Democracy, especially as it became more inclusive, kept causing trouble for the men who wanted economic liberty—trouble that illuminates for us why they later adopted the strategy they did. “Prepare the lifeboats for possible emergency,” Gordon Tullock advised William F. Buckley in late October 1964. By then it was clear that Barry Goldwater, the candidate whom right-wing activists had worked so hard to make the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, was sinking fast in the polls and threatening to take the movement’s “morale” down with him.1 The ever shrewd Buckley was already one step ahead.
In September, the National Review editor had warned a convention of young conservatives, still giddy from having secured the nomination for their preferred candidate, to prepare for “the impending defeat of Barry Goldwater.” Some wept. But Buckley went on to deliver the hard truth they needed to hear. Thanks to their Herculean efforts, a historic opportunity had come—but far before its time. For a candidate such as Goldwater to be elected would presuppose “a great sea change in American public opinion.” That had not been achieved; the effort had barely begun. Buckley urged his listeners to see “the necessity of guarding against the utter disarray that sometimes follows a great defeat.” The young activists had to accept that “a counter-revolution” takes years of careful preparation.2
That work had barely begun, especially outside the South. Goldwater was campaigning on a vision of economic liberty that sounded much like that of Virginia’s 1956 States’ Rights presidential candidate, T. Coleman Andrews.3 And Andrews had garnered the largest share of the vote in only one community in the United States, Prince Edward County, not exactly the kind of place from which most Americans would want to take cues, especially with that county’s public schools still closed and black children going without education as the campaign season of 1964 approached. How in the world could Goldwater articulate their shared view of the just society and still get elected?
The man given “major staff responsibility for every one of the campaign’s important speeches,” as well as an equally important say in “every statement that left the [Republican] National Committee” in the campaign, “including political principles,” was Warren Nutter.4 Nutter would boast that he had personally written most of the candidate’s “speech to the platform committee (including [its section on] ‘civil rights’),” a section that rightly outraged veteran African American Republicans, because it replaced the party’s long-standing support for civil rights with a call for states’ rights. It also shocked moderate white northern Republicans, veteran GOP voters who were not eager to enforce full citizenship for blacks but also did not like stepping in line with the refractory white South. “For those of us who revere the memory of Abraham Lincoln,” a New Jersey woman on the Republican National Committee complained, “this is a difficult pill to swallow.”5
Part of the problem in reaching moderates lay with the candidate. Enamored of economic liberty and priding himself on calling things as he saw them, Goldwater was determined to make his run a referendum on the cause’s ideas. And so, even before his candidacy was official, he went to Tennessee to ask why Washington, D.C., was producing hydroelectric power in Appalachia. “I think we ought to sell the TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority],” the senator said. But that did not play well in Tennessee. “I have contributed to your campaign and helped organize the Goldwater club here, but since you have . . . come out . . . for the sale of the TVA, I am taking off my Goldwater stickers,” wrote a Chattanooga resident, one of thousands to recoil in alarm. “Why in the hell did you say that about the TVA?” an Atlanta fan demanded. “The Southeast will never vote for anyone who advocates turning over the TVA to the . . . monopolists.”6
Goldwater next took on the most popular New Deal program—Social Security—and in a state with one of the nation’s largest ratios of retired voters. On the hustings in New Hampshire, he called for the program to be made “voluntary,” knowing that this would cripple—and in time end—the system, because, like Obamacare in the new century, Social Security relies upon a vast pool of contributors to spread risk and ensure adequate provisioning. In an attempt to deal with the backlash, his advisers insisted that he explain that he meant only to see Social Security “strengthened” and made “sound,” but most voters knew he had said what he meant originally. For many, the proposed alternative—investing their money in the stock market—raised painful memories of the crash of ’29, when families lost their life savings. For others, investing elsewhere was not an option, because they had never earned enough money to save for old age. Without Social Security, they could not get by.7
Goldwater was not done educating the American people on the principles of freedom. Medicare, he then argued, was nothing but “socialized medicine.” Alas, “the idea of medical insurance for the aged” was a federal initiative that even “most South Carolinians liked,” one history of the campaign notes.8
