If it seems to you like the ultimate goal of the most extreme conservatives is to undermine democracy and cripple democratic institutions—well, according to historian Nancy MacLean, you’re right. This week, MacLean unpacks the meteoric rise in popularity of the radical right’s ideas, and offers a way forward for progressives, based on lessons from successful social movements throughout American history.

Nancy MacLean is an award-winning scholar of the twentieth-century U.S. and the William H. Chafe Distinguished Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University. Her book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, was a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award, and The Nation magazine named it the “Most Valuable Book” of the year.

Twitter: @NancyMacLean5

Democracy in Chains: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781101980965

Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com/

Twitter: @PitchforkEcon

Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics

Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

 

David Goldstein:

Hello, Pitchfork listeners. The following interview with historian Nancy MacLean was recorded in early March before the pandemic. In fact, it was the last time that Nick and I sat down together in the same room to record a podcast. So of course, we don’t talk about the pandemic with Nancy, but I think you’ll agree that a lot of the conversation is applicable to what’s going on today, especially the failure of the Federal Government to provide adequate leadership and resources in response to the pandemic. Think about that when we talk about public choice theory and the libertarian argument that the government that governs least governs best.

Nick Hanauer:

How did we end up with a political system and a set of economic policies in a democracy that benefit the few and crushed the many?

Nancy MacLean:

Buchanan’s ideas have been weaponized by the Koch donor network to undermine the model of 20th century governments in the US.

Nick Hanauer:

The great advantage we have is for every Charles Koch, there’s literally a million people who are not.

David Goldstein:

There’s 300 and some million who are not.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, yeah, okay. Right.

Announcer:

From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer. It’s like Econ 101 without all the BS.

Nick Hanauer:

I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

David Goldstein:

I’m David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures.

Nick Hanauer:

So Goldie, we’re going to talk today to Nancy MacLean who wrote one of your favorite books.

David Goldstein:

Well, I want to qualify. It’s a great book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. Great book. Everybody should read it. I hated it. I mean, it just makes me so mad. It’s depressing, and it is not over the top to say that the world we’re living in today politically and economically is the consequence of a multi-decade plot against America, against American democracy. It’s not an accident. I mean, I sound like a paranoid lunatic here, Nick, but it’s, I mean, it’s real. What she uncovers is this very detailed and specific plan to basically undermine our democracy and impose the rule of a select group of libertarian oligarchs.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right. To be clear, Nancy MacLean is a historian, not an economist and she wrote a book about the history of this. What’s very interesting to us is that she wrote about a person, James Buchanan, a Nobel Prize winning economist, who was at the very center of some of the most consequential and evil parts of the neoliberal takeover of both political parties.

David Goldstein:

Right. Somebody who we were familiar with peripherally because of some ridiculous things he wrote, quotes that we like to make fun of, but who we had no idea is his crucial role in this almost from the very beginning, not a founding member of the neoliberal movement but pretty early on and certainly its chief strategist.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right. That’s right. I mean, he was consequential because he both evolved a set of ideas that were weaponized into the most corrosive forms of trickle down economics and neoliberalism, but he also was the author of a bunch of political strategies that made that possible. One of the most impactful ideas that Buchanan created and sold was public choice theory, which is largely the idea that-

David Goldstein:

Government is bad.

Nick Hanauer:

Yes. Government is bad. Why is government bad? Because every group of people simply seeks their own advantage. If you give government bureaucrats power, they will make choices, which simply advantage them personally rather than the public good.

David Goldstein:

Right. Either they will make decisions in their own interest, or they will be captured by special interests, which can be Buchanan’s case he meant unions.

Nick Hanauer:

People, humans, non-rich humans.

David Goldstein:

Not businesses.

Nick Hanauer:

Exactly.

David Goldstein:

Well, maybe some businesses, the businesses that compete with the Kochs, but regardless it’s really this. Ronald Reagan with his government isn’t the answer, it’s the problem. This is James Buchanan. This idea that government, you never want government to interfere. You never want government to spend money because you can’t trust government actors.

Nick Hanauer:

One of the questions that people either do ask or should ask is how did we end up with a political system and a set of economic policies in a democracy that benefit the few and crushed the many? How did that happen?

