Has the National Book Award been corrupted by politics?
The Award committee has just shortlisted as a finalist Nancy
MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The
Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, an
expose of the Koch Brothers’ plot to undermine democracy. The book is well written and a fast
read. It tells a story that is
heartening to those who fear the Kochs’ growing power. It is, however, full of errors and
distortions, which have already been extensively documented. The selection, in the face of these notorious
problems, raises uncomfortable questions about what the committee is thinking.
Awards committees have occasionally recognized scholarship
that later turned out to be badly flawed.
They can’t check sources.
Scholarship inevitably relies on norms of trust that are sometimes
betrayed. But this may be the first time
that a work was honored with a nomination for a major award after the flaws were widely known.
Democracy in Chains
has been testing the proposition that there is no such thing as bad
publicity. There has been an explosion
of documentation
that MacLean gets facts wrong, misunderstands her sources, and invents
quotations or pulls them out of context to mean the opposite of what they
said. You can find all this easily if
you just google the book’s title.
It is hard to avoid the inference that the book’s defects are
outweighed, in the committee’s judgment, by the book’s eloquent denunciation of
the Kochs. Perhaps the committee so
distrusts MacLean’s attackers that it has not bothered to look into their
claims. This development is bad news for
the political left, which, until now, has prided itself on its ability to face
inconvenient truths.
MacLean’s central historical claim is false. That claim is that the economist James
Buchanan devised the “master plan” (xviii) by which the Koch brothers are now
subverting democracy. Buchanan devised
no master plan, and there’s no evidence that the Kochs’ political actions
were influenced by anything he wrote.
MacLean states a valid and important complaint against the
Kochs. They threaten to impose a new quasi-feudal hierarchy in the guise of
liberty. But a work of history is
supposed to be more than a denunciation of bad political actors.
Democracy in Chains
is an extended study of Buchanan. His
work, which won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economics, argued that, if state actors
are as selfish as private actors normally are, they are likely to be captured by
unsavory special interests. Some
interest groups dominate the electoral system because they are unusually good
at organizing. These groups are able to
advance their policy goals even when their gains involve greater losses
for others who are unorganized. Congress
subsidizes big farming, artificially cheap high fructose corn syrup then finds
its way into most processed foods, and the mass of citizens endure obesity,
diabetes, and inflated food prices. Legislation and regulation sometimes stifles
competition and pointlessly burdens economic activity.
Buchanan’s scholarship thus supports the views of
libertarians, who want to minimize the role of the state. (Even a minimal state presupposes, however,
that there is a limit to the corruptibility of public officials. The police must still reliably protect persons
and property. If it’s conceded that they
can be honest, why can’t other state agencies?)
Buchanan himself was so eager to promote privatization that he pushed a
school voucher scheme in Virginia amid the desegregation struggle, oblivious to
the way in which it would promote racial segregation.
Libertarianism’s growing influence in American politics is
largely the achievement of one man, the billionaire industrialist Charles
Koch. (He, more than his younger brother
David, is the moving force in the brothers’ political activities. He talked David into being the Libertarian
vice presidential candidate in 1980, because he was too busy running the family
company to do it.) Since 1966, long
before he became a household name, he has energetically supported libertarian
causes and funded libertarian thinktanks.
Buchanan was one of the many beneficiaries. Koch’s growing network has mobilized, not
only his own vast wealth, but hundreds of millions from other rich capitalists,
moving the Republican Party in a libertarian direction and helping it win
elections. The party is increasingly
hostile to all aspects of big government, not only Obamacare but also Medicare,
Social Security, and environmental regulation.
What does Koch want?
And why is he winning? There has
been some very good scholarship and journalism, notably by Theda Skocpol and
Jane Mayer, exploring that question. But
Democracy in Chains distorts rather
than advancing our understanding.
The book is beautifully written and a fast read. Its best pages vividly describe the Virginia
that Harry Byrd dominated, first as governor and then as U.S. Senator from the
1920s until 1965, and its resistance to school desegregation. The state was a corrupt racist oligarchy, so
secure in its control that it did not need Klan violence, using cleverly
designed legal rules to hold down both taxes and voter participation. Here MacLean, an expert on Southern history,
writes with authority.
When she turns her attention to the contemporary libertarian
right, she sees something familiar. Its
ambitions would make the country look a lot like the deep South in the bad old
days:
“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.” (233)
The one useful contribution of the book is to call attention
to this parallel.
