“What happens if individuals do not value liberty sufficiently highly?” James Buchanan’s colleague and friend Charles K. Rowley asked after the failure of the Reagan revolution. “Should they be forced to be free?”1
Rowley was not an outside critic. He was a dedicated libertarian who had been part of the Virginia school of political economy since joining the George Mason economics department in 1984. At the time of his death, in 2013, he was working on a biography of James Buchanan, whom he still deeply admired. Indeed, with words perhaps prescient, he depicted Buchanan as “perhaps the most hated and feared enemy of left-leaning economists throughout the world.”2
As for his question about those who did not share the cause’s zeal, we do not know whether anyone answered it explicitly or whether those answers satisfied his concerns. What we do know is that by the opening of the new century, he seems to have become more uneasy about the movement’s direction. As the Mont Pelerin Society was making plans to celebrate its golden anniversary in Washington, D.C., Rowley refused invitations from Edwin J. Feulner, head of the Heritage Foundation, to serve on the host committee. He told him frankly that he did not like what big money was doing to an organization that had once focused on ideas. The “large subsidies from corporations” and “wealthy individuals” led to “extravagant junketing” that disturbed him. “This was not the original intent of Friedrich von Hayek” in creating the society, Rowley protested. “Too many meetings are now dominated by wealthy individuals, foundation executives and the like.”3
Rowley did not detail the corruption of purpose that unsettled him, at least not in the documents I’ve been able to find, but it’s not difficult to read between the lines in order to understand his confusion. The core claim of this movement—certainly Buchanan’s core claim going all the way back to Brown—was that government did not have the right to “coerce” the individual, beyond the basic level of the rule of law and public order. If liberty, as Buchanan and others in the movement would use that term, had any hard and fast meaning, it lay in the conviction that every person, up to the very wealthiest among us, had the same right to control the earnings of his own labor as he saw fit, even when the majority thought that this money might be put to better use serving the public interest. In the movement’s view, government was the realm of coercion, and the market was the realm of freedom, of freely chosen, mutually valued exchange.
But what Rowley saw—up close—was two equally troubling patterns that did not square with that way of thinking. First, the sheer scale of the riches the “wealthy individuals” brought to bear turned out to have subtle, even seductive, power. And second, under the influence of one wealthy individual in particular, the movement was turning to an equally troubling form of coercion: achieving its ends essentially through trickery, through deceiving trusting people about its real intentions in order to take them to a place where, on their own, given complete information, they probably would not go. This was not classical liberalism, no matter how often cadre members claimed that mantle. When you combine the emerging deceitful and therefore coercive strategy—one that owed much to James Buchanan—with the fact that those attending the Mont Pelerin Society golden anniversary meeting, intellectuals and operatives alike, were ever more beholden for their sustenance to a single man, Rowley’s discomfort is easy to explain. It is a contradiction in terms to remain a self-governing intellectual and be part of a messianic movement. Messiahs don’t entertain doubts. I suspect Rowley felt the change under way; if it didn’t bother others about themselves, it bothered him about himself.4
For we also know that once the Koch people settled in—and then took over—at George Mason University, concern turned into contempt, then disgust, until Rowley came to viscerally despise the team of operatives and their academic enablers who were now, as far as Rowley was concerned, occupying his campus. He called Richie Fink, Charles Koch’s top strategist, “a third-rate political hack” and “a man who is very appropriately named.”5
Rowley said what others never dared to admit: “Far too many libertarians have been seduced by Koch money into providing intellectual ammunition for an autocratic businessman.” It had reached the point, he came to believe by 2012, that there was no hope that any of those who participated in the “free market think tanks” would “speak out.” He was blunt about the reason why: “Too many of them benefit financially from the pocket money doled out by Charles and David Koch.”6
Did Rowley include Buchanan, as well, in this suggestion of so many having been bought? While Buchanan no longer came to campus after 1998 to teach strategy to a new generation of operatives with the alacrity he once showed, nor did he play any other ongoing direct role that I have been able to trace in what had now become Koch’s movement, he continued to accept the honors and emoluments that Koch’s people made sure to send his way. In his memoirs, published ten years later, he went out of his way to say that, looking back over his lifetime’s work, “I have no regrets.”7
Perhaps. But Buchanan was far too smart not to remember the young man who had once promised UVA president Colgate Darden that he would seek to defeat Keynesian economics and liberal politics by winning the war of ideas against the other side—not by writing training manuals for subversion by stealth. Had he withdrawn after the Wendy Gramm episode so that he would not have to personally witness what his decades of work had wrought? Again, we don’t know.
Rowley clearly continued to respect Buchanan, but perhaps not so blindly, for he predicted, as the 2012 election approached, that the libertarian cause they shared “may well suffer,” at least in principle, “serious harm” for having become the instrument of a tyrant. Watching how Koch commandeered the Cato Institute for his “crude” plan to speed up the libertarian conquest of America by using the very governmental apparatus that libertarians had long criticized made him angry. He saw, too, that Koch had “no scruples concerning the manipulation of scholarship”; he wanted Cato’s output to aid his cause, period. When a few veteran libertarian board members and staff raised questions, he replaced them with his own people, who now included the kind of “social conservatives” and political party figures who were once anathema to libertarians. In the end, though, Rowley’s loyalty was to the cause, not to his adopted country. (He was born and educated in England.) He was concerned about Cato, not America, and certainly not the fate of majority rule. Neither he nor any other insider ever went public with their concerns. Nor did anyone else sound the alarm for the rest of us about what Koch’s “proxy army,” as one Rowley reader called it, was doing to the country.8
Intrepid investigative journalists had by then reported on many of the maneuvers of that proxy army. They revealed how it was operating on more fronts through more ostensibly separate organizations than ordinary mortals could easily follow. It was occupying the Republican Party, using the threat of well-funded primary challenges to force its elected officials to do the cause’s bidding or lose their seats. It was pushing out radical right laws ready to bring to the floor in every state through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). It was selling those laws through the seemingly independent but centrally funded and operationally linked groups of the State Policy Network. It was leveraging the anger of local Tea Party groups to move the legislative agenda of Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks. Its state affiliates were energizing voter turnout with deceitful direct mail campaigns. Its elected allies were shutting down the federal government; in effect, using its employees and the millions who rely on it as hostages to get what they otherwise could not—and much, much more.9
In the shock-and-awe-style coordinated push to implement radical change in record time, without customary transparency or deliberative process, is it any wonder that no one noticed how many of the leading operatives in this vast project had been trained in economics at Virginia institutions, especially at Buchanan’s last home, George Mason University? No. Nor is it any wonder that in the scramble to keep up with all the action, no one inquired about the source of the ideas that made these efforts cohere or identified their endgame. Surely, this was just partisan hardball played with astonishing new viciousness.
