Transcripts For CSPAN2 Democracy In Chains 20170826 : vimars

CSPAN2 Democracy In Chains August 26, 2017

Democracy in chains. Ive made no secret of just how important i think this book is, in my humble opinion. [inaudible] we are doing our best, okay . Turn up the airconditioning back there . Okay, okay. My little experience in electoral politics, some of you might know i was on the Durham City Council for eight years in the previous lifetime. [applause] and 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 them, what they are really trying to do. And as this book shows, i think, that our understanding of what is called at sometimes the radical right, the libertarian right, has been very limited, and that there has been a philosophy and a strategy that goes back decades that is behind much of what we see in politics now. I think there are a few things that can be more important for those of us who dont agree with that kind of politics than to read this book, understand it. And i think will be a much better position to counter the arguments that are being made on the libertarian right. Nancy maclean is the William Chafe professor of history in political science, right . And Public Policy at Duke University. She taught previously at Northwestern University where she served as chair of 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. Thanks, cspan, for covering this. Nancy maclean. [applause] wow, i am so thrilled to see how many of you are here. Its so nice to look at and see so many friends and colleagues at people i havent met yet but hoped you. So thank you so much for coming. I want to give a special thanks to tom who took an interest in this book way back when what i was still furiously writing and revising it is, in vikings catalog and tom called me or contacted me to set this up. Im grateful to be here. Its a wonderful bookstore. I hope you all stay and browse if you havent been here before. [applause] can you hear in the back . No. All comedy. Okay, im going going to get my big voice on, how is that . No. Is not a function of the microphone. [inaudible] i will do my best, folks. Can you hear me now . Good. Im going to tell you a little bit about how i came to this topic and what i learned i want to share with you a few passages from the book and then will open it up to the questions and comments and such. So i am a historian of social movement. I have a particular interest in the u. S. South. About te ten years ago i just finished another book and i was in philadelphia and went into the American Service Committee Archives and alert about a story i had never heard before even though i am a historian with emphasis on the south. And the story was the story Prince Edward county virginia in aftermath of round versus board of education where the county in the name of state sovereignty and individual liberties completely shut down the Public School system and sent all the white children off to private schools with public monies and let the black children with no schooling for five years because the students have had the temerity to go on strike in 1951 for a decent school, school that might be at least a little bit as nice as the white students school. And for the act which then funneled into brown v. Board of education, the Prince Edward case became one of the five cases in brown v. The board of education. For that active resistance the county leaders shut down the schools and let the children with no Public Education for five years. All they had was a social Movement Organizations could provide like the naacp, the american friends Service Committee and so forth. I was horrified by the story i i had never heard a special as an educator and i was deeply moved by what happened to the students. Students. I started to research that story and i learned that tuition grants can what we would today be calling vouchers, were crucial to the truth of what happened in Prince Edward county. And i learned that Milton Friedman, this is part of the Virginia Program of massive resistance to brown which led the entire south in doing and to learn that Milton Friedman, the chicago trained economist had issued his first manifesto for School Vouchers in 1955 after the news have been coming up from the south for several years by then at the most arched segregationists were threatening to set the Public Education rather than allow desegregation in defiance of the federal courts. So at first i thought all the common Milton Friedman is part of my story can let me keep him on the radar. I kept moving with my school story which was a civil rights meets neoliberalism story, you could say. In following footnote i learned of a 1959 report by two economists also trained at the university of chicago, James Mcgill Buchanan and were not her would set up the center of University Virginia in 1956. 1956. Arrived in september just after the General Assembly of virginia had passed this week of massive resistance loss. Im going to get a sense of that report, the 1959 report in a moment with the reading but i would just say it really shocked me to see to University Professors making an economic case for what the arched segregationists were asking, both radical committed segregationists in virginia were seeking. What really upset me, provoke me intellectually is that these economists were not making their case in racial terms. They were making it they said in the terms of the discipline but it was clear that they were opportunistically exploiting the crisis, tremendous crisis and tragedy that was unfolding in the south in order to push through their agenda. And, in fact, when they sent the report to one of the state legislation was one of the links of massive resistance, they said they were making the case in the terms of economics, the terms of the discipline letting the chips fall where they may. That phrase haunted me, letting the chips fall where they may. So that put buchanan and his colleague on my radar but i still thought the school story was my focus and that Milton Friedman was the surprise figured that i was tracing for the many connections he turned out to have two virginia people who are pushing for these tax subsidies for private education for segregated schooling for white children who did not want to go to school with black children. Then i learned again by chance from a political scientist who is transnational political scientist who also worked on latin america that although many people have heard Milton Friedman went to chile and advise the dictatorship on how to combat inflation, in fact, the Virginia School of James Buchanan have had everlasting effect. The beginning school, then i started to get interested in began, like what is going on . What trail have i happened on . So i continue to follow it and then the move to North Carolina in 2010 and at the point Milton Friedman was still the focus. He was the famous one, the one everyone you stuff about the what is he doing . Im following obvious connection and as you know, something happened in 2010. After the midterms, and radicalized Republican Party won majorities in both houses of the legislature, suddenly all these things i was reading in the canyons work, a man who wrote abstractly compassionate understand these abstractions 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 last few years. What i was seeing, comes from buchanans thoughts. He always argued it was a mistake to focus on the question of who rules. The real question was the rules. If you didnt like what was going on in a government, in a society, which none of his libertarian and rightwing and ultrafree Market College student like what was happening, so his argument was needed to focus on the rules and change the rules. And you need to break up collective power, the kind of power you would see in labor unions, and civil rights organizations, even the aarp, a retired people, any collective group that could make demands on government for tax resources that would lead to transfers of resources. That was a problem. His solution was to alter the nature of