Still, the chance to argue their ideas to the American people was so intoxicating that none of the libertarians could resist doing so. The Chicago school’s Milton Friedman, who served as Goldwater’s scholarly surrogate, explained to the press that the goal of the campaign was “to stop the drift toward centralization and collectivism.” That drift had helped “to undermine individual responsibility and to weaken the moral fiber of the people.”9 On a visit to Harvard, Friedman devoted most of his speech to criticizing the Civil Rights Act, complaining that it used “coercive” means to make all “conform to the values of the majority,” in violation of the liberty of the white minority that opposed reform. Friedman urged reliance instead on “free market principles”: prejudice would cause lower wages for black workers, which in turn would reduce production costs for those who employed them, so more employers would hire African Americans, he said—and, presto, “virtue triumph[s].”10
Goldwater went even further in his anti-Brown position, citing the Virginia Plan’s argument: “Freedom of association is a double-edged freedom or it is nothing at all.” Liberty entailed “the freedom not to associate,” a justification for another innovation in the GOP platform: support for state subsidies for private schools.11
Today Goldwater is best remembered for one line in his acceptance speech, the most uncompromising in major-party history, until recently. Critics of “our cause,” he suggested, could leave the GOP and take their “fuzzy” Republicanism with them. “I would remind you,” the nominee announced in his climax, “that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” Contemporaries and historians interpreted the line in light of the candidate’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act that had just been enacted and his suggestion that nuclear weapons could win the war in Vietnam. Those were reasonable inferences, given the candidate’s avid backing from segregationists and his many followers in the John Birch Society, known for its bellicose anti-Communism and fierce opposition to the Warren Court and civil rights.12
But for Goldwater himself and the team who crafted the passage, Nutter among them, “extremism in the defense of liberty” referred to his stand for “a free society” in the Mont Pelerin Society sense. The speech was a proud rebuff of what they perceived as a “smear,” to use Ayn Rand’s word. She argued, with some justification, that liberals deployed the label “extremism” to evade head-on engagement with Goldwater’s uncompromising “advocacy of capitalism.” By implying an association with fascism, Rand said, the critics dodged what libertarians considered “the basic and crucial political issue of our age . . . capitalism versus socialism, or freedom versus statism.”13 Nearly a half century later, Milton Friedman still called the speech “splendid. I recall particularly relishing the sentence that came back to haunt Goldwater: ‘Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.’”14
When Election Day came, the cause’s standard-bearer suffered the worst defeat of any major-party presidential candidate in a century and a half. Goldwater won the Electoral College votes of only six states: his home state and five states of the Deep South that practiced acute voter suppression, among them Mississippi, where he garnered 87 percent of the almost entirely white vote.15 By contrast, Goldwater lost the Rim South—Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia—where a new economy was arising. The Arizona senator repelled voters in the growing southern suburbs, gaining less support there than Eisenhower and Nixon had before him.16
The regional concentration of his vote pointed to a larger truth about the Mont Pelerin Society worldview. As bright as some of the libertarian economists were, their ideas made the headway they did in the South because, in their essence, their stands were so familiar. Goldwater did best in the part of Virginia—like that of the nation as a whole—most resistant to civil rights reform: the old plantation counties that were most eager to, as officials of Prince Edward County had put it, get “out of the business of public education.”17 White southerners who opposed racial equality and economic justice knew from their own region’s history that the only way they could protect their desired way of life was to keep federal power at bay, so that majoritarian democracy could not reach into the region. That is why Harry Byrd was Barry Goldwater’s “philosophical soul mate,” in the words of Byrd’s biographer.18
As the Republican establishment scrambled to cope with the near wreckage of their party, the election affected the leaders of the Chicago school of economics and the Virginia school of political economy in starkly different ways. For Milton Friedman, the exposure he gained as a Goldwater spokesman was a career booster. Newsweek magazine invited him to write a regular column, an arrangement that lasted nearly two decades and yielded hundreds of pieces on matters from the minimum wage to financial deregulation. “By the end of the 1960s,” a biographer notes, “Friedman was the most prominent conservative public intellectual at least in the United States and probably in the world.”19 As he made the case for libertarian economics, he assumed that the cause would eventually triumph by conversion—voter by voter, as long as it took.