David Goldstein:

That are so anti-democratic. How do you-

Nick Hanauer:

It was not just anti-democratic. Put aside any democratic, it’s just anti-economic for the bottom 95% of people, right? Forget the democracy. You’re just not getting paid anything. So how did we end up there?

David Goldstein:

Right, and so that’s what’s fascinating about this book. You can see in it how Nancy MacLean starts out on a subject and had no idea where this book was going. She stumbles upon this archive of James Buchanan and learns through her research what an integral role he played and how really a decade after his death he’s still playing this role today through the immense fortune of the Koch brothers and all the institutions they’ve set up largely following the strategy that he laid out. It was a strategy for weaponizing an ideology.

Nancy MacLean:

I’m Nancy MacLean. I teach history and public policy at Duke University. I am the author most recently of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.

Nick Hanauer:

So first of all, we want to cover both your thoughts and thinking on social movements, both in history and today, but we also want to connect that to your book. Goldie and I had a big laugh because we have been deriding Buchanan for a long time.

David Goldstein:

He’s been a butt of a joke in this office because we work a lot on the minimum.

Nancy MacLean:

Really?

Nick Hanauer:

Oh, yeah.

David Goldstein:

Yeah. We work a lot on the minimum wage. There’s a quote from him we like to abuse where he-

Nancy MacLean:

Oh, the one where he called the economist who supported it camp-following whores?

David Goldstein:

Yes, camp-following whores. The idea that just as no physicist would claim that water runs uphill, no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. So we’ve been poking fun at that for years. Then I read your book and, “Oh, my God. We thought he was a clown. We didn’t know he was any people clown.”

Nancy MacLean:

That’s very interesting.

Nick Hanauer:

The quote interests us a lot because the main body of our work is tearing down neoliberalism as a meaning system, as a system of thought. The most pernicious part of the neoliberal meaning system is the claim that this is all laws of nature, that these are the inescapable and unavoidable facts of life and so on and so forth. This quote by Buchanan is one of the canonical examples of that. He literally invokes physics, which is so interesting. Anyway, tell us a little bit, just tell our listeners a little bit about your book. Let’s start with that.

Nancy MacLean:

So my book started out in a very direct, different direction than the way it ended up, which sometimes happens with historians, but not. They usually don’t go as far a field as mine did. I was looking at the State of Virginia’s reaction to the Brown versus Board of Education decision, particularly the policy of massive resistance that required the governor to shut any public school that were going to desegregate, which they did in several Virginia communities. As I started looking into that, I found that the economist Milton Friedman and other founding neoliberal thinker had actually issued his first manifesto for tax-funded school vouchers for private schools in 1955 in the full knowledge of how it will be used by Southern segregationist. So I thought, well, here’s an interesting story about neoliberalism where nobody has found it before and put it in the South in a reaction to the civil rights movement and the segregation. So I was following that story when Buchanan appeared in my peripheral vision. To make a long story short, he just kept appearing in other places in designing the Chilean constitution, advising on the Pinochet constitution that has led to huge demonstrations in the streets this past year, many people being killed and actually blinded by security forces as they try to get rid of this constitution that has so bound their democracy.

Then I moved to North Carolina in 2010, just after a radicalized Republican party swept both houses of the general assembly for the first time since reconstruction. It’s a very different Republican party. It was dominated by Tea Party figures funded by the Kochs and a local cousin. People call him Art Pope. Anyway, I saw this new legislature enacting measures that were straight out of the Buchanan playbook. So I started to shift my vision to Buchanan. When I was able to get into his private archive when he died in 2013, that really confirmed my belief that Buchanan’s ideas have been weaponized by the Koch donor network to undermine the model of 20th century governments in the US. We can pick that apart in any way you want to.

David Goldstein:

Right, and to be clear, central to our thesis is that rising economic inequality undermines democracy. Your book, you pointed out that undermining democracy was exactly the point.

