The Deep History of the Radical Right’s (No Longer) Stealth Plan for America

What Are the Deep Roots of Project 2025?

The Democratic National Convention was chock full of references to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and flashing red light warnings about its horrifying implications for American Democracy and the fate of the most vulnerable citizens of our country. As Doug Porter’s fine series of columns on that document expose, it is a wide-ranging attack on everything from the union movement as I discussed last week, to environmental protections, civil rights, women’s reproductive freedom, the sanctity of voting, and every conceivable good that government could do for ordinary Americans. 

It is, as comedian Kenan Thompson joked at the DNC, a 900-page document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time. 

Project 2025 is a bold, full-frontal assault on inclusive democracy and the vast majority of Americans in the service of the moneyed elite.  What is most amazing about this deeply unpopular project is that in it, the Republicans started to tell the truth out loud. 

For decades, a large, complex network of right wing think tanks funded by corporate interests and billionaires have worked through organizations such as Heritage, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the State Policy Network, the Reason Foundation, and other reactionary outlets which have done everything they could to chip away at the legacy of the New Deal and Civil Rights Movement and every other progressive gain of the twentieth century. In an effort to take us back to the days of the Robber Barons, when all the restrictions on corporate excesses and protections for ordinary folks in American society did not exist, they have worked assiduously to roll back over a century of sometimes uneven progress toward a more perfect union and inclusionary democracy.   

These attacks on progressive principles, however, have rarely been promoted honestly. Indeed, from the myriad bogus “reform” efforts of rightwing hacks like Carl DeMaio here in San Diego, to the scurrilous attacks on unions and climate action by the corporate sector at the national level, the strategy has always been to NOT say the evil part out loud.  What distinguishes our current moment, Trump’s disingenuous disavowals aside, is that the right is finally letting its freak flag fly.  Hence the stark contrasts between the future promised by the right and the one sketched out by the Democrats could not be more dramatic. 

Now that the public is finally being exposed to the strange beast that has been slouching toward Washington, D.C. to be born for decades, we will learn whether or not racial and culture war distractions still have the power to move a majority of Americans to vote against their own self interests.

So where did all this come from in the first place?  History holds the answers. 

Back in 2017 at the San Diego Free Press, I penned a couple of columns addressing the history of what had been the right’s stealth campaign to undermine American Democracy.  Revisiting those columns now, it is clear that we have come to a key inflection point in American history as historian Nancy MacLean so clearly illustrated.  

Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America is the single most important book for progressives to read if they want to understand how we got to the dark moment of the present. 

MacLean takes us to the roots of the current crisis via an intellectual history of James McGill Buchanan, the thinker whose work, more than anyone else’s, informs the machinations of the “Kochtopus,” that shadowy network of interlinked billionaire-funded right-wing think tanks that is driving American politics.

If you want to know the central ideas behind the “dark money” that Jane Mayer’s seminal book of the same title addresses and the philosophical origins of the neoliberalism that Naomi Klein analyzes in her work, MacLean’s text is the key.  In it, we learn that Buchanan is the intellectual godfather to an intentionally dishonest, covert movement by the right to “save capitalism from democracy—permanently.” 

MacLean’s study of Buchanan’s work and history gives us a disturbing view of “the germ of today’s billionaires’ bid to shackle democracy” and deliver a libertarian Utopia where “property rights supremacists would rather let people die than receive health care assistance or antismoking counsel from government.”  She exposes an extremism in defense of “liberty” strictly defined as the freedom of the propertied elite from any form of “collective gangsterism.”  It is a worldview so rigid that its adherents “would rather invite global ecological and social catastrophe than allow regulatory restrictions on economic liberty.” 

Buchanan was a southerner whose great movement was born out of the crucible of the battle to undermine what he and his fellow white confederates saw as the oppressive government overreach resulting from the Brown vs Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court. For them, the movements for labor rights, civil rights, environmental protections, and/or any other variety of government action which taxed anyone without universal consent to do public good was tyranny of the worst sort—a manifestation of “a modern version of mob attempts to take by force what the takers had no right to: the fruits of another person’s efforts.” 

