In Nancy MacLean's book, "Democracy In Chains" she recounts how Republicans like Hatch, Arlen Specter, and John Boehner were driven out by the James McGill Buchanan, Virgina school, Koch-funded radical right libertarians. Boehner called Ted Cruz 'lucifer in the flesh'.
The George Mason economics department and law school is deeply rooted in the Koch political machine, anyone interested in its history and outsized influence on our government for the last several decades should read Democracy in Chains.
Effort Post: I went to a talk by Duke University professor Nancy Maclean that detailed the historical roots of the modern far right movement. She traces it back to James Buchanan (Nobel Prize in Economics) who did his work from George Mason University, and his relationship to the Koch brothers. The title of the book derives from a quote from Buchanan that "for Capitalism to thrive, Democracy must be enchained." He also said that every constitution currently in existence is garbage and should be thrown away.
On the topic of throwing away constitutions and starting again, the book details how these guys were invited to implement their perfect government in Chile (Pinochet), and have also done so in North Carolina and Wisconsin. Their ultimate goal for the United States is to do a State-driven Constitutional Convention to throw out our constitution. The Republicans pretty much have all the states they need to do this.
Anyways, here's the book. It's the most depressing thing you'll read this year.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
This is the worst. I will unsubscribe from any Gimlet podcast if this persists. The Koch brothers are working very successfully toward a medieval caste system in America. They literally hate democracy.
"Can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding"
I just read an entire book about the libertarian movement in this country called Democracy in Chains. I highly recommend. Yes, the staunchest libertarians are wealthy elite that are trying to cut taxes to preserve their wealth; they are against public education, police, Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, public infrastructure, environmental protection - everything. They have cultivated their messaging in a way that makes the unwealthy and uneducated useful idiots for their movement by making them think that they'll be richer by paying marginally fewer taxes despite the fact that they are being robbed of major public investments; ones that have made us the democracy that we are. And some of the libertarian think tank leaders acted as political advisors to the Chilean government in the second half of the 20th century and largely contributed to Chile's current economic mess.
Edit: Here is a link to the book.
The real shadow organization that's controlling everything is led by groups like "Americans For Prosperity" which is funded by the Kochs and the Mercers. Basically, make everyone, including politicians, so desperate for money that they'll do just about anything to get it. Then whoever has the most money controls the country. If you want a real conspiracy theory to read about, I suggest the book Democracy in Chains. People like Ben Shapiro are paid by these people, to muddy the waters and misdirect people's anguish.
However, when you assume the world is so miserable, it really isn't. That's mostly just you, and you're assuming everyone else feels the same way you do. But if you think about it for a few minutes, you'll realize that can't be right.
Read the book 'democracy in chains', it goes into the philosophical underpinning of the modern GOP.
Endgame is to restrict democracy as much as possible (they would prefer to go back to a time when only property owning white men could vote) since their ideas are very unpopular and then to turn the US into a corporate oligarchy. Remove as many taxes and regulations on the rich/powerful as possible while also removing the entire social safety net, while also keeping a lot of laws and restrictions limiting people's ability to fight back against their agenda (gerrymandering, stacked courts, voter suppression, anti-union laws, anti free speech laws, corporate media).
The end game is to turn the US into Chile under Pinochet. Remove all laws and taxes on the rich, and create very draconian laws governing everyone else so they can't rebel in any meaningful way (taking away their voting rights, their ability to protest, their ability to organize into unions, their ability to share ideas etc). The modern GOP doesn't believe in small government, they want a very powerful and influential government to suppress and neutralize the riff raff so they can't fight back against corporate oligarchy.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
Been listening to Democracy in Chains recently, and you’re right.
The ‘fringe cult’ reflects what has been a gradual takeover of conservative principles by libertarian radicals. At its core, they desire to ‘free capitalism from “the tyranny of the majority (aka democracy)’. They believe that property owners (especially white males) shouldn’t be taxed to provide for any (especially poor minority) public services.
> right-wing as they are up for small government and freedom of individual.
