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Despite his campaign comments to the contrary, President Donald Trump will apparently meet Friday for the first time with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Germany.

If Trump fails to stand up to Putin and forcefully raise the issue of Russian interference in our elections, the Kremlin will conclude that he is too weak to stand up to them at all. That makes his statement todaythat no one really knows who was behind the hacking and dumping of Hillary Clinton's emailsmore than discouraging. Far from putting America first, if he continues to cling to this personal fiction, he will be elevating Russian interests above all others.

On the agenda should also be Russia's continued destabilization of Ukraine, Russia's propping up of Bashar al-Assad, and a clear declaration that the U.S. will not turn a blind eye to any potential Russian support of the Taliban or increased trade with North Korea.

There is little evidence, though that Trump plans to confront Putin on any of these serious matters. Instead, he may seek little more than the exchange of pleasantries and the usual claims of a fabulous meeting.

This would be a historic mistake, with damaging implications for our foreign policy for years to come. Because what the Russians have in mind goes well beyond interference in one election, or the restoration of Russian dominance in what it considers to be its sphere of influence into a profound challenge to a rules-based international order that has been of incalculable benefit to freedom-loving people around the world.

Last summer, what began as a Russian effort to gather foreign intelligence on candidates for the presidency of the United States became a very different kind of enterprise when Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to weaponize the data stolen by his intelligence services. Putins dumping of private stolen emails in an effort to influence the U.S. election was a breathtaking escalation of Russian interference in our internal affairs. It is vital that we understand both why he chose such a provocative course, and the new threat that the Russian government poses to the very idea of liberal democracy.

There is no question that Putin despised former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over her support of pro-democracy protesters who gathered by the tens of thousands in Moscow streets years earlier to protest his governments fraud and corruption. Putin was terrified by these mass protests and believed he saw the hidden hand of the Central Intelligence Agency behind them.

Putin understands innately that the only real threat to his regime will come from the streets, not from an election process where opposition leaders are continually jailed or killed, and where the state controls all the major media. Putin was more than aware Clinton would continue her strong support of sanctions over Russias invasion of Ukraine, and those sanctions are a keen threat to the regime specifically because they have slowed the Russian economy and made the prospect of popular opposition to Putin even greater.

Apart from opposing Clinton, there was every reason for the Russian government to prefer Donald Trump, who over the course of the campaign belittled NATO, celebrated Brexit and a further weakening of Europe, expressed a common purpose with Russia in Syria notwithstanding our very different interests on the survival of the Assad regime, and most significantly, made clear his willingness to revisit our economic sanctions on Russia.

But we would make a grave mistake to assume the Russian intervention was solely about hurting Clinton or helping Trump, or even its main object. Above all, Putin wanted to tear down American democracy just as he is assaulting other liberal democracies around the world. We are in a new battle of ideas, pitting not communism against capitalism, but authoritarianism against democracy and representative government. America must not shrink from its essential role as democracys champion.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, we lived in a world in which the number of people living in free societies was ever increasing. The triumph of liberal democracy in Europe seemed certain, and around the world, democratic change was often plodding but seemed inexorable.

Today, even with welcome victories for candidates like Emmanuel Macron, we may be at an inflection point in which we can no longer be assured that the number of people around the world who will enjoy the freedoms of speech, assembly and religion will increase. It may, in fact, contract. Putins autocratic model is on the rise in places like Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Egypt, the Philippines and elsewhere.

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The narrative Putin wishes to tell is that there is no such thing as democracy, not in Russia nor in the United States, and our commitment to human rights is mere hypocrisy. Putins aims are served when Trump baselessly accuses President Obama of illegally wiretapping him or when the President lashes out at a secretive deep state allegedly working against him.

Of all the praise heaped undeservedly on Putins leadership, none would have pleased him more than when Trump was asked during the campaign why he could not criticize Putin's assassinations of reformers and journalists, at home and abroad. Trump responded, Well, you think our country is so innocent?

The Trump Administration has decided that democracy and the promotion of human rights will no longer be a top priority and instead we will put America first. This fundamentally misapprehends the degree to which the success of democracy around the world is a core American interest.

When the President complements Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on a massive campaign of extrajudicial killing, he is not advancing American values or interests only causing the rest of the world to turn away. We fought two world wars to make the world safe for democracy, because we recognized, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., that a threat to democracy anywhere was a threat to democracy everywhere.