Nancy MacLean:

Yes, I think that is crucial to appreciate that distinction, and I’m so glad that you raised that. Because there is an emerging sense among scholars across disciplines, economists, sociologists, local scientists, historians that the levels of inequality that we have now in the United States are absolutely a threat to democracy for reasons that you’ve talked about and we could talk more about. What I found that was so interesting and terrifying way was that this anti-democratic ideology among libertarians is actually pretty systematic and deep and thorough going. What Charles Koch found in the ideas of James Buchanan was something he never had before, which is a strategy to impose a minority agenda, libertarians the teeny-tiny majority of the whole population the really hardcore ones, but a strategy to impose that ideology on the vast majority in the full knowledge that if people understood that this was happening, they would act and try to stop it.

So that is, and that’s hence the title of my book, too, Democracy in Chains, and that was actually a language that Buchanan himself used this language of enchaining and speaking of the Demos needing to be in chain. That was because for a hardcore libertarian like James Buchanan or Charles Koch, democratic government is necessarily problem because it leads the majority to infringe on the purported rights of the minority of extremely wealthy people and corporations who don’t like doing what the rest of their fellow citizens believe needs to be done. So what Koch got from Buchanan was a strategy for how to reverse that through incremental changes in the rules that most people wouldn’t even notice until it was too late.

Nick Hanauer:

So can you give us some examples of the rule changes that they were after and that they enacted?

Nancy MacLean:

Yes. Well, then they’ve already done a lot of this in the states, particularly since the 2010 midterm that had such low turnout on the progressive and democratic side. So, and again, my state North Carolina is a Petri dish for this. It is one of their prime laboratories, and where I went to graduate school, the University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin was similarly a laboratory. So we could start with Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, who under the misleading guys have a budget repair bill took away collective bargaining rights from public sector workers that they’d enjoyed for half a century. That was an example of a radical rules change. Even within that law, there were all kinds of smaller pieces, stipulations to ensure that it weakened unions as much as possible, that would be one example.

Also, the spate of laws in states dominated by this Koch-backed, Koch transformed Republican party to suppress voting. So there’s been a significant focus and understandable on the way that they have aimed at African-American voters because that’s legally actionable in the courts. They have also aimed at young voters who are much more likely to want action on the climate to support more progressive measures, attempts to deal with inequality, et cetera. So voter suppression has been another piece.

The most radical and sophisticated gerrymandering we’ve ever seen in our political history to make it so that these Republican legislators are choosing their voters rather than letting voters choose their representatives. In some states, the impact is absolutely breathtaking. So for example, in the 2018 midterms, Democrats in my state, North Carolina, won 50.2% of the vote, and they ended up with, what was it, two to nine, two seats versus nine of the Republican side. So the drawing of district lines has just been astonishing and its deliberate effort to under-represent voters They know would object to this agenda and try to block it and to over represent those on whom they feel they can rely. So those are some measures. There’s also a lot of other stuff going through the courts and the efforts to change the legal thinking and the judiciary but at every step sharply focused attention to changing the rules.

David Goldstein:

Right, and to be clear, the voter suppression and the gerrymandering, it’s not just a partisan tactic in terms of just Republicans versus Democrats. You point out it’s ideological. They actually want less democracy. It’s not just less Democrats.

Nancy MacLean:

Yeah.

David Goldstein:

They’re going for less democracy. They think democracy is dangerous.

Nancy MacLean:

Yeah. I really appreciate your bringing that up. Because I think that part of our challenge in understanding what we’re really up against in this country is the persistence of older terms that actually block our vision from what’s happening. So the notion that this is partisan, that this is just Republicans versus Democrats or vice versa, or that this is a battle between liberals and conservatives, both of those frameworks mislead the first one. Because this is no longer my father’s Republican party, one could say. This is a party that has been absolutely transformed by the strategic changes to the rules and the incentives practiced by these arch-right donors. I’ll give you just one example of that.

Charles, the Koch industries itself and many of the other donors are based in the fossil fuel industry. They are desperate to stop action on the climate, which their libertarian dogma also deems inappropriate. Well, by using the power of donors to punish any Republican who didn’t toe the line with a primary challenge from the right and the funding of candidates who did deliver for the donors, they were able to make it such by 2014 that only eight of 278 Republicans in Congress would admit that climate change is caused by human activity. That is a radical transformation of a party that was not much different from Democrats in the early ’90 in its recognition of the science. So I mean, it’s almost like invasion of the body snatchers or something what they’ve managed to do to the Republican party. So that’s not really a party anymore in the sense of traditional American major parties that were coalitions representing different interests. This Republican party now has an almost Leninist discipline and that is by design from the way the donors have re-rigged the punishments and the incentives.