Buchanan, characteristically, drew less sunny conclusions than Friedman. The fate of his institution was now, as it had been from the beginning, tied to the grip of the Byrd machine on Virginia. As citizen organizing, the Supreme Court, and Congress pried that grip open, Buchanan’s institutional base became less secure. It did not help his mood that Goldwater pulled down so many other GOP candidates that Lyndon Johnson, one of the most skilled political tacticians ever to sit in the Oval Office, was able to gloat that the incoming Congress “could be better, but not [on] this side of heaven.”20 This Congress would pass everything from work-study programs to help students work their way through college to Medicare and Medicaid, a War on Poverty, and laws to ensure clean air and water. Its crowning achievement was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, designed to allow every American citizen, at last, to participate in the political process.21
The once omnipotent Harry Byrd, who had refused to endorse Johnson, decided to retire in 1965. Howard Smith, Byrd’s long-serving and similarly archconservative counterpart in the House, was not so savvy; staying in the running, he was swept out of the 1966 Democratic primary by a combination of black voters and white urban and suburban voters. “Many whites and blacks in the new district,” his biographer summarizes, “wanted the federal programs and civil rights guarantees that Smith had long fought.” Able, finally, to wield power in proportion to their numbers, they delivered “one of the most stunning defeats ever sustained by a Byrd Organization candidate.”22
With such stalwarts of economic liberty out of power and an era of grand expectations opening, the Virginia General Assembly, in a nod to the new growth-minded business class and residents of the growing cities and suburbs, repealed the “pay as you go” requirements in the state constitution, which had put the Virginia of their day fiftieth in the nation in capital spending for health and welfare. Borrowing money to invest in public schooling and infrastructure in a way that would have been unimaginable with Byrd still in power, they turned Northern Virginia, especially, into a cornucopia of economic growth.23
• • •
As the state and the nation changed, it would not be long before the University of Virginia did as well. In the early 1960s, President Darden acknowledged that academic excellence at UVA would require more federal research grants, a more distinguished faculty, and a larger and higher-achieving student body recruited from broader sources than the white, country-club South.24 What he had not foreseen is what it would take to open the campus to such improvement.
Nothing did more to bring the new world to campus than the sit-ins that began in March 1961. “The segregated restaurants, barber shops, and movie theater” in the midst of the campus, reported one former student, had become “an embarrassment to fair-minded white students and faculty and a source of despair and frustration for black students,” tiny as their numbers were. Patient efforts to persuade the business owners to stop turning away African Americans proved unavailing. So a hardy band of four black students and two dozen white students and faculty, stirred by the larger sit-in movement then sweeping the South, began a petition-and-picket campaign to open local public accommodations to all. Campus conservatives railed against them, insisting on the business owners’ right, as property owners, to discriminate as they wished.25
The clash polarized the campus: as the advocates of the Golden Rule founded an interracial group, the defenders of the right to discriminate built a chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), with encouragement from Gordon Tullock.26 Things grew tenser still when opponents of racism persuaded the Student Council to declare “all segregated businesses off-limits to University organizations and threaten [campus] violators with censure.” This prohibition would include the Farmington Country Club, used by many university programs, among them the Thomas Jefferson Center, to host visitors. Hundreds of critics signed a petition, started by Leon Dure, against “any rule that would dictate to groups or persons where they may or may not go,” on the grounds that “individual liberty is a higher good than racial equality.”27
The new university president, Edgar F. Shannon Jr., relished controversy over desegregation no more than his predecessor had. But Shannon also knew that nondiscriminatory admission, coming quietly if possible, was both right and necessary for academic excellence. In 1965, responding to changing constituents and mindful of running afoul of the new federal ban on discrimination, President Shannon informed university administrators that no further evasions of the antisegregation policy would be allowed.28
When the city of Charlottesville that same year abandoned the segregation-enabling “freedom of choice” for a public school policy that would allow more integration, Buchanan grumbled to Tullock that now “the leftists will be attracted” to the University of Virginia.29 His crankiness hid justified fear. That year, Tullock was denied promotion by the upper administration, something that would never have happened under the old regime. Tullock told Milton Friedman he sensed that “the University administration feels much the same about Nutter [and] Buchanan . . . as it does about me.” Buchanan, too, felt a chill wind rising. “If we are forced out,” he said darkly, the “knaves and fools” at the helm of the university should know that “we shall not go without stirring up a few people”—presumably his own elite backers.30 But the threat was idle: his backers no longer held sway as they once had.
