The future…

This is troubling, a piece in Slate which examines one of those who have supplied intellectual ballast (of sorts) to a certain very reactionary strand on the right in the US.

 

Tennessee-born economist James McGill Buchanan was horrified [at desegregation]. Over the course of the next few decades, the libertarian thinker found comfortable homes at a series of research universities and spent his time articulating a new grand vision of American society, a country in which government would be close to nonexistent, and would have no obligation to provide education—or health care, or old-age support, or food, or housing—to anyone.

But even more than that was what was a fundamentally anti-democratic underpinning to all the above.

This radical vision has become theplaybook for a network of people looking to override democracy in order to shift more money to the wealthiest few…

And:

… Buchanan helped Chile’s dictator craft a profoundly undemocratic constitution.

In the course of an interview between Rebecca Onion of Slate and Nancy MacLean of Duke University who has written a book on this it is clear that the scope of this far right vision is one which essentially sees democracy being diverted and obstructed and that those who cleave to it continue to move forward in their efforts to implement it.

What’s perhaps more troubling is that this is a project that isn’t really linked into Trump, or the alt-right, as such. Is indeed more problematic because it eschews all the bombast of those particular strains and instead focuses on fairly clear set goals. MacLean is clear this isn’t a conspiracy in the usual sense of the word, but there is a deceitfulness in terms of goals not being made clear, and it uses an instrumental approach to racism and so on. Maclean’s definitions of the approach is in a quiet way quite terrifying:

 

People who believe it will harm their liberty for other people to have full citizenship and be able to work together to govern society. And that somehow that goes much deeper than money to me. It’s hard to find the right words for it, but it’s a whole way of being in the world and seeing others. Assuming one’s right to dominate.

 

And:

…they’re doing because they understand that their ideas make them a permanent minority. They cannot win if they are honest about what they’re doing. That’s why they’re doing things in the deceitful and frightening ways that they are.