Good evening. [applause] my name is tom campbell, regulator bookshop and we are thrilled to welcome nancy mclean here this evening. Democracy in chains is a marvelous book. I have made no secret of just how important i think this book is in my humble opinion. It seemed to me then that one very important thing in politics is to understand your opponent, and understand where theyre coming from, what motivates the them, what they are really trying to do. As this book shows that our understanding of what is called, sometimes the radical right or the old right, the libertarian right, it has been very limited, and there has been a philosophy and a strategy that goes back decades that is behind much of what we see in politics now and so i think there are a few things that can be more important for those of us who dont agree with that kind of politics then to read this book, understand it, and i think we will be in a much better position to counter the arguments that are being made on the libertarian right. Nancy mclean is the william j professor of history and Political Science and Public Policy had Duke University. She taught previously at Northwestern University where she served as chair for the department of history. She came to Duke University in 2010. We are very pleased, very happy to have her here, thank you all for coming, thank you cspan for covering mass. Nancy mclean. [applause] wow. I am so thrilled to see how many of you are here. Ever since moving here we have seen so Much Community and friends and colleagues i havent met yet but hope too so thank you. I also want to give a special thanks to tom who took a special interest in this book we back when and tom called me or contacted me. Its such a wonderful story. I hope you all stay and browse if you havent been here before. Can you hear in the back . Okay. Im going to get my big voice on. Hows that. [inaudible] all right. I will do my best. Can you hear me now . Good. Im going to tell you little bit about how i came to this topic and what i learned and then i want to share with you a few passages from the book and will open it up to your questions and comments and such. I am a historian of social movement. I have a particular interest in the u. S. South and about ten years ago i had just finished another book and i was in philadelphia and i went into the archives and i learned about a story i had never heard before, even though i am a historian with emphasis on the south. In the aftermath of brown versus board of education where the county, in the name of state sovereignty and individual liberty completely shut down the Public School system and sent all the white children off to private school with public money and left the black children with no schooling for five years because those students had had the temerity to go on strike in 1951 for a decent school, a school that might be at least a little bit as nice as a white student school, and for that act which then funneled into brown versus board of education, it became, for that active resistance they shut down the school and all they had was what social music organizations could provide. I was horrified by the story especially as an educator. I was deeply moved by what had happened to the students. I started to research that story and i learned that tuition grants which we would call vouchers were crucial to the story in Prince Edward county. I learned that Milton Freedman , the chicago trained economist had issued his first manifesto for School Vouchers in 1955 after the news had been coming up from the south for several years that the most segregationists were threatening to shut down Public Education rather than allow desegregation in the court. At first i thought golly, Milton Freedman is part of my story. Let me keep him on the radar. I kept moving but in following a footnote, i learned of a 1959 report by two economists also trained in chicago who had set up a center at the university in 1956. They arrived in september just after the General Assembly passed a sweep of laws. I will give you a sense of that report in a moment with the reading, but i would just say it really shocked me to see two University Professors making an economic case for what the segregationists were asking. What really provoked me intellectually is that these economists were not making the case in racial terms, they were making it in the terms of their discipline but it was clear they were opportunistically exploiting the crisis, the tremendous crisis in tragedy that was unfolding in the south in order to push through their agenda. In fact, when they sent their report to one of the legislators who was one of the leaders of massive resistance, they actually said they were making the case and the terms of their is a plan, letting their chips fall where they may and that phrase haunted me, letting the chips fall where they may. That put buchanan and my colleague on the radar and i still thought the school story was my focus and Milton Freedman was a surprise figure i was tracing for the many connections who turned out to have two virginia people who are pushing for these tax subsidies for private education for segregated schooling. Then i learned, again by chance that a political scientist who also worked on latin america that although many people have heard Milton Freedman went to chile and advise dictatorship on how to combat inflation, in fact, Virginia School of James Buchanan had had a more lasting effect and the buchanan school. [inaudible] then i got more interested in buchanan like what is going on. What trail have i happened on so i continued to follow it and then i moved to North Carolina in 2010. At that point Milton Freedman was my focus. I thought what is he doing, whats going on and i was following all these connections. As you