “is not a conspiracy,” she said in an interview. “A conspiracy involves illegality, and this movement, while it operates by stealth, is generally careful to stay within the rules that exist.”

She uses “fifth column assault” instead. She acknowledged “fifth column” also is “a phrase with a fraught history.” But the academics, operatives, ideologues, and billionaires of the radical right “have a fundamental hostility to our form of government as it existed over the 20th century,” and seek to vanquish it from within.

Democracy in Chains expands on Jane Mayer’s reporting in Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Where Mayer follows the radical right’s money trail, MacLean examines its intellectual origins—“the master plan behind it,” as she writes in her book’s introduction. Her findings will leave you deeply concerned for our democracy and civic life.