The acclaimed jurist Louis Brandeis, who over the course of his lifetime amassed considerable wealth, once warned the American people that as a nation, “we must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” I suspect, however, that even Brandeis (who also spoke of the need for unions, and for social justice and wise regulation in an earlier age when capital ran amok) never imagined that enough wealth could be concentrated in the hands of a few to launch such an audacious stealth attack on the foundational notion of government being of, by, and for the people.10
But Brandeis also bequeathed us the maxim “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” In that spirit of bringing secrets from the shadows out into the open light of day, where they can be examined by all those they affect, I will use this conclusion to convey what is in store if we do not take this assault on our governance and our way of life seriously and respond effectively to it. For all its horror, this portrait can be painted in good part with the words of the people who seek to create it.
• • •
“If you tell a great lie and repeat it often enough, the people will eventually come to believe it,” Joseph Goebbels, a particularly ruthless, yet shrewd, propagandist, is said to have remarked. Today the big lie of the Koch-sponsored radical right is that society can be split between makers and takers, justifying on the part of the makers a Manichaean struggle to disarm and defeat those who would take from them. Attend a Tea Party gathering and you will hear endless cries about the “moocher class.”11 Read the output of the libertarian writers subsidized by wealthy donors and you will encounter endless variations. David Boaz of the Cato Institute, to choose just one, speaks of the “parasite economy” that divides us into “the predators and the prey.”12 Addressing an audience of $50,000-per-plate donors, Mitt Romney famously remarked that “47 percent” of voters were, in effect, leeches on “productive” Americans.13
Is there any evidence to suggest that close to half of American society is intent on exploiting the rich through the tax system? That they contribute nothing, while using government to gang up on a defenseless minority that somehow, all on its own, generates wealth? Is it true that the wealthiest among us are being unfairly fleeced by government? If so, how do we square that with what is now common knowledge: that the secretary to a billionaire will often pay a higher tax rate than her boss?
Might such motivated arguments belie a deeper purpose, a compulsion to control others, to limit their freedoms, in the name of ensuring one’s own liberty? Surprisingly, the cause—so secretive in so many other respects—has given us the answer.
Charles Koch has always argued that his vision of a good society will bring prosperity to all. But his trusted cadre, the people he relies upon to justify and advance his messianic vision, apparently believe otherwise. They have sketched out the society that will emerge if their cause succeeds (while wiping their own fingerprints from the story of its emergence). What does that society look like? And what will they have to do to our people and our democracy to secure it?
Koch learned as a young adult, from his mentor Baldy Harper, that “the great social problem of our age is that of designing the preventive medicine that will stop the eroding of liberty in the body politic.” Harper warned that “once the disease has advanced, a bitter curative medicine is required to gain already-lost liberty.”14 James Buchanan revealed just how bitter the medicine would be. People who failed to foresee and save money for their future needs, Buchanan wrote in 2005, “are to be treated as subordinate members of the species, akin to . . . animals who are dependent.”15
Tyler Cowen, the man who succeeded Buchanan and now directs the cause’s base camp at George Mason, the Mercatus Center, has explained that with the “rewriting of the social contract” under way, people will be “expected to fend for themselves much more than they do now.” While some will flourish, he says, “others will fall by the wayside.” And because “worthy individuals” will manage to climb their way out of poverty, “that will make it easier to ignore those who are left behind.” Cowen foresees that “we will cut Medicaid for the poor.” Also, “the fiscal shortfall will come out of real wages as various cost burdens are shifted to workers” from employers and a government that does less. To “compensate,” the chaired professor in the nation’s second-wealthiest county recommends, “people who have had their government benefits cut or pared back” should pack up and move to lower-cost states like Texas. Granted, he says, “Texas is skimpy on welfare benefits and Medicaid coverage,” and nearly three in ten of its residents have no health insurance, but the state does have jobs and “very cheap housing” to offset its “subpar public services.”16
Indeed, Cowen forecasts, “the United States as a whole will end up looking more like Texas.” His tone is matter-of-fact, as though he is simply reporting the inevitable. And he enjoys great authority, as his blog, The Marginal Revolution, is the most visited intellectual blog in professional economics, known for criticizing Republicans as well as Democrats, and also respected for Cowen’s signature incorporation of economic concepts to analyze cultural phenomena from food to travel. He presents himself as a pragmatic libertarian (indeed, the blog’s motto is “small steps toward a much better world”). Yet when one reads his flip remarks on the fate now facing his fellow citizens with the knowledge that he has been the leader of a team working in earnest with Charles Koch for two decades to bring about the society he is describing, the words assume a different weight. They sound like a premeditation. For example, the economist prophesies lower-income parts of America “recreating a Mexico-like or Brazil-like environment” complete with favelas like those in Rio de Janeiro. The “quality of water” might not be what U.S. citizens are used to, but “partial shantytowns” would satisfy the need for cheaper housing as “wage polarization” grows and government shrinks. “Some version of Texas—and then some—is the future for a lot of us,” the economist advises. “Get ready.”17
Those who subscribe to the libertarian philosophy believe that the only legitimate role of government is to ensure the rule of law, guarantee social order, and provide for the national defense. That is why they have long been fervent opponents of Medicare, Medicaid for the poor, and, most recently, Obamacare. The House budget chairman, Paul Ryan, has explained that such public provision for popular needs not only violates the liberty of the taxpayers whose earnings are transferred to others, but also violates the recipients’ spiritual need to earn their own sustenance. He told one audience that the nation’s school lunch program left poor children with “a full stomach—and an empty soul.”18
Less well known is that these zealots do not believe that the government should be involved in trying to promote public health, period. We are not talking about subsidized hip replacements and birth control. We are talking about things like basic sanitation, something governments have committed to since the Progressive Era as the single most important measure to stop waterborne epidemics such as cholera and typhoid.