know, something happen in 2010 after the midterms here. A radicalized Republican Party one majorities in both houses of the legislature. All these things i was reading and this is a man who wrote very abstractly but i was trying to understand these and suddenly it became real concrete and really frightening because i was seeing these ideas play out in what im sure you all remember and have responded to over the past few years. What i was seeing as it comes from buchanans thoughts. He always argued it was a mistake to focus on the question of who rules. The real question was the rule and if you didnt like what was going on in the government, in a society, which none of his libertarian and right wing alter free markets didnt like, his focus was you had to look at the role and change the role and breakup collective power, the kind of power you would see labor unions and civil right unions, even the aarp, any groups that could make them for tax resources that would lead for his solution was to alter the nature by radical rule change. Lets go back to North Carolina where this was becoming real to me. What we saw was radical changes, one after another. Extreme gerrymandering with the operation read map, attempts to undermine unions, hostility to Public Education at all levels and radical cuts for changes to the governments of Public Education. Refusal to except medicaid even though there was a desperate need among low income people for healthcare. Rolling back measures to protect the environment and address global warming, getting rid of the Racial Justice act and then the monster Voter Suppression law. What i found disturbing and even frightening was that i could see this was an application of James Buchanans ideas, a strategy guided by his understanding of the political process and ill come back to that in a moment because he had original insights and he won a nobel prize in 1986, but driven, guided by his ideas and guided by a libertarian morality that says it would be better to let people die from lack of healthcare if they cannot afford to pay for it than to receive it from government. Its a morality that i dont think anyone in this room would share but i think its extremely important to understand that it is a coherent ethical system and frankly for some people for some, it is shaping our Public Policy as we gather here. The bottom line idea is that what they really mean by personal responsibility is that you should be on your own. You should be a self responsible individual, and if you fail to save for your future needs, whether its healthcare or retirement security, whether its your childrens college or your own, tough luck. Your failure will teach other people they need to conduct their lives differently and start saving from the moment they become able. In january, so i knew i had to get into his private papers. After buchanan died in januar january 2013, i finally got access to his private collectio collection. It was led by republicans who had been trained in these ideas and were engaging in a Government Shutdown in a case of what they might have called coercive bargaining. Its such a cause too so many. It was just wanting to go into that archive with that unfolding. In those papers, they were everywhere. I found my hypotheses confirmed in a way that literally took my breath away. One moment i will describe was finding the correspondence about his trip to chile in 1980. He was invited in by the most antidemocratic civilian associated with the regime in order to advise on this constitution and they translated his work into spanish and they gave him audiences with all these regime figures and he gave about five public lectures any thank them for the accuracy, and what i found, in 1980 chile was one of the worlds leading examples of why human rights mobilizations were beginning because the dictatorship was absolutely brutal. It was clear they had just purchased the universities before he came. I could go on. The letter that stopped my heart was the thank you letter that he wrote to sergio decastro who was one of the top advisers any thank them for the lovely lunch held in his honor, the wine in the jewelry given to mrs. Buchanan and something else. Not a word about any of this but just this Lovely Exchange between friends and i thought youre with someone who said his life mission was promoting the free society, promoting liberty. How do i get my mind around tha that. Another key moment was when i went upstairs into his personal options and found helterskelter on a chair, a series of letters from a blowup that happened after they started investing massively in George Washington university and some of the people connected engaged in what confidential whistleblower and so that was also pretty heart stopping. In any event, once i brought home these hundreds and hundreds of documents that i copied their and put them together with the published work and other source sources, i found myself lying down pieces of the puzzle because sometimes, to be honest literally nauseated me. When i saw the scope of the operation being guided by this individual, when i started to follow out the career trajectory established at george mason and saw people coming from this program and all these funded world, it was shocking. As i took the measure of this project, i saw something else. The form of government that these men understood as ideal, that they referred to as liberty mirrored that of mid century virginia minus the segregation. What am i getting at here . A great political scientist published a book about southern politics just before these events and he said virginia was the most oligarchical state in the south. Next to virginia mississippi is a hotbed of democracy. [laughter] so virginia had a leak control like you cant imagine. Harry byrd