Public lecture by Nancy MacLean – Professor of History, Duke University
Today’s plutocracy is the product of decades of right-wing activism that not only changed who rules, but also the fundamental rules of democratic governance. Billionaires did not launch this project; a white economist in the embattled Jim Crow South did. But when Nobel-Prize winning economist James McGill Buchanan teamed Charles Koch, a multibillionaire on a messianic quest to rewrite the modern social contract, they created a vast, relentless strategy to underwrite the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and the rest of us. This is a chilling story of how academics and wealthy donors teamed up to put democracy in chains.