The Republican majority in Congress has “systematically cut public health budgets that address Zika, Ebola and other ailments,” notes the columnist Nicholas Kristof.19 The insiders’ thinking helps explain why. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina state senator elevated to the U.S. Senate in 2014 with backing from the Koch apparatus, has said that restaurants should be able “to opt out of” laws requiring employees to wash their hands after using the toilet, “as long as they post a sign that says, ‘We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom.’ The market will take care of that.”20
Even before Obamacare was enacted, a public choice economist funded by the Liberty Fund, Gary M. Anderson, produced a study alleging that the field of public health was, from its beginning in the early twentieth century, nothing more than “a major device used by organized interest groups to redistribute wealth to themselves.”21 Amity Shlaes, a libertarian journalist on the Wall Street Journal editorial board and author of a best-selling book based on Buchanan’s ideology, The Forgotten Man, came to a similar conclusion as the fight over Obamacare began. She “found that public choice theory explained everything,” including that “health officials’ interest in testing small children’s blood for lead made sense when one considered that finding poisoned children validated their jobs.”22
The largely African American population of Flint, Michigan, knows firsthand what will happen to “people who fall by the wayside” in the new political economy run by people who think this way. The Flint scandal broke because of a mother who would not give in. When she appealed to the appointed city manager and Republican governor in late 2014 because her daughter’s hair was falling out, her older son was suffering abdominal pain, and her twins were developing untreatable rashes, they brushed aside her concerns. It was not until she found scientific experts from another state who were willing to help that most Americans learned of the worst public health disaster in state history. “For 18 months, 100,000 residents were exposed to toxic water,” explained one Ph.D. student. No amount of lead in water is safe, especially for children, whose developing brains and bodies are so vulnerable; exposure can cause irreversible mental impairment.23
What happened in Flint was not a natural disaster. Nor a case of governmental incompetence. What happened there was directly attributable to the prodding of the Mackinac Center, one of the first Koch-funded—and in this case, Koch-staffed—state-level “think and do” tanks that now exist in all fifty states and are affiliated with the State Policy Network (SPN), also Koch-concocted, to coordinate efforts to prevent state governments from responding to the demands of the “takers.”24
“When the Mackinac Center speaks, we listen,” said Michigan governor John Engler in 1994. Indeed, so did his successors. In 2011, the center pushed hard for legislation that would allow the governor to take over all aspects of local government in any community facing a “financial emergency” and hand control over to an emergency manager. The powers of these unelected managers to impose austerity measures would be vast, including the authority to unilaterally abrogate collective bargaining agreements, outsource services, sell off local resources to private companies, and change suppliers at will. By 2009, more than half of the deindustrializing and economically troubled state’s black voters were being governed by such appointed emergency managers, among them the residents of Detroit, Benton Harbor, and Flint. “It’s dictatorship, plain and simple,” one city commissioner said of the new system. To save money, Flint’s appointed city manager switched the source of the city water supply to the polluted Flint River. The Mackinac Center lobbyists, by the way, made sure that the law incorporated provisions to protect the appointed managers from lawsuits. Given the scale of the damage they had every reason to know they would inflict, that was a wise protection of potential future foot soldiers for the cause.25
Is it any surprise, then, that those who would put public sanitation and clean water at risk are now the leading proponents of climate change denial? Or that before embarking on this mission, Buchanan’s students and colleagues were producing economic analyses funded by the tobacco industry to discredit the “paternalists” who would deny cigarette companies, smokers, and those in their immediate surroundings their “voluntary choice” in a misguided “majoritarian” quest, pushed by “rent-seeking interest groups” whose “appeal to the ‘public’s health’ is essentially just political rhetoric designed to camouflage the coercion”? Or that these economists would insinuate that government-funded researchers would never find a cure for cancer because that “would put many cancer bureaucrats out of work”?26
Just as the property rights supremacists would rather let people die than receive health care assistance or antismoking counsel from government, so they would rather invite global ecological and social catastrophe than allow regulatory restrictions on economic liberty. The Koch cadre identified the public’s embrace of environmentalism as a problem early on. Back in 1997, for example, the same year that Charles Koch made his first big contribution to George Mason, yet another Koch operation, Citizens for a Sound Economy, warned its corporate allies that 76 percent of Americans thought of themselves as environmentalists. “Worse, 65 percent” told industry pollsters that they “do not trust business” to take action against pollution, and “79 percent of voters think current regulations are about right or ‘not strict enough.’”27 The lesson the cadre took from this was that it could not win majorities to its true goals. So what was to be done? “It might be hard to admit,” said the chair of the economics department at George Mason, Donald J. Boudreaux, but because public choice showed that a government cure would be worse (from their perspective, of course) than the disease, global warming “is best left alone.”28
That advice was rejected by serious scientists and concerned citizens, so the Cato Institute and the Independent Institute joined a circle of less-known Koch-funded libertarian think tanks driving what two science scholars describe as systematic environmental “misinformation campaigns.” They spread junk pseudoscience to make the public believe that there is still doubt about the peril of climate change, a tactic they learned from the tobacco companies that for years sowed doubt about science to keep the public from connecting smoking and illness.29 Even more galling are the personal attacks on scientists that suggest, as one Koch-subsidized organization has done, that climate scientists are seeking personal monetary rewards. “All Aboard the Climate Gravy Train” reads a typical headline (a smear more scandalous when you consider that it was coming from operatives on retainer to a billionaire).30
The Koch team by then could count on its Club for Growth to fund primary challenges to ensure that the party line on environmentalism would be maintained by Republican members of Congress. That explains why Senator John McCain is but the best-known—and once most principled—Republican to flip his position after being faced with a Tea Party primary challenge. By 2014, only 8 of 278 Republicans in Congress were willing to acknowledge that man-made climate change is real.31 “We’re looking at a party,” the economist and columnist Paul Krugman rightly points out, “that has turned its back on science at a time when doing so puts the very future of civilization at risk.”32
