From Chile to the Smithsonian: The Psychology of Threatened Domination and the Fear of the Supermajority that We Already Are

Good morning from Austin, Texas. I’m re-posting this reflection from 2017 because Duke University political scientist Nancy MacLean’s prophetic book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, has never been more relevant than it is right now. If we lacked the words then, her research gives us a vocabulary for what’s happening to our country today.

MacLean identifies what she calls the “psychology of threatened domination”—the conviction that one’s liberty is somehow diminished when others gain full citizenship and exercise collective power to govern society. This mindset closely overlaps with zero-sum logics, where equality for others is perceived as a loss for oneself. She describes it as “a whole way of being in the world and seeing others. Assuming one’s right to dominate.”

This worldview, grounded in the writings of Nobel laureate James McGill Buchanan and carried forward by billionaire networks like Charles Koch’s, has always been more than about money. It is about a messianic cause, a stealth vision of government stripped to its bones, where the majority is permanently locked out of power.

We cannot forget that Buchanan’s project was not confined to the United States. In the mid-1970s, he single-handedly re-wrote Chile’s constitution under the Pinochet dictatorship, turning that nation into a testing ground for neoliberalism. The result was a “constitution of locks and bolts,” designed explicitly to keep the majority from exercising democratic will unless it achieved an almost impossible supermajority. This anti-democratic template remains at the heart of the radical right’s playbook today.

MacLean warned us:

“They’re doing a lot of things for strategic reasons and not being honest with the public about it… This is a messianic cause, with a vision of the good society and government that I think most of us would find terrifying, for the practical implications and impact that it will have on our lives.”

A powerful—if horrific—recounting of this violent chapter in Chilean history appears in the documentary The Pearl Button (El Botón de Nácar), which captures the brutality of that era and the lingering wounds Chileans are still struggling to crawl out from under.

Look around in 2025: Project 2025 laying out blueprints for dismantling federal agencies, state legislatures gutting DEI, book bans spreading like wildfire, and now former president Donald Trump reshaping the Smithsonian to erase histories that don’t fit the far right’s narrative. These are not isolated skirmishes. They are part of the same stealth plan MacLean revealed years ago.

The radical right fears the rise of a supermajority—a multiracial, multigenerational, justice-minded coalition that already exists. Their voter suppression, gerrymandering, and culture wars are desperate attempts to contain it.

The truth? We already are that supermajority. But we must act like it. We cannot afford to underestimate the elite, extremist right—or the messianic fervor that drives them.

And yet, there is a silver lining. What was once hidden in the fine print of policy or embedded in distant experiments like Chile’s constitution is now visible to all who care to see. This visibility is power: it awakens communities, spurs coalitions, and galvanizes a new generation to act. If authoritarian forces seek to dominate knowledge, history, and culture, then our charge is to preserve memory, build archives of resistance, and imagine anew the institutions we deserve. Out of crisis comes possibility—an opening to create educational and cultural spaces that reflect justice, dignity, and collective flourishing.

In short, the stealth plan is no longer stealth. It’s here. And what we choose to do in this moment will determine whether democracy survives for our children.

-Angela Valenzuela

What Is the Far Right’s Endgame? A Society That Suppresses the Majority. 

JUNE 22, 2017 REBECCA ONION | SLATE

Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by MBisanz/Wikimedia, Dechateau/Wikimedia, Atlas Network/Wikimedia, and Thinkstock

Nancy MacLean, author of an intellectual biography of James McGill Buchanan, explains how this little-known libertarian’s work is influencing modern-day politics. 
By Rebecca Onion 

When the Supreme Court decided, in the 1954 case of Brown vs. Board of Education, that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, Tennessee-born economist James McGill Buchanan was horrified. Over the course of the next few decades, the libertarian thinker found comfortable homes at a series of research universities and spent his time articulating a new grand vision of American society, a country in which government would be close to nonexistent, and would have no obligation to provide education—or health care, or old-age support, or food, or housing—to anyone. 

I spoke with MacLean about Buchanan’s intellectual evolution and its legacy today. We discussed whether it’s helpful or counterproductive to call the network of organizations funded by Charles Koch a “conspiracy,” the line of influence between Buchanan and what’s going on in MacLean’s home state of North Carolina, and that time Buchanan helped Chile’s dictator craft a profoundly undemocratic constitution. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

So why is James Buchanan so unknown? He had a Nobel Prize; how did he manage to fly under the radar? 

He had a very different personality from somebody like Milton Friedman. I think of them as kind of a yin and yang. Friedman was very sunny, and Buchanan was kind of a darker figure. Friedman was always very anxious to be in the limelight, and Buchanan was not like that at all. He was very interested in making an impact over the long term and training other people, and he seemed to be content to talk to powerful people more than to talk to public audiences. His books were really written for other scholars, not so much the general public. 

Can you put him in relationship with other people, besides Friedman, who might be more familiar to us today? 

People might be familiar with the Mont Pelerin Society, the international invitation-only group that began in 1947 launched by Friedrich Hayek. That society included Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Buchanan, ultimately Charles Koch (which I think not many people know!), and many others.

Friedman and Hayek put much more emphasis on making the case for free markets, whereas Buchanan’s distinctive mission was to make a case against government. … His basic idea is that people had been wrong to think of political actors as concerned with the common good or the public interest, when in fact, according to Buchanan’s way of looking at things, everyone should be understood as a self-interested actor seeking their own advantage. He said we should think of politicians, elected officials, as seeking their own self-interest in re-election. And that’s why they’ll make multiple costly promises to multiple constituencies, because they won’t have to pay for it. And he would say agency officials—say, an official at the EPA—would just keep trying to expand the agency, because that would expand their power and resources. 

Now there were other people who actually tested that empirically and found out that it didn’t hold, so it’s really a caricature of the political process, but it’s a caricature that’s become very, very widespread right now. 

You mentioned a few times in the book that Buchanan didn’t really do empirical research. So what was he writing from? 

He was also trained in game theory at the Rand Corporation, so he uses a lot of that. But basically he writes more like a social philosopher, someone studying the social contract. 