David Goldstein:

So you’re a historian. Is there any historical parallel to what we’re seeing right now?

Nancy MacLean:

Not really, not in this level. I mean, what you have here is it’s not the whole capitalist class. It is a fraction thereof but a significant and extremely wealthy fraction. One journalist George Monbiot at the Guardian calculated that if the fortunes of Charles Koch and his recently deceased brother David Koch were combined, they would be the richest man in the world. So lots of wealth and Koch has convened over 600 other donors who give large amounts. Basically, that it is a deeply ideological, well-funded, high-risk strategic integrated long game to transform our society. We just don’t have anything else like that in our history. Someone could point to say the election of 1896 and the way that corporations rallied under the leadership of the Republican Mark Hanna. They put in crazy amounts of money to defeat William Jennings Bryan and a reform-minded Democratic party. Even that is not like this because this effort by the Kochs also involves quite literally hundreds of separate organizations, extensively separate like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC, the Federalist society.

I could go on, lots of organizations, and they’re moving the same plan down the road in elaborate division of labor. I mean, I wish there was more coordination like this on the progressive side in order to counter this, but we’ve just never seen that kind of tight coordination before.

David Goldstein:

Yeah, so interesting.

Nancy MacLean:

If I may say to the systematic disinformation like this whole enterprise relies on this information, whether it is climate science denial or the support that Koch network organizations provided to the tobacco industry. It was facing challenge to the support of Fox News and efforts like that that poisoned public discourse. It is a wrap-around enterprise that is I think really toxic to democracy.

David Goldstein:

Come on Nick, get a couple more zeros onto your net wealth and fight that.

Nick Hanauer:

What’s interesting is that at the end of the day-

Nancy MacLean:

Well, if I may say, I so appreciate your voice Nick in speaking out and trying to bring other people of wealth to the understanding that this is creating an utterly unsustainable society.

David Goldstein:

For sure. So obviously Nick, isn’t rich enough to take on the Koch brothers. There really doesn’t seem to be anybody on the left willing to spend money that way over a 50-year period. So we can’t follow the plan that the Kochs and Buchanan followed, but I’m wondering if there’s any lessons from this movement or other conservative movements that we can learn in terms of fighting back against this.

Nancy MacLean:

Yeah. I think there are definitely lessons that we can learn. One of them is the need for a long view, which has been, pardon me, but in short supply on the progressive side for some time now it was once the case. At early 20th century, mid century, et cetera, we’re progressive. We’re thinking long term where they were thinking decades ahead and what would happen if a generation or two that is no longer the case by and large. So thinking long term is crucial, also getting out of the silos is crucial. I mean, there’s been great work done in various spaces of progressive politics, whether it’s environmental politics or dealing with economic inequality in different ways or anti-racism or feminism, et cetera. Our problem now is that there’s not enough connection between all of these domains. Even within them groups are fragmented and pitted into competition against one another by funders, and so it’s a real problem.

So those are some of the problems we face. I would say though, I believe the single most important finding of my book is to see Charles Koch, James Buchanan, and their ilk saying again and again that they recognize, that they are a permanent minority, that nobody wants the program they are trying to impose and that is why they turn to stealth. They turned to stealth for the first time as near as I can tell with Social Security in the early 1980s. Seeing that it had just an almost universal failings of support, Buchanan came up with a scheme to try to undermine that by misleading the public, by divide and conquer members of the coalition, et cetera. So that’s just one example, but I think if we pay attention to what is driving this on their side and focus in on that, we can help people understand what a tiny minority cause this is.

In fact, when it’s actually telling the truth about what it seeks, we can expose that. We can help people understand the stealth measures that it’s used and how it is rigging the rules in order to move through its program without having to argue openly for it. We can take advantage of the fact that there is a huge majority that this libertarian right is afraid of. I do think that when people come together across these various differences of ideas, of demography, of region, of the country, et cetera, and rally to stop this and to renew democracy, that could be an incredibly powerful and transformative force.