Backing up that chokehold on federal action is what one reporter called a “secretive alliance” between red-state attorneys general and fossil fuel corporations to litigate in federal courts with “unprecedented” coordination to obstruct environmental and other regulatory efforts.33 The use of state government power to undercut national reforms follows a strategy of “competitive federalism” advocated by Buchanan and inspired by John C. Calhoun’s constitutional theory and Jack Kilpatrick’s application of it to fight the implementation of Brown v. Board of Education. You could call it the “race to the bottom” by intentional design, now led by the American Legislative Exchange Council and advocated by the entire Koch-funded State Policy Network, which provides scholarly legitimacy for the state legislators’ actions.34 Advised by the Wisconsin affiliate on his agenda since taking office as governor, Scott Walker’s administration imposed a gag order in 2015 to prohibit employees charged with oversight of state-owned land from even discussing climate change on the job.35
To put all this another way: if the Koch-network-funded academics and institutions were not in the conversation, the public would have little doubt that the evidence of science is overwhelming and government action to prevent further global warming is urgent.36 Sadly, however, their campaigns are working. The number of Americans who believed that “the continued burning of fossil fuels would alter the climate” dropped from 71 percent in 2007 to 44 percent in 2011.37
A different kind of catastrophe is under way in the nation’s public school system, a target of the Mont Pelerin Society cause since the 1950s—well before the rise of powerful teachers’ unions, it bears noting. Rather than admit their ideological commitment to ending public education, they have convinced a sizable segment of the American population that the problems in schools today are the result of those teachers’ unions having too much power. In the states where they have won control, like my own state of North Carolina, the cadre’s allied elected officials, pushed by affiliates of the State Policy Network, have rushed to pass laws to debilitate teachers’ unions, one bill being hurried through passage after midnight. The Republican-dominated North Carolina General Assembly then also cut seven thousand teacher assistants, allotted $100 million less than the state budget office said was needed merely to maintain the schools, and budgeted $500 million less to public schools than it had in 2008. Even the school supplies budget was cut by more than half; students can no longer take home textbooks in some poor communities, for fear they may be lost.38
Where is this money going? Into corporate America, to a new “education industry” of private schools, many of which are held to no standards or even disclosure requirements. One shocked superior court judge found that the North Carolina General Assembly had violated the state constitution in sending children with tax subsidies to “private schools that have no legal obligation to teach them anything.” (His verdict was overruled by the state supreme court, which the Koch cadre had spent handsomely to control for just such eventualities.) The new for-profit virtual charter schools, whose CEO personally earned $4 million in 2014, were found, by one Stanford University research study, to have left their enrolled students falling far behind their public school counterparts, equivalent to missing “72 days of learning in reading and 180 days of learning in math” in a 180-day school year. In other words, the online schools in this study taught nothing in math, and little in reading.39 As a result of all this, North Carolina, which during the twentieth century, through wise investments in public education, had climbed from the poorest of southern states to one of the best-off, now ranks beneath Mississippi in per-pupil spending.40
Just as the radical right seeks, ultimately, to turn public education over to corporations, so it pushes for corporate prisons. The mission seems important enough that Alexander Tabarrok, a GMU economist then moonlighting as research director for the Koch-funded Independent Institute, issued a whole book on the subject in 2003, with the coy title Changing the Guard. “We now know that private prisons can be built more quickly, operated at lower cost, and maintained at a quality level at least as high as government-run prisons,” Tabarrok announced. While warning of “special-interest groups, in particular the correctional agencies and the prison guard unions” that push for more prison spending, he neglected to note how the profit motive could lead private prison corporations to push for tougher sentencing to drive up prison populations and to cut costly items such as job training and substance abuse counseling.41
After all, it was by then a common operating principle among insiders that, as the cause’s Stephen Moore had argued two decades earlier, turning public functions over to corporations was a “potent strategy” to “create new pro-privatization coalitions,” because the corporations that profit from the spun-off government functions would push for further change.42 And sure enough, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) has become a powerful lobbying force for further privatization—as well as a donor to Koch’s Reason Foundation, which pushes it.43 “Cashing In on Cons” was the apt title of an undercover report on a sector with annual revenue of more than $50 billion, CCA being among the most profitable players—and a very generous one with the Republican legislators who received 92 percent of its political contributions.44
In one emblem of the perverse incentives for-profit prisons have created, a Pennsylvania judge was convicted in a “‘cash for kids’ scheme” in which private detention centers paid judges $2.8 million in kickbacks for sentencing thousands of children to their facilities.45 With no rights or collective voice and few allies, detained immigrants have proven to be even more ideal commodities for a reliable cash stream to such corporations, so lucrative that one recent report on the facilities that house them bore the title “Banking on Detention.”46
• • •
If the nation’s health, schools, and prisons, and the world’s climate, are at a watershed moment, so, too, is the U.S. labor force. A large body of research by economists and political scientists over the past two decades has demonstrated that the surging inequality on display in America today is not an inevitable result of impersonal developments such as globalization and new technology, even as these have contributed. Rather, the extremity of our current situation is in good part due to the outsized power of corporations and wealthy donors over our politics and public policy. A case in point: According to the International Monetary Fund, an organization known for decades of draconian fiscal prescriptions, “the decline in unionization is strongly associated with the rise of income shares at the top.” The IMF concluded that the rights of workers to bargain collectively must be restored to slow the growth of inequality and enable economic growth.47
Yet the cause is pushing hard in the opposite direction: willful destruction of workers’ ability to organize into unions and negotiate for better wages and conditions. At midcentury, the former slave states of the South led the nation in passing antiunion right-to-work laws, with only a smattering of imitators elsewhere, mostly in places of sparse population. Yet between 2012 and 2016, guided by Buchanan’s ideas and pushed by the Koch-funded organizations ALEC, the SPN, and Americans for Prosperity, four former free states passed such laws: Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and West Virginia.48
The new antiunion rules unfurled first by Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin in 2011 are more devilishly lethal in their cumulative impact than anything the cause had theretofore produced. Their elaborate precision evoked the analogous changes in Chilean labor law instituted in the Pinochet era with Buchanan’s input. In the new Wisconsin, public employees would no longer be allowed to negotiate working conditions and benefits, only wages (with those held to the rate of inflation). Each contract would be only a year in duration, thus draining staff time and energy away from addressing the concerns of existing members and from organizing new members in order to prepare for now back-to-back annual negotiations. Unions would lose the right to have dues deducted from members’ paychecks and instead have to chase down individuals who did not pay. And, in a final slap, with the unions no longer able to do anything of substance for their members, they would face recertification elections each year.49 No wonder Walker boasted that “we dropped the bomb.”50 His approach cut in half, over just five years, the share of public employees who belong to unions.51