With generous funding from anonymous Virginia business donors, university administrators had just authorized a new institute to study the state’s economy, so as to guide them in developing “the kind of Virginia we want in 1980.” The creation of the new institute, with its vision of using public policy and tax dollars to enhance economic development, signaled a direct rejection of the approach of Buchanan’s center by the state elite represented on the university’s Board of Visitors.31 For the first time, business pragmatists not beholden to the Byrd Organization were in the saddle. Among them were such civic leaders as the corporate lawyer (and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Lewis F. Powell Jr. and the banker J. Harvie Wilkinson Jr., both of whom had opposed the 1958 school shutdowns and believed it legally and morally wrong to defy the federal courts as Byrd’s men had. Wilkinson called himself a “constructive conservative.” He wanted to lure outside investment to build the state’s economy, and he knew that they would want good public schools at every level and other public investments to make it happen. “With good business practices, you’ve got to invest,” President Shannon explained. “You’ve got to borrow some money that you know is going to pay off.”32
The cofounders of the Thomas Jefferson Center had known from the outset that their secret political mission carried intellectual risk. “The obvious danger,” Nutter had once confided to Milton Friedman, with a plan to create a political “rallying point” for the like-minded, “is that of slipping from scholarship to propaganda.”33 He and Buchanan also knew that they must eventually attract “reputable” scholarly grants—not just the right-wing corporate funding they had to date, but what Nutter called “‘clean’ and respectable” money.34
What they had not realized until it was too late was that those around them were also beginning to notice a troubling contradiction. Buchanan and his fellows trumpeted “the free society,” yet they brooked no dissent from their assumptions. University leaders had first become troubled about the ideological intensity of the enterprise in 1960, when the program came up empty-handed in a major application to the Ford Foundation, and a follow-up visit only confirmed Ford’s fears of dogmatism.35 Ensuing episodes worsened the worries back home in Charlottesville.36
In June 1963, the dean of the faculty alerted the president to “a condition in the Department of Economics that has worried me for quite a while. Doctrinalism tends to breed authoritarianism,” he warned. “And absolute doctrinalism breeds absolute authoritarianism absolutely.”37 The zeal of the Thomas Jefferson Center’s faculty was scaring others. Colleagues not in the inner circle complained of “the department as being too far to the right.” The university opened a secret study, a highly unusual practice. The inquiry found that the center and the economics department were indeed “rigidly committed to a single point of view”: the “‘Virginia School,’ an outlook described by its friends as ‘Neo-Liberalism’ and its critics as ‘Nineteenth-Century Ultra-Conservatism.’” Interviews with untenured faculty exposed a “disquieting” atmosphere: one way of thinking so controlled the department “as to make it difficult or impossible for other views to find expression, whether in instruction or research.” The climate was such that two mainstream conservatives had left for other institutions.38
In addition, the exclusively private funding of the autonomous center suggested external influence on the scholars’ mission, a reference to right-wing corporate donors funding an academic program to advance their political agenda. Hiring some faculty outside the mold, and soon, the study concluded, was vital for introducing “an element of pluralism into an otherwise closed society.”39
It was a sad circumstance for an enterprise founded “to preserve liberty” to be tarred with the “closed society” label then used for totalitarian states. And it would not be the last time it happened.
• • •
Oblivious to the growing uneasiness among administrators answerable to a more inclusive electorate, Buchanan still pushed his approach aggressively at every opportunity. Like his maternal relatives, he became a preacher. Elected president of the Southern Economic Association in 1964, he used his bully pulpit to prescribe “what economists should do.” They should cease focusing on problems of resource distribution—what the field called “allocation problems”—because the very idea that inequality was a bad thing led to looking for remedies, which in turn led the discipline toward an applied “mathematics of social engineering.” Instead, they should adopt his radical methodological individualism in all that they studied, and assume that individuals always sought personal gain, whether in the economy or in politics. But, he opined, markets were good, whereas politics was bad. In the economy, individuals engaged in voluntary exchange; politics, by contrast, was a “whole system of coercive or potentially coercive relationships,” because it relied on government force. Buchanan insisted that his hyper-individualistic method was ideologically “neutral.”40
But it was not. It took effort to deny that “the market” was not a real thing but rather an intellectual abstraction. In the real world, throughout history, people had created markets, and governments had shaped those markets in various ways, always benefiting some groups more than others. History and the daily news alike showed how hard it was for people with vastly unequal wealth to come to a mutually satisfying solution. One had only to read Charles Dickens to grasp the reality of unregulated capitalism; the unchecked economic power of some enabled the domination of others.
