It’s part of politics to attempt to split the opposition and make political gains irreversible
Buchanan was not an evil genius who masterminded a new “‘technology’ of revolution” with profound practical consequences. Despite MacLean’s apparent shock, for example, the political tactics that Buchanan advocated are nothing unusual in politics. He advocated splitting the opposing coalition (liberals and the left), to win advantage for the pro-market agenda through stealthy tactics, and to change the terrain of politics to make the policy victories of his side hard to reverse.
Buchanan was no more inspired a political tactician than the average political scientist or economist, which is to say, not very inspired at all. As historical institutionalist political scientists have argued repeatedly, strategies of slow, incremental change are very commonly adopted by groups looking to alter an apparently immovable status quo. So too are policies that are intended deliberately to create (or split) coalitions to protect (or undermine) institutions.
The architects of the welfare state used such stratagems to hide their true intentions and entrench the welfare state so deeply that future politicians would be unable to roll it back. Entire books by mainstream scholars like Brown University’s Eric Patashnik, the late Martha Derthick, and the University of Oregon’s Alison Gash have explored these topics, focusing mainly (although not exclusively) on the center left.
FDR famously observed of the decision to fund Social Security through a payroll tax, “We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. … With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”
From one perspective, Buchanan was trying to stop a revolution, not start one
Indeed, what Buchanan and others thought they were doing is more aptly described as trying to
undo the advantages won by their left-wing opponents, who had succeeded in building a welfare state that seemed immune to fundamental reform, even when Republicans held the presidency and both houses of Congress. Where MacLean accuses Buchanan and those he influenced of undemocratic schemes for political entrenchment, they saw themselves as engaging in a strategy of counter-entrenchment. At least in this if in nothing else, it really is the case that “everyone does it.”
If
Democracy in Chains were just another overheated partisan book, it wouldn’t be worth discussing. Yet the book was written by a highly respected professor in a first-rate department, and was published by a major trade press — and has been acclaimed by well-known figures on the left. There is every reason to believe it will shape how those on our side of the political spectrum understand the history and strategies of their adversaries.
Why have so many left-wing readers embraced such a transparently flawed book? The most persuasive explanation is that MacLean confirms and extends their deep preexisting suspicions. The book tells them how a single man with a single plan united neoliberal economists, the Kochs, and Republican operatives in a secretive plot against democracy, before he was undone in an internecine clash with Charles Koch, which MacLean depicts as a titanic clash between two ambitious leaders. Leftists and liberals are left with the belief that their opponents are all working in coordination, implementing a single master plan with fiendish efficiency, while they themselves are in hapless disarray.
MacLean’s book is only the latest to make this kind of “master plan” argument, which more typically tends to focus on the so-called “Powell memo” of 1971, written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. (MacLean also discusses the memo, which urged business to organize and wield its power to preserve “the American economic system,” which Powell thought was under siege.) Seemingly unbeknownst to MacLean, the claims that the memo was the master plan for conservative mobilization has been shrunk down to size by a number of scholars (including Teles’s own
The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, which MacLean cites extensively).
Conservatives have their own versions of a mythology portraying opponents as secretive plotters, focusing on such supposed puppet masters as George Soros, Saul Alinsky, and Frances Fox Piven. Each side assumes the existence of a flawless, ruthlessly executed plan on the other side, while bemoaning the chaos and excessive scruples that beset their own allies. It is always tempting to think that the other side is more organized, more motivated, and more seamlessly united than they are, since all one can see are their successes, and not the compromises, mistakes, and frustrations that lie behind those successes.
If you believe your opponents work through secret cabals, your own strategic thinking gets distorted
If what MacLean writes were true, the obvious solution for liberals and the left would be to come up with their own centralized approach. The problem, however, is that it is not true at all. In fact, the historical record suggests that the most successful conservatives, including the wealthy individuals and foundations who helped fund public choice economics, didn’t start with a preconceived master plan. They did not commit wholeheartedly to any one strategy but instead spread their bets across a portfolio of different people and organizations, understanding that most of them would probably fail but hoping that a few would survive and work.
Public choice economics was certainly one of the success stories — but even it flourished in unexpected ways. Within economics, it remains a minority approach, but it has had a profound influence on legal and public policy thinking, including among those on the center left (such as ourselves).
Public choice economics succeeded in part because it had valuable things to say. Politicians indeed sometimes care more about reelection than doing the right thing. Voters often fail to pay attention, allowing lobbyists to persuade politicians to enact regulations that favor the few rather than the many. These arguments may have been best articulated by right-wing thinkers, but they have value for the left too, because they identify real problems. When MacLean depicts people like Buchanan and Cowen as wicked monsters, out to destroy democracy, she excludes the possibility that she or her readers could learn from them.
The left and center left should accept that not only do their opponents not have any grand master plan but that having a grand master plan is probably a bad idea. Like conservatives in an earlier era, they should recognize the limits of their knowledge and capacity to see the future, and diversify their strategies. Some of these strategies will involve mass mobilization like that pioneered by the Indivisible movement, Black Lives Matter, and Bernie Sanders supporters. Others will involve more traditional retail politics, or building strange-bedfellows coalitions with people on the right who are frustrated and angry at Donald Trump. Others still will involve building up the intellectual infrastructure for new understandings of politics.
As the political theorist Nancy Rosenblum has observed, good partisans don’t stick to their preconceptions but instead are always scrutinizing the public and their adversaries, figuring out how to amass the votes and resources they need to win elections. In a chaotic political environment, the best way to do this is to encourage experimentation, so as to figure out what works and build on it. That — not sinister Machiavellian plans — is the real lesson of the political success of public choice economics.
Henry Farrell is professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, where he has a particular interest in the politics of economic ideas. His book The Political Economy of Trust
was published by Cambridge University Press. Find him on Twitter @henryfarrell.
Steven Teles is an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. He is the co-author (with Brink Lindsey) of the forthcoming The Captured Economy
(Oxford), co-author of Prison Break
(Oxford), and author of The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement
(Princeton).
Even the intellectual left is drawn to conspiracy theories about the right. Resist them.