The combination of hobbling unions and privatizing public services has taken a particular toll on African Americans, who were able to move into the middle class in significant numbers specifically because of measures preventing discrimination in government jobs. “Public employment,” explained the authors of a large interdisciplinary research study on U.S. inequality, “has been the principal source of black mobility, especially for women, and one of the most important mechanisms reducing black poverty.” One recent headline captures the impact succinctly: “Public Sector Jobs Vanish, Hitting Blacks Hard.” The austerity measures induced by the Great Recession have contributed, but public sector employment’s failure to rebound also results from deliberate choices to cut taxes and services and outsource or privatize what remains.52
The historian of women Ruth Rosen looks at the impact of the spreading attack on government from yet another perspective. “Who will care for America’s children and the elderly,” she asks, now that two-thirds of mothers with children under six are in the workforce, yet “market fundamentalism—the irrational belief that markets solve all problems—has succeeded in dismantling so many federal regulations, services and protections?”53 But the cause would argue that it has answered that question over and over again: You will. And if you can’t, you should have thought of that before you had kids or before you grew old without adequate savings. The solution to every problem—from young people loaded down with student loan debt to the care of infants and toddlers and the sick and the elderly—is for each individual to think, from the time they are sentient, about their possible future needs and prepare for them with their own earnings, or pay the consequences. Indeed, George Mason’s Tyler Cowen and a Mercatus colleague told young Americans a few years ago that they “should not be occupying Wall Street, they should be occupying AARP” (to keep retirees from taking from them).54
But the elderly, too, and those now aging will have plenty of problems of their own. Social Security offers another tragic illustration of the destructive import of privatization and “personal responsibility,” with Chile’s experience again hinting at America’s future. Our nation’s retirement system is “the soft underbelly of the welfare state,” leading cadre member Stephen Moore has said. “Jab your spear through that” and you can kill the whole thing.55 The Koch team, led by Cato, continues to push the Pinochet model of individual investment accounts, a model for which they have won the support of many Republican elected officials. But in reality, that model proved so disastrous that after the dictatorship ended, a nearly universal consensus emerged on bringing back key elements of social insurance. The system of individual accounts proved a huge boon to the financial corporations that received the automatic deductions from workers’ paychecks. The companies exploited that access mercilessly, achieving an average annual profit rate of more than 50 percent over a five-year period, thanks, not least, to their taking between a quarter and a third of workers’ contributions as fees. (One senator decried them as “thieves in jackets and ties” who “rob people of their pensions.”) Even Sebastián Piñera, a conservative billionaire elected president of Chile in 2010 and the brother of the Pinochet labor minister who imposed the system, said it needed “deep reforms, because half of Chileans have no pension coverage, and of those who do, 40 percent are going to find it hard to reach the minimum level” needed for retirement.56
Meanwhile, the United States, distracted by the false fearmongering of the libertarians from the true challenge ahead, faces a retirement shortfall on a scale of more than $6 trillion as wage earners, in particular, have been thrown back on their own resources. Pushed by market pressures and encouraged by Mont Pelerin Society thought, U.S. corporations have nearly all discontinued the defined benefit pensions that a generation ago covered half the labor force. And with wages essentially stagnant for the majority since the 1970s, very few Americans have 401(k) accounts or other savings equivalent to what has been lost. Two authorities offer this stark summary: “The harsh reality is that the majority of today’s workforce—probably the large majority—are heading toward increasingly difficult and, in some cases, financially disastrous retirements.” The researchers also show, however, that this bleak future does not need to be. Social Security “remains the most widespread, effective, secure, and significant source of retirement income” for the vast majority of Americans. To stave off the crisis, the need is precisely the opposite of what the libertarian cadre argues: the nation’s social insurance system should be expanded to compensate for the spread of low-wage work and the shortfall from other sources.57
• • •
The ultimate target of the well-heeled right’s stealth plan, though, as Buchanan for so long urged, is the nation’s most important rule book: the U.S. Constitution itself. To understand where that endgame fits with all that has already unfolded, it may help to take a step backward and review the planning of the whole project that has unfurled since 2008, when the combined impact of the financial crisis that set off the Great Recession and the election of the nation’s first African American president, Barack Obama, gave the cause the opening for which Charles Koch had patiently waited after setting up shop at George Mason in 1997.58
That very year, Tyler Cowen was commissioned to lay the conceptual groundwork for the planned push to transform America with a paper titled “Why Does Freedom Wax and Wane?”59 The paper was a review of research that could guide the Mercatus Center in its quest to eradicate the “restrictions on liberty” characteristic of twentieth-century democracies.60
What did Cowen discover? One key finding was that by the 1920s, in both Europe and the United States, “the expansion of the voter franchise” beyond “wealthy male landowners” had produced the unfortunate result of enlarged public sectors. Alas, “the elimination of poll taxes and literacy tests leads to higher turnout and higher welfare spending.”61
“The freest countries have not generally been democratic,” Cowen noted, with Chile being “the most successful” in securing freedom (defined not as most of us would, as personal freedom, but as supplying the greatest economic liberty). Cowen pointed to Hong Kong and Singapore as other lasting examples, as well as to two other cases: Peru under Alberto Fujimori and New Zealand from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, which deregulated financial markets, privatized extensively, slashed taxes on the wealthy to create “a (nearly) flat tax,” and undermined labor unions’ bargaining power.62
The professor identified another commonality in the success stories: “In no case were reforms brought on by popular demand for market-oriented ideas.” The pro-liberty cause faced the same problem it always had: it wanted a radical transformation that “find[s] little or no support” among the people. Cowen delivered the action implication of its minority following without mincing words: “If American political institutions render market-oriented reforms too difficult to achieve, then perhaps those institutions should be changed.”63
The economist was creating, it seems fair to say, a handbook for how to conduct a fifth-column assault on democracy.