So that’s what I’ve been trying to encourage. I’ve done a lot of speaking since the book came out around the country and worked with groups of all kinds. I will say that’s an exciting thing, too, that everybody now realizes we are at an all-hands-on-deck emergency moment for the future of democracy in this country. So people are trying to make bridges across the silos and work together to make structural democracy reform a top agenda item, wherever progressives get powers. So that I think is exciting.

There’s people, for example, Annie Leonard, the head of Greenpeace is saying, “We realize we’re never going to get a healthy environment unless we have a healthy democracy.” Over at Planned Parenthood, they’re saying, “We realize we can’t protect women’s health and their reproductive rights, unless we have a healthy democracy.” Within labor circles, people realizing the same thing. So I’m encouraged by all that. I think it’s going to take a lot more organizing and a lot more support and a lot more public education to make sure we make the most of that potential.

David Goldstein:

In fact, on a hopeful note, one of the ironies in your book is that Buchanan got his start focusing on trying to impose his ideological agenda in Virginia. Recently, the State of Virginia has completely flipped politically to the Democratic side.

Nancy MacLean:

Yes, and interestingly that the big flip came in a single cycle and since that’s happened, they’ve done all kinds of things that have benefited the population and that contribute to democracy reforms. I’m often asked by audiences when I speak about this challenge that we’re facing from the radical corporate, right, led by the Kochs. It seems so daunting. It seems so systematic. It’s so integrated, sometimes people can feel overwhelmed by that. My answer is if you think you’ve got a challenge, go back and look at the abolition movement. They had 33 people in a room when they brought together the American anti-slavery society. There were enslaved African-Americans who fled that their conditions who knew that they were not chattel that they were human beings. There were some radical white, religious figures who agreed with them and thought slavery was a sin and a curse and a blight on the nation.

All the established institutions of our society were against them, higher education, the mainstream churches, the courts, the papers, everything. Yet, somehow they managed to transform the consciousness of the country so much that now it’s almost impossible to explain to young people how it was that anyone ever believed they could hold another group in slavery, as was done in this country. So I tend to think of knowing history and particularly the history of social movements as being a very empowering resource and one that can be incredibly inspiring, too, in challenging times like this. Because you realize that people in the past faced in some ways much more seemingly insurmountable challenges. Yet, and again, I think this is why the fact that we’re talking about a majority being threatened by a tiny minority I think that we will, I hope to find ways to breakthrough, to transform the public conversation and to renew democracy in the ways that we’ve known it needed to be renewed and reform for almost 50 years now on our side, too.

David Goldstein:

Yeah. Which social movements do you find most promising today?

Nancy MacLean:

Oh, that’s interesting. Well, I think there’s exciting things going on in many different domains. Some scholars and younger generation people use the language of intersectionality to get at that but meaning that there’s breaking through up silos, right, and connecting people with different features of their identities. I think that’s happening in some really significant ways in the environmental movement and particularly among the young people who are focusing on the impending climate catastrophe. I think that what I see is an environmental movement that’s been significantly transformed by environmental justice bytes, which featured people of lesser means, often people of color, communities of color that were being devastated by pollution and misuse of different kinds. As that understanding has spread through the movement, I think it led to the development of concepts like the Green New Deal to realize that if we do want to protect our planet, we’ve also got to do it in a way that speaks to the very pressing needs and concerns of ordinary citizens for good jobs, for economic security, for sustainable communities.

So I’d say, I think that has the greatest potential to unite people across different domains at this point. Again, I think that we need to, to think big, to dream big but always in connection with where people are now, people who are in motion and what they are willing to take up and work for. When that happens, things that would have seemed impossible do happen and they’ve happened regularly in history.

David Goldstein:

So we have one final question for you.

Nancy MacLean:

Okay.

David Goldstein:

Why do you do the work you do?

Nancy MacLean:

I love that. I guess might flip the answers because I can’t imagine doing anything else, just being who I am and knowing what I know and feeling as strongly as I do about these things. I will also say, and this might be for listeners who have not gotten involved in things yet, but who are disturbed by what they see happening in the country in the world. People forget to mention this often, I think, but being civically active is incredibly rewarding. You meet other people who share your values, who share your commitments. There’s a spree to core to it, have fun, have camaraderie. It is the best antidepressants that don’t come over the counter in a jar to be with people who are good people who are trying to make the world better, again who share some of your ideas and values. They always stretch you and challenge you and there’s a lot of joy actually along the way in that camaraderie. So I’d say that’s what keeps me going.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. I could not agree with you more. Civic participation, social change, it’s fun.