Hence was born the stunningly radical anti-modernist vision of the contemporary American right.  Buchanan’s agenda from his days fighting civil rights and the desegregation of public schools to his time advising Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship on how to dismantle democracy in Chile was calculated to frustrate what he saw as the “obstacle” of our “empathy” and deliver a “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.” 

When Buchanan landed at UCLA for a period during the late sixties, he thought of it as “a lunatic asylum” and was “uncomfortable with the number of African Americans living in the city and attending UCLA.”  After a visit to San Diego State University, he approvingly observed that there were “very few blacks in attendance” and that the students seemed “more orderly.” His response to the chaos he perceived not just at UCLA but in the country as a whole was to call for the widespread repression of student activists, and, in order to win the long war, he and his colleagues thought the elite needed to make use of “the social control function of denying a liberal arts education to young people from lower income families who had not saved to pay for it.”  That way, they mused, those who likely wouldn’t make it “into management” but still might “raise trouble” would not have “their sights raised.” 

This kind of “totalitarian capitalism,” as the Guardian review of the book calls it, is the hallmark of Buchanan’s thinking and would come to inform the entire agenda of the American right:

[I]n collaboration with business tycoons and the institutes they founded, developed a hidden programme for suppressing democracy on behalf of the very rich. The programme is now reshaping politics, and not just in the US.

Buchanan was strongly influenced by both the neoliberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and the property supremacism of John C. Calhoun, who argued in the first half of the 19th century that freedom consists of the absolute right to use your property (including your slaves) however you may wish; any institution that impinges on this right is an agent of oppression, exploiting men of property on behalf of the undeserving masses.

James Buchanan brought these influences together to create what he called public choice theory. He argued that a society could not be considered free unless every citizen has the right to veto its decisions. What he meant by this was that no one should be taxed against their will. But the rich were being exploited by people who use their votes to demand money that others have earned, through involuntary taxes to support public spending and welfare. Allowing workers to form trade unions and imposing graduated income taxes were forms of “differential or discriminatory legislation” against the owners of capital.

This oppression of the rich through unjust taxation, which he defined as any form of taxation without 100% approval by all citizens, was what Buchanan spent his academic and political career fighting with all he had at his disposal. This perverse definition of “freedom” as protection of oligarchy was so sacrosanct that he felt what the United States ultimately needed was a “constitutional revolution” that would bring to us what the good people of Chile were gifted by the Pinochet junta—a constitution with “locks and bolts” preventing any real collective power over the opulent minority. 

Sadly, as horrifying as this all sounds, MacLean doesn’t allow her readers to comfortably imagine that this program is something that is lurking in the dark margins of the American right.  As the Guardian piece smartly observes, Buchanan’s history is simply “the missing chapter” that illuminates not the nature of the fringe, but rather the current mainstream of American politics brought to us by Buchanan’s most eager students, Charles Koch and his vast network of allies who have taken over the Republican Party, USA:

Through the network of thinktanks that Koch and other billionaires have sponsored, through their transformation of the Republican party, and the hundreds of millions they have poured into state congressional and judicial races, through the mass colonisation of Trump’s administration by members of this network and lethally effective campaigns against everything from public health to action on climate change, it would be fair to say that Buchanan’s vision is maturing in the US.

Of course, none of this was ever on any ballot, but that was by design.  As MacLean ably documents, the stealth strategy of those following Buchanan’s playbook is to never tell the truth.  Hence, we are never offered a choice between utterly unregulated dog eat dog capitalism and democracy; instead, we are sold one disingenuously packaged “market reform” after another until the evil that is the public sector is small enough to, as Grover Norquist once said, “drown in a bathtub.” 

What will be left is a Social Darwinist nightmare where the obstacles of empathy, the collective interest, and the public good are nothing but quaint relics of the past. 

As centrally important as it is to understand that basic premise of the right’s agenda, it is equally valuable for progressives to learn precisely how and why that is the case and what, ultimately, the endgame looks like. 