Did his ideas change over time? 

The core ideas kind of stayed the same. What did change over time was his own outlook. It became much darker over the years. His first big book in his field, which is called public choice economics, was titled The Calculus of Consent, and it came out in 1962 and was co-authored with Gordon Tullock. It was the work for which Buchanan was most recognized in his Nobel citation. In that work, he seemed to believe that somehow people of good will could come to something close to unanimity on the basic rules of how to govern our society, on things like taxation and government spending and so forth. 

And by the mid-1970s he concluded that that was impossible, and that there was no way that poor people would ever agree … there was no way that people who were not wealthy, who were not large property owners, would agree to the kind of rules he was proposing. So that was a very dark work. It was called The Limits of Liberty. He actually said in that work that the only hope might be despotism. 

And he went from writing that to advising the Pinochet junta in Chile on how to craft their constitution. This document was later called a “constitution of locks and bolts,” [and was designed] to make it so that the majority couldn’t make its will felt in the political system, unless it was a huge supermajority. 
So yeah, it’s pretty dark. 

Tell me more about the relationship between Koch and Buchanan. 

I think too many people on the left have really underestimated Koch’s intelligence and his drive, and also misunderstood his motives. There’s been brilliant work by journalists, really good digging on the money trail and the Koch operations, but much of that writing seems to assume that he is doing this just because it’s going to lower his tax bill or because he wants to evade regulations, personally. I think that really misgauges the man. He is deeply ideological and has been reading almost fanatically for a very long time. I see him as someone who’s quite messianic. He’s compared himself to Martin Luther and his effort being like the Protestant Reformation. When he invested in Buchanan’s center at George Mason University, he said he wanted to “unleash the kind of force that propelled Columbus.” 

This is not someone who’s just trying to lower his tax bill. He wants to bring in a totally new vision of society and government, that’s different from anything that exists anywhere in the world or has existed because he is so certain that he is right. I think it’s more chilling because it doesn’t correspond to the ideas we have about politics. 
Right, like he’s not trying to get a particular person elected. You mention several times Buchanan was very against that idea, that the point was to get a particular person elected. The point, for him, was to change the whole system. 

Right. You asked how the two men connected. I only have the documentary trail that I found. But from what I found, I believe that they first came in contact or first began to work together about 1969 or 1970, and that was in the context of the campus upheaval against the war in Vietnam, and for black studies, and so forth. Buchanan wrote a book about the campus unrest that applied his particular school of thought to it. Koch had an operation called the Center for Independent Education, and that center took Buchanan’s book and turned it into a kind of pamphlet that could be circulated more broadly. 

In 1970, Koch joined the Mont Pelerin Society. Once he got in, he began to advertise his many different organizations and efforts and try to recruit and get people to events and so forth, through Mont Pelerin. Buchanan helped with the founding of the Cato Institute and with various other intellectual enterprises that were close to Charles Koch’s heart, like this thing called the Institute for Humane Studies. 

And then Koch funded Buchanan’s center, as well as other projects, at George Mason University. One of Buchanan’s ideas that Koch liked was the concept of making a flurry of changes all at once so that people have a hard time opposing them. 
Yes, and in the same year that Koch invested all this money in George Mason, [economist] Tyler Cowen got a commission by the Institute for Humane Studies to produce this review of places where economic liberty has made big advances. Cowen advocates what he calls a “Big Bang.” 

Interestingly it’s that same phrase that gets used by Civitas, the Koch-affiliated organization in North Carolina, after they take over the state legislature here in 2011. I actually have to give the North Carolina Republican-led General Assembly some credit for this book because I was struggling through Buchanan’s ideas, trying to understand the implications, because he did write in a somewhat abstract manner. 

And then the General Assembly came in in North Carolina and just made it all so clear. I saw the practical measures being taken and was like, “Oh, this is what he’s talking about! That’s what this is!” I should have put them in the acknowledgements. 
I’d like to talk more about the way racism works in Buchanan’s intellectual project. You write in the conclusion to the book that this school of thought advocates “enlisting white supremacy to ensure capital supremacy.” Is it possible to disentangle those two? 

So this is a challenge for the left because some of our categories, I think, are not very supple, and are also driven by the political world in which we operate. So for example, as we try to think about what’s going on with these voter suppression measures, the only thing that’s actionable is racial discrimination. Right? And so people think of voter suppression efforts as being motivated by racism. These are these good old boys who hate black people and that’s why they’re doing this. 

I think too many people on the left have really underestimated Koch’s intelligence and his drive, and also misunderstood his motives. —Nancy MacLean 

I think actually what’s going on is that these people are extremely shrewd and calculating, and they understand that African Americans, because of their historical experience and their political savvy, understand politics and government better, in a lot of ways, than a lot of white Americans. And they are a threat to this project because they will not vote for it. So they want to keep them from the polls. 

Similarly, young people are leaning left now, and they don’t accept a lot of these core ideas that come from this project, so this project has been very determined to keep young people from the polls. Frankly, if they could keep women away, they would, too. Because they understand that women suffrage opened the way to greater government involvement in the economy, and greater social provision and regulation. 
We make a mistake when we think these are just reactionary prejudices, and we need to see them as shrewd calculations to keep people who would oppose this vision away from the polls. 

So it’s about power, money. 

Not just money. I think it’s also much more about this psychology of threatened domination. People who believe it will harm their liberty for other people to have full citizenship and be able to work together to govern society. And that somehow that goes much deeper than money to me. It’s hard to find the right words for it, but it’s a whole way of being in the world and seeing others. Assuming one’s right to dominate. 
Your book calls Buchanan’s ideas a “stealth plan.” How can we, on the left, avoid falling into the trap of conspiracy-theory thinking while trying to understand this movement? 

One of the challenges is that our language is not up to the threat that we’re facing. As a scholar, I understand the problem of conspiracy theories. I don’t want to be seen as promoting a conspiracy theory. Not least because this is not a conspiracy, by definition. A conspiracy involves illegality, and the people who are funding, and supporting and promoting this operation have extremely good lawyers and I think they actually do believe in the rule of law, and they are being, with the possible exemption of nonprofit tax law, scrupulously legal in what they are doing. 