That movement is a scam, fascism dressed up in terms like liberty and so on.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
When they "liberated" latin american countries they over threw democratically elected leaders and installed military dictatorships that crushed opposition to the poverty private individual corporations foisted on the people, while they were stealing the oil and other resources.
Some of them probably, they certainly do the bidding of these far right groups, for example the clintons helped set up the mass incarceration system. Many of them go along with right libertarians cuts to welfare and health care, the mainstream democrats sell out the average and poor american as much as the right libertarians will.
But I don't think thats a good argument, because the right libertarian movement is a way of intentionally popularizing fascism and giving far right corporate interests more power, and there is no indication that has changed, it spawned the alt right thats recent.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
People that vote for trump and support the alt right and right libertarianism.
They don't know who the leaders are, milo might know the reality of it, the rest dont.
Its a scam by some of the worlds wealthiest people in get ordinary people to support fascism.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
>Wrong again. A movement advocating for smaller government does not mean it is advocating for a big government coupled with unregulated corporate tyranny.
Not necessarily, left libertarianism doesn'tm right does. But right libertarians don;t know that.
Its basically an oligarch and deep state movement advocating for fascism.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
Man, whoever amongst us hasn't already read her book "Democracy in Chains" is comically missing the point of most of what the GOP is doing. They're not seeing the situation as the chess board that the Koch organization sees it to be.
​
Too many of us bemoan the individual moves of various republicans in state and federal office, but it's mostly part of a vast, coordinated effort to literally rewrite our Constitution to permanently prevent the will of the people from having any power over private-sector commercial interests.
​
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
​
r/KochWatch
The article is basically just a summary of a book called "Democracy in Chains" by Duke professor of history Nancy MacLean, which claims that economist James M. Buchanon was the mastermind of an ultra-right-wing conspiracy funded by the Koch brothers to destroy democracy and create a government which works in the interests of corporations. Buchanon, who died in 2013, was one of the most influential thinkers in public choice theory and is the father of the Virginia school of political economic thought. It is important to note that the book has been extensively criticized for misrepresenting who Buchanon was and what his ideas were. Fellow Duke professor and economist Michael Munger called the book "a work of speculative historical fiction", while GWU professor Henry Farrell and Johns Hopkins professor Steven Teles concluded that "MacLean is not only wrong in detail but mistaken in the fundamentals of her account."
> he is open to looking at evidence from all sides of this issue
He's not though. Anyone on the other side he calls "fringe" and blinded by ideology. We're talking actual scientists here, not Ezra Klein. > Many people don't accept IQ tests are a valid measure of intelligence. Do you?
In the opening to the Charles Murray podcast, Sam Harris came out with very strong statements how IQ is a rock solid measure of intelligence. I believe he said it's the most rock solid fact in all of neuroscience.
My opinion, if you care, is that it's probably a pretty good indicator but that some questions can be culturally biased if the question taker doesn't know certain terms referred to in the question.
> We could, as a policy, commit to egalitarian beliefs in human rights regardless of IQ, race, etc.
Well that's a nice utopia that I'd like to live in too. But that's not our current world. And Sam Harris has nothing but disdain for anyone trying to help bring that post-racial utopia into being.
> These are the policies Harris believes in as it is, anyway.
Charles Murray is a libertarian in the school of Nobel Prize winning economist (note: not a real Nobel Prize, but that aside) James Buchanan who was a racist that practiced racism in economic terms. When asked about the terrible effects his policies would have on black people, his reply was that he believed in "letting the chips fall where they may." He also said that "for Capitalism to thrive, democracy must be enchained."
Do you know who took it upon himself to put the ideas of James Buchanan into practice? Charles Koch, current money man of the Republican Party and Dave Rubin. If you'd like to know more on this subject, I suggest you pick up the following book from the library (before the libertarians get rid of them)
If you aren't familiar with James McGill Buchanan, read Nancy MacLean's book "Democracy in Chains". Charles Koch is a true believer of Buchanan's Virginia school of economic politics.
​
Here are a couple of summaries:
Fair question, "they" in the first paragraph was in relation to who I was responding to. So in that case it was referring to the democrat leadership who "appear" to be "paralyzed" on moving to remove to the filibuster and pass voting reform.
