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

Understand the problem. I strongly recommend the book Democracy In Chains. If we don't understand the root of the problem, it's far too easy for bad actors to misdirect us with scapegoats. From the book's synopsis:

> Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.
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> In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.
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> Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy.
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> Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting.

The problem lies in the oversimplified models they use. It's a sociopathic way of modeling human behavior, as a means of preserving power hierarchies. But it doesn't model human instincts and behavior well at extremes. The general idea is to make everyone, including politicians, so desperate for money that they'll do just about anything to get it. The term used in the book to describe it is "economic eugenics". Then to prevent socialist uprisings, people's frustration is misdirected towards government institutions, as a means of reducing them in size and power.

But people exhibit behavior that can't easily be modeled, when they're subjected to that much stress. The forces responsible for this right-wing media misdirection (basically the Kochs and the Mercers) are playing with fire, and they're too arrogant to realize it. One way or another, it's only a matter of time before these chains are broken. We can only hope to minimize the collateral damage when it happens.

edit:

YouTube interview with Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains

Slate interview with Nancy MacLean

List of Koch policies that have been implemented under the Trump administration, as of last year

Atlantic article on the psychological differences between liberals and conservatives

Also need to add Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean (also available as a fantastic audiobook). In it, Nancy traces how the Kochs built their radicalizing right wing network. Fascinating read about how self perpetuating the indoctrination has become.

Keep digging:

Look up Jane Mayer and Nancy MacLean.

Look into the Koch, Scaife, Olin, De Vos, Bradley, and Coors families, as well as Sheldon Adelson.

Look into the economics departments at the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech and George Mason University since the 1950s.

Follow the money.

And look at the use of neurolinguistic programming in the higher levels of the fundraising, voter registration and get-out-the-vote schemes in both of our major political parties.

And once you've done all that, go volunteer to work for your county or state party political organization to see how the pyramid works and whether or not I'm talking out the side of my neck.

cc: u/Lamont-Cranston, u/troublesomefaux

sure!

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