They’re doing a lot of things for strategic reasons and not being honest with the public about it. —Nancy MacLean

So conspiracy is not a good word. But on the other hand, this is a vast and interconnected and not honest operation. They say these anodyne things about liberty—like the title of one book is Don’t Hurt People And Don’t Take Their Stuff! And that’s not what this is about. The reality is that they are gerrymandering with a vengeance, to a degree we’ve never seen before in our history; they’re practicing voter suppression in a way we’ve not seen since Reconstruction; they are smashing up labor unions under fake pretenses, not telling people that they actually do want to destroy workers’ ability to organize collectively ... I could go on and on. 

They’re doing a lot of things for strategic reasons and not being honest with the public about it. That suggests to me that we need a new vocabulary for grasping what we’re dealing with here. I guardedly used the term “fifth column” in the book, and you know, there’s problems with that term too, but at least it gets at the fact that these wealthy donors that Charles Koch has convened are deeply hostile to the model of government that has prevailed in the United States and in many other countries for a century. 

While I think we need all the great investigative work that’s being done to try to show us how these organizations that are being presented to the public as separate are actually coordinating together, I don’t think that just laying that out is enough. I think that what we need to convey to people is that this is a messianic cause, with a vision of the good society and government that I think most of us would find terrifying, for the practical implications and impact that it will have on our lives. 

We are at a crucial moment in our history, and we will not get another chance, by this cause’s own telling. They say again and again that this is going to be permanent, and they’re very close to victory. So I think we need to be really clear-eyed about understanding this and reaching out to one another without panic. 

The most important thing I want readers to take from this book is an understanding that the Koch network and all of these people are doing what they’re doing because they understand that their ideas make them a permanent minority. They cannot win if they are honest about what they’re doing. That’s why they’re doing things in the deceitful and frightening ways that they are. 

And that, I think, is a sign of great power for the majority of people, who I think are fundamentally decent, and agree on much more than we’re led to believe.

1.4k Comments Join In 
*Update, June 22, 2017: This article has been updated to add MacLean's academic credentials. (Return.)




 Rebecca Onion 
Rebecca Onion is a Slate staff writer and the author of Innocent Experiments.

This radical vision has become the playbook for a network of people looking to override democracy in order to shift more money to the wealthiest few, historian and professor at Duke University Nancy MacLean argues in her new book, an intellectual biography of James Buchanan called Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.* Buchanan’s life story, she writes, is “the true origin story of today’s well-heeled radical right.”

Author’s Advice to White Teachers in Urban Schools: Drop the ‘Savior Complex’ and Learn from Students

This piece connects to my previous post on Dr. Cesar Cruz' reflection on the savior complex.

-Angela


By MAYA ELIE on Author's Advice to White Teachers in Urban Schools: Drop the ‘Savior Complex’ and Learn from Students: It doesn't take a hero, says Dr. Chris Emdin, to integrate the cultures and views of students into the learning experience.

What Is the Far Right’s Endgame? A Society That Suppresses the Majority, by Rebecca Onion, Slate.com

Good morning from Austin, Texas. I’m re-posting this reflection from 2017 because Duke University political scientist Nancy MacLean’s prophetic book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, , has never been more relevant than it is right now. If we lacked the words then, her research gives us a vocabulary for what’s happening to our country today.

MacLean names what she calls the “psychology of threatened domination”—the belief that one’s liberty is diminished if others gain full citizenship and work collectively to govern society. She describes it as “a whole way of being in the world and seeing others. Assuming one’s right to dominate.”

This worldview, grounded in the writings of Nobel laureate James McGill Buchanan and carried forward by billionaire networks like Charles Koch’s, has always been more than about money. It is about a messianic cause, a stealth vision of government stripped to its bones, where the majority is permanently locked out of power.

We cannot forget that Buchanan’s project was not confined to the United States. In the mid-1970s, he single-handedly re-wrote Chile’s constitution under the Pinochet dictatorship, turning that nation into a testing ground for neoliberalism. The result was a “constitution of locks and bolts,” designed explicitly to keep the majority from exercising democratic will unless it achieved an almost impossible supermajority. This anti-democratic template remains at the heart of the radical right’s playbook today.

MacLean warned us:

“They’re doing a lot of things for strategic reasons and not being honest with the public about it… This is a messianic cause, with a vision of the good society and government that I think most of us would find terrifying, for the practical implications and impact that it will have on our lives.”

Look around in 2025: Project 2025 laying out blueprints for dismantling federal agencies, state legislatures gutting DEI, book bans spreading like wildfire, and now former president Donald Trump reshaping the Smithsonian to erase histories that don’t fit the far right’s narrative. These are not isolated skirmishes. They are part of the same stealth plan MacLean revealed years ago.

The radical right fears the rise of a supermajority—a multiracial, multigenerational, justice-minded coalition that already exists. Their voter suppression, gerrymandering, and culture wars are desperate attempts to contain it.

The truth? We already are that supermajority. But we must act like it. We cannot afford to underestimate the elite, extremist right—or the messianic fervor that drives them.

The stealth plan is no longer stealth. It’s here. And what we choose to do in this moment will determine whether democracy survives for our children.

-Angela Valenzuela

What Is the Far Right’s Endgame? A Society That Suppresses the Majority. 

JUNE 22, 2017 REbecca Onion | slate

Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by MBisanz/Wikimedia, Dechateau/Wikimedia, Atlas Network/Wikimedia, and Thinkstock

Nancy MacLean, author of an intellectual biography of James McGill Buchanan, explains how this little-known libertarian’s work is influencing modern-day politics.
By Rebecca Onion

When the Supreme Court decided, in the 1954 case of Brown vs. Board of Education, that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, Tennessee-born economist James McGill Buchanan was horrified. Over the course of the next few decades, the libertarian thinker found comfortable homes at a series of research universities and spent his time articulating a new grand vision of American society, a country in which government would be close to nonexistent, and would have no obligation to provide education—or health care, or old-age support, or food, or housing—to anyone.

