Nancy MacLean, _Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America_; Michelle Alexander, _The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness_

MacLEAN"S TITLE STRUCK me as melodramatic, but even a few dozen pages in, it began to feel like a good fit.

Here's the thing. The extremely wealthy are inevitably going to a minority, so from their prospective, any form of majority rule will pose a threat. The extremely wealthy thus ask themselves: how can the majority (or their representatives) be prevented from imposing taxes and regulations, or ensuring the rights of workers, or protecting the environment or consumers' health, or taking any of the many other measures that might hamper the operations of the wealthy, or their corporations, or their financial institutions? Majority rule needs a pair of handcuffs, basically, or a straitjacket, or a muzzle, or some kind of restraint lest it obstruct the rights of property and the functioning of the market. That is the problem the our apostles of the free market want to solve.

It's an old problem. Tocqueville considers it, and MacLean devotes a chapter to John Calhoun, who was mainly interested in obstructing any majority that sought to outlaw slavery; we could go back to the Gracchi or Pericles, for that matter. But MacLean focuses on James Buchanan--not the hapless president who preceded Lincoln, but the Nobel laureate economist who taught at the University of Virginia, then Virginia Tech, then George Mason, who attracted the largesse of the Koch brothers and the Scaife and Olin foundations (see Jane Mayer's Dark Money), and whose acolytes populated such outfits as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Club for Growth. That is, the story of Buchanan's career sits at the heart of the hardcore secular right, the whole movement for curtailing the role and reach of government in education, health care, worker rights, the environment, financial regulation...you name it.

As MacLean describes in her last twenty pages, they are closing in on getting everything they want.

What especially hit me, though, was that Buchanan got his first leg up, made his bones as it were, in the wake of Brown vs. the Board of Education and the movement in Southern states to resist federal efforts to de-segregate public schools.

That is--racism turns out, once again, to be virtually the sole engine of American history. The effort to keep black people down while at the same time profiting from their labor, intelligence, and creativity turns out once again to be not just a tragic sidebar to our national history, with occasional redemptive moments like the abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but the secret spring of everything in our national life.

This is what made me think of Alexander's book, naturally. The War on Drugs. What was that really about? Or the Electoral College, which landed us with President Trump. What was that really about? The rise of a political movement that rode to power by arguing that our own government, elected by us, was somehow our worst enemy. What was that really about?

Dig down anywhere, you hit a seam of white supremacy.