America is not a victim, as the President so often paints her, but the most powerful nation on earth and the greatest beneficiary of a liberal world order established at tremendous cost in American blood and treasure. That is a legacy to cherish and to defend.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

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Schiff: Putin Aims to Take Down Liberal Democracy. To Put America First, Trump Must Stand Up to Him - Daily Beast

Storm clouds gather over the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. | Office of the Architect of the Capitol

Our country is in the midst of a profound governmental crisis. This crisis is revealing itself deep within the bourgeois state, that hallowed body of legislators, lawyers, and corporate lobbyists vaunted by some as the apogee of modern civilization. There are overlapping crises in the White House, in the executive as a whole, and between the presidency and the federal judiciary. Fault lines also lie in the relationship between the presidency and Congress with regard to traditional checks and balances and consent for judicial nominees. Congress itself is not immune, as witnessed by the subversion of the traditional filibuster rule. Here, GOP partisanship is pursued to the exclusion of all else. In the period before the election, the vacillation and caving of neoliberal Democrats was also to blame.

The crisis is expressing itself in most severe forms in the war among White House factions, in the discontent evident among officials in both U.S. intelligence apparatus and the Department of Justice, and in a series of judicial checks on presidential overreach that carry implications of a constitutional crisis.

Branches of the executive are in apparent contest with one another, with roles traditionally attributed to the State Department and Pentagon being challenged by the intelligence agencies. Neo-fascist conspiracy theories about conflicts within the deep state abound on all sides, repeated by the president himself.

The State Department itself seems to be in deep crisis as positions go unfulfilled due to turf wars regarding hiring, while its responsibility for foreign policy gets replaced in some cases by Trump family members.

People are asking, Whats it all about? and How will it affect me? These are important questions on the minds of a broad public more than a little overwhelmed and perplexed by Trumps crisis-a-week style of governing. The implications of unchecked minority party rule both in Congress and in the executive, exacerbated by presidential mendacity on a scale never seen before, are becoming ever more apparent.

The crisis of the American state

On one level, the crisis is sparked by a self-declared war by a faction within the White House on the administrative state, i.e., the various departments that comprise the executive branch of government. The aim of this assault is to undo the protections and services government provides, things like workplace safety guidelines or warnings about lead in the drinking water. Such measures are a nuisance, if not anathema, to a ruling class in pursuit of maximum profits.

At work here is not only the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy but also an undoing of an idea that underlies it the concept that the purpose of government is to serve the people. This notion is the lynchpin, the very basis, of the U.S. social contract since the days of the New Deal. In this regard, Trump is the fullest realization of the neoliberalism elaborated in FDRs shadow.

On another level, the crisis has broader implications. Not only is the structure of the state being reimagined, so too are its ends and the means by which theyre achieved. In this regard, is Trumpism an attempt to normalize non-democratic decision making? Some seem to think so, including many Republicans, as evidenced by House support for an amendment offered by Rep. Barbara Lee challenging the presidents authority to make war.

The implications here go not only to the decision-making process itself in other words, democracy but to the very concept of the country itself as a nation-state. The U.S. is extremely polarized, with powerful centrifugal forces pulling at its seams.

Consider that the U.S. nation, like other capitalist democracies born in the 19th century, is still in formation. Some argue, for instance, that its bourgeois democratic revolution was only recently completed with the passing of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. Among the reasons for the delay have been the ongoing influences of racism and nationalism, influences that historically are at work in every land.

In fact, Lenin once observed that this is an objective process and that in every country, as well as internationally, two tendencies are at work: separation and integration. Here he was speaking of what Marxists call the national question, the formation of nation-states during the imperialist stage of capitalism. In Lenins view, the process of production itself determined that the trend towards integration was primary.

However, today it is difficult to say with any certainty for how long the dominant trend, integration, will hold sway. In light of the breakup of the Soviet Union, or more recently the ascendance of separatist trends in Europe and the passing of initiatives to withdraw from the European Union, scenarios unimaginable a few years ago are todays political realities.

With white nationalism and the proposition that an oppressed white nation is fighting for its place in the American sun part of the everyday discourse among the Breitbart encampment of Trumps coalition, can the re-emergence of such Confederate forces be completely ruled out?

