Today’s Republican Party bears little resemblance to its more moderate past. While President Ronald Reagan tried to limit the “overreach” of the federal government in favor of states’ rights and individual freedom, this purportedly high-minded (if self-serving) movement has since morphed into something rawer and more extreme: an apparent effort to curb democratic rule, reshape the Constitution, and protect money interests well beyond limiting taxes on the wealthiest.
According to our podcast guest this week, historian and professor Nancy MacLean, this is no accident. She proposes to WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman the provocative idea that this has all been part of a 60-year effort to create, through the GOP, a “fifth column assault” on America.
Its intellectual underpinnings come from Nobel Prize winning economist James McGill Buchanan, whose alliance with oil billionaire Charles Koch has given birth to a master plan marked by a kind of misanthropic libertarianism. The ultimate goal is to free capitalism from government interference and, ultimately, to strip the government’s role down to nothing but maintaining law and order and national defense, i.e. to protect the “haves” from the “have nots.”
According to MacLean, this is what lies behind the GOP’s fervor to eliminate labor unions, the EPA, the minimum wage and government health care, and to privatize social security and education, while of course lowering taxes.
Many who espouse these ideas today have no idea where they came from. MacLean identifies the true architects of this plan, laying bare a real-life conspiracy that has never been fully exposed.
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