“The weakening of the checks and balances” in the American system, Cowen suggested, “would increase the chance of a very good outcome.” Alas, given the pervasive reverence for the U.S. Constitution, a direct bid to manipulate the system could prove “disastrous.” Cowen’s best advice, informed by the Chilean experience, was sudden percussive policy bombing, akin in nature, one could say, to the military doctrine of shock and awe, which uses colossal displays of force and calculated interlinked maneuvers to shock the enemy into submission. When the right opportunity arose, the economist advised, “big-bang style clustered bursts” could dispense with multiple democratic constraints on economic liberty in the same surge (rather like, one could infer, the radical policy changes imposed on multiple fronts in the same sessions in newly Republican-dominated states like mine after 2011, among them education, employment, environment, taxation, and voting rights).64
In the meantime, shaping public opinion was crucial. Efforts should probably focus on men, because they “are more likely to think like economists,” whereas women tend to anticipate the downside of economic liberty and so support government intervention. Research being done at George Mason also suggested a good deal of irrationality in the electorate, which could be turned to advantage. “It might be possible for ‘irrationally held’ views to in fact support good policies,” particularly if the cause were to enlist insights from “cognitive science and perhaps evolutionary biology.” Knowledge of just how vulnerable humans are to hardwired drives that resist reasoned evidence, it seemed, might prove helpful in getting voters to unwittingly enable an “unpopular” agenda.65
Changes under way in the media offered still more promise for the cause. Television’s new fixation on private peccadilloes, as seen in the Clinton era, could leave citizens jaded and suspicious, thus sowing helpful mistrust of government (although some caution was in order, as the “cynicism may undercut some of the values needed to sustain a free society”). The emerging Internet, for its part, “appears especially well suited for rumor, gossip, and talk of conspiracy.”66
Before we turn to how American “political institutions could be changed” to enable “weakening of the checks and balances” as recommended by Cowen, ultimately through altered interpretation among sitting judges followed by constitutional amendment, a little orientation may be helpful, because, in truth, the U.S. Constitution already restrains what we the people can do to a degree not seen in any other democratic nation. Fittingly for a cause whose lineage traces back to John C. Calhoun, the Koch-funded cadre works to exaggerate the most troubling features of what one legal scholar fairly called “slavery’s constitution.”67
Let me explain.
Americans are taught from an early age to revere the checks and balances built into our political system by that document, features designed to act as imposing speed bumps, if not complete roadblocks, to radical change from hotheaded majorities, particularly those who may encroach upon the property rights of the minority. The most obvious among these binding features is our grossly malapportioned Senate, designed to put brakes on the House of Representatives, which was to represent the people directly. A state with comparatively few residents, such as Wyoming, has the same Senate representation as the most populous state, California. That means the vote of a Wyoming resident carries nearly seventy times more weight than the vote of a Californian in Senate elections and deliberations.68 How fair is that? It’s not. It is precisely the kind of malapportionment that the Supreme Court, in the early 1960s, ruled unconstitutional in internal affairs of the states, whose officials were purposely overrepresenting rural residents over urban and suburban residents—indeed, a much more egregious departure from the “one person, one vote” standard. But because the apportionment of Senate seats is written into the Constitution, in the one section that cannot be amended, the remedy cannot be applied nationally.
On the one hand, this constitutional system has helped make the United States the most stable republic in the modern world. On the other hand, it has also made ours by far the least responsive of all the leading democracies to what the people want and need. It takes upheaval of truly historic proportions to achieve significant change in America, even when it is supported by the vast majority—as evidenced by the civil war required to end slavery, the tens of thousands of strikes and other struggles needed to achieve reform during the Great Depression, and the mass disruption and political crisis that civil rights activists had to bring about in order to win for African Americans the same constitutional rights enjoyed by other citizens.69 The existing checks and balances, in short, create an all but insuperable barrier to those seeking to right even gross social injustice.
The problem is systemic. Built into our Constitution, the change-blocking mechanisms prevent us as a polity from addressing our most profound challenges until there is supermajority support for doing so. We can see the toll of these constraints by looking at the problem of economic inequality. As it has swelled in the United States to a degree not seen in any comparable nation, intergenerational mobility—the ability of young people to move up the economic ladder to achieve a social and financial status better than that of their parents, which was once the source of America’s greatest promise and pride—has plummeted below that of all peer nations, with the possible exception of the United Kingdom. Many thinkers seek to explain this divergence by citing a uniquely individualistic culture. We have all heard those claims, perhaps even floated them ourselves.
But two of the country’s most distinguished comparative political scientists, Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz, recently approached the puzzle of U.S. singularity in another way: they compared the number of stumbling blocks that advanced industrial democracies put in the way of their citizens’ ability to achieve their collective will through the legislative process. Calling these inbuilt “majority constraining” obstacles “veto players,” the two scholars found a striking correlation: the nations with the fewest veto players have the least inequality, and those with the most veto players have the greatest inequality. Only the United States has four such veto players. All four were specified in the slavery-defending founders’ Constitution: absolute veto power for the Senate, for the House, and for the president (if not outvoted by a two-thirds majority), and a Constitution that cannot be altered without the agreement of two-thirds of the states after Congress. Other features of the U.S. system further obstruct majority rule, including a winner-take-all Electoral College that encourages a two-party system; the Tenth Amendment, which steers power toward the states; and a system of representation in the unusually potent Senate that violates the principle of “one person, one vote” to a degree not seen anywhere else. Owing to such mechanisms, Stepan and Linz note, even in the late 1960s, “the heyday of income equality in the United States, no other country in the set [of long-standing democracies] was as unequal as America, and most were substantially more equal.” As arresting, even the most equal U.S. state is less equal than any comparable country. What makes the U.S. system “exceptional,” sadly, is the number of built-in vetoes to constrain the majority.70
To this already singularly restrictive system the cadre seeks to add still more veto points. In the dream vision of the apparatus Charles Koch has funded to carry out Buchanan’s call for constitutional revolution, it would be all but impossible for government to respond to the will of the majority unless the very wealthiest Americans agree fully with every measure.71 The project has multiple prongs.
One is a vast legal shift, also anchored at GMU; it illuminates how quietly executed changes in legal rules can bind citizens as never before. In 2015, the New York Times headlined an investigative report, “Arbitration Everywhere, Stacking the Deck of Justice.” The journalists’ intensive research revealed “a far-reaching power play by American corporations” to include in the extensive fine print of applications for, say, employment, credit cards, cell phone service, medical practices, or long-term care, language to which exhausted and unwitting consumers routinely agree without reading. That language prevents the signers from participating in class action lawsuits over corporate malpractice and compels them to accept mandatory arbitration in a system in which the corporations in question write the rules and choose the decision-makers. That is: the contracts take away citizens’ constitutional right to sue in court, proclaiming their signatures as consent.72
“This is among the most profound shifts in our legal history,” warns a Reagan-appointed federal judge. His words bear slow reading: “Ominously, business has a good chance of opting out of the legal system altogether and misbehaving without reproach.” A subsequent headline noted that it amounts to a “Privatization of the Justice System.”73
In their bid for constitutional revolution by combined increments, the operatives of the apparatus tell themselves and those in their listening audience that they are restoring the founders’ vision. Some even call themselves “Madisonians.”74
That, too, is misinformation. Rather, the cadre is promoting a view of the Constitution that comes from a unique era of U.S. history: the period after the defeat of Reconstruction and leading up to the Great Depression. Buchanan acknowledged as much in the book that built his career, when he and coauthor Gordon Tullock said that the nation’s decision-making rules were closer to “the ‘ideal’ in 1900 than in 1960.”75 The year 1900 was the age of both Lochner v. New York and Plessy v. Ferguson—decisions remembered today because they blocked majority desire for meaningful employment reform, in the one case, and allowed state-legislated racial oppression, in the other. Both decisions twisted the Fourteenth Amendment to serve the already privileged rather than the embattled citizens whose rights the amendment was designed to protect.
