Fighting Progressive Social Change: The Origins of Today's Radical Right and and the Crisis of American Democracy | National Humanities Center

Humanities in Class: Webinar Series

Fighting Progressive Social Change: The Origins of Today’s Radical Right and and the Crisis of American Democracy

American History; United States Government; Far-Right Politics; Political Progressivism

Nancy MacLean (Fellow, 2008–09; Fellow, 2021–22)

October 2, 2018

The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. In a brilliant and engrossing new book Democracy in Chains, Nancy MacLean shows how Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In this webinar MacLean will discuss her book and the operation Buchanan and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.


Subjects

Political Science / History / American History / United States Government / Far-Right Politics / Political Progressivism /

Rights

Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0