Past the first paragraph it was mostly being used as an intentionally nebulous catch-all to describe the myriad of powerful interests that have a stake in the governmental structure of the US. If you would like a more complete answer I recommend Democracy in Chains and Dark Money.
>Academia must be seeded with professors sympathetic to big business, textbooks reviewed and evaluated, guest speakers deployed on campuses to counter the narrative.
The Book "Democracy in Chains" tells of the rise of James Buchanan and the funding of James Madison University funded by the Koch Brothers.
Yep, Qristian Nationalists have been steadily and stealthily working on a takeover plan literally called Dominion for decades now.
Which they do cyclically, really resurging probably once every other generation or so. As before this, there was NAZI blood libel, McCarthyism, Reefer Madness, Salem Witch Trials, Grimms' Fairy Tales, Manifest Destiny, Doctrine of Discovery, Spanish Inquisition, etc, etc...
Pay attention to reality. Trump is actively campaigning, building the anti-democracy movement. https://news.google.com/search?q=Trump&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen
Read the news from credible sources: adfontesmedia.com will show you which are left, right, or credible.
Read a book now and then:
Democracy in Chains by Nancy McLean https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch https://www.amazon.com/Constitution-Knowledge-Jonathan-Rauch/dp/0815738862
I'm sorry that you find public discourse about valid issues to be so stressful that you want everybody else to avoid discussing them for your benefit. This reflects on our education system which has proven to be a collosal failure, but also on your inability to engage in meaning dialogue without calling names. Blessings, and good luck.
The book Democracy in Chains, link talks about how the Koch brothers have been funding anti democratic projects for a long time.
You may find Democracy in Chains to be even more informative, if depressing.
They truly are scum. And I say that as someone who used to be Republican.
If you want to understand what happened to the US read this book https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
My source is this book. https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966 I probably took a few liberties on the matter of primary agency. The Koch's jumped into something that had already been in the works since the 1960s. Also, you can learn more about James M. Buchanan as well as the controversy around the book here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_M._Buchanan
>Gun owners are typically more conservative and likely to vote for smaller and less intrusive government.
Modern conservative thought is guided by billionaires with an agenda to take over government and limit democracy.
This is one of the sources on it.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
> because enacting authoritarian systems in the United States would require a lot of body bags.
Not when conservative gun owners are actually supporting it.
>As far as your comment regard American police, substantiate that and provide evidence.
The AIR counter-insurgency program that Charles Murray worked in was designed to serve as a model for the CIA and Pentagon for counter-insurgency operations elsewhere in the world, including back home in the United States. The AIR proposal to the Pentagon stated: “The potential applicability of the findings in the United States will also receive special attention. In many of our key domestic programs, especially those directed at disadvantaged sub-cultures, the methodological problems are similar to those described in this proposal; and the application of the Thai findings at home constitutes a potentially most significant project contribution.” As one study on anthropology ethics observed, it took “little imagination to recognize the identities of the ‘disadvantaged subcultures'” that AIR’s proposal was referring to. [ 4 ] In a 1994, New York Times interview, Murray admitted that his work in Thailand laid the foundation for his harsh authoritarian politics and policies he later espoused in the United States under the political label “libertarianism.” Murray returned to the United States in the early-mid 1970s, and began advising law enforcement agencies to impose harsh zero-tolerance measures on inner-city and minority populations. In 1979, Murray co-authored a series of studies on juvenile crime underwritten by the US Department of Justice, titled “Juvenile Corrections and the Chronic Delinquent” calling for mass-jailings of youths — a plan Murray argued was not “philosophically barbaric and expensive.” The Carter Administration rejected Murray’s proposals; however, under the Reagan Administration, juvenile and minority incarceration rates soared.
Im not applying it broadly, the people here are using the term to mean something else in an alt facts sort of way.
This is a sensible person talking about fascism.
https://off-guardian.org/2016/07/13/neoliberalism-is-a-species-of-fascism/
Here is a well researched book on how big money has been guiding american conservatives to fascism through right wing "libertarianism".