In short, Buchanan’s desired constitutional order enabled an era of unmatched corporate dominance, in which elites North and South reunited in a shared disdain for the political participation of the great mass of the citizenry. His view of the Constitution allowed mass disenfranchisement in the South, suppression of working-class voting in the North and the West, treatment of workers that was odious enough to set off veritable rolling civil wars between capital and labor, ruin of the environment in community after community, and more. The heyday of what millions of contemporaries dubbed a “plutocracy,” it was a time that saw, in the words of the legal scholar Barry Friedman, “a colossal loss of faith in the efficacy of law” as citizens concluded that judges always and unfailingly took the bosses’ side. Not coincidentally, it was also a time that, the journalist Ida M. Tarbell wrote, “dripped with blood.”76
Had Buchanan’s ideal system of 1900 endured at the national level in the Great Depression, the United States might well have experienced a revolution from the right or the left, instead of pulling off the achievement of being the sole liberal democracy to survive the global catastrophe. That feat was made possible by an emergent understanding of the Constitution that put some constraints on property rights in the name of freedom for all and collective self-government in the age of the large corporation.77
• • •
There is another, biting irony to note: the goal of this cause is not, in the end, to shrink big government, as its rhetoric implies. Quite the contrary: the interpretation of the Constitution the cadre seeks to impose would give federal courts vast new powers to strike down measures desired by voters and passed by their duly elected representatives at all levels—and would require greatly expanded police powers to control the resultant popular anger. An omen: after years of criticizing “judicial activism” by the Supreme Court for greater equity, Koch grantees are now making, as one Cato publication puts it, the Case for an Activist Judiciary to secure economic liberty.78
To advance their constitutional revolution, the donor network has pumped hitherto unheard-of sums into state judicial races. While media attention has focused on the impact of Citizens United on the presidential and congressional races, the opening of the spigots in state judicial races may prove more consequential over the decades ahead as corporate donors invest in those they believe will interpret the Constitution and the laws in their favor. The Republican majorities that are rushing through “radical reform” know that citizens of their states are likely to turn to the only branch of government left that might blunt the blows. That is why the large donors have invested so heavily in judicial races: to elect judges who will allow the revolution to go forward. One North Carolina insider summarized the danger bluntly: “Lose the courts, lose the war.”79
At this writing, though, the flagship success of the constitutional wing of the cause was Chief Justice John Roberts’s decision in the Affordable Care Act case, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. While some on the right excoriated Roberts for having upheld the ACA, smart court watchers noted not the verdict but what Roberts said about the Commerce Clause.
Some context: In 1937, when the Supreme Court upheld a minimum wage law for the first time and then the Wagner Act, too, signaling its acceptance of the New Deal, it did so by agreeing with government attorneys that the Commerce Clause of Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the ability to regulate interstate trade. Under the rubric of regulating interstate trade, the federal government then dramatically increased its oversight of what used to be considered strictly private or state matters. But in the Affordable Care Act case, Roberts, who in his first year on the bench did more to limit the reach of Brown v. Board of Education than any previous justice, commented that “the Commerce Clause is not a general license to regulate an individual from cradle to grave” (a proposition no one has suggested). Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her opinion, rightly picked up on that surprising assertion, calling the chief justice’s claim “stunningly retrogressive.” But as court watcher Jeffrey Toobin notes, “Roberts’ narrow conception of the Commerce Clause is now the law of the land”—and an invitation to legal challenges to other federal legislation and programs.80
A Stanford law professor dubbed Roberts’s ruling “a loaded gun.”81 Faculty at the George Mason School of Law, now aptly named after Antonin Scalia, are urging the court to fire it by going back to its pre-1937 jurisprudence, when the justices routinely struck down government action to advance popular economic security or social justice goals.82
As the push for aggressive judicial activism on behalf of economic liberty illustrates, for all the small-government rhetoric, the cadre actually wants a very strong government—but a government that acts only in a way they deem appropriate. It wants our democracy to be curbed as Chile’s was, with locks and bolts on what the majority can do. Three additional battlefronts illuminate this truth, highlighting the stark restructuring of power under way.