What Buchanan was doing was leveraging the prestige of economic “science” to reject what several generations of scholarship in the social sciences, humanities, and law had exposed: that the late-nineteenth-century notion of a pure market was a fiction. That fiction helped emerging corporate elites to shape law and governance to their advantage while devastating the societies over which they held sway by virtue of their wealth and the control over others it could purchase. Founders of the discipline of modern economics, among them Richard T. Ely and John R. Commons, had demonstrated that social power shaped markets, and they debunked the thinkers such as Herbert Spencer who pretended otherwise. Ely, who had led in the 1885 founding of the American Economic Association, was blunt about the laissez-faire economics his generation aimed to supplant. “This younger political economy,” Ely said, “no longer permits the science to be used as a tool in the hands of the greedy and the avaricious for keeping down and oppressing the laboring classes.” No one who claimed the mantle of science should advocate “doing nothing while people starve.”41
It was views like these that Buchanan aimed to defeat with his new school of thought. Take, for example, one of the central concepts of public choice analysis: “rent-seeking.” Mainstream economists enlisted the concept of “rents” to describe the additional profits a firm might secure without creating additional value for the economy by productive activity—say, by lobbying to extend the patent on an existing product. Buchanan’s team, though, gave the concept a new and distinctive meaning, one in wide use on the right today. They depicted as “rent-seeking” any collective efforts by citizens or public servants to prompt government action that involved tax revenues. And, in their assumption that individuals always acted to advance their personal economic self-interest rather than collective goals or the common good, Buchanan’s school went further, projecting unseemly motives onto strangers about whom they knew nothing. Similarly, Virginia school economists deployed the existing term “special interests” to refer primarily to organized citizens seeking government action and occasionally to corporations seeking legislative favor. Their usage of the phrase implied that these people were scheming, trying to extract money from the economic producers through vote gathering and lobbying rather than earning it from personal labor. The scholars were conducting, in effect, thought experiments, or hypothetical scenarios with no true research—no facts—to support them, while the very terms of their analysis denied such motives as compassion, fairness, solidarity, generosity, justice, and sustainability.42
A case in point: Tullock argued that Lyndon Johnson had undertaken the War on Poverty because “he probably foresaw a fairly direct exchange of political favors for votes.”43 The allegation was the more absurd because the president had known his policies would cost his party its former hold on the white South from the time he signed the Civil Rights Act. Tullock simply presented his own biases about how the world works to discredit those he opposed. It was an old saw on the American right that the people were so dull and inert that any call for government action could come only from self-interested third parties, outside agitators—whether abolitionists, “labor bosses,” Communists, or politicians—seeking to make personal hay.44
This school of thought certainly did satisfy corporate donors, but it was sharply at odds with the independent ideas the Virginia school was competing with in this era, when so many other scholars, moved by the hard questions raised by the civil rights movement, reached nearly opposite conclusions. Researchers in history and sociology, for example, including some emerging leaders in UVA’s own history department, such as the southern historian Paul M. Gaston, were reaching conclusions that, in effect, echoed the teachings of Martin Luther King and civil rights activists: that radical restructuring would be required to include all Americans in the promise of opportunity, and that for this, federal intervention was essential. It was needed for a simple reason, they showed: because only the federal government had the power to end the long train of damaging injustices shielded by undemocratic state governments.45
Not surprisingly, then, even at an institution as relatively culturally conservative as the University of Virginia, more people were looking askance at the project of the Thomas Jefferson Center. A member of the top administration murmured that, in effect, “there was nobody in the Department [of Economics] to the left of the John Birch Society.”46
In 1967, unnerved by their loss of stature and sensing that they were “being liquidated,” the founders of the center shifted its funds to a foundation beyond the university’s control. Then, for the third time in as many years, the senior economics faculty, led by Buchanan, again recommended that Gordon Tullock be promoted to full professor. That, too, could be read as brinkmanship. Tullock had never earned a Ph.D. and by his own admission had never completed an economics course. Brilliant though Buchanan and his allies might have believed the law school alumnus to be, he lacked training in the field in which he taught, and his publication record—apart from the book he had coauthored with Buchanan—was undistinguished. He was also an awful teacher. It did not help that Tullock struck many outside the center as an egomaniac—or just a twit. (Once, for example, as a new colleague was unpacking his books, Tullock appeared at the door. “Oh, Mr. Johnson, I’m glad you finally arrived,” he said. “I need the opinion of someone obviously inferior to me.”)47 Tullock would not be promoted. Buchanan was furious.
