Whatever happened to Majority Rule?
Written by Jim Rettig
Recently the U.S. Senate voted 54 for and 35 against legislation to establish an independent commission to investigate the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The majority vote lost and the minority vote won. In grade school social studies I learned about the bedrock ideas supporting democracy: the “Majority rules” and “One person, one vote.” Yet the Supreme Court vote on Citizens United says that money is free speech and does not affect voting patterns. Really? Have you noticed that today the rule is “One dollar, one vote?” Its decision to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1964 suggests the Court doesn’t think Jim Crow is alive and well. Are you worried about voter suppression, gerrymandering, attacks on the U.S. Postal Service, mail-in ballots, the reduction of voting places, the removal of ballot drop boxes?
I want to tell you about a book I recently finished which I found to be extremely disturbing. Do you approve of/see the need for the Environmental Protection Agency, the Endangered Species Act, the International Migratory Bird Treaty Act? How about keeping public lands public and free from exploitation by extractive industries such as oil drilling, fracking, mining? Do you like to breathe clean air, drink clean water, swim in rivers, lakes, and oceans free of polluting substances? This book tells the story of right-wing ideologues who want to kill all regulatory powers of our government and to let “unregulated corporate capitalism” reign free.
In Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Nancy MacLean, a social movement historian, examines “the Right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution.”
To keep this article short and to say more about the book, I simply quote a paragraph (author unknown) from the book’s back cover, the source also of the above quote:
“Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But businessmen like the Koch brothers did not launch this movement: a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect — the Nobel Prize-winning economist James McGill Buchanan — and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.
“A chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok, Democracy in Chains is not only a revelatory work of scholarship, but also a call to arms to protect the achievements of the twentieth-century American self-government and democracy itself.”
I highly recommend this book to you. $18.00 from PenguinRandom House, 234 pages of text, plus extensive, informative, and provocative footnotes.