I spoke with MacLean about Buchanan’s intellectual evolution and its legacy today. We discussed whether it’s helpful or counterproductive to call the network of organizations funded by Charles Koch a “conspiracy,” the line of influence between Buchanan and what’s going on in MacLean’s home state of North Carolina, and that time Buchanan helped Chile’s dictator craft a profoundly undemocratic constitution. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

So why is James Buchanan so unknown? He had a Nobel Prize; how did he manage to fly under the radar? 

He had a very different personality from somebody like Milton Friedman. I think of them as kind of a yin and yang. Friedman was very sunny, and Buchanan was kind of a darker figure. Friedman was always very anxious to be in the limelight, and Buchanan was not like that at all. He was very interested in making an impact over the long term and training other people, and he seemed to be content to talk to powerful people more than to talk to public audiences. His books were really written for other scholars, not so much the general public. 

Can you put him in relationship with other people, besides Friedman, who might be more familiar to us today? 

People might be familiar with the Mont Pelerin Society, the international invitation-only group that began in 1947 launched by Friedrich Hayek. That society included Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Buchanan, ultimately Charles Koch (which I think not many people know!), and many others.

Friedman and Hayek put much more emphasis on making the case for free markets, whereas Buchanan’s distinctive mission was to make a case against government. … His basic idea is that people had been wrong to think of political actors as concerned with the common good or the public interest, when in fact, according to Buchanan’s way of looking at things, everyone should be understood as a self-interested actor seeking their own advantage. He said we should think of politicians, elected officials, as seeking their own self-interest in re-election. And that’s why they’ll make multiple costly promises to multiple constituencies, because they won’t have to pay for it. And he would say agency officials—say, an official at the EPA—would just keep trying to expand the agency, because that would expand their power and resources. 

Now there were other people who actually tested that empirically and found out that it didn’t hold, so it’s really a caricature of the political process, but it’s a caricature that’s become very, very widespread right now. 

You mentioned a few times in the book that Buchanan didn’t really do empirical research. So what was he writing from? 

He was also trained in game theory at the Rand Corporation, so he uses a lot of that. But basically he writes more like a social philosopher, someone studying the social contract. 

Did his ideas change over time? 

The core ideas kind of stayed the same. What did change over time was his own outlook. It became much darker over the years. His first big book in his field, which is called public choice economics, was titled The Calculus of Consent, and it came out in 1962 and was co-authored with Gordon Tullock. It was the work for which Buchanan was most recognized in his Nobel citation. In that work, he seemed to believe that somehow people of good will could come to something close to unanimity on the basic rules of how to govern our society, on things like taxation and government spending and so forth. 

And by the mid-1970s he concluded that that was impossible, and that there was no way that poor people would ever agree … there was no way that people who were not wealthy, who were not large property owners, would agree to the kind of rules he was proposing. So that was a very dark work. It was called The Limits of Liberty. He actually said in that work that the only hope might be despotism. 

And he went from writing that to advising the Pinochet junta in Chile on how to craft their constitution. This document was later called a “constitution of locks and bolts,” [and was designed] to make it so that the majority couldn’t make its will felt in the political system, unless it was a huge supermajority.
So yeah, it’s pretty dark. 

Tell me more about the relationship between Koch and Buchanan. 

I think too many people on the left have really underestimated Koch’s intelligence and his drive, and also misunderstood his motives. There’s been brilliant work by journalists, really good digging on the money trail and the Koch operations, but much of that writing seems to assume that he is doing this just because it’s going to lower his tax bill or because he wants to evade regulations, personally. I think that really misgauges the man. He is deeply ideological and has been reading almost fanatically for a very long time. I see him as someone who’s quite messianic. He’s compared himself to Martin Luther and his effort being like the Protestant Reformation. When he invested in Buchanan’s center at George Mason University, he said he wanted to “unleash the kind of force that propelled Columbus.” 

This is not someone who’s just trying to lower his tax bill. He wants to bring in a totally new vision of society and government, that’s different from anything that exists anywhere in the world or has existed because he is so certain that he is right. I think it’s more chilling because it doesn’t correspond to the ideas we have about politics.
Right, like he’s not trying to get a particular person elected. You mention several times Buchanan was very against that idea, that the point was to get a particular person elected. The point, for him, was to change the whole system. 

Right. You asked how the two men connected. I only have the documentary trail that I found. But from what I found, I believe that they first came in contact or first began to work together about 1969 or 1970, and that was in the context of the campus upheaval against the war in Vietnam, and for black studies, and so forth. Buchanan wrote a book about the campus unrest that applied his particular school of thought to it. Koch had an operation called the Center for Independent Education, and that center took Buchanan’s book and turned it into a kind of pamphlet that could be circulated more broadly. 

In 1970, Koch joined the Mont Pelerin Society. Once he got in, he began to advertise his many different organizations and efforts and try to recruit and get people to events and so forth, through Mont Pelerin. Buchanan helped with the founding of the Cato Institute and with various other intellectual enterprises that were close to Charles Koch’s heart, like this thing called the Institute for Humane Studies. 

And then Koch funded Buchanan’s center, as well as other projects, at George Mason University. One of Buchanan’s ideas that Koch liked was the concept of making a flurry of changes all at once so that people have a hard time opposing them.
Yes, and in the same year that Koch invested all this money in George Mason, [economist] Tyler Cowen got a commission by the Institute for Humane Studies to produce this review of places where economic liberty has made big advances. Cowen advocates what he calls a “Big Bang.” 

Interestingly it’s that same phrase that gets used by Civitas, the Koch-affiliated organization in North Carolina, after they take over the state legislature here in 2011. I actually have to give the North Carolina Republican-led General Assembly some credit for this book because I was struggling through Buchanan’s ideas, trying to understand the implications, because he did write in a somewhat abstract manner. 

And then the General Assembly came in in North Carolina and just made it all so clear. I saw the practical measures being taken and was like, “Oh, this is what he’s talking about! That’s what this is!” I should have put them in the acknowledgements.
I’d like to talk more about the way racism works in Buchanan’s intellectual project. You write in the conclusion to the book that this school of thought advocates “enlisting white supremacy to ensure capital supremacy.” Is it possible to disentangle those two? 