Clearly, the crisis of late stage state monopoly capitalism is giving rise to unpredictable consequences.

Here a mix of two schools of bourgeois political economy and governance, Keynesian and neoliberal, are at play and battling for influence in union halls, university campuses, corporate boardrooms, city councils, state legislatures, and into the courts and halls of Congress, pitting workers, immigrants, races, genders, and identities against each other in a uniquely American white nativist us versus a multinational, multicultural them.

But curiously, both schools have reached their nadir, with Keynesian methods long ago running their course and austerity now too meeting the same fate. Hence, we get Trumps curious mix of economic nationalism, austerity, and privatization alongside plans for business-funded infrastructure investment and (in all likelihood false) promises to stay the course on some entitlements in a desperate attempt to maintain his base and find economic solutions, even if only temporarily.

Trump and the counterrevolution

And it is precisely here that the greatest danger lies, and its an ominous one at that. To achieve these ends, Trump has, for reasons of both ideological predilection and necessity, allied the traditional Republican coalition with the so-called alt-right and its mass base in the lower middle class and among some sections of white workers, particularly in small towns and rural areas, potential shock troops in the battles to come.

Already hamstrung by the mass resistance to his policies and, in particular, by the aftermath of his firing of FBI Director James Comey, Trump in keeping with Roy Cohns schooling increasingly skirts along the edges of the law.

In relation to Comey, the Commander-in-chief seems to have actively interfered in the law enforcement process not only by attempting to get the former director to drop the Flynn case but also by approaching Dan Coats and NSA Director Michael Rogers with the same directive. And so far, Trumps allies in Congress have refused to side with federal law enforcement or the intelligence community in checking this abuse of power.

Here the issue of how Trumps surrogates responded is key. Did the attorney general or White House chief of staff challenge his overtures, or were they silent? In a White House and Republican Party dominated by a rash and authoritarian president and surrounded by loyal family insiders, did government officials find the courage to uphold the legal and political rules of the game, or did they ignore them? As one legal scholar put it: The institutional defenses against the breakdown of basic norms begin with an understanding among the key personnel of the government that their roles require them to cooperate in upholding these norms.

If they didnt uphold them, the countrys already in deep trouble. Indeed, the crisis in the state consists precisely in the degree to which these norms of government broke down.

In this regard, the whole reaction by the administration to the Russia investigation suggests a definite step in the direction of lawlessness, with all of the danger that this implies.

A breakdown in the norms of governance also pertains to the relationship between the presidency and the fourth estate. Trump, in Nixonian fashion, has labeled the capitalist press the enemy of the people, and purveyors of fake news. To be fair, there has long been a tendentious relationship between the White House and the press but never a sustained wholesale assault on truth, facts, and the pushing of alternative narratives and realities lending an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy to the institutions of both state and civil society.

The point here is that Trump and company, as a political force, represent something new, a break, a rupture with past norms and bourgeois democratic practices. Other administrations have broken the law and attempted to dismantle the EPA or the Department of Education, but never has there been such a sustained assault on the foundations of government married to an alliance with neo-fascists and supported by an apparent foreign interference in the electoral process. The country appears to be in the first stages of veritable counterrevolution aimed at imposing a new form of capitalist rule.

At this juncture, the crisis is occurring within the upper echelons of the ruling class itself as different sections contend for influence: Big Oil and Wall Street demanding deregulation and tax relief; Silicon Valley pursuing more free trade, and the military-industrial complex pushing for foreign intervention and a bigger share of federal spending.

In the White House, theres the appearance of a truce between alt-right neo fascists and Wall Street bankers on the one side and more traditional conservative Republicans, represented by the Trumps chief of staff, on the other. Support for the president among the various GOP factions in Congress remains, though Trump is taking no chances, returning again and again to the GOP base to shore up support.

Moving beyond resistance

How then will the crisis be resolved, and what does it portend for the future? Clearly, the special counsels probe and Congress investigation must proceed along parallel lines, but just as clearly, they cannot be left to themselves.

Notwithstanding the current skirmish with Trump, the FBI is hardly a bastion of democracy, and both chambers of Congress are dominated by the GOP. Hence the need for ongoing mass public pressure. Here, both a generalized form of broad public pressure (popular front) and a class-based one emphasizing the socialist solutions that have burst onto the agenda as a result of the Sanders campaign are necessary. Both must be carried on in tandem without mechanically placing one against the other, with the Communist Party always bringing the interests of the working class to the fore.