But her expertise also misleads her. Studying texts from the deep South during the
Jim Crow period gives one a lot of experience seeing through nice-sounding
rationalizations for feudalism. Her
first book, on the Ku Klux Klan, was appropriately titled Behind the Mask of Chivalry.
But the lessons can be misapplied.
You can start seeing hidden racism everywhere.
She claims to know a lot about what Buchanan was
thinking. The new school of political
economy that he created at the University of Virginia was “meant to train a new
generation of thinkers to push back against Brown
[v. Board of Education].” (xix) “[S]omehow,
all he saw in the Brown decision was
coercion,” a danger to “Virginia’s archaic labor relations, its measures to
suppress voting, or its efforts to buttress the power of reactionary rural
whites by underrepresenting the moderate voters of the cities and suburbs of
Northern Virginia.” (xiv) The stakes were “personal,” because “his
people” were now going to be pushed around by “Northern liberals – the very
people who looked down upon southern whites like him, he was sure.” (xiv)
“I can fight this, he
concluded. I want to fight this.” (xiv)
The “intellectual lodestar” (xxxii) of the libertarian movement is John
C. Calhoun, who wanted to constrain democracy in order to protect slavery. Buchanan’s “school of political economy
mirrors” Calhoun’s. (1) The racist
agrarian poet Donald Davidson, who thought that the growth of federal power
threatened a new totalitarianism, was "(t)he Nashville writer who seemed
most decisive in Jim Buchanan’s emerging intellectual system," (33) and as
a young man Buchanan “seemed to see through lenses wholly crafted by Donald
Davidson.” (34)
All these descriptions of Buchanan’s thoughts are pure
invention. The internal monologue I just
described is based on nothing he wrote.
She offers no evidence that he ever read Calhoun or Davidson. Neither
name appears in the index of his 20 volume collected works. The book is full of this kind of thing. Steve Horwitz evidently is right
that the book is “a massive exercise in confirmation bias resulting in misread
and misinterpreted sources and factual claims unsupported by those sources.” Given the years she spent studying dishonest
Southern racists, we can reconstruct how she could go so wrong. The National Book Award committee has less
excuse. The nomination makes it more
likely that many will treat the book as a reliable source of information about
libertarianism. In order to be eligible
for a nonfiction award, a book should in fact be nonfiction.
I have seen MacLean promote the book, and spoke to her
once. She carries enormous conviction,
she is earnest and idealistic, and she clearly believes what she is
saying. If you fear the Kochs, it is
comforting to have a Duke University historian on your side. But conviction isn’t the same as accuracy. Some parents show great conviction when they
blame their children’s autism on vaccines.
MacLean’s big “discovery,” the
“stealth plan” promised in the book’s title, is Buchanan’s “devious and
deceptive” (178) proposal to destroy Social Security. She reads him as proposing that anyone
attempting to dismantle the program should (1) reassure current recipients that
their benefits were in no danger, (2) induce high earners to fear that they
would be taxed at higher rates, (3) persuade younger workers that they were
unfairly subsidizing the old, and that their own benefits were insecure, and
(4) increase payroll taxes and the retirement age, to irritate those
approaching retirement. (178-82) This mirrors modern Republican behavior
pretty exactly. She claims that when
Charles Koch read this work, he “concluded that he’d finally found the set of
ideas he had been seeking for at least a quarter century by then – ideas so
groundbreaking, so thoroughly thought-out, so rigorously tight, that once put
into operation, they could secure the transformation in American governance he
wanted.” (xx)
She has, however, massively misread her key document, which
is, as one critic has shown
in detail, “just a mundane economics paper.” Its main purpose is to explain why people
continue to support Social Security in light of its problems of solvency –
problems which, as it happens, were resolved shortly after the paper was
written. In one section, two paragraphs
long – less than a page of a 15
page scholarly article - Buchanan games out likely strategies for the
program’s opponents. (It doesn’t include
point (1) above; that’s a wild
inference from another part of Buchanan’s article.) There is no reason to believe that Charles
Koch ever read it.