So this is a challenge for the left because some of our categories, I think, are not very supple, and are also driven by the political world in which we operate. So for example, as we try to think about what’s going on with these voter suppression measures, the only thing that’s actionable is racial discrimination. Right? And so people think of voter suppression efforts as being motivated by racism. These are these good old boys who hate black people and that’s why they’re doing this.

I think too many people on the left have really underestimated Koch’s intelligence and his drive, and also misunderstood his motives. —Nancy MacLean 

I think actually what’s going on is that these people are extremely shrewd and calculating, and they understand that African Americans, because of their historical experience and their political savvy, understand politics and government better, in a lot of ways, than a lot of white Americans. And they are a threat to this project because they will not vote for it. So they want to keep them from the polls. 

Similarly, young people are leaning left now, and they don’t accept a lot of these core ideas that come from this project, so this project has been very determined to keep young people from the polls. Frankly, if they could keep women away, they would, too. Because they understand that women suffrage opened the way to greater government involvement in the economy, and greater social provision and regulation.
We make a mistake when we think these are just reactionary prejudices, and we need to see them as shrewd calculations to keep people who would oppose this vision away from the polls. 

So it’s about power, money. 

Not just money. I think it’s also much more about this psychology of threatened domination. People who believe it will harm their liberty for other people to have full citizenship and be able to work together to govern society. And that somehow that goes much deeper than money to me. It’s hard to find the right words for it, but it’s a whole way of being in the world and seeing others. Assuming one’s right to dominate.
Your book calls Buchanan’s ideas a “stealth plan.” How can we, on the left, avoid falling into the trap of conspiracy-theory thinking while trying to understand this movement? 

One of the challenges is that our language is not up to the threat that we’re facing. As a scholar, I understand the problem of conspiracy theories. I don’t want to be seen as promoting a conspiracy theory. Not least because this is not a conspiracy, by definition. A conspiracy involves illegality, and the people who are funding, and supporting and promoting this operation have extremely good lawyers and I think they actually do believe in the rule of law, and they are being, with the possible exemption of nonprofit tax law, scrupulously legal in what they are doing.

They’re doing a lot of things for strategic reasons and not being honest with the public about it. —Nancy MacLean

So conspiracy is not a good word. But on the other hand, this is a vast and interconnected and not honest operation. They say these anodyne things about liberty—like the title of one book is Don’t Hurt People And Don’t Take Their Stuff! And that’s not what this is about. The reality is that they are gerrymandering with a vengeance, to a degree we’ve never seen before in our history; they’re practicing voter suppression in a way we’ve not seen since Reconstruction; they are smashing up labor unions under fake pretenses, not telling people that they actually do want to destroy workers’ ability to organize collectively ... I could go on and on. 

They’re doing a lot of things for strategic reasons and not being honest with the public about it. That suggests to me that we need a new vocabulary for grasping what we’re dealing with here. I guardedly used the term “fifth column” in the book, and you know, there’s problems with that term too, but at least it gets at the fact that these wealthy donors that Charles Koch has convened are deeply hostile to the model of government that has prevailed in the United States and in many other countries for a century. 

While I think we need all the great investigative work that’s being done to try to show us how these organizations that are being presented to the public as separate are actually coordinating together, I don’t think that just laying that out is enough. I think that what we need to convey to people is that this is a messianic cause, with a vision of the good society and government that I think most of us would find terrifying, for the practical implications and impact that it will have on our lives. 

We are at a crucial moment in our history, and we will not get another chance, by this cause’s own telling. They say again and again that this is going to be permanent, and they’re very close to victory. So I think we need to be really clear-eyed about understanding this and reaching out to one another without panic.

The most important thing I want readers to take from this book is an understanding that the Koch network and all of these people are doing what they’re doing because they understand that their ideas make them a permanent minority. They cannot win if they are honest about what they’re doing. That’s why they’re doing things in the deceitful and frightening ways that they are. 

And that, I think, is a sign of great power for the majority of people, who I think are fundamentally decent, and agree on much more than we’re led to believe.

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*Update, June 22, 2017: This article has been updated to add MacLean's academic credentials. (Return.)




Rebecca Onion
Rebecca Onion is a Slate staff writer and the author of Innocent Experiments.

This radical vision has become the playbook for a network of people looking to override democracy in order to shift more money to the wealthiest few, historian and professor at Duke University Nancy MacLean argues in her new book, an intellectual biography of James Buchanan called Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.* Buchanan’s life story, she writes, is “the true origin story of today’s well-heeled radical right.”

On the topic of White privilege...here is another great piece by novelist Teju Cole on the topic of white privilege that he refers to as the "White-Savior Industrial Complex."  He wrote this after having watched the now-famous, Kony2012 video. Afterwards, he posted a sequence of powerful tweets that rocked the establishment somewhat.  Note: Go to actual page for this article in the Atlantic to see Cole's stirring Tweets.

From this article that is a must read, here is a couple of comments that caught my attention:

But I disagree with the approach taken by Invisible Children in particular, and by the White Savior Industrial Complex in general, because there is much more to doing good work than "making a difference." There is the principle of first do no harm. There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them.

Let us begin our activism right here: with the money-driven villainy at the heart of American foreign policy. To do this would be to give up the illusion that the sentimental need to "make a difference" trumps all other considerations. What innocent heroes don't always understand is that they play a useful role for people who have much more cynical motives. The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage. We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue fund. I have no opposition, in principle, to such donations (I frequently make them myself), but we must do such things only with awareness of what else is involved. If we are going to interfere in the lives of others, a little due diligence is a minimum requirement.

We see these white savior images in film all the time.  We see it in real life.  To counteract these grand narratives, we must be reflective scholars and practitioners.

-Angela

The White-Savior Industrial Complex

• Teju Cole
• Mar 21, 2012

If we are going to interfere in the lives of others, a little due diligence is a minimum requirement.