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
>Masks prevent you from getting beaten up or arrested?
Not me, them.
>Hmm, I wasn't aware of that.
Of course not because this is an ideological echo chamber and people here don't read both sides.
>And your opinions about libertarianism make me laugh.
See above.
>Here's what it boils down to: you believe violence is justified to silence political opponents. That's what the mob was doing.
No, I was explaining what is going on you, because you have no idea.
You can read up about what right libertarianism is in sources like this.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
Or here, you see where the right libertarian movement introduced the alt right and have an anti democratic agenda.
>In the essay "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement", Rothbard reflected on the ability of paleolibertarians to engage in an "outreach to rednecks" founded on social conservatism and radical libertarianism. He cited former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke and former U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy as models for the new movement.[4]
>In the 1990s, a "paleoconservative-paleolibertarian alliance was forged", centred on the John Randolph Club founded by Traditionalist Catholic Thomas Fleming.[5] Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard supported paleoconservative Republican candidate Pat Buchanan in the 1992 U.S. presidential election, and described Buchanan as the political leader of the "paleo" movement.[6] In 1992, Murray Rothbard declared that "with Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy".[7]
I just gave you information about Hayek, who you all repeat here.
Conservatives have been steered to the radical right slowly over decades.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
>These American revolutionaries were not 17-21 y.o. Marxists
They were basically left wing activists and many probably did fall into that age group.
>The real Boston Tea Party was a protest against huge corporate tax cuts for the British East India Company, the largest trans-national corporation then in existence. This corporate tax cut threatened to decimate small Colonial businesses by helping the BEIC pull a Wal-Mart against small entrepreneurial tea shops, and individuals began a revolt that kicked-off a series of events that ended in the creation of The United States of America.
>They covered their faces, massed in the streets, and destroyed the property of a giant global corporation. Declaring an end to global trade run by the East India Company that was destroying local economies, this small, masked minority started a revolution with an act of rebellion later called the Boston Tea Party.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/thom-hartmann/the-real-boston-tea-party_b_187189.html
But in the US today, tea party, libertarian, liberty, free market and terms like that have been appropriated by the extreme right, corporate lobby and used to fight for corporate dominance instead of against it, fascism dressed up as freedom.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
And that lobby made big gains in the last US election and people went out and protested.
>Care to provide examples or sources of the three? Also, conspiracies exist because they have some evidence that might be alongside the theory but never enough to prove it.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
> And yes, before you referred to individualism promotion as a sign of far right. Which is indeed wrong. Tilting to the far right is a mistake, but it's your mistake, don't blame intellectuals like JBP of dogwhistling for the far right.
He admits his narrative on postmodernism comes from Steve Hicks, on the economic far right.
Hicks narrative is a reiteration of a nazi conspiracy theory.
>Why do you insist on saying things that are untrue?
Assume that people you are talking to someone that know something you don't.
>Which turned out to be correct.
Only if you exclude all the examples where it didn't, which out number the examples where it did, and exclude all the dictatorships by his class, and in the name of capitalism.
>One should also remember Hayeks most famous work was explicitly showing how economic collectivism led to dictatorship and that this was wrong.
Hayek romantized the good old days when 90% of people were landless pesants and his class could do whatever they want, thats collectivism.
Thats why ideologues like him could see nothing wrong with the horrible conditions they imposed on latin american people, and stealing all the resources, because he hankered after times when the were no restrictions on that.
>But I have to wonder how a communist has the gall to criticizing movements for bad actors.
Communism wasn't intended to be like some of the terrible examples, nor is real libertarianism.
Right libertarianism is like nazism, the bad outcomes for most people are intentional. Those are foundational members of the movement.
Hayeks road to serfdom is full of inaccuracies and conflations, and its way out of date.
Here is some debunking of it.
Another good source on it here.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
It's just a way to get monkeys out to vote. I'm sure there is big money behind Kavanaugh.
I think Nancy MacLean wrote a very good book on the subject: Democracy In Chains
>The NHS has been on the chopping block for the past 60yrs. It has never been out of an election cycle. Don't buy into that garbage.