But the question arises as to what degree in the short term the crisis is resolvable, given that the forces in play have permanent class interests and long-term resources for realizing them. In other words, the underlying causes of the crisis are to no small degree independent of the present actors and, short of addressing these causes, the symptoms are likely to reproduce themselves again and again.

The state, democracy, and their related institutions are strained and in crisis because the conditions in which they function are strained and in crisis. The rate of profit continues to fall. Wages are stagnant. Debt, both personal and public, is sky-high. Life as it was once lived is disappearing, never to return. In these circumstances, promises of change are broken, repeatedly. Class, racial, and cultural resentments abound. Government is not trusted, the news media is not believed, and voting is seen by half the population as a waste of time.

And yet, the country is in the midst of the largest and most sustained mass movement for democracy in its history. Initiated by women in the aftermath of the inauguration and joined by millions in cities across the country, this movement has engaged the Trump administration at every turn, particularly on health care. It has already set the midterm elections in its sights, recruiting thousands of candidates. Shouldnt communists take their place among them?

And it is here that hope lies. It is a new, inexperienced movement. As of yet, its working-class component lacks full involvement, focus, or an agenda balancing the demands of the left and center along with the equality imperatives of people of color, women, LGBTQ people, and the disabled. Still, it is the countrys best and only chance to move beyond resistance to a new advanced democratic dawn.

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The state and counterrevolution: Democracy in the era of Trump - People's World

Strike up the bands and light up the fireworks. This is the week America celebrates not just the 241st birthday of our great nation, but the birth of the American republic that would ultimately spread the democratic model across the globe. Lets hope the Millennials dont mess this thing up.

Generation Y, better known as the Millennials, have taken a lot of bashing over the years. They are the generation where everyone got a ribbon for participating and eventually found themselves with their faces planted firmly on the screen of their smartphones. They take the heat for a lot of stuff.

Now, it seems they are under attack for potentially destroying democracy. Last December, The New York Times reported that the Millennials, more than any other generation, are likely to believe it is not essential to live in a democracy. As many as 25 percent of them believe democracy is failing. For the record, not even close to a majority believes that.

Then, last week, The Australian published a report that researchers from the University of Melbourne and Harvard University have found that this same demographic has simply given up on democracy. Their conclusion was that voter apathy is an early indicator that democracies, as Britains The Courier Mail put it, are feeble and subject to populist takeover. After all, as the Courier concludes, this is how Donald Trump became leader of the free world.

If you believe this stuff, its possible were in worse shape than I thought. The problem with the Couriers thesis is that President Trump was elected by 50 states not the populace. That is the difference between a true democracy and a democratic republic.

Granted, it is true that elections are based on popularity, but here in the United States, that popularity is divided among the 50 states and territories. It is the very reason people have been screaming that Trump is an illegitimate president. He won the battle of the states, but he lost the popular vote.

The other fallacy about their conclusions is that people who are the same age of these current Millennials are historically low-turnout voters. With the possible exception of the flower power movement of the 1960s, it has been common for young voters to generally be disenfranchised from the system. If you talked to some of the young people I have met, they actually are more concerned they dont know enough about politics to cast a confident vote.

Like it or not, elections are popularity contests. Whether it be a local Assembly race or election for national president, the candidate who is best known frequently wins. Several political pundits are quick to share that Hillary Clinton lost the Midwest states because she assumed she had them in her back pocket. She lost because Trump campaigned harder in this region.

One has to wonder whether or not we would have seen similar reporting about the demise of democracy had Clinton won last November. In contrast to their arguments, had she carried the Midwest, she not only would have won the battle for the Electoral College, she would have won the popular vote. Then, by true definition, we would have elected the popular candidate.

Populism is defined by the dictionary as support for the concerns of ordinary people. The left-wing media, like the Huffington Post, love to compare todays conservative movement to the populist movement of Adolph Hitler.

The same conditions of a poor economy, lack of government action and a realistic foreign threat are the same reasons people elected Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Had Clinton carried the Midwest, she would have won under the same conditions. The populist support of any of these people isnt going to rise to historys next Hitler.