Left, Invisible Children's Jason Russell. Right, a protest leader in Lagos, Nigeria / Facebook, AP

A week and a half ago, I watched the Kony2012 video. Afterward, I wrote a brief seven-part response, which I posted in sequence on my Twitter account:

These tweets were retweeted, forwarded, and widely shared by readers. They migrated beyond Twitter to blogs, Tumblr, Facebook, and other sites; I'm told they generated fierce arguments. As the days went by, the tweets were reproduced in their entirety on the websites of the Atlantic and the New York Times, and they showed up on German, Spanish, and Portuguese sites. A friend emailed to tell me that the fourth tweet, which cheekily name-checks Oprah, was mentioned on Fox television.

These sentences of mine, written without much premeditation, had touched a nerve. I heard back from many people who were grateful to have read them. I heard back from many others who were disappointed or furious. Many people, too many to count, called me a racist. One person likened me to the Mau Mau. The Atlantic writer who'd reproduced them, while agreeing with my broader points, described the language in which they were expressed as "resentment."
This weekend, I listened to a radio interview given by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof. Kristof is best known for his regular column in the New York Times in which he often gives accounts of his activism or that of other Westerners. When I saw the Kony 2012 video, I found it tonally similar to Kristof's approach, and that was why I mentioned him in the first of my seven tweets.

MORE ON THE LORD'S RESISTANCE ARMY
	The Decline of American Nationalism: Why We Love to Hate Kony 2012
	The Soft Bigotry of Kony 2012
	Kony 2012: Solving War Crimes With Wristbands
	Obama's War on the LRA
	The Bizarre and Horrifying Story of the LRA

Those tweets, though unpremeditated, were intentional in their irony and seriousness. I did not write them to score cheap points, much less to hurt anyone's feelings. I believed that a certain kind of language is too infrequently seen in our public discourse. I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

But there's a place in the political sphere for direct speech and, in the past few years in the U.S., there has been a chilling effect on a certain kind of direct speech pertaining to rights. The president is wary of being seen as the "angry black man." People of color, women, and gays -- who now have greater access to the centers of influence that ever before -- are under pressure to be well-behaved when talking about their struggles. There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as "racially charged" even in those cases when it would be more honest to say "racist"; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.
It's only in the context of this neutered language that my rather tame tweets can be seen as extreme. The interviewer on the radio show I listened to asked Kristof if he had heard of me. "Of course," he said. She asked him what he made of my criticisms. His answer was considered and genial, but what he said worried me more than an angry outburst would have:

There has been a real discomfort and backlash among middle-class educated Africans, Ugandans in particular in this case, but people more broadly, about having Africa as they see it defined by a warlord who does particularly brutal things, and about the perception that Americans are going to ride in on a white horse and resolve it. To me though, it seems even more uncomfortable to think that we as white Americans should not intervene in a humanitarian disaster because the victims are of a different skin color.

Here are some of the "middle-class educated Africans" Kristof, whether he is familiar with all of them and their work or not, chose to take issue with: Ugandan journalist Rosebell Kagumire, who covered the Lord's Resistance Army in 2005 and made an eloquent video response to Kony 2012; Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, one of the world's leading specialists on Uganda and the author of a thorough riposte to the political wrong-headedness of Invisible Children; and Ethiopian-American novelist Dinaw Mengestu, who sought out Joseph Kony, met his lieutenants, and recently wrote a brilliant essay about how Kony 2012 gets the issues wrong. They have a different take on what Kristof calls a "humanitarian disaster," and this may be because they see the larger disasters behind it: militarization of poorer countries, short-sighted agricultural policies, resource extraction, the propping up of corrupt governments, and the astonishing complexity of long-running violent conflicts over a wide and varied terrain.

I want to tread carefully here: I do not accuse Kristof of racism nor do I believe he is in any way racist. I have no doubt that he has a good heart. Listening to him on the radio, I began to think we could iron the whole thing out over a couple of beers. But that, precisely, is what worries me. That is what made me compare American sentimentality to a "wounded hippo." His good heart does not always allow him to think constellationally. He does not connect the dots or see the patterns of power behind the isolated "disasters." All he sees are hungry mouths, and he, in his own advocacy-by-journalism way, is putting food in those mouths as fast as he can. All he sees is need, and he sees no need to reason out the need for the need.
But I disagree with the approach taken by Invisible Children in particular, and by the White Savior Industrial Complex in general, because there is much more to doing good work than "making a difference." There is the principle of first do no harm. There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them.
I write all this from multiple positions. I write as an African, a black man living in America. I am every day subject to the many microaggressions of American racism. I also write this as an American, enjoying the many privileges that the American passport affords and that residence in this country makes possible. I involve myself in this critique of privilege: my own privileges of class, gender, and sexuality are insufficiently examined. My cell phone was likely manufactured by poorly treated workers in a Chinese factory. The coltan in the phone can probably be traced to the conflict-riven Congo. I don't fool myself that I am not implicated in these transnational networks of oppressive practices. And I also write all this as a novelist and story-writer: I am sensitive to the power of narratives. When Jason Russell, narrator of the Kony 2012 video, showed his cheerful blonde toddler a photo of Joseph Kony as the embodiment of evil (a glowering dark man), and of his friend Jacob as the representative of helplessness (a sweet-faced African), I wondered how Russell's little boy would develop a nuanced sense of the lives of others, particularly others of a different race from his own. How would that little boy come to understand that others have autonomy; that their right to life is not exclusive of a right to self-respect? In a different context, John Berger once wrote, "A singer may be innocent; never the song."

What Africa needs more pressingly than Kony's indictment is more equitable civil society, more robust democracy, and a fairer system of justice.

One song we hear too often is the one in which Africa serves as a backdrop for white fantasies of conquest and heroism. From the colonial project to Out of Africa to The Constant Gardener and Kony 2012, Africa has provided a space onto which white egos can conveniently be projected. It is a liberated space in which the usual rules do not apply: a nobody from America or Europe can go to Africa and become a godlike savior or, at the very least, have his or her emotional needs satisfied. Many have done it under the banner of "making a difference." To state this obvious and well-attested truth does not make me a racist or a Mau Mau. It does give me away as an "educated middle-class African," and I plead guilty as charged. (It is also worth noting that there are other educated middle-class Africans who see this matter differently from me. That is what people, educated and otherwise, do: they assess information and sometimes disagree with each other.)