was the center, it was almost a corporate form and that made sure that they had their economic liberty and that meant no one else had their freedom and they didnt have much else besides. In the name of liberty, they practiced extreme Voter Suppression, they gerrymandered the General Assembly sort overrepresented rural conservative districts and underrepresented urban and suburban community, they passed laws and they brought in harry byrd and brought in right list immigrants to harvest his Apple Orchard because again that was liberty. Why should he employ American Workers who might have access to the constitution. As i began to trace the operation built up at George Mason University with money to apply buchanans understanding to his, as charles cook said as he gave this big gift when all this really got going, he said i want to unleash the kind of force that propels columbus to his discovery. What was really interesting, to me is that he also said since we are greatly outnumbered the failure to use our technology will will essentially lead to continued failure. This is a guy with reengineering degrees from my tea. Hes talking about ideas that can create a great advantage. What he was doing was harnessing this understanding developed by buchanan in order to achieve what he wanted. I thank you all know he wants a very audacious radical change but if you didnt, its worth knowing this man is can comparing himself to martin luther. He has that sense of his mission in life. So, he had the money and he had been funding intellectuals for some three decades until he found the technology he wanted and he found that at george mason and he turned it into an Operational Strategy for something that buchanan had long advocated. He spoke of in chaining, it was very clear to me from Everything Else i found in his paper and correspondence that what he meant was to in chain modern democracy, to undermine the power of organized citizens and this is crucial, to make changes in state and federal constitutions through persuasion or the electoral process. They tried it in chile and we can talk more about it in the q a, its coming to america. I would just say, before going to reading a few selections from the book, i honestly believe what is at stake right now is the American Democratic system. Remember im a student of social movement. The kind of government that citizen action has demanded since the 1890s. There was a time when all social movements seem to think they could be in silos the labor people here in the environmentalist here, they are coming to every group that looks to government to achieve social justice and their need to fix the environment, all of those things. This is really a unified challenge. Ill stop there again with the story, im happy to say more the q a but i want to give you a sample of the narrative. The first selection is from an early chapter about the events in the fall of 1958 in virginia. Using the power of the State Government to prevent municipalities to prevent their citizens from doing what they would otherwise what they would like to do. They would like to take away the autonomy of local communities and support on their residence the will of a gerrymandered conservative state legislature that any school was about to be segregated in response to a federal court order should be shut down. Okay. Thats the context. The chapter goes back to our phrase, letting the chips fall where they may. James buchanan and William Motter did not pu forward their proposal until early 1959. When they did it was as if they pulled down the shades on every window, canceled subscriptions to the newspapers unplugged their ear to a new set of voices in virginia. They had maintained the fight was against the government, against coercion from outsiders in a stand for liberty. They ignored the overt racism and turned a blind eye to the chronic violations of liberty and Constitutional Rights that led to the intervention. The voices of 1958 and early 1959 survived their narrow and exclusionary framing of the conflict. They came from white middleclass virginia, from parents in particular who were shocked at the actions of their state officials and determined to a wri resist. Most were moderate republicans and democrats of the expanding cities and suburbs of northern virginia. They spoke powerfully enough over a sixmonth period to move them to explain publicly what their vision of liberty would mean on the school system. In the summer of 1958, three different communities, home to a u. S. Navy base and university of virginia announced their intention to admit a few black students to some previously white schools the following september. They were moved to do so not because the white townspeople or the school board suddenly converted to equal rights under the law, and no doubt if you did, but most having been reared since infancy in the culture of jim crow did not. Still, many saw themselves as patriotic lawabiding citizens and so were unwilling to defy a court ruling even on the matter of race. Federal courts had instructed them to desegregate without further delay, particularly schools and they plan to comply. The local plans triggered the implementation of the 1956 resistance legislation empowering the governor to shut any white school that plan to admit any black student. His act would deny Public Education to some 13000 white students throughout the fall of 1958 in these communities from firstgraders to high school seniors. The reason it was only white schools is because no white schools were suing to enter black schools so they werent subject to this coercion. So, in july of 1958, the week after lindsay announced he would close the schools comfort virginia, a country dr. Who paid little attention to state politics announced that she would run for t