One is a power grab by affiliated state legislators reaching down to deny municipal governments the right to make their own policies on matters hitherto within their purview, not least local election rules. Pushed by State Policy Network affiliates and guided by ALEC-affiliated legislators, GOP-controlled states have been passing what are called preemption laws that deny localities the right to adopt policies that depart from the model being imposed by the network-dominated state legislatures.83
Typically, the GOP state governments are preventing city and suburban governments from enacting measures to raise local minimum wages, protect the environment, or enact antidiscrimination measures that would protect LGBTQ citizens. In Texas, for example, the City of Dallas lost the autonomy to discourage local retailers from using plastic bags, because, its people were told, it ran counter to “the Texas model” of “low taxes, limited government and free markets.”84
But the pattern now emerging is not a paradox after all: the cause understands that, as in the 1950s, corporate and conservative interests can make their will felt most easily in state governments—and are more likely to be challenged successfully by the citizenry at the federal and local levels—partly because state affairs are less well monitored by the people and the press.85 Tractability was thus state officials’ prime qualification for the cadre’s plans. Virtually every state government, according to a recent study by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, kowtows to business and the wealthy, underrepresents citizens of lesser means, lacks transparency, and does a poor job of enforcing ethics laws. The promotion of states’ rights is not an atavistic racial reflex for the insiders, that is to say, but a cold-eyed way to secure minority rule.86
If the cadre has its way, in fact, and its allied legislators continue to comply, a nation that stands at 138th of 172 democracies in the world in voter turnout will have even fewer people participating in the political process.87 After America elected its first black president, operatives throughout the apparatus and their allied officeholders systematically kindled the irrational conviction that Barack Obama had won through massive voter “fraud,” and that, unless a battery of new laws prevented it, such fraud would be used to “steal” more elections. This was the cadre at its most cynical. But so avidly has this big lie been spread that nearly half of registered voters, and even federal judges and Supreme Court justices, came to believe that fraud was a big problem—and cases have been decided on those fallacious assumptions.88
With fewer people voting, everything will be so much easier to achieve. In the two years after Republican candidates swept the 2010 midterm elections, ALEC-backed legislators in forty-one states introduced more than 180 bills to restrict who could vote and how. The measures would most reduce the political influence of low-income voters and young people, who had been inclining leftward. America had not witnessed such a burst of limits on voting rights since the calculated mass disenfranchisement instituted by southern states a century ago.89 But now the effort was national, not only regional, and before long it was affecting outcomes.90
A related strategy further distorts political representation to advance the property rights supremacist project. One part of this initiative was the most audacious gerrymander in U.S. history, with the purpose of ensuring systematic underrepresentation of Americans viewed as troublesome by the cause and overrepresentation of the more manageable—while lining up the supermajority of reliably controlled states needed to hold a constitutional convention. Journalists—in particular, Jane Mayer and David Daley—have done an excellent job of exposing the evil genius of the 2010 midterm elections campaign plan called the Redistricting Majority Project, or REDMAP. It was a cunning project to amass state-level power to transform the nation by using the decennial redistricting process to sharply boost the power of Republicans, even where majorities backed Democrats, and to pull the Republican Party to the right of its own voters in the process.91
Understandably, many saw the power grab in purely partisan terms, but it was much more. The breathtaking import is conveyed well by Salon editor in chief David Daley: “Without the protection of a fairly drawn district, the citizen is a pawn of billionaires who use the map of the country” to get what they want. And the game was a long one, all but invisible to those it was locking out. Daley points out that the GOP is an election away “from achieving an unimaginable goal in a country that sees itself as a beacon of democracy: a veto-proof supermajority operating without majority support.”92 The ever strategic Koch grantee Grover Norquist equates the cause’s expanding chokehold over the states with a Roman pilum—a spear powerful enough to penetrate any shield, and barbed, so it “could not be pulled out.”93
A final example of the new bullying we can expect from the plan to enchain democracy also harks back to the midcentury South, with its inquisition-minded state and private bodies to investigate and intimidate dissenters. In 2015, the journalist Kenneth Vogel revealed that the Koch network had “quietly built a secretive operation that conducts political surveillance and intelligence gathering on its liberal opponents, viewing it as a key strategic tool in its efforts to reshape American public life.”94 A case in point: when Jane Mayer began to expose the operations of the Koch brothers and their network, they dispatched private investigators in a fruitless quest to find dirt with which to discredit her and tried to convince her employer to fire her. Anyone who tries to expose what this cause is up to thus must ask herself: Will I become the target of a similar scurrilous attack? Wouldn’t it be wiser to keep quiet? The cadre even has an economics euphemism for harassment designed to intimidate—they call it “upping the transaction costs for the other side.”95
• • •
“Democracy,” the towering African American historian John Hope Franklin observed in the midst of World War II, “is essentially an act of faith.”96 When that faith is willfully exterminated, we should not be surprised that we reap the whirlwind. The public choice way of thinking, one sage critic warned at the time James Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, is not simply “descriptively inaccurate”—indeed, “a terrible caricature” of how the political process works. It also constitutes an insidious attack on the very “norm of public spiritedness” so crucial to shaping good government policy and ethical conduct in civic life. That is to say, public choice theory was wrong in its explanations, and would be toxic if believed by the public or its representatives. We have seen the truth of that prediction.97
The United States is now at one of those historic forks in the road whose outcome will prove as fateful as those of the 1860s, the 1930s, and the 1960s. To value liberty for the wealthy minority above all else and enshrine it in the nation’s governing rules, as Calhoun and Buchanan both called for and the Koch network is achieving, play by play, is to consent to an oligarchy in all but the outer husk of representative form.98
The question this stealth plan presents Americans with is, at one level, quite simple: Do we want to live in a cosmetically updated version of midcentury Virginia, in a country that so elevates property rights as to paralyze the use of government for democratically determined goals and needs? That extinguishes “the political we”?
For what is the substance of James Buchanan’s and Charles Koch’s idea of liberty but Harry Byrd’s Virginia, the state subjected to the “most thorough control by an oligarchy,” with tools now to be grafted upon the nation as a whole? Byrd’s state-mandated racial oppression would go; the cause would not publicly advocate for that. But nearly all else about the political economy of midcentury Virginia enacts their dream: the uncontested sway of the wealthiest citizens; the use of right-to-work laws and other ploys to keep working people powerless; the ability to fire dissenting public employees at will, targeting educators in particular; the use of voting-rights restrictions to keep those unlikely to agree with the elite from the polls; the deployment of states’ rights to deter the federal government from promoting equal treatment; the hostility to public education; the regressive tax system; the opposition to Social Security and Medicare; and the parsimonious response to public needs of all kinds—not just the decent schools sought by aspiring teenagers like Barbara Rose Johns and John Stokes but also the care and shelter of the elderly poor, the mentally ill, and others in whose names Dr. Louise Wensel ran her 1959 Senate campaign against Old Harry. Her core criticism, after all, was that he worshipped “the golden calf”: that he prized the accumulation of private wealth over the Golden Rule and democracy, “no matter what the cost.”
The libertarian cause, from the time it first attracted wider support during the southern schools crisis, was never really about freedom as most people would define it. It was about the promotion of crippling division among the people so as to end any interference with what those who held vast power over others believed should be their prerogatives. Its leaders had no scruples about enlisting white supremacy to achieve capital supremacy. And today, knowing that the majority does not share their goals and would stop them if they understood the endgame, the team of paid operatives seeks to win by stealth. Now, as then, the leaders seek Calhoun-style liberty for the few—the liberty to concentrate vast wealth, so as to deny elementary fairness and freedom to the many.
Is this the country we want to live in and bequeath to our children and future generations? That is the real public choice. If we delay much longer, those who are imposing their stark utopia will choose for us. One of them has announced flatly: “America will soon make a decision about its future. It will be a permanent decision. There will be no going back.” As we consider the future of our democracy in light of all that has happened already, we may take heed of a Koch maxim: “Playing it safe is slow suicide.”99