In any case, Kristof and I are in profound agreement about one thing: there is much happening in many parts of the African continent that is not as it ought to be. I have been fortunate in life, but that doesn't mean I haven't seen or experienced African poverty first-hand. I grew up in a land of military coups and economically devastating, IMF-imposed "structural adjustment" programs. The genuine hurt of Africa is no fiction.
And we also agree on something else: that there is an internal ethical urge that demands that each of us serve justice as much as he or she can. But beyond the immediate attention that he rightly pays hungry mouths, child soldiers, or raped civilians, there are more complex and more widespread problems. There are serious problems of governance, of infrastructure, of democracy, and of law and order. These problems are neither simple in themselves nor are they reducible to slogans. Such problems are both intricate and intensely local.
How, for example, could a well-meaning American "help" a place like Uganda today? It begins, I believe, with some humility with regards to the people in those places. It begins with some respect for the agency of the people of Uganda in their own lives. A great deal of work had been done, and continues to be done, by Ugandans to improve their own country, and ignorant comments (I've seen many) about how "we have to save them because they can't save themselves" can't change that fact.

Let me draw into this discussion an example from an African country I know very well. Earlier this year, hundreds of thousands of Nigerians took to their country's streets to protest the government's decision to remove a subsidy on petrol. This subsidy was widely seen as one of the few blessings of the country's otherwise catastrophic oil wealth. But what made these protests so heartening is that they were about more than the subsidy removal. Nigeria has one of the most corrupt governments in the world and protesters clearly demanded that something be done about this. The protests went on for days, at considerable personal risk to the protesters. Several young people were shot dead, and the movement was eventually doused when union leaders capitulated and the army deployed on the streets. The movement did not "succeed" in conventional terms. But something important had changed in the political consciousness of the Nigerian populace. For me and for a number of people I know, the protests gave us an opportunity to be proud of Nigeria, many of us for the first time in our lives.
This is not the sort of story that is easy to summarize in an article, much less make a viral video about. After all, there is no simple demand to be made and -- since corruption is endemic -- no single villain to topple. There is certainly no "bridge character," Kristof's euphemism for white saviors in Third World narratives who make the story more palatable to American viewers. And yet, the story of Nigeria's protest movement is one of the most important from sub-Saharan Africa so far this year. Men and women, of all classes and ages, stood up for what they felt was right; they marched peacefully; they defended each other, and gave each other food and drink; Christians stood guard while Muslims prayed and vice-versa; and they spoke without fear to their leaders about the kind of country they wanted to see. All of it happened with no cool American 20-something heroes in sight.

Joseph Kony is no longer in Uganda and he is no longer the threat he was, but he is a convenient villain for those who need a convenient villain. What Africa needs more pressingly than Kony's indictment is more equitable civil society, more robust democracy, and a fairer system of justice. This is the scaffolding from which infrastructure, security, healthcare, and education can be built. How do we encourage voices like those of the Nigerian masses who marched this January, or those who are engaged in the struggle to develop Ugandan democracy?

If Americans want to care about Africa, maybe they should consider evaluating American foreign policy, which they already play a direct role in through elections, before they impose themselves on Africa itself. The fact of the matter is that Nigeria is one of the top five oil suppliers to the U.S., and American policy is interested first and foremost in the flow of that oil. The American government did not see fit to support the Nigeria protests. (Though the State Department issued a supportive statement -- "our view on that is that the Nigerian people have the right to peaceful protest, we want to see them protest peacefully, and we're also urging the Nigerian security services to respect the right of popular protest and conduct themselves professionally in dealing with the strikes" -- it reeked of boilerplate rhetoric and, unsurprisingly, nothing tangible came of it.) This was as expected; under the banner of "American interests," the oil comes first. Under that same banner, the livelihood of corn farmers in Mexico has been destroyed by NAFTA. Haitian rice farmers have suffered appalling losses due to Haiti being flooded with subsidized American rice. A nightmare has been playing out in Honduras in the past three years: an American-backed coup and American militarization of that country have contributed to a conflict in which hundreds of activists and journalists have already been murdered. The Egyptian military, which is now suppressing the country's once-hopeful movement for democracy and killing dozens of activists in the process, subsists on $1.3 billion in annual U.S. aid. This is a litany that will be familiar to some. To others, it will be news. But, familiar or not, it has a bearing on our notions of innocence and our right to "help."

Let us begin our activism right here: with the money-driven villainy at the heart of American foreign policy. To do this would be to give up the illusion that the sentimental need to "make a difference" trumps all other considerations. What innocent heroes don't always understand is that they play a useful role for people who have much more cynical motives. The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage. We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue fund. I have no opposition, in principle, to such donations (I frequently make them myself), but we must do such things only with awareness of what else is involved. If we are going to interfere in the lives of others, a little due diligence is a minimum requirement.
Success for Kony 2012 would mean increased militarization of the anti-democratic Yoweri Museveni government, which has been in power in Uganda since 1986 and has played a major role in the world's deadliest ongoing conflict, the war in the Congo. But those whom privilege allows to deny constellational thinking would enjoy ignoring this fact. There are other troubling connections, not least of them being that Museveni appears to be a U.S. proxy in its shadowy battles against militants in Sudan and, especially, in Somalia. Who sanctions these conflicts? Under whose authority and oversight are they conducted? Who is being killed and why?
All of this takes us rather far afield from fresh-faced young Americans using the power of YouTube, Facebook, and pure enthusiasm to change the world. A singer may be innocent; never the song.

Will you commit class suicide with me?

Excellent piece on the unpacking of white, middle-class privilege by Dr. Rolf Straubhaar:

 

Challenging white privilege—something that has been reinforced for decades to the point of becoming ‘common sense’—requires a regular, committed, and long-term unpacking of assumptions and behaviour; an explicit effort to recognize and refute the privileges we are afforded.