governance by radical rules change. Lets come back to North Carolina where this is becoming real to me. What we saw unfold in North Carolina after 2010 was radical changes one after another, extreme gerrymandering with the operation red map. Attempts to undermine unions particularly publicsector unions, hostility to Public Education at all levels, and radical cuts in funding for Public Education and changes to the governments of Public Education. Refused to accept Medicaid Expansion that was part of the Affordable Care act even though there is a desperate need among lowincome people for healthcare. Rolling back measure to protect the environment and address global warming, getting rid of the Racial Justice act. In instituting what some called the monster Voter Suppression law. What i found disturbing and evn frightening was that i could see this was an application of james prince edwarbuchanans ideas ofy guided by his understanding, hes unique of the political process, a come back to that in a moment because he had original insight and he won a nobel prize in economics site for the 1986, but driven, guided by his ideas and driven 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 on their own if they did not say for it, then to receive them covered. Its a morale to donna dont think almost anyone in this room which yea share but i think its extremely important for us to understand that it is a coherent ethical system, and it is frankly think for some people a fanaticism that is shaping our Public Policy as we gather here. The bottom line idea is 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 say for your future needs, whether thats healthcare, whether that retirement security, whether that your childrens college or your own, tough luck. Your failure will teach other people that they need to conduct their lives differently and start saving from the moment they become essentially sent him. So okay, so i want to keep this moving. In january, so i knew i had to get into his private papers and was a collection at george mason to i been trying to get in. After buchanan died in january 2013, i finally get access to his private archive at george mason. Ironically, just as a Government Shutdown led by republicans who would been exposed to his ideas and trained in these ideas were engaging in this Government Shutdown in washington in the case of what buchanan might have called coercive bargaining. Such a cost of so many. It was just haunting to go into the archive with a totally when i had came out to the reader. In those papers, and they were everywhere. They were key attic. If you read the book, lets talk about it a bit. But papers fmi 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 picky was invited in by actually the most antidemocratic civilian associate with the regime in order to advise on this constitution and they translate his work into spanish and they gave him audiences with all these regime figures and he gave up five public lectures that were recorded by the regime newspaper. He thanked them for the accuracy of those reports. And what, this is a 1980, chile was one of the worlds leading examples of what human rights mobilizations were beginning to become acute phenomenal because this dictatorship was brutal and it was clear they purchased university before he came. I could go on. The letter that really stop my heart was when he got back, he wrote a thank you letter to a man named sergio decastro is one of the top advisers to pinochet and he thanked them for the lovely lunch held in his honor, the wind in the jewelry given to mrs. Buchanan and something else. This is not a word about any of this but there is this Lovely Exchange between france and i thought it was someone set his life mission was promoting free society, promoting liberty. How do i get my mind around that . And so then i went on and took, and then another key moment was when i went upstairs into his personal office and found stacked helterskelter on the chair a series of letters from the blowup that happen after charles koch started investing massively in George Mason University and, in fact, some people connected with the operation engaged in what confidential whistleblower identified as probably illegal activity in its violation of the tax codes. That was also pretty heart stopping. In any event once i bought him these hundreds and hundreds a document that i copied and put them together with buchanans publish work and other sources, i found myself lying down pieces of a puzzle that sometimes to be honest literally nauseated me. When i saw the scope of the operations being guided by this individual, when i started to follow out the career trajectory that made out of this Training Center that they established at george mason and saw that people coming from this program, this Talent Pipeline were stacking of these major institutions of the Koch Brothers Donor Network world, it was shocking. And as it took the measure this project i saw something else, that the form of government that these men understood as ideal that they referred to as liberty mirrored that of midcentury virginia, minus the segregation. What am i getting at . A great political scientists sct published a book about southern politics just before these events and he said that virginia was the most oligarchical state in the south picky set next to virginia, mississippi as a hotbed of democracy. [laughing] so virginia, they had elite control like you couldnt imagine, this kind of unified elite, and harry byrd was the senator almost a corporate form and that elite made sure that they had their economic liberty, and that meant nobody else had the freedom. They didnt have much else besides. So in the name of liberty they practiced extreme Voter Suppression with the poll tax. They gerrymandered the General Assembly so it overrepresented rural conservative districts and underrepresented urban and suburban communities. They pass laws that prevented workers from organizing, even tax labor organizers who came in. It was absurd. And they brought in harry byrd was a big is grow in virginity he brought in right list immigrants to harvest his Apple Orchard because again that was liberty and these were the cheapest workers he could get to why should he employ American Workers who might have access to the constitution . Anyway, as a begin to trace the operation built up at George Mason University with koch money to apply began his understanding of political economy to come as charles koch said, he said when he gave this beget in 1997 when all of this really get going in earnest he said, i want to unleash the kind of force that propelled columbus to his discoveries. What was really interesting to me, too, is that he also said since we are greatly outnumbered, the failure to use our technology will essentially lead to continual failure. This is a man with three degrees from mit. When he speaks of technology hes talking about ideas that can create a great advantage. What he was doing was harnessing this understanding of political economy developed by buchanan in order to achieve what he wanted. I think you will know that he wants a very audacious, radical change in our institutions. Ready to did and its worth knowing this man is compared himself to martin luther. Hes got that messianic sense of his mission in life. So koch of the money and he been funding intellectual spies on description when he gave this morning for some three decades, until he found the technology he wanted. He found that at george mason and he turned it into an Operational Strategy for something that he can have long advocated a buchanan spoke of chaining leviathan when he was very clear to me from Everything Else i found in newspapers and in his correspondence and his writings that when he spoke of in chaining leviathan was what he really meant was to nj and modern democracy. To undermine again the power of organized citizens, to curtail regulation, to curtail transparency and ultimately, this is crucia

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