MacLean is very clear about why the right came to believe it necessary to systematically lie about their intentions:

These libertarians seemed to have determined that what was needed to achieve their ends was to stop being honest with the public.  Instead of advocating for them frontally, they needed to engage in a kind of crab walk, even if it required advancing misleading claims in order to take terrain bit by bit, in a manner that cumulatively, yet quietly, could begin to radically alter the power relations of American society.

She then goes on to tell the story of how the beginning assaults on Social Security were framed not as ways to kill the program but as ways to “reform” or save it from itself.  Even as those attempts failed, the lesson learned from defeat was not that American public opinion was against them but that it was better to take a dishonest and incremental approach. 

The key here was the embrace of privatization as the point of the spear, the starting point for their greater, unstated war on government and democracy itself.  One of things that made this effective, of course, was the fact that many neoliberal Democrats were unwitting accomplices in this slow-motion demolition of democracy.  MacLean again notes:

Many liberals then and since have tended to miss this strategic use of privatization to enchain democracy, at worst seeing the proposals as coming simply from dogma that preferred the private sector to the public.  Those driving the train know otherwise.  Privatization was a key element of the crab walk to the final, albeit gradual, revolution—the ends justify-the-means approach that allowed for using disingenuous claims to take terrain that would make the ultimate project possible.

In this way, every time a Democrat supported privatizing a public service, outsourcing, or applying “market approaches” to solving problems, they were unknowingly doing the bidding of the wrecking crew.  Hence, the free trade agreement-pushing, corporate education and charter school-loving, and Wall Street-abetting crew of New Democrats at all levels have really been tools of the highest order unless, of course, they knew better all along and were simply comfortable making deals with the devil.  Either way, they too are responsible for the mess we are in at present. 

What are the central targets of the right’s strange creatures and what sort of Brave New World do they imagine?

MacLean carefully outlines their list of enemies: regulation loving environmentalists, health policy crusaders, progressive tax advocates, all tax-funded public education, and feminism with its tendency toward “socialism.”  All these things and more were seen as threats to their vision where the only legitimate roles of the government were its policing and national defense functions—and even those could stand for a good amount of privatization. 

Also seen as a danger to liberty is “a broad and inclusive electorate” that would inevitably have the inclination to want more than a servile role in American society.  Buchanan, the intellectual architect of this current in right-wing philosophy, explicitly complained that the U.S. was “rapidly enfranchising the illiterate” and saw mass voting as a problem to be contained. 

If they are successful, those in this Buchanan-inspired movement envision a Social Darwinist paradise where “some will flourish” and others “will fall by the wayside.”  No one will deserve health care, clean water, housing, education, labor rights, retirement security, fair criminal justice, or even democracy except those who can buy them.  Voting rights will be restricted, state and municipal governments shackled, and the Constitution loaded with multiple “vetoes” to collective power. 

MacLean notes that one of Buchanan’s heroes was James Calhoun, a great enemy of broad-based franchise in American history.  And his vision, fell right in line with the intellectual legacy he cherished:

Buchanan’s desired constitutional order enabled an era of unmatched corporate dominance, in which elites of 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 civil wars between capital and labor, ruin the environment in community after community, and more. 

Buchanan’s dream, she notes, was “plutocracy,” and we are well on our way to enshrining it.  That is why MacLean goes so far as to describe the right-wing movement of think tanks and the subsequent political movement they inform as a kind anti-democratic “fifth column” set to undermine all that any lover of democracy holds dear. 

MacLean ends her book by asking if we want to live in a society where we “value liberty of the wealthy minority above all else” and change our nation’s governing rules “play by play” as the Koch machine is currently doing.  Do we want a society that “extinguishes ‘the political we’”?

That, she rightly notes, is the real “public choice” we face.  Now that they are finally showing their hand in Project 2025, nobody can say that we weren’t warned.  If we keep our eyes on the prize, history may very well show that finally telling the truth out loud was the right’s fatal error.