As with all forms of privilege (e.g., heterosexual, religious, non-trans, documented status, etc.), white privilege is a bias that must be named and acted upon whenever and wherever it presents itself.  Without keeping it in check as this piece illustrates, not only results in biased interventions to help those not so privileged, but it reconstitutes the very problematic of white, middle-class privilege itself, and thusly, the ideology of racial superiority.

-Angela

Will you commit class suicide with me?

Rolf Straubhaar 14 August 2015

Recognizing that privilege is unearned is essential to dismantling the white saviour complex.

Hilary Swank in “Freedom Writers.” Credit: https://curlykidz.wordpress.com. All rights reserved.

When I was eight years old, I lived with my family in the giant metroplex of São Paulo, Brazil. One evening my parents took us to the movies to see Back to the Future Part II, a relative luxury in what were very troubled times for the Brazilian economy.

On the way out of the film, as my imagination soared on dreams of riding a hoverboard just like the characters on the screen, we passed by several street-children wearing worn-out clothes. The oldest of them looked to be about my age, and she was pushing two toddlers in a wheelbarrow and holding a sign that asked for money.

At this point in my life, my main concerns were waking up in time for my morning cartoons and remembering to buy my favourite comics every month. Yet there in front of me was a child just like me in years who was already responsible for feeding herself and two other children. It was the first time that I remember feeling the reality of income inequality, and much later in life, it provided a formative experience for me as I began to study ‘white privilege,’  ‘white supremacy,’ and the ‘white saviour complex.’ 
By ‘white saviour complex’ I mean the idea that socially privileged individuals possess, simply by virtue of their position, some unique ability or power to help less-privileged people in ways they’re unable to help themselves. In hierarchical societies both the one per cent and the 99 per cent routinely receive messages implying that their respective positions are natural, justified and based on merit.
These messages translate easily into a belief in superior wisdom and capability for those who are born into privilege. We see this reflected constantly in the media we consume, which elevates narratives portraying noble white saviours helping marginalized people of color who are seemingly unable to help themselves—the self-sacrificing small-town lawyer who represents black defendants in the American South in To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, or the rich white woman who adopts a black teenage boy in The Blind Side and encourages him to pursue a career in American football.
I grew up surrounded by these narratives and found them immensely appealing. I wanted to use the law to stand up for the downtrodden like Atticus Finch, or help a bunch of lost black and brown students to find purpose and self-confidence like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds or Hilary Swank in Freedom Writers. The role of people like me in narratives like these was very clear and—fresh out of college—I was on fire to get started.
My cognitive dissonance emerged about halfway through my second job in international development, while I was working for an NGO in adult education in rural Mozambique. I had worked in this field before, as an English as a Second Language instructor in Houston and with community organizations in Northeast Brazil. But many of the Mozambican staff in the organization had much more experience than I did, and most were many years my senior.
Yet time and time again, they would ask me for advice and guidance, often with regard to tasks that were far outside my professional purview. And time and time again, I would give my uninformed opinion. That’s when the question hit me: why did I keep on pretending? The answer, though painful at first, was obvious—it was because I held an implicit belief that I brought a greater understanding, vision, or something to the job by virtue of who I was and where I came from. In other words, I had a well-developed white saviour complex.
What can be done to dismantle a sense of entitlement like this that’s built up over many years of experience and socialization and reinforced every day? In the nine years since I started that job in Mozambique I’ve been trying to find out the answer to that conundrum. The process of questioning usually begins with some event or series of events that makes your privilege crystal clear—just like my realization in Mozambique. But in isolation, such experiences don’t produce much change, especially if you let them pass without any serious reflection.
Challenging white privilege—something that has been reinforced for decades to the point of becoming ‘common sense’—requires a regular, committed, and long-term unpacking of assumptions and behaviour; an explicit effort to recognize and refute the privileges we are afforded. To quote the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, it requires that people like me be willing to commit ‘class suicide.’
A commitment to class suicide is a process, not a singular event. It must be re-enjoined again and again, every time a benefit is offered, every time status is implicitly conferred, and every time advantages are provided that have no basis in merit or achievement. Recognizing that privilege is unearned is essential to this process. If this doesn’t happen, whatever actions we may undertake out of a sense of social responsibility may be held up by a latent social Darwinism, an implicit assumption that I am in a privileged position to help because I deserve to be. Unfortunately this is typically what happens, especially in the ‘helping professions’ like international development, foreign aid, NGOs and philanthropy. I know, because it’s happened to me.
I can think of dozens of moments when I’ve let this recognition slide, sometimes because I’ve wanted the personal benefits that come with privilege, and at other times because I’ve acted out of pride—not wanting to give up the idea that I had earned or deserved what I was given. Here’s an example:
Some years ago I was teaching third grade school children on the Navajo Nation in Shiprock, New Mexico. At the end of one school year, we found out that the students’ test scores had risen dramatically, improving the school’s position on the state’s performance rankings. While I was one of three third grade teachers, I was new to the school that year, and I remember that many more teachers, administrators and parents came to thank me than went into the classrooms of my two other colleagues. They were both older Navajo women, and I was a white man in my mid-20s. But I did nothing to share the appreciation of any of my well-wishers with my co-workers.
I don’t make excuses for decisions like these, since there are none to be made. I shouldn’t have to wait for others to point them out to me since dealing with privilege isn’t someone else’s job – it’s mine. And while ‘class suicide’ may seem intimidating, it’s a clear and abiding responsibility for everyone who is born and raised with privilege. If you think that’s unfair, consider it a simple act of rebalancing power and opportunity in the world. What’s truly unfair is that people who don’t share your privileges are assumed to be less deserving.
If you are reading this and are in any way like me—that is, if you are engaged in social justice work and are at the same time white, or male, or from a privileged social class, or heterosexual, or cisgender, or able-bodied, or a member of a dominant religious tradition such as Christianity, or any combination of the above—I hope you’ll look inside and consider the possibility that the personal motivations behind your work are linked to a white saviour complex, at least to some extent.
Only when we are willing to recognize this bias and give it a name can we begin to work against it. And only in naming it can we engage honestly with our colleagues in the pursuit of true equality and justice.