Buchanan was never particularly important within libertarian
circles. If one wanted to find an
obscure character with big effects, a better candidate is Murray Rothbard, a
genuine Calhoun admirer who had a huge personal impact on Robert Nozick, the
most important libertarian philosopher, and Randy Barnett, the mastermind of
the legal challenge to Obamacare. In 1976 Rothbard persuaded Koch to begin funding
libertarian causes. He and was (and
years after his death largely remains) chief ideologist of the Libertarian
Party. (The leading history of libertarianism, Brian Doherty’s Radicals
for Capitalism, which MacLean cites, reports that the most important
libertarian thinkers are Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Rothbard,
and Milton Friedman.)
Moreover, even if Buchanan were read as offering a master
plan, the strategy MacLean breathlessly reveals - splitting one’s opponent’s
coalition and making one’s victories irreversible - is unremarkable in
democratic contestation. All political
movements begin as small groups of activists who want something that the
majority isn’t thinking about. Roosevelt
thus consciously
sought to protect Social Security from future politicians. A similarly countermajoritarian network
produced Obamacare: most people were happy with their health insurance, and the
millions who were left out tended to be low income people who aren’t
politically active. MacLean loves
democracy, but doesn’t seem to grasp how it works in practice.
She calls this a plan to “undo
democratic governance.” (xv) But the
Kochs have for the most part played by the rules as they found them: raising
money from donors and spending it on elections.
Buchanan flirted with the idea of changing constitutional rules to
disable big government, but that idea was hardly original with him.
The “stealth plan” evidently extends to everything the Kochs
now do. But some of the nastiest Koch
efforts MacLean enumerates, such as voter ID and climate change denial, weren’t
in anyone’s minds when Buchanan wrote his 1983 paper. How can it make sense to blame him?
That leads us to the biggest big-picture failing of the
book. Buchanan’s talk of “individual
liberty” leads MacLean to observe that the term had “its own coded
meaning.” (xiv) That meaning, she concludes, was resistance
to Brown. Doubtless the term was thus used by a lot of
racists. But how does MacLean know that
this is what Buchanan meant by it?
Libertarianism started out as an idealistic creed, resisting
oppressive state power. Adam Smith
argued that mercantilism was hurting the working classes for the benefit of a
few rich producers. Ludwig von Mises and
Friedrich Hayek argued that socialism would produce economic stagnation and
tyranny. All of them were right. The modern form was led by romantic fabulists
like Rothbard and Ayn Rand, peddling a combination of giddy optimism about how
nice anarchy would be and cruel disdain for those who don’t do well in an
unregulated market. Even this silly and
dangerous stuff, which really does appear to have some grip on the Kochs, is
built on a premise of equal rights (albeit interpreted to produce mighty
unequal results).
MacLean doesn’t appear to understand any of this. She thinks that the libertarian cause “was
never really about freedom as most people would define it.” (234) In her telling, libertarians were always
plotting to impose an oligarchy on the rest of us. They were exactly like Harry Byrd. This doesn’t even do justice to Koch. He spent years as a lonely voice in the
political wilderness, with no reason to think he’d ever have much influence.
The really interesting question, one that MacLean’s
framework disables her from asking, is how what was once a philosophy of
freedom has become so thoroughly corrupted.
Libertarianism has indeed become a mask for oligarchical behavior,
lately sinking all the way to the Koch brothers’ energetic support for vote
suppression – a despicable political strategy that had long disappeared from
American political contestation. (Here
the South really has risen again.) They
have also poured millions into spreading lies about global warming.
The fundamental difference between Koch’s America and Harry
Byrd’s Virginia is that industrial capitalism offers a lot to those on the
bottom. America’s ruling class is historically unique because it
really does have a respectable defense for its privileges. In
most societies, the rich have been useless parasites – landlords extorting
tribute from peasant farmers, kings demanding tribute from those landlords, and
so forth. Since about 1800, however, the
human race has become steadily richer, and a big part of the reason is the
growth of free markets. Capitalism is,
in its broadest tendencies, good for the poor.
After the collapse of Communism and the abandonment of socialism by such
major powers as India, the proportion of the human race living in
desperate poverty plunged. In 2013, 10.7
percent of the world’s population lived on less than US$1.90 a day,
compared to 35 percent as recently as 1990. (MacLean writes that “the reality
of unregulated capitalism” can be grasped by reading Dickens (97).)
So why are the Kochs, and the
army of billionaires they lead, so radical?