David Goldstein:

Especially when you win.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

Nancy MacLean:

Absolutely.

Nick Hanauer:

Well, Nancy, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us, and thanks for your work.

Nancy MacLean:

Thank you, Nick and Goldie. This has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for your show, too. It’s really terrific. Okay.

David Goldstein:

Thank you.

Nick Hanauer:

Talk soon.

Nancy MacLean:

Buh-bye.

David Goldstein:

So lessons from this, you take away, you feel.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. I mean, the lesson is one that I think we have well understood here, which is that it takes a plan to beat a plan. It takes a model to replace a model, and that one of the, I think, she said that the left needs a long-term plan, which is another way of saying the right had a plan and the left didn’t and as a consequence, it got rolled. I think one of the lessons, of course, is the great advantage their side has is that there’s so much economically at stake for those folks in prevailing, that it is very easy to justify spending immense amounts of money.

David Goldstein:

They have immense amounts of money.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right, to advance your side. The same is not true on the progressive side that as you know, I run around the country talking to very, very rich people about helping with these things. It’s sadly a very rare one who is willing to subordinate their near-term economic interest for the rest of the country, human nature and all. The great advantage we have is it for every Charles Koch, there’s literally a million people who are not.

David Goldstein:

For every Charles Koch, there’s 300 and some million who are not.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, yeah, okay. Right, but the non-wealthy outnumber the wealthy a hundred to one. The people who don’t benefit from these arrangements outnumber the people who do by 10 or a hundred to one. So while they have money, the side of righteousness and good has the overwhelming majority of people, if we can activate them, tell the right story and get slightly, even slightly organized.

David Goldstein:

Right. I think that one of the big takeaways for me from this book is that the Kochs and Buchanan and their team, they recognized fairly early on at least by the 1970s that they weren’t going to persuade the majority of Americans.

Nick Hanauer:

Correct.

David Goldstein:

They had a minority ideology that would not hold sway and so they had to resort to subterfuge and to scheming and to lying and to the expenditure of these immense amounts of money in order to achieve what they have achieved. I mean, let’s be clear they have been winning but as you said, there’s more of us than there are of them. We’re not just on the right side, Nick, we’re right. We’re actually right both morally and intellectually.

Nick Hanauer:

Correct.

David Goldstein:

We have a better understanding of how the economy works. We have a better understanding of why maintaining a robust democracy is so important, not just to our individual liberty, but to ironically our economic liberty and to the well-being of the economy as a whole. So if we can just get our shit together and build a movement, it doesn’t have to be as good as theirs. It can be bigger and more effective because there are many, many, many more of us than there are of them.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right. I think that whether it was their effectiveness or the left’s fecklessness, the truth is that their ideas dominated discourse and thinking on the right and left for the last 40 years.

David Goldstein:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Nick Hanauer:

There was no alternative to neoliberalism really coherent, persuasive, empirically, verifiable, alternative to neoliberalism offered. As a consequence, even a bit, in the absence of alternatives, even a bad idea will be accepted. So I take some solace in the fact that those alternatives are rapidly being developed and deployed. We are a little gang of collaborators both here in Seattle and from around the world that are working hard on that stuff. I think that there’s hope for replacing some of those bad old ideas.

David Goldstein:

I think the challenge for Democrats, in particular progressives in general, is to really think carefully about the cliches you spout and the assumptions you accept when you worry about whether a $15 minimum wage, or let’s be clear, a $20 minimum wage will kill jobs. You are repeating the assertions of James Buchanan, right? When you worry about the moral hazard of forgiving college loans, you are repeating the same ideas of James Buchanan. When you worry about whether we can afford Medicare for all, you’re basically echoing James Buchanan. So understand that these ideas are so strong and have been put into our heads for so long because there was a multi-decade effort to put those ideas there. We need to actively play a role in reaching into our own minds and pulling out all these bad ideas and these bad assumptions and fight for the type of economy and democracy that we want instead of the best we think maybe we might be able to achieve.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, I agree.

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