Responding to Each Tweet is Not a Strategy

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Nancy MacLean

The author had this to say in a recent edition of The Chronicle:

“One thing has really stood out for me. For all the thousands of words that they have written, my critics still fail to engage the central message of the book: Leading libertarian thinkers concluded they could never win over the majority to their agenda. Therefore, they decided to achieve their utopia by attempting to radically change the rules of governance in order to change society.

In their writings, Buchanan and other libertarian thinkers lay out a vision for a certain kind of society. It’s a society where capitalism has free rein and the rights of the wealthy few are protected, while the many are prevented from exercising countervailing power. It’s a society where government is so shrunken as to be unrecognizable. In the country they envision, most protections that benefit average Americans have vanished: Social Security has been abolished, worker and public-health protections are gone, and public schools are shuttered in favor of private education. It’s a country where national parks and water supplies are sold to the highest bidder.

That’s not a country most Americans would recognize. And it’s not a country most of us, from any political party, would want to inhabit. Yet it’s the America Charles Koch and his fellow donors dream of bringing into being by applying Buchanan’s insights. It’s critical to bring this vision out into the open, so we can have honest debate about the kind of country we want. That’s why Buchanan’s vision of enchaining democracy — and the frightening degree to which it has become a reality — is a central focus of my book.”

And a connection the author made in the same interview that hits home for me:

“In the past, publishers and media outlets often assumed "both sides are equally at fault." Those assumptions may have once applied, but in the current context they rarely do. 

We are experiencing what Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann called "asymmetric polarization," in a book aptly titled It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. 

The coarsening of dialogue that we often now see from the radical right is hurting people, norms, and all that enables a society to work. In order to deal with this shift effectively, we need to stop reacting case by case and understand the trouble as systemic. That’s part of the message of my book.”

Related books to consider:

Dark Money: The Hidden History of Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Jane Mayer (2016)

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Who are the immensely wealthy right-wing ideologues shaping the fate of America today? From the bestselling author of The Dark Side, an electrifying work of investigative journalism that uncovers the agenda of this powerful group.

In her new preface, Jane Mayer discusses the results of the most recent election and Donald Trump’s victory, and how, despite much discussion to the contrary, this was a huge victory for the billionaires who have been pouring money in the American political system.

It’s Even Worse Than it Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein (2004)

Washington Post review of Mann & Ornstein here.

Great analysis by a liberal (Mann from Brookings Institute) and a conservative (Ornstein from American Enterprise Institute)…to counter the BS notion that ‘both sides are doing it’ with a strong and evidence-based demonstration that we are observing ‘asymmetric polarization,’ as also found in the recent Columbia Journalism Review study discussed here, where researchers found evidence that polarization is dominant on Right.

The Republican Noise Machine: Right Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy, David Brock (2004).

Brock is a former foot soldier in this noise machine who decided he could no longer stomach the efforts to undermine democracy.

Sound-Bite Saboteur: Public Discourse, Education, and the State of Democratic Deliberation, Julie Drew, William Lyons, and Lance Svehla (2010)