NHS privatisation exposed: Scale of treatment for paying patients at NHS hospitals revealed http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nhs-privatisation-health-service-exposed-private-cancer-patients-hospitals-treatment-work-government-a7974096.html
>The costs for healthcare in the US are a de-incentive for using a hospital for anything, let alone birth. It's not a specific attack on birthing.
As I said, it was a strong example of de inventiving birth rates. I didnt say it was specifically designed to do that.
The only examples of something similar are the right libertarian movements idea to privatize education to stop black people getting access.
>I still no evidence for voluntary eugenics.
Voluntary eugenics as Margret Sanger described it, is deciding to use a technology like birth control to avoid having a child you can't afford.
>If you see it that way, it has been. It has got nothing to do with the fact that globalization has forced hundreds of millions of people into the economy that were not beforehand in the economy. The capitalists couldn't control that if they tried. That's pure nation-state business.
I took Warren Buffets word for it, and this book
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
Its pretty obvious that smart people on top are going to look after their own class interests, if they didn't they wouldnt be on top.
Book here on the modern conservative movement, it has very little to do with Adam Smith, who disapproved of right wing mis intrepretations of his work.
>“This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be” – NPR
An explosive exposé of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, and change the Constitution.
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.
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.
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.
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. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
>Which is ironic because now the "liberals" are trying to distinguish themselves from full blown lefties.
They don't have to distinguish themselves, they are the neoliberal left, not "lefties".
The left have little to no time for them
[Identity] politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature.
An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do. As I have argued, following Walter Michaels and others, within that moral economy a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people.
It would be tough to imagine a normative ideal that expresses more unambiguously the social position of people who consider themselves candidates for inclusion in, or at least significant staff positions in service to, the ruling class.
>https://bennorton.com/adolph-reed-identity-politics-is-neoliberalism/
Right libertarians are the origional alt right, an astroturf movement that was on the fringes, and out of that movement came more extreme ideologies. A decade or so ago the right libertarians in us politics used to be called the loonies, now they are more and more mainstream.
Anyhow, its not difficult to find right libertarians, that believe they are nothing like the alt right, that make the same nazi arguments about race and crime and immigration.
>I don't see how that then makes Libertarianism Authoritarian?
RIGHT libertarian, extreme corporate tyranny, a corporate lobby group funded astroturf movement dressed up in terms of the left that wants to limit democracy. You need authoritarianism if you are going to shrink the middle class and create extreme inequality.
The origional classical liberals (they were the left) had no desire to see the corporate monstrosities, private tyrannies and extreme wealth inequality that right libertarianism defends, they viewed corporate wage slavey as a lack of freedom that was bad for the development of individual humans.
They might have been right because our iq's have been dropping since the 1800s.
Classical libertarian - no gods, no master - no royal masters, no corporate masters, no religious masters.
Here is a right libertarian argument for monarchy.
>A Libertarian Case for Monarchy https://mises.org/library/libertarian-case-monarchy
Here is a history of the right libertarian movement.
>https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
In the latin american right libertarian dictatorships, they were making the people worse off than they were in their socialist systems, so they needed brutality to keep revolution in check.
Hayek said dictatorships were probably a good idea for the transitional period.
Now that the emergence of these nazis has widened the overton window, it allows right libertarian extremists to present as the moderate right instead of the extreme.
Im not saying thats by design, I'm saying its happening.
Other incarnations of alt or radical right would be the tea party and so on.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
Right libertarians are calling to end healtcare and welfare support for the poor.
That will kill 10s of millions of americas and a lot of those people will be minorities.
The people behind those assassinations and their underlings are still in power in the USA and have been making great strides to consolidate their control. There's a direct line from LBJ, Hoover and the conservative movement and every major GOP administration since then, with a constant parade of the same names and faces moving through the government and intelligence agencies.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
Modern conservativism is fascism.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966
Some credible poitical scientists would argue that the neoliberal left is fascism too.
https://off-guardian.org/2016/07/13/neoliberalism-is-a-species-of-fascism/