I have followed the machinations of the radical right starting from the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was a student in high school and am well familiar with most of the characters who played a major role in it. I also am well familiar with the libertarian crapola that is doing untold damage in this country. I have started to read Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains which traces the origin of this libertarian crap. It largely came into being as a result of Brown v. Board of Education when a crackpot "economist" and academic of a PUBLIC university, James M. Buchanan, came up with the notion government had no role at all if it stood in the way of unfettered wealth accumulation. Never mind the reality such a plan would never succeed (look no further than Chile, which is still trying to clean up the mess Pinochet created) even if the fascists and plutocrats controlled the police and military. Buchanan and billionaire backers like Charles Koch simply don't give a shit. They were (since Buchanan is mercifully dead) and are sociopaths.
This should enrage anybody who is a thinking individual about the fallout from the Brown decision:
Either way, the proximate result of Buchanan’s privatizing scheme was to help prolong the stalemate in Virginia. In Prince Edward County, to cite the most egregious example, public schools were padlocked for a full five years. From 1959 to 1964, white children went to tax-subsidized private schools while most black children stayed home—roughly what some politicians had in mind all along. The episode was, among other things, a vivid early instance of the bait and switch, so familiar now, whereby many libertarians seem curiously indifferent to the human cost of their rigid principles, even as they denounce the despotism of all three branches of the federal government.
This idiot Buchanan, like Milton Friedman, won the Nobel Prize for economics, which should discredit that award right then and there. Furthermore, this "libertarian" spent his academic career working for PUBLIC universities supported by taxpayers (University of Virginia, George Mason University) while at the same time taking handouts from the likes of Charles Koch.
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Utopian cults like libertarianism will never work because people get hurt. There are simply too many of us and too few of them to succeed, despite their owning much of the political apparatus. You don't have to be a Marxist to see that people like Koch do not "create" wealth; since money is a finite resource, it has to come from somewhere, and that "somewhere" is the rest of us. If we don't have jobs, we don't consume, if we don't consume, no jobs and no wealth are created. Over the past few decades, the very rich have STOLEN from the rest of us by owning D.C. politicians to create policies that send wealth upward. Contrary to the libertarian mantra, it is not the masses who are "parasites"--it is the very rich.
To see all this as simple obstructionism, perversity for its own sake, is a mistake. A cause lies behind it: upholding the sanctity of an ideology against the sins of the majority. This is what drives House Republicans to scale back social programs, or to shift the tax burden from the 1 percent onto the parasitic mob, or to come up with a health-care plan that would leave Trump’s own voters out in the cold. To many of us, it might seem heartless. But far worse, Buchanan once explained in a famous essay, is misguided Good Samaritanism, which, by helping the unlucky, cushions them against the consequences of their bad choices. This is exactly the sentiment voiced by the House Republican who voted to strip away Obamacare and then explained that the new proposal, which punishes people with preexisting medical conditions, has the advantage of “reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives.”
With a researcher’s pride, MacLean confidently declares that Buchanan’s ideological journey, and the trail he left, contains the “true origin story of today’s well-heeled radical right.” Better to say that it is one story among many in the long narrative of conservative embattlement. The American right has always felt outnumbered, even in times of triumph. This is the source of both its strength and its weakness, just as it was for Buchanan, a faithful son of the South, with its legacy of defeats and lost causes. MacLean’s undisguised loathing of him and others she writes about will offend some readers. But that same intensity of feeling has inspired her to untangle important threads in American history—and to make us see how much of that history begins, and still lives, in the South.
And again like most Southern far right ideas, it will fail.
Meanwhile, some people are defending Buchanan, saying he wasn't the racist, public school-hating jerk MacLean says he was.
Buchanan or no, the "libertarian" right IS as draconian, racist, and sociopathic as MacLean depicts. I have followed their crap for decades.
MacLean says here that the "left" is underestimating Charles Koch's "intellect" and doesn't understand he is a True Believer, like all people who wrap themselves up in a cult. Koch, for the record, has STEM degrees (undergrad and graduate degrees in engineering) from MIT, which may make him "smart" that way, but unfortunately like many people who are in or majored in those fields, isn't terribly knowledgeable about the world outside of the narrow scope of STEM. He clearly hasn't read much in the way of history--real history and not partisan-oriented nonsense--or not experienced enough of the real world outside his social circle and it has twisted his political outlook, which is not only naive but downright vicious and cruel. He was born on home base and truly believes he hit a home run.
Koch may think he is a "visionary," but that is the trait of a malignant narcissist or a sociopath if he fancies himself as the next Martin Luther and thinks he has The Truth and everybody else is wrong. The fact is what he "envisions" HAS been tried; so-called laissez faire or "the invisible hand," or similar bullshit lead directly to the Great Depression. Of course few people alive today have any meaningful firsthand experience with the Great Depression, as the Crash happened some 88 years ago, and that includes Charles Koch. Chuck is around 82, and as far as I am concerned, his death can't come soon enough. What he envisions is not bringing "back" capitalism but actually destroying it. FDR in fact rescued it by putting in numerous regulations. Those regulations helped prevent almost certain unrest and possible government overthrow.
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