LISTEN. How good it was to be visited by my sister Saturday night, stopping on her way home to Missouri from Carolina, and then to speak yesterday by screen with our old friend in Florida who's been felled and bedridden by stroke. As the poet says, "Often a sweetness comes as if on loan, stays just long enough to make sense of what it means to be alive..."
Let's begin by visiting campus, as most of us have not done in quite some time.
On the walk between the Business and Aerospace Building (where a couple of my classes this semester were scheduled) and the McWhorter Learning Center (named for the former Governor) stands this plaque honoring James McGill Buchanan. His name also adorns the Honors College's top fellowship, and an expansive but often-off limits reading room on the top floor of the Library. He attended our institution, known then as Middle Tennessee State Teachers College (or Normal School) in 1940.
Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1986, for his work on "how politicians' and bureaucrats' self-interest, utility maximization, and other non-wealth-maximizing considerations affect their decision-making." Put another way, he was "architect of the radical right."
At his death in 2013, Buchanan was hardly known outside the world of economists and libertarians, but his ideology remains much in force. His view of Social Security—a “Ponzi scheme”—is shared by privatizers like Paul Ryan. More broadly, Buchananism informs the conviction on the right that because the democratic majority can’t really be trusted, empowered minorities, like the Freedom Caucus, are the true guardians of our liberty and if necessary will resort to drastic measures: shutting down the government, defaulting on the national debt, and plying the techniques of what Francis Fukuyama calls our modern “vetocracy”—refusing, for example, to bring an immigration bill to a House vote lest it pass (as happened in the Obama years) or, in the Senate, defying tradition by not granting a confirmation hearing to a Supreme Court nominee. --Atlantic review of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean
As Bill McKibben summarizes Buchanan's importance, his work comes to the view that billionaires (and everybody else) are "victimized" by taxation, leading to "overinvestment in the public sector" and the stifling of economic growth. But more insidiously, it amounts to the judgment that democracy must be subverted so that wealthy people won't be forced to "support the lazy" who "mooch" at the public trough.
Nancy MacLean writes, in Democracy in Chains, that Buchanan
directed hostility toward college students, public employees, recipients of any kind of government assistance, and liberal intellectuals. His intellectual lineage went back to such bitter establishment opponents of Populism as the social Darwinists Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. The battle between "the oppressed and their oppressors," as one People's Party publication had termed it in 1892, was redefined in his milieu: "the working masses who produce" became businessmen, and "the favored parasites who prey and fatten on the toil of others" became those who gained anything from government without paying proportional income taxes. "The mighty struggle" became one to hamstring the people who refused to stop making claims on government.
How many of our students at MTSU realize that we've so honored a figure so openly hostile to their own aspirations? MTSU's unblushing pride in Buchanan is an embarrassment, its investment in the Koch-funded Political Economy Research Institute a contradiction of its stated commitment to progressive values and liberal education.
But it didn't start with Buchanan, or the Koch brothers. Before them was Buchanan's spiritual parent Ayn Rand, and their actual parent the Bircher Fred Koch. McKibben tells part of that story in our reading today, in trying to get to the bottom of our culture's endemic "hatred for the poor," "virtue of selfishness," and "winner take all" mentality.
Some questions for today: Do working class and middle class Americans really think they too (or their kids) can become Jeff Bezos or Sam Walton? Is that why they tolerate the "sick" gap between corporate owners and employees? If more egalitarian societies are healthier and happier, shouldn't that message be politically popular? Will it be, in the years ahead?
Will we adopt anything like Naomi Klein's Leap Manifesto for Canada, calling for us to care "for the Earth and one another"?
Or will more Buchanans come along to castigate caring as coddling and weakness?
We have better native sons to choose from, in Murfreesboro. We can play a better game.
For when the One Great Scorer comes To write against your name,
He marks-not that you won or lost- But how you played the game.
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