Revolutionary libertarian ideas do not usually accompany great
wealth. One peculiarity of the Koch
network is that in most times and places, wealthy elites are conservative in
the classic sense of the word: averse to abrupt change, reverent toward
tradition. They don’t want upheaval,
because if the world is turned upside down, they might not be able to keep what
they have. The welfare state was
invented by Otto von Bismarck in the nineteenth century to pacify the working
classes. In Finland in 2000 – a prosperous
country with an unusually robust welfare state - the top 0.5 percent of the
population owned
71.6 percent of all investment wealth in the capital market, compared with
41.4 percent for the same cohort in the United States. The Finnish superrich understand that their
wealth is more secure if the lower classes feel secure. Meanwhile America’s elite are keen to destroy
Social Security and Medicare. That’s the development in the history of
ideas that really needs explaining.
Koch’s undoubted recent success isn’t because of any master
plan. It’s because, after decades of
trial and error, he has put together a superb political organization, on two
levels: the network of organizations like Americans for Prosperity that can
bring pressure to bear on legislators by threatening to finance challengers, and
the large body of wealthy donors who fund that network. (The
Kochs undertook an intensive reappraisal of their strategy as recently as 2012,
after they wasted millions trying to defeat President Obama’s reelection.)
Koch didn’t know, twenty years ago, that
this was what would work, or he would have followed this plan sooner. He succeeds because his opponents don’t have
his organizational skill. If the left
wants to fight him, it needs to develop similar skills.
Libertarian philosophy does contain the seeds of
oligarchy. But that doesn’t mean that
it’s what the authors plan or intend. Karl
Marx’s political theory, when implemented, probably leads inevitably to the
likes of Brezhnev. You can’t say he
wasn’t warned: Michael Bakunin argued in 1873 that Marx’s aspirations, if
realized, would produce “a despotism of a governing minority, all the more
dangerous in that it is an expression of a supposed people’s will.” Marx responded with daffy optimism, declaring
that the dictatorship of the proletariat would merely deploy “means for its
liberation which will fall away after the liberation.” That’s not how it worked out. But one would misread Marx if one concluded
that he had a stealth plan to put a corrupt oligarchy in power. He wanted to
liberate, not enslave, the working classes. He was simply mistaken about the consequences
of his philosophy.
The argument between libertarians and their critics on the
left is similarly about consequences.
Libertarianism is a variety of liberalism, the philosophy that values
freedom. The argument is about whether
human freedom will be promoted by radically constraining the state. We are arguing about means, not ends, and so
we have common ground to work from. All
this disappears in MacLean’s picture, in which libertarians (who have
understandably been enraged by the book) are mendacious enemies of liberty, the
moral equivalent of the Southern racists who fought Brown. How could one
possibly have a conversation about anything with such people?
This picture poisons American political discourse. It produces reactions like MacLean’s response
to her critics, which has mainly consisted of
ad hominem attacks: “You’ve accepted
funding from the Koch brothers, therefore shut up.” (For whatever it’s worth, I’ve never sought
or received a penny from them, and any hope I might have had for their support is
being ruined by what you’re now reading.)
She has an obligation to respond in detail to the charges of
falsification and distortion, answer them if she can, confess error if she
can’t. She showed no inclination in that
direction even before the National Book Award shortlist. This misbehavior has now been rewarded.
Committees sometimes make mistakes: after Michael Bellesiles won the Bancroft
Prize for his book Arming America,
the book was shown to be full of fabrications, the prize was rescinded, and Bellesiles
resigned his Emory University professorship in disgrace. But the Bancroft committee did not know about
the book’s defects when it made its decision.
What excuse has the National Book Award committee?
The political left has until now prided itself on being the
reality-based community. Unlike Fox News
and Breitbart, it does not embrace invented facts when they support its
melodramatic narrative. Until now. With a few honorable
exceptions,
it has received MacLean’s book with enthusiasm.
The nomination bespeaks a new low in polarization: if you
write a readable book denouncing the Kochs, we love you, and we don’t care
whether anything you say is true. The
prize is being used to make a political statement, like Obama’s 2009 Nobel
Peace Prize, awarded less than nine months after he took office. Even he found that embarrassing. Party solidarity now overrides all other
considerations. This is, of course, the
kind of thinking that led otherwise thoughtful Republicans to vote for Trump.
You need to be able to look at libertarian ideas
respectfully, with an appreciation of their attraction, if you’re going to
understand the dreadful way in which they are being abused.