Democratic Facts

I'm still reading the book Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean. This is taking longer than I expected, for two reasons,

1. It is long and detailed.
2. It is about James Buchanan, so fact checking means reading his writings and some of the sources.

Waging Totalitarian War on the 90%

It is also about how conservative doctrine has become totalitarian.

...Reagans efforts to implement Grifter, Oligarchic and Privateering notions of Government. Stockman noted, what Buchanan had seen done in Chile. Stockman balked at waging war on Democracy. Buchanan didn't.

David Stockman noted:

“The democracy had defeated the doctrine.”

He was morally a moderate and so the notion of waging war on

“Social Security recipients, veterans, farmers, educators, state and local officials, the housing industry,”

Was something naturally reprehensible.

Stockman eventually realized that facts are not democratic or republican, and became a critic of the fantasy thinking of everyone involved. Stockman would go on to be a fierce critic of Republican totalitarian efforts to wage war on common sense, by granting great privileges to the wealthy -- all the while reducing taxes on them.

Becoming a Totalitarian Movement

Unfortunately to Totalitarian True believers like James Buchanan that was precisely what they saw was needed. They see a majority that is "dependent on Government Service" as Lazy, unproductive and not worthy of benefits from the Government. Buchanan also developed a thesis that those in charge of such services would feather their nests and expand bureaucracy to the point where they'd eventually bankrupt the Government. They didn't believe it was even possible for government officials to act in the general interest. Yet somehow they believed that private interests would behave contrary to their inclinations. So they made a case for privatization and austerity.

Thus if MacLean is even half right Buchanan, and reading his writings pretty much suggest she is, he is even more the father of the Alt Right Republican party than Hayek or Von Mises. Buchanan, like Stockman, realized that his economic theories were harmful to the majority of people. But he saw that that was due to something wrong with the morals of the majority not the ideas. Instead of revising those theories in the face of inconvenient facts, he taught that the Republicans had to proceed by way of stealth. They had to indoctrinate cadres. They also had to wage war on truth to do so. Whether Buchanan advocated for it or not, they used coded language to make people think that policies that actually were hurting fellow, but poor, whites, were aimed at undesirable elements like black folks, libertines, etc....

All these techniques are familiar to anyone who has studied totalitarianism.

Using "Economic Constitution" to imprison policy

Because they didn't want to brazenly overthrow the Government. Rather they wanted (and still want) to tinker with its constitution to lock out and lock down majority rule. In the meantime they use totalitarian propaganda to wage war on the, formerly great, middle class. Based on "trust" but don't you dare "verify" policies, he had tried to lock down similar policies in Chile by putting (constituting) the language in the Charter. Buchanan wanted to reconstitute society to create his dystopic vision of an ideal society. His policies created disaster in Chile. Similar ones are being pursued here, or are already in place.

Totalitarian Polity

The result is a totalitarian polity where "alternative facts" [really lies] are at war with facts. And folks actually argue that their are "democratic facts" and "republican ones". The result of this newspeak is a divisive, angry and destructive Politics. All of which stems from the unwillingness to confront facts of their avatars.

Thomas Jefferson, James Buchanan And Jefferson Davis

Thus James Buchanan is to Economics what his namesake was to the Union and the Civil War. She links James Buchanan to the Austrian School, but his school really deserves its own name. I'd call it "The Virginia School of Revanchist Economics."

The Virginia School of philosophy tends to come up with perfectly valid and universal ideas and then spend years and huge effort denying their universality. Just as Jefferson wrote down "All men are Created Equal" and then spent years denying that the principle applies to women, black people and thus resisting the implications of his own words. So his disciples, like Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan and Jefferson Davis, spent years fighting the full application of the very principles they espoused.

Liberty for the Elite means slavery for the Masses

In the end "liberty" became the property mostly of privileged, elite white males; all else were reduced to a pyramidal hierarchy of oppression. James Buchanan, the economist, created an entire political economy based on a similar schema of beliefs and faulty logic.

Jefferson, his disciples, have some good ideas, but in classic ideological style,

• Assumptions come first,
• Are made as claims of A-Priori Principle,
• Are made with decent quality logic
• Are justified with cherry picked facts
• Ignore application of those principles that don't fit the assumptions
• Wind up subverting their own Universality.

Jefferson did this with his marvelous statements of universal rights. His disciples threaten a uniquely absurdist totalitarian ideology of systematic oppression based on notions of "economic liberty" that somehow exclude actual liberty for the masses.

Two James Buchanans

James Buchanan the President... was a man who had followed Andrew Jackson, served James Polk and was elected thinking the Dred Scott case would save the Union. He also thought that warring on Utah (and polygamy) would unite the Union and that the United States had no call to help those harmed by the panic of 1857, there should be "reform not relief". His conservatism, history with slavery and slavers, racism and elitism uniquely prepared him to instigate the Civil War. An economic determinist might claim that the civil war was started due to the depression of 1857. Whatever the case, the way that our country handled it's economy contributed to the instability and anger that drove the war.

"reform not relief"

The New York Times article, and Harpers Weeekly, both note that "In reality, government officials took only limited action in response to the economic crisis." They believed in the Universal principles of economic freedom, for bankers, banks and economic elites. "Reform" had limited meaning because they believed in the sanctity of contract, states rights and hands off (laissez Faire) economics.

The panic of 1857 embodied the sort of Laissez Faire, James Buchanan the Economist would admire. He would try to resurrect that Zombie.

But the reality is that Lee Hamilton was right in the first place.

“There are neither Republican facts nor Democratic facts—just facts.”

I'm still reading MacLean's book and digesting Buchanan's ideas. I kind of like some of them. Just not the way he spins and applies them. Faulty conclusions usually flow from faulty and unexamined premises. I may modify this post later. But this is enough for now.

The Triumph of Politics, by David Stockman

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/923199.The_Triumph_of_Politics

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966

NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/harp/1024.html?mcubz=0

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/04/were-going-to-have-a-crisis-david-stockmans-stark-warning-for-america/274554/

The Great Deformation Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Deformation-Capitalism-Corrupted-Democracy/dp/1586489127

My Review:Reading Deformations

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/12/the-education-of-david-stockman/305760/

Lee Hamilton Quotation:

“There are neither Republican facts nor Democratic facts—just facts."

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0446402990

David Stockman and James Buchanan

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-architect-of-the-radical-right/528672/