Trying to leverage his standing to avenge his own honor and his colleague’s name, Buchanan threatened to leave unless the president reversed himself and made Tullock a full professor. The president held firm. “I have deep and abiding loyalties to the South, Virginia, and the University,” Buchanan said upon resigning, but he could tolerate neither the “gross injustice” to Gordon Tullock nor “the long-smoldering internal campaign of slander, malicious gossip and vilification” directed at his program and his own running of it.48
So Buchanan left. He accepted a regular faculty position at the University of California at Los Angeles, “a fine” department and among the closest in spirit to Virginia’s and Chicago’s. Indeed, in subsidizing the free-market training of men from other countries, the libertarian Earhart Foundation treated the Chicago, Virginia, and UCLA economics departments as interchangeable options.49 It did not feel that way to Buchanan, though. On a visit to Los Angeles he revealed that he disliked the city and found the school “impersonal.” He went despondently, knowing that he would no longer be the big fish able to make an outsize splash in a small pond. He also seemed uncomfortable about the number of African Americans living in the city and attending UCLA, commenting to Tullock after a visit to San Diego State about how there were “very few blacks in evidence” and the students seemed “more orderly” than UCLA’s.50 Equally dispirited, Warren Nutter left UVA to serve as President Nixon’s assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.51 The program, the loyal alumnus James C. Miller III protested, had suffered “emasculation.”52
• • •
Over the ensuing decades, Buchanan and his colleagues would tell the tale of their center’s implosion as one of liberal perfidy—the politically motivated backstabbing of innocents. “Things at Virginia have fallen apart,” Jim Buchanan informed his former adviser, “due to [a] rotten and wholly dishonest administration.”53
Buchanan’s telling distorted the reality in at least two ways. The administration was not, in fact, liberal, let alone hostile to right-wing ideas. Its members were pragmatic conservatives; Buchanan’s men were zealous libertarians. And the administrators had realized that the difference mattered. They were practical men who wanted more investment by the state government in Virginia’s future. Shannon and his board understood that “to really serve the needs of the state”—a democratizing state, at that—the university could no longer operate as it had in the Byrd era, certainly not if it wanted to become a nationally reputable research institution. Among other things, it needed to attract not just African American men but women of all groups as well, a change Shannon urged in 1967 and saw to fruition in 1970.54
Buchanan also bore more than a little personal blame for his program’s fate. He had misgauged his market, one could say, from the time he jumped into the public debate in 1959 to urge wholesale privatization of the state’s schools. Colgate Darden had authorized their center to push back on the New Deal, yes, but not to side with the reactionaries who threatened the destruction of public education to save segregation. Public schools were a staple of civilized society, in his view, a view shared by the state’s top business leaders. The split only widened under Shannon as Buchanan’s conduct as a colleague hurt his cause. Just as he could see no exploitation in the market, so he saw as unremarkable his own taking advantage of his status to get what he wanted, regardless of the opinions of other colleagues who rightly assumed decisions should be made democratically. By his own reports, Buchanan ran his department as though he were the CEO of a private firm, answerable to no one. Where other departments made hires through collective deliberation, he chose those “who fit my requirements,” unconcerned that others might not be comfortable with his nonnegotiable choices.55
He never acknowledged any fault on his or his fellows’ part for their fall from grace. In his telling of his life story, the campus donnybrook took its place alongside the alleged discrimination he had suffered in the Navy, where he had felt the sting of Ivy League northerners’ snobbery about Middle Tennessee State Teachers College. He was the victim of mistreatment; he was sure of it. He ascribed the demise of his program to “crude attempts at thought control” by “establishment intellectuals,” men who bore “envy-engendered hatred” toward those who rejected their “romance with the state.”56 As Buchanan fled Charlottesville for Los Angeles, he found further grounds for his fury—and more reasons to constrict democracy.