. . .

Daina Ramey Berry explores this sinful institution in The Price for Their Pound of Flesh. Those in power saw enslaved people as exchangeable commodities, specimens, and human chattel. Beginning at the moment of birth, their entire lives were defined by their financial value. Birth announcements were ledger entries. Baby showers were instead auctions of human property for sale. Humans appreciated in value until adulthood and then depreciated as they aged. They were flesh that could be bought, sold, traded, and discarded.

Berry invites us into an uncomfortable truth: despite the seductions of the so-called American dream, our particular economy in the United States wasn’t born of grit, gumption, and freedom. It was born of humans who were violently rendered into units of property and economic production. This poisonous root of our economy continues not only to fund white supremacy in this country (Will Adams died just 70 years ago, when my grandmother was a young woman) but also to shape our imagination of what the United States economy even is.

What Dan Patrick called the American dream has been informed, both directly and indirectly, by this damning history that used human life as payment for the economic success of the powerful. Fears of the collapse of our economy are real and valid. But equally real and valid are the ways our imagination of what the economy even is has been collapsed by its evil foundations: chattel slavery.

The impulse to think of human life as money is as old as our country, woven into the very fabric of our political imagination. COVID-19 did not generate this impulse in Dan Patrick and so many others. Rather, COVID-19 has, like any trauma, tapped into deep-seated anxieties. Anxiety often brings with it reversion: reverting back into past habits, comfortable patterns of behavior. The anxiety of this pandemic is causing some of us to revert back to the sinful foundations of our economy: humans as units of economic production.

To be clear, current conversations about sacrificing the vulnerable for the economy are not the same thing as chattel slavery. But the logic being exposed— a logic that has poisoned our imagination of what economic health looks like, and who is disposable to achieve it—cannot be divorced from our not-so-distant history.

Can we imagine an economy that does not require cannibalistic capitalism to survive, or human life that’s irreducible to units of production? Can we imagine the American dream apart from the ongoing struggle of people of African descent to survive in an economy where the average white family has seven times the wealth of the average African American family? . . .

Ask people to name the key minds that have shaped America’s burst of radical right-wing attacks on working conditions, consumer rights and public services, and they will typically mention figures like free market-champion Milton Friedman, libertarian guru Ayn Rand, and laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.

James McGill Buchanan is a name you will rarely hear unless you’ve taken several classes in economics. And if the Tennessee-born Nobel laureate were alive today, it would suit him just fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many economics students have little understanding of his work.

The reason? Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept.

That is a dangerous blind spot, MacLean argues in a meticulously researched book, Democracy in Chains, a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. While Americans grapple with Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency, we may be missing the key to changes that are taking place far beyond the level of mere politics. Once these changes are locked into place, there may be no going back. . .

she read through boxes and drawers full of papers that included personal correspondence between Buchanan and billionaire industrialist Charles Koch. That’s when she had an amazing realization: here was the intellectual linchpin of a stealth revolution currently in progress.

. . .

The Oligarchic Revolution Unfolds

Buchanan’s ideas began to have huge impact, especially in America and in Britain. In his home country, the economist was deeply involved in efforts to cut taxes on the wealthy in 1970s and 1980s and he advised proponents of Reagan Revolution in their quest to unleash markets and posit government as the “problem” rather than the “solution.” The Koch-funded Virginia school coached scholars, lawyers, politicians, and business people to apply stark right-wing perspectives on everything from deficits to taxes to school privatization. In Britain, Buchanan’s work helped to inspire the public sector reforms of Margaret Thatcher and her political progeny.

To put the success into perspective, MacLean points to the fact that Henry Manne, whom Buchanan was instrumental in hiring, created legal programs for law professors and federal judges which could boast that by 1990 two of every five sitting federal judges had participated. “40 percent of the U.S. federal judiciary,” writes MacLean, “had been treated to a Koch-backed curriculum.”

MacLean illustrates that in South America, Buchanan was able to first truly set his ideas in motion by helping a bare-knuckles dictatorship ensure the permanence of much of the radical transformation it inflicted on a country that had been a beacon of social progress. The historian emphasizes that Buchanan’s role in the disastrous Pinochet government of Chile has been underestimated partly because unlike Milton Friedman, who advertised his activities, Buchanan had the shrewdness to keep his involvement quiet. With his guidance, the military junta deployed public choice economics in the creation of a new constitution, which required balanced budgets and thereby prevented the government from spending to meet public needs. Supermajorities would be required for any changes of substance, leaving the public little recourse to challenge programs like the privatization of social security.

The dictator’s human rights abuses and pillage of the country’s resources did not seem to bother Buchanan, MacLean argues, so long as the wealthy got their way. “Despotism may be the only organizational alternative to the political structure that we observe,” the economist had written in The Limits of Liberty. If you have been wondering about the end result of the Virginia school philosophy, well, the economist helpfully spelled it out.


A World of Slaves

Most Americans haven’t seen what’s coming.

MacLean notes that when the Kochs’ control of the GOP kicked into high gear after the financial crisis of 2007-08, many were so stunned by the “shock-and-awe” tactics of shutting down government, destroying labor unions, and rolling back services that meet citizens’ basic necessities that few realized that many leading the charge had been trained in economics at Virginia institutions, especially George Mason University. Wasn’t it just a new, particularly vicious wave of partisan politics?

It wasn’t. MacLean convincingly illustrates that it was something far more disturbing.

MacLean is not the only scholar to sound the alarm that the country is experiencing a hostile takeover that is well on its way to radically, and perhaps permanently, altering the society. Peter Temin, former head of the MIT economics department, INET grantee, and author of The Vanishing Middle Class, as well as economist Gordon Lafer of the University of Oregon and author of The One Percent Solution, have provided eye-opening analyses of where America is headed and why. MacLean adds another dimension to this dystopian big picture, acquainting us with what has been overlooked in the capitalist right wing’s playbook.