Poll after poll demonstrate that people do not trust the president, Congress or the media. They are more likely to support the person they know, the populist, over the institutions, the establishment, as a whole. The perceived problems with democracy simply come down to a lack of trust. On the flip side, I would trust all three of these institutions before I would trust King George or Emperor Hirohito.

The founders of this country, those that wrote the Declaration of Independence and those who framed the United States Constitution, were revolutionary. Aside from overthrowing an evil monarchy, they forged the future. Its a framework that is likely to last another 241 years.

The founding generation created a republic that would outlast democracy. They had already taken the Millennials into account. Not even Generation Y could mess it up.

Tim McCumber believes a bankrupt nation feeds no one.

Link:
McCumber column: Democracy will carry on - WiscNews

Every real problem this country and this planet face is replaced by a fantasy problem, which all the powers of government then pretend to address. Meet Donald Trump, master of the street con, trickster extraordinaire.

How many cabinet positions and high-level government posts have been filled by someone whose life work and raison detre make him or her the least qualified person imaginable for the job? Names burst from the news: Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessions . . .

And now theres Kris Kobach, who brings an ironic twist to the con, in that hes actually a perfect fit for the position he has recently been given by Trump: vice chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, a.k.a., the voter fraud commission, whose mandate is to stanch the flow of illegal people swarming into Americas polling places by the millions and, ahem, voting. Good God, they almost threw the election to Hillary last year.

Kobach, Kansas secretary of state, is the guy who developed Crosscheck, a voter-tracking system that is ingenious in its inanity: It finds people on the list of registered voters in participating states who have the same names, like . . . oh, James Brown . . . and declares that they are one person voting multiple times. And they are then subject to removal from the voter roll, even (eyeball roll is appropriate here) if their middle names differ. This is such an obviously inept process its hard to believe anyone on the planet takes it seriously. But its part of hardcore Republican governance.

Its almost as though, in an eerie way, Trump Republicans really do believe that illegal voters are invading the system if not technically illegal, then morally illegal, in that voting against Trump proposals or Republican ideas in general (the wall, the elimination of Medicaid) is a sign that that youre not a real American. And this is especially true if you belong to a racial minority.

The mission of Kobachs commission is to ensure that Republican America holds strong, even as the party itself sinks ever more deeply into minority status.

The New York Times editorial board defined the real goal of the Commission on Election Integrity thus: to make voting harder for millions of Americans, on the understanding that Republicans win more elections when fewer people vote.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast, who has long been sounding the warning about Crosscheck, put it a bit more bluntly: This country is violently divided, but in the end, there simply arent enough white guys to elect Trump nor a Republican Senate. The only way they could win was to eliminate the votes of non-white guysand they did so by tossing Black provisional ballots into the dumpster, ID laws that turn away students the list goes on. Its a web of complex obstacles to voting by citizens of color topped by that lying spider, Crosscheck.

American quasi-democracy has a long, long history of what one might call protective racism, and it hasnt gone away. What requires protection is the status quo of power. And nothing is more inconvenient to the status quo than real democracy, with regular people having a say in the creation of their social structure. That means the politically powerful are always vulnerable, especially if they focus on serving their own interests, not their constituents. You can see the problem with that.

The Crosscheck program, as well as the presidential claim that the problem with Americas democracy is that too many people are voting, are examples of contemporary deeply coded racial politics. According to Palast, Crosschecks list of suspect voters in the 2016 election was so racially biased that fully one in six registered African-Americans were tagged in the Crosscheck states that include the swing states of Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona and more.

Forget about the Russians. Election tampering is a game played by Republicans. And its hardly limited to Crosscheck. Another highly effective vote suppression measure is the recent spate of strict voter ID laws, which, according to a study by researchers at the University of California San Diego, skew democracy in favor of whites and those on the political right.

This is because the lack of proper identification that is, a government-issued photo ID is not evenly distributed across the population. Studies show that a lack of identification is particularly acute among the minority population, the poor, and the young, according to the study.

Furthermore, existing laws are not applied evenly. Instead, poll workers disproportionately ask minorities for identification. And, the study notes, these laws are passed almost exclusively by Republicans and . . . they tend to emerge in states with larger black populations.

Other tricks and games meant to suppress minority voting include fewer polling locations, shorter hours for voting, repeal of same-day voter registration and the disenfranchisement of felons and (in three states) ex-felons, which is one of many shattering consequences of the countrys expanded prison-industrial complex.

The effects of voter ID laws that we see here are eerily similar to the impact of measures like poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements, and at-large elections which were used by the white majority decades and centuries ago to help deny blacks many basic rights, the study concludes.

The fraud is committed by those who govern, not those who vote. It comes from the top down.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

###

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Source: http://commondreams.org

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Skewing Democracy White - eNews Park Forest

In my last post, I noted that NancyMacLean claimed with regard to George Mason Universitys law school and its most influential dean, Henry Manne, that Mannes law school would stake out a position on the side of corporations against consumerism and environmentalism, two causes that had grown in popularity and influence since the 1970s. His faculty would advocate the superiority of unregulated corporate capitalism and assert, as Manne himself argued in print, that companies needed liberation from the distortions created by government intervention.

I pointed out thatMacLeans footnoted sources for asserting that Manne wanted the George Mason Law School to stake out particular political positions are as follows: John Saloma, Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth (1984), and M. Bruce Johnsen, ed., The Attack on Corporate America: The Corporate Issues Sourcebook (1978). The latter source, I recounted, published eight years before Manne became dean at GMU, stated Mannes personal position on unregulated corporate capitalism, but never suggested that he sought to impose this on a law school.

I have since received the relevant page cited in The Conservative Labryrinth. Here it is:TN 379209.doc

The page in question describes the fact that Manne ran economics programs for judges through the Law and Economics Center at Emory University and the University of Miami. It doesnt remotely support what MacLean wrote about Manne and the law school. For what its worth, and as befits a program aimed at federal judges, Mannes programs were truly focused on teaching judges economics, not ideology. For example, he paired the famous liberal economist, Paul Samuelson, with Milton Friedman when putting together his faculty. So not only does the reference to LEC programs fail to support MacLeans point, if anything it undermines it.

Meanwhile, toward the very end of the book, we find this sentence: Faculty at the George Mason School of Law, now aptly named after Justice Antonin Scalia, are urging [the Supreme Court] to fire [a loaded gun] by going back to its pre-1937 jurisprudence, when the justices routinely [sic] struck down government action to advance popular economic security or social justice goals. In support of that assertion, she cites my book Rehabilitating Lochner. Nowhere in the book do I suggest that the court go back to its pre-1937 jurisprudence, nor do I take any other normative position on constitutional jurisprudence. A minor point, perhaps, but at some point, given all the other documentedflaws with the book, one wonders whether one can trust the footnotes to support the text.

Its also indicative of a lack of understanding of the broader subject matter that MacLean thinks both that George Mason faculty support a return to the limited government jurisprudence of the pre-New Deal period and that the law school is aptly named after Scalia, who of course was strongly opposed to the courts pre-1937 due process jurisprudence on economic and personal liberty. Nor was Scalia inclined to return national power to anything remotely approaching its pre-1937 constitutional limits, as his vote to uphold prosecution of non-commercial growing of marijuana reveals. But MacLean seems to believe that Scalia, like Edwin Meese, was a secret member of the libertarian cadre.

Finally, MacLean seems to suggest the economist James Buchanan, the villain of the book, developed his public choice ideas in response to Brown v. Board of Education, though she provides no documentation of this relationship. How direct she believes the connection to be isnt 100 percent clear from the book, but the dust jacket, which one assumes she approved in my experience authors always get to approve the text of the dust jackets boldly states that Buchanan first forged his ideas in Virginia, in a last-gap attempt to preserve the power of the white elite in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. As Michael Munger points out in a comprehensive review of the book, desegregation seems an odd choice for MacLean to emphasize. It was after all desegregation that was imposed, at the point of a bayonet, at the command of an anti-majoritarian institution, the Supreme Court. Put another way, MacLeans primary criticism of Buchanan is that his work on constitutional economics was fundamentally anti-majoritarian and anti-democratic. Its illogical to surmise that he came to his anti-majoritarian, anti-democratic views as a hostile response to an anti-majoritarian, anti-democratic* supreme court decision.

*Its true that the segregation was imposed in many Southern jurisdictions that were at best imperfect democracies, as African Americans were largely disenfranchised. But the defendants in Brown included jurisdictions that arent subject to that criticism, such as Topeka, Kan., where the majority clearly supported segregation.

More:
Yet more dubious claims in Nancy MacLean's 'Democracy in Chains' - Washington Post