The Billionaire-Led Effort to Destroy America As We Know It. Nancy MacLean, author and professor of history and public policy at Duke University returns to Democratic Perspective to discuss her book Democracy In Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. She tells co-hosts Steve Williamson and Mike Cosentino that the movement was begun by James McGill Buchanan and financed by Charles Koch.

“Buchanan thought the ideal America was 1900 when there were no organized labor unions and when women could not vote,” she says. “They recognized that their ideas are unpopular, so they operate by stealth, moving toward an effort to re-write the Constitution in order to entrench the power of a wealthy minority over the vast majority. The Republican base is not coming to these ideas on their own. They are being jacked up by the right-wing media and donors,” MacLean notes. “Health care bills that allow insurance companies to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions are a great example,” she says. “Nobody believes that, if you have cancer, you shouldn’t be able to get health care. They had three health care bills that had at most 18% approval, but they